The PMC And The Walls That Separate Us From Them... pt 1.
Nance's Extramural Missive On Algorithmic Capital, Recognition Debt, And The New Peasants
by Bryce
When I was young there were few things in the world I wanted as much as to become Doctor Nance, Professor of Arts and Sciences, knower-of-things-in-general, expert mathematician and titan of philosophy, all around well-to-do gentleman, and paragon of the modern age. I’m sure there were some fantastical things I would’ve wanted more, but as far as things that might come true, becoming a world-renowned academic was the height of my desire. Things didn’t work out that way, and I have still failed to fully come to terms with the fact as an adult.
My partner, and our friends, are all Masters of some thing, according to various state universities; they’ve accomplished my lifelong dream of graduating from grad school, and we genuinely have a great time when we’re all together, but I can’t help feeling like I am constantly failing to live up to some unspoken standard, like they are judging me and finding me lacking, like I’m an outsider, like there exists a wall that I can’t, no matter how I might try, scale or tunnel under or break through, which sets us apart from one another.
It’s not a wall that anybody intentionally built, just one that sprung up over the years. I was born poor white trash, so I had to climb a mountain of shit just to be at the foothills that my chosen tribe takes for granted; and along the way I collected many scrapes and scars that I simply can’t hide; and while those marks are merely consequential, they do bear meaningful content. I am in some way, due to our differing backgrounds, fundamentally other from them, and they from me, in ways that we have been conditioned to think are questions of moral worth or ability or utility.
I have always had a hard time taking people who didn’t “have it rough as kids” seriously, I harbor sometimes immense resentment toward people who’ve had an “easier road” than I have. I look at people who grew up in seemingly functional families—who had all the things I saw on TV and coveted—and I think they are unable to experience life in some key way. There is this sense that they lack some level of understanding that makes me “better.” I know this is all bullshit, just a way to comfort myself in the long darkness, but nevertheless I cling to it.
Things, in general, have never come easy to me, but school was especially difficult. It wasn’t that I struggled scholastically, but the issues that plagued me were more social and behavioral. It was what it was. I don’t want to write some sappy memoir only to say that I’ve always had to try extra hard to fit in to any given social organization, and I’ve always been oddly ashamed of that effort. I could at least get good grades, but just fitting in with any group of fellow kids required maximum effort.
Because I was “smart” but kept getting into trouble, many teachers tried to help me. They saw that I was on a path that would result in me being just another sad statistic: a poor white trash kid with a dead mom and an absentee alcoholic father and a proclivity for self destruction. These teachers would try to lend my suicidal teenage-self encouragement by telling me I was gifted. They said this intelligence is a golden ticket off of the worrisome path and into a bright future.
According to those teachers who were trying to help me out, the only thing I had to do was work hard and eventually things would fall into place. Well, joke’s on them, I worked hard as fuck. The problem was, I had to work multiple jobs to support my family, and my ways of coping were pretty self destructive: drug dependency and petty crime. I was a mess because I didn’t know how to raise myself, much less my newborn daughter. There are those who, in my position, might have made it work without getting into so much trouble, but I sure didn’t.
Academia had set up a series of trials to prove myself worthy of existing within its walls, and I failed. Was it that I just wasn’t made of the right stuff? Or was my maximum effort just not enough? Either way, I am a failure by the social standards taken for granted by my class. Sometimes I think my inability to succeed in that environment is a mark of my authenticity, my inability to sellout, my principled fidelity to being who I really am. Other times I think they’re right about me—that I’m a total fuck up. For all that effort I put into school, I should be good at something.
The contradictory ideology of discipline, effort, and natural talent
I skateboard, pretty much daily, and I like to push myself to my limit when I do so. I usually stay at the skatepark or the spot until I just can’t skate anymore, then I get in my car and crank the a/c and drive home to the sweet and soothing sounds of white men, most usually but not always, discussing theory and philosophy, or sometimes UFOs and science fiction stories.
Our society is like a walled fortress where most people are outside of the walls supporting those who are on the inside. Come hurricane, flooding, or war, most of us are stuck on the outside regardless of talent, desire, or dedication. The only reliable strategy of winning the game seems to be being born already having won.
Only the sparsest few make it through. We celebrate those that do and act like all is as it should be, like them being there makes it so we can imagine ourselves outside of our own situations. Our day to day lives are “structurally stultified of timenergy,” as David McKerracher would put it, meaning that all we have left after our work week is garbage time, as in “time-without-energy.” Or we have random bursts of energy without repeatable time, which is also largely useless for overcoming the obstacles used to keep us out. So when we aren’t putting in incredible effort just to get by, we invest our restless energy in the lucky few who make it to the top. We make out of them totems and hometown heroes and receptacles for our dead dreams. We indulge in the fairy tales because we know real life simply sucks, and we most often fail. Yet, when we exert ourselves fully, we have the urge to conceal our effort.
