librarypunk - 124 - Bloch and Utopia feat. Jon

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

We’re talking about Jon’s upcoming book on Bloch and how libraries are or are not models of utopia.  Pre-order Jon's book: https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/zer0-books/our-books/primer-utopian-philosophy-ernst-bloch Horror Vanguard: https://soundcloud.com/user-317910500  Media mentioned https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/ https://www.akpress.org/resist-everything-except-temptation.html https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/index.htm kt0E46n9mnbpPWHnc2Nd

Yeah. Time is fascist, actually. Yeah. I'm... Darnow mode. I'm not far from being like an abolished bed time anarchist. Like, I'm getting there. Okay. I'm Justin. I am what I am becoming, and my pronouns are he and they? I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library. My pronouns are they them? I'm Jay. I'm a music librarian, but I also start out empty. And my pronouns are he him.

And we have a guest. What'd you like to introduce yourself? I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to start. My name is John. My pronouns are he slash they. I am a author, a writer, a philosopher in massive inverted commas. And for my sins, I am also a podcaster. What the fuck? Justin. No more podcasters. That means we also have to die. Okay. Poth four. Punishable by death. podcast Stalinism. Podcast aside.

Oh, man. Love to see that on TikTok. I'm going to drive these microphones off of a bridge. All right. It's shaking. I'm so good at interviewing, y'all. No. So we're going to talk about block.

We're going to talk about Ethiianism. We're going to talk about hope. I'm going to talk about religion and derail because Jay did all the research, so I get to derail this week. I'll try not to mention Buddhism too much. Yeah, you've got to stay. on task. And then I'll throw them the curveballs. Because I was reading the chapter that you sent us. And then I was like, what was that one thing Jesus said? And I just started going like looking up something in the RSV. And I was like, I'm not going to finish this in time. Whereas I was like sending John DMs being like, is there ever been any research about comparing this concept of Buddhism stuff? I should have known that was going to come up. As soon as you saw the word empty, you should have been like, oh, hey.

There is some. There is a little bit because I did, I honestly, I didn't, I didn't know. But there's like a few, there's a few little bits of stuff which have never been translated from German. There's, there's, I will send you some, I'll send you some PDFs. Excellent. Yeah, this, this is, I find a lot of things that are strangely not translated for a very long time. Like, I'm not sure if Bruno Bauer's stuff has been translated again. It wasn't like years ago when, when I was interested in him, when I was interested in like the Dutch radicals and all that. And I was like, when, when, when? And then I was like, well, I took German. I can read this. Right. And I was like, oh, right. German spelling reforms happened after he wrote. So I can't read this. I can't read a word of it. There we go. It's all phonetic. I've found, I've found a similar problem because I'm trying to translate one of Bloch's books, which has never been translated into English. And I went, I, I, I, like, my German's okay. There are, there are really good dictionaries available. And then immediately went, oh, no, what have I done?

becomes like this massive job and this massive, like, logistically complicated thing that you go, that you go, oh, maybe this will take me a few months. And then it suddenly goes, you suddenly have the realization of going, no, this is why people dedicate years of their life to doing this stuff. Yeah. I did really appreciate the way that you would describe how some of his concepts were translated, which we'll get into, but especially like the Nakhnecht, because I took German in college too. And like, just the way that you sort of like have sometimes direct translations aren't accurate, like they leave out these other concepts and stuff. So that's a, for people to go by and read this book, it's very good at explaining things, especially when things have been

translated. Thank you. Speaking of historical problems, which like our intuition pumps are different. Like Freud uses steam engines to explain things as an intuition pump. And then how we use computers as intuition pumps for concepts. So, you know, how do you relate? to someone born in 1880s and what kind of intuition pumps they're using. It's like, yeah, you know how when, like, you go gather a bunch of sticks in the common field? No.

With the lads? Absolutely not. Not in America. You know. I did live next to a bunch of woods, so I did wander around at night gathering sticks for no reason. You could chop it and diggin. That's what you do.

Yeah. Homs to among us, if given the opportunity, would not. Like, do we not all yearn to return to the, to the woods at night to gather foot together. That's, yeah, that's my kind of returning, right? Rather than this sort of pseudo-seudo-intellectual reactionaryism where it's like, look at my cool Twitter account where I have a Roman statue avatar.

No, no, no. No, no. So I thought it might be good to start off of like, so like an intro of basic concept before we kind of get into how these might be related to libraries or, you know, what we do with it. Basic concepts. Who's Block? What's Utopianism?

Like, what is this book? You know, stuff like that. This book is a primer on utopian philosophy, an introduction to the work of Ernst Block. It is, I don't know when this episode is going to drop, but it will be out imminently or is just out with zero books. Link in the show notes, I assume. Yes, it's already in there. I got you. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Please go buy it. It's very, it's very cheap. it's very affordable. Zero has a new series of like these short kind of interventions into the problem and tradition of utopian philosophy. So Ernst Bloch is a German philosopher and communist who is born in the late 1880s, lives through maybe some of the most kind of tumultuous times in European intellectual and political history, is friends with pretty much anyone who's anyone in that tradition, is close friends with Georgi Lukash, with Walter Benymin, with

Bertolt Brecht with Kurt Vile, with Adorno. But in, like, in our spheres of, like, left Twitter, who is maybe, like, into theory, Block really doesn't get mentioned all that much, right? You have, like, Adorno heads, you have people who are very into Ben, you mean, you have people who love Brecht, but, like, lots of Bloch's work has not been translated,

and lots of it has been... The reception history is quite complicated, but is minimized. So, Brock is a... Frederick Jameson describes Ernst Block as a... Theologian of Revolution, which I actually think is a really good description. It is, so his work is, it runs to like, I think about 20 volumes in German. The Principle of Hope, which is his most famous book and was translated in the 60s,

is 1,800 pages long in English and goes across three volumes and was written over the course of about 12 years in the USA. Lots of it written at Harvard. And he is the philosopher of hope in kind of the Western Marxist tradition. He was an anti-fascist, he was extremely interested in religion, in culture, in questions of revolutionary strategy, and in philosophy. So his, the kind of, trying to boil down this person to say, the aim of their work is, is, is, like, quite problematic with someone like Block. But, like, very broadly, the principle of hope is an encyclopedia of human cultural history, tracing the perpetuation and continuation of, of this utopian principle that is baked into existence.

So the problem that Block is trying to solve is, what does it mean to have hope? Like, hope is often assumed to be like this subjective, fleeting human feeling, right? We have moments where we feel hopeful. But Block says, actually, no, hope is a philosophical principle that is existential and actually even ontological, like, is baked into the very stuff of the universe itself. And that philosophical project of hope is the kind of necessary correlate to the political project of utopia. So he is the philosopher of hope for a utopian politics. And then what's like utopianism?

Because I know that like utopianism is often seen as naive, right? Or like I remember like being in school. I don't know if it's the same in the UK. But like in English class, when you learn about the concept of utopian, usually then that leads into you reading dystopian literature. Yeah. Right. That's when you start reading The Giver in 1984.

It's like, look at what happens when you do utopia. Like, you know, bad things happen. So, like, utopianism is always seen as, like, very naive and maybe even immature. Or even just, like, oppression in disguise, like obfuscated oppression. Yeah. A really great point and a really important point. Utopia is very old and is the kind of question of, like, what is it, what would it mean to live in a world that was good? Because this idea of like the world being bad is not new either.

It's like a very old philosophical problem that we don't live in a world that is a world of justice or a world of equality or a world of harmony. Like the world is wrong in some ways, right? Some of the first utopias are religious. So what does it mean to live in paradise? Is like, that's a fundamentally, that's a religious question, but that's a utopian question. And so Thomas Moore's Utopia is probably one of the earliest. Like that's where the term is coined. Utopia is literally, if you take it from its Greek roots, there's no place. The Otopos.

Like utopia does not exist, right? It's not a place. But it is a recognition that the place we're in is not that. So a lot of the time it is taken to be very naive. And it's like, you know, this idea that like, I sort of feel like, you know, there's a very like childish or even like teenager question. of like, well, why are some people poor or why are some people starving? That doesn't seem right. And people go, oh, well, you just kind of have to grow up. And you accept that certain

things are the way they are. And the tradition of utopian philosophy goes, actually, no, those children are asking an incredibly important question. And it's worth taking those questions, like, profoundly seriously. There are, there are these interesting, it's such a complicated did history, but you can go back to, you know, Plato's ideal republic, Thomas Moore, there was a big like up surge of utopian experiments in throughout the Reformation. But utopia is the, is the outworking in the process of shaping the world that you live in for the better. And I think one of the things I would flag up right from the start is this is something Block believes very strongly is that utopia is not a program or a place or a perfect state, but is a process. And is a process,

and is a process that unfolds through all of like human striving, human desire, human action. Like, Block at the beginning of the principle of hope writes quite extensively about daydreams. And this idea of like when your mind drifts for each of you and everyone listening, your mind kind of drifts off sometimes and you think about what your life would be like in a kind of perfect world. You know, if only I didn't have this job, if only I didn't have to go to work, if I didn't have to like pay huge amounts of like take on huge amounts of debt for education or healthcare or food or the means of life that I not need but deserve.

In fact, both of those things, right? And people go, oh, stop daydreaming. But Block takes these like these daydreamings very seriously because it's we, it is a sign on some level that we recognize what we don't have, right? We recognize something missing within us and within the kind of like an absence in the world that we kind of feel the absence of. The phrase that Block uses, which I really love, is he talks about Haimath quite a lot, the German word for home. And Utopia is being at home in the world, or as he puts it, the place where you can walk upright for the first time.

There's a really great piece over at the Verso blog by Matthew Beaumont talking about Block and Franz Fanon. And Fanon talks about like the physiological impacts of colonialism, right? To be colonized, is to be tense, is to be always watched, is to be like hunched, to make one thing. itself small in the world, right? And to be in the place where you can walk upright for the first time, that's utopia, because that's the place where all of those kind of burdens, all of those absences, all of those things that you don't have, but you kind of feel existentially the kind of pain of their absence no longer exist. A block goes even further and says that actually, like, in some ways, we're not even like human yet. Like, our humanity has been like blocked or taken

away from us because of the fundamentally kind of like alienating, exploitative, like, brutalizing system of capitalism. And utopia would be the place where humanity would be humanity, as if for the very first time. Yeah, that's very similar, and I put this in the nose, but it's very similar to the way that Wild views utopia and that, like, we need socialism in order to achieve, like, this kind of state that, like, we need socialism, that people can make art and make the world beautiful. and live the lives that they want and not have to, like, be under the toe of a state or to do jobs or anything. We should all just be making beautiful things all of the time, you know?

Yeah, what could be better? What could be more utopian than, like, than like a world that's free? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's like the parts of Marx where he talks about building socialism as sort of an ongoing social project, not just changing the relationships of production, but actually building a socialist humanity. And I like how you put things in sort of like negative terms, like an absence of justice makes us yearn for it the same way an absence of food makes us hunger. And so we are yearning towards socialism actually all of the time if we imagine socialism is the place where we get to be humans for the first time. Yeah, precisely.

Yeah, like, and Justin's going to hit the Mark Fisher alarm. on me. So I like the point that you make when you talk about like with capitalist realism and like, you know, it's easy to. Yeah. It's, it's like, it's like, something felt. I think Arthur touched something. But like where it's easier to imagine, you know, like the end of the, you know, what is at the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But within that statement itself, like, even though it is a negative, it reveals the capacity for imagining. right? Like, yes, this is a negative statement, but it kind of contradicts itself. Like, it reveals the capacity to imagine. So why are we limiting that imagination? I think, I think the charge of kind of, like, naive utopianism is applicable to people who are optimists. And I don't think if you count yourself as, like, interested in politics, you should be an optimist. But I do think you should be hopeful. And those, I think there's a very, to me, I think there's a really important distinction between those two things. I don't think of myself as optimistic, but I do think of myself as someone

who has hope. And it's precisely because optimism is naive, because it just goes, well, like, things will generally work out, okay. And the people in charge probably know what they're doing more than I do. So, and like the reason, like, this, this long philosophical tradition that's often very religious about, like, utopianism needs, like, the input of, like, revolutionary, like, Marxism, which is what Block kind of sought to bring, is utopianism as a philosophical and political idea is inevitably, like, double-faced. You are kind of, kind of, you are kind of, of looking like at the world like unflinchingly in all of the kind of awful totality that we have to reckon with and and at the same time simultaneously are able to kind of like project

forward and a a sort of political sense that is like the world can be less worse right as bad as things are like there is there is something like incredibly audacious and almost like jewel dropping about the idea the argument of utopianism like Rosa Luxembourg's famous quote is society stands at a crossroads, barbarism on the one hand, or the transition to socialism on the other. And that's 100 years ago. And like the choice, that choice in many ways seems to have been made, right?

We've chosen which way we're going to go. The crossroads is in the distance. But if that's the case, the stakes of a utopian political and philosophical projects are actually even higher because otherwise you accept the kind of naturalization of this, of right, of the state of things.

And I think a really good example, of this is like in dystopias. So utopias are for the utopian, supposed to be about the suggestion of kind of change. You see a potential future and it's supposed to inspire something within you now to go, whatever that is going to be, I don't want that. But there is an attempt by, I think, the culture of capitalist production to enclose the idea of utopian thinking. One of the people I really love to read is Biffo Baradi, Franco Baradi, great Italian, kind of communist Marxist. It talks about the Hunger Games. And the Hunger Games is like, it's a dystopia of passivity because you go, well, your revolution is mediated as a media spectacle back to you as an audience member.

So really, really, no matter how bad things are going to go, well, it's a kind of naturalized state of things, right? It's a dystopia that's aiming to produce passivity rather than like a call into an action to like re-inscribe a better future over that dystopia. So I, we are, we're in the middle, I think, of a kind of like resurgence of utopian thinking. but that is precisely because, not because of like a naive refusal to see the facts, but precisely because we know what the facts are, and we know just how kind of like dangerous and potentially catastrophic existence could be. So it's not a surprise then that like this criticism of like, oh, it's naive utopianism. It's like, no, actually, if you're going to be a utopian, you have to be, you know,

how can you, I've written this sentence somewhere else in a different book about music, but it's like, how can you have any sense of something better, unless you have this almost like overwhelming sense of how fucked you are. And like you have to look at like it's a cliche. Maybe it's a little cliche or maybe this is a little bit kind of like squishy for people. But like you have to look at the world with like rage and love. And those two things are not contradictions. I always think of, I know this is terrible from a philosophical point of view probably.

But like there's some quote on Tumblr that hope is a thing with teeth that I always think about like. hope is the ability to fight and the motivation to fight and not necessarily something passive. I mean, it's a great quote because that's a quote from China Mayville. Oh, okay. In an article about utopia. And in that same article, he talks about the fact that we live in a utopia. It just isn't a utopia for us, right? We must learn to hope with teeth.

It's like hoping against the world, right? So utopian philosophy is double-faced. You're looking towards the future. and you're looking back at this world to see it's like we have to unmake it to make something better. We do have to imagine the end of the world. Yeah. Because that is then the end of capitalism and then we built the new world, you know. Yeah.

I like your point about enclosing thought because I feel like that's kind of the project of this podcast is forcing people to think about alternatives. For a long time, we would usually ask people like, what would your ideal solution to this problem be? Like, if you could remake it, what would it be? because we're as professionals who work in a liberal structure, right? It's going back to my old, like, season two of this podcast where I was just on a thing about liberalism. We're stuck in sort of reform mindsets. If we just tweak this, if we just pinch it that, if we just, you know, fiddle the knobs here, something's going to get better rather than saying, this is a long project and it's difficult, but it's what I actually want at the end of things. And then waiting for a potential to make either a small change, a big one, which is sort of like any kind of like apocalypse movie is at the end of it, there's the hope that something different is going to come out of it, right? Genesis begins at the ending. Yeah, I mean, this is, this is Bloch's famous line, which is like Genesis is at the end,

not the beginning, no matter what you think you might find in your Bible, the end of something is also the start of, it's the precondition for something new to come into being. Exactly. Yeah. So, like, tell us more about the book. Like, why write it? What was your process? And then because, like, I feel like, you know, Justin has mentioned this before that, like, librarians often don't then know, like, the author process and sometimes vice versa.

Like, how did libraries help or maybe even hinder your, like, your research and writing? I mean, I would like to say it was written out of like some sort of high-minded ideal, but it was written entirely practically, which is like, I needed, I needed to make a living. I needed to make, I had to be done. And one thing I'm quite good at is, is exegesis and explaining. There's nothing in here which is like super original, but this is like, Block is a kind of absent point in the network of people's framework of a certain European philosophy that's been translated into English. Adorno is incredibly well discussed, but Adorno in so many ways, is writing indirect response

and in conversation with Ernst Block. Like, my somewhat spicy take is that Adorno is a utopian, just as Blancelow. Block is, but they have completely almost opposite philosophical approaches. So it's like if you, this, this reputation of Adorno being very dour and like a miserableist is like, is a kind of like meme, but he's, but he's not. He's negative in the philosophical sense of the term, right? Block is much more of the kind of positive philosophical projects, but both of them are writing about similar problems, right? Adorno is all about this idea of like, you can't, the life can't be lived rightly in a wrong world, right? That's what minimia Moralia is. In fact, all of his work is about, and this idea of

refusing the naturalization of the state of things. So Block is, Blok is translated quite sporadically. He is, so somewhere else I've described Block as like, it's philosophy written as literary modernism. So he is, like, he's, it's often incredibly beautifully written. Like, bits of block to read, especially read them out loud. It's just, it's amazing writing. And it has this kind of like, Adorno talks about these great passages of block music, and it's like these huge, crashing, symphonic paragraphs. And he writes amazingly about music as well, as like access to the ground of philosophy. But it's often very complicated and elusive, and it's full of references to like medieval philosophy and German literature and arts. So I think this is a primer on utopian philosophy.

right, it is designed to start something for the person reading it. A primer is a beginning point. So this is not the last word or like the definitive exegesis block in English. This is something that is short and easy to read and easy to pass on to someone and be like, actually, here are more tools that maybe you didn't know about. In terms of method and how did librarians or libraries help? Quite a lot of the time they didn't. Exactly.

Lots of his work is only in academic libraries, and academic libraries are heavily credentialed to access. And I think I really there is, I suppose, I don't know if you would call him a librarian, but I think I have to talk about Alexandra Albacian. She is the founder of SciHub, and without her, the book would not exist, because it's by using things like SyHub and mirrors like that, that I was able to access a lot of, like the PDFs and blocks work. And, you know, I think that library is a really good example of like, like, what does the utopian distribution of information and knowledge look like? And it's not a surprise that she's, she's a communist and has written extensively about that in ways that I think

would probably quite, would be quite shocking to a lot of people. So I wrote it by by downloading a whole bunch of PDFs and spending a spending like if you followed me on Twitter you probably realized that I spent like three years just posting about this because there is there is this idea of like so I think in in left philosophy you end up with two kinds of philosophers which is like system builders or people who are like all about the particular so like Kierkegaard for example it's all about the particularity so always about one person like a kind of almost painful subjectivity and then you have people like Hegel and you have people like Block who are like, actually, philosophy is not philosophy unless it's able to kind of integrate and talk about everything.

And again, it's like, it's kind of like staggeringly audacious. If you look at the principle of hope, it goes from like daydreams to the history of literature, to like Marxism, to philosophy, to like medieval theology, to like architecture, to like, architecture, to culture. Like, it's a book about everything. And I think everyone has these moments in your own kind of like political journey when you, when you find a person. and you go, this is like a key. It's like walking through a door that you've never seen before. And you suddenly go,

oh my goodness, there's this kind of like transformative intellectual experience that happens for you. And that's what writing it was like. I wrote it, the first draft of it, I wrote for patrons with pirated PDFs.

And then, as I say at the beginning of the book, I'm incredibly grateful to a small handful of Anglophone scholars, Vincent Gio Gioga Hagen, Wayne Hudson, Kat Moyer, and the person who first introduced me to a block, who is a legendary figure in Anglophone European philosophy, Peter Thompson,

who used to be a professor at Sheffield University. He was the first person who kind of is like, you should read this guy. And it's thanks to them that like the very first ideas from Block were trying to, were kind of found into this milieu. And this is a very small contribution to that work, I hope. Excellent. Yeah. Like I always see, there's been the trend now of like on Twitter of librarians being like,

why aren't people crediting us in their research, right, even though we helped them? And it's like, well, you know, maybe sometimes we did help, but also libraries are also keeping people from getting access to research as well. And that is why Sihub is so important. That's why, like, Libgin is so important. Like, every time J-Store tries to, like, post some cute bullshit on Twitter, I'm like, y'all have blood on your hands, literally. like, you know, so like, I just like for libraries of all types to think about the ways that, like, we are keeping people from accessing things, even though we think we're providing free access. Yeah, and this is not, this is, and it's not like, I think people can often feel quite defensive about that, right? Because it's like, well, you're blaming me. It's like, no, it's like, it's like the systemic forces that, like, academic, if you want to make money, you want to make, like, serious stacks, be an academic publisher, because you have, like, margins that are obscene. Do you pay the people who produce the work? No. I haven't gotten any royalties

on the book I wrote. Yeah. Do you pay the people who write the work? No. Do you pay the people who edit the work? No. But you make people pay absolutely exorbitant fees to access the work. And you know they have to do that. Like as business models go, Elsevier, for example, is like, it's basically just permission to print money. Yeah, the people who run Elsevier have names and addresses. That's what I'll say about that. Yeah, I gave a presentation yesterday to mostly School of Medicine faculty who wanted to talk about predatory publishing. And then I was like, well, I want to talk about other stuff, other issues. And then I talked about all the bad business practices that go on in legitimate publishing.

And I talked about SIHUB. I said, you know, look at all of these Elsevier papers that have SciHub links in the references. If Syhub didn't exist, they couldn't create this new commodity to sell. Right. So while Elsevier was suing SciHub in like New York court, I was creating a database of every Elsevere paper that had SciHub links in it and saving PDFs because they scrubbed them because they're gone now. You can't find them. You can find my data set though. But yeah, that I ended with sort of a discussion on what do we need to do. And it was, and I said to straight face to a bunch of, you know, tenured faculty. We need to decommodify academic publishing. We need to. I took out the word nationalized because I didn't want to. shocked them too much. I didn't want them to flip their wigs. But I did say, you know, this was publicly owned in the 50s and then it was sold off. It can be publicly owned again. And, you know, it's not going to be like much better for like the neoliberal academy to own it, but at least

there's some modicum of democratic control over universities. And there's some more accountability with, I don't use the taxpayer argument, but with public funds. Yeah, just on a bit on a very basic level, this idea that like knowledge is the collective out, the collective work of like human civilization and the idea that it's, it's, it is something that can be enclosed just as, you know, common land was once enclosed a few centuries ago. It should, it should be like just morally unacceptable. And I'm like, I can't, I can't, I can't, I don't think we can really put number on, on it, but like, I can't imagine how many papers, how many books, how many research articles simply would not exist if not for Syrup.

Like if if if that wasn't there, the the number of like people like me who are sort of like adjacent to the academy, but like orthogonal to it, like this book wouldn't exist. My next book wouldn't exist simply because there's no way of accessing the material, right? Unless you have, unless you have the the codes and keys that will get you into the right door. I will say that I am a library director and I have control over my libraries in our library loan and I'm the one that puts in all the requests, just putting that out there. Just as a fun fact.

Yeah. Including, do people know that you can get journal articles through Interlibrary loan and even book chapters? Because you can. Wow, another fun fact. ILO is beautiful and I love it so much. Yes. Do you hear me on Twitter?

I guess like the last thing about like the book. specifically I want to talk about that will then kind of lead us more into how these ideas apply in libraries. There's this one footnote that you're probably going to think it's very silly than I'm focusing so much on it. So you have this footnote because there's not really like citations in this, right? There is a bibliography like a, you know, suggested readings at the end. And it's very obvious like you talk about, you quote people, like it's very obvious where you're pulling things from, but there's not like footnotes or in notes or in text citations, which people might go, you can't do that. And they've got this great footnote where you talk about that you're

not doing that because you're following like Adorno calls it the tyranny of form. And that like made all the alarms in my head go off because we talked about this in the infosop episode, but there's this concept of like print capitalism, right, of like how like the way that like printed materials printed or online now, I guess. But like, you know, since the printing press, the way that the public ideas and stuff are shaped is based on kind of what can get printed out, right? And in libraries, particularly academic libraries and scholarly communication, this like way that we focus on citation. So heavily, and there's been lots of like critical examinations and discussions of, like, feminist citation and critical citation is something I'm very interested in. So I just, I didn't know if

maybe you wanted to talk a little bit more about like this sort of tyranny of form in the context of maybe more like quote scholarly writing. Yeah. Okay. So the footnote in full says for this reason I've tried to avoid the usual style of academic writing, excessive footnotes, technical vocabulary and so on, or what Theodore Adonner would call the tyranny of method. Yeah, tyranny of method. That's what it was. And yeah. So this is weirdly, it's like the one footnote in the book. And it's like This is maybe like such a big question, which is like, how should one do philosophy? What does that mean? And so in academic writing, it means adhering to a certain set of conventions and a certain mode

of discourse, a kind of certain mode of language. And to buttress that language, you have to have all of this kind of paratextual information. But I try it. But like, this is not an academic book because philosophy is not an academic practice. for Block. It is not something that is confined to a certain mode of discourse. There's this, there's this great, actually, it was the introduction to a special edition of a journal on Block, and it's written by the philosophy professor, Johann Siebers, and Siebers says, academic philosophy has largely put itself out of play by withdrawing into an increasingly

arcane, scholastic practice of disputation that lacks the power of imagination and the liberating potential that we know from the great texts of the philosophical tradition. Critique has become uncritical, we might say, with an Adornite flourish. It's a very Sontag statement too. Yeah, right? So, like, Adorno, I can't remember where this is where you can find this, but like, Adorno, this is quote from Adorno, talking about finding Bloch's book, the Geist, the Utopia, a spirit of utopia, which comes out in the 19thens.

And he says it was like, it was like a shock because it's like something that, like, has fallen off a shelf in a German library in like the 1700s, and it says he's reminded that you can do philosophy freed from the tyranny of method. And philosophy can be this, like, immediate thing that emerges out of like, not this academic discourse of footnotes and disputations and scholasticism, but emerges out of like listening to, you know, in Box's case, like, listening to Wagner. Like, that's the ground and place of philosophy