When someone does a skateboard trick it is just as important, if not moreso, to make it look as if it were easy, as it is to do the trick in the first place. We don’t celebrate people who are visibly trying hard, we want to believe in people who are naturally good. That’s why people fetishize IQ. We want to believe in the meritocracy. Those who did better in school are just better people, and those who don’t succeed in life just weren’t made of the right stuff. But also they didn’t work hard enough. We’re getting both messages at the same time because the middle class is an odd mixture of old bourgeois values and the New Left PMC.
Being successful in the bourgeois ethos means you worked hard to get there. Being successful in the modern PMC sense though, is that it should just be because you’re a natural, because you’re cool, meaning you don’t try too hard. Ideology always goes a lot deeper than one’s conscious belief. For instance, even though I can scorn this idea of coolness resembling low-effort natural talent, I nonetheless fall right back into it when just going about my day.
Even though I’ve been so critical of this recently, earlier this week, when I tried recording a video, I made sure I had the lights just so and the microphone in the perfect place. I triple checked my camera’s focus, wanting to ensure it looked and sounded as good as I could manage. So what? The point is that when it came down to recording the video I went out of my way to conceal all that. I didn’t want anyone to see how hard I was trying!
There are some people who are just born good at things, but nobody ever becomes excellent without trying hard. I have known some freakishly talented people in my life, from professional athletes to soldiers and marines and sailors, and even some airmen. I’ve known some freakishly smart people and unbelievably good artists. Not a single one of these excellent-at-a-thing people were just that good without very long periods of time to become great at the things that they were determined to master. Even so, this ideology of “natural talent” persists.
Our society worships the accidental savant, or “the inherently better-at-a-thing” category itself. Now, I don’t know about accidental savants, I’m sure there are people who are strangely good at a thing for no apparent reason who lack certain other skill sets, and I’m no expert, but I think we can exclude those people from the category of Excellence here because they are already excluded from so many other things in life, and just this one more won’t hurt. Excellence, or the idea of mastery, demands obsessive dedication, regardless of whether you have tons of natural talent or not.
When I say “ideology” I am using it in multiple senses, one of which is the basic Marxist meaning: beliefs that obfuscate the relations of production while reproducing the existing class structure. The naturally talented category is an artifact of Capital that functions to propagate the idea that some people are just better at certain things—some people are just cut from the right stuff to belong to certain groups. This entails the idea that some people are just not made of the right stuff. Some people are poor and criminalized, but that’s because the group they belong to is naturally that way or it is what their actions have merited.
The idea of natural talent easily lends itself to ideas about essential racial traits that maintain and strengthen the divisions within the masses. These kinds of divisions hinder the development of a class awareness and consciousness that might threaten Capital. So that’s, in part, why this is pure ideology. Or, in keeping with the metaphor I’m running through this piece, “naturally gifted” masking insane effort and sacrifice is the ideological cement that holds together the walls so many of us stand outside of in a class society.
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This post was an excerpt from Underground Theory: Coming To A City Near You. Enjoy it serially here for free. Each part of Nance’s piee will be published over the next of the Theory Underground tour in Europe (photo below). If you prefer a physical copy, orders within the U.S. can get it at a discount here. Otherwise, I recommend getting it from Amazon. Also, stay tuned for the Audible version of this - in production now!
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Bryce Nance’s Bio:
Nance would've been just another disgruntled denizen of the internet, were it not for the decade spent trying to take his education seriously in order to build himself into a subject with something to contribute to the conversations about The Situation; a decade that led him to the conclusion that a project such as Theory Underground was the only path forward for people such as himself. He has been, and is, many things in this life. From homeless teenage punk rocker to young father holding down multiple jobs while attending (and quickly leaving) university on an academic scholarship, to American soldier in Iraq, to corrections officer and eventually mental health care provider to incarcerated and adjudicated youth, to truck driver, to gig worker, and many things in between. Aside from being published alongside some of biggest names in contemporary theory, and the brightest stars in the underground theory scene, in Underground Theory: Coming To A City Near You (and touring the world in support of the anthology’s release), and Nollie Dolphin Flips, Nance doesn’t have any accomplishments he feels like talking about, but he is immensely grateful for all of your attention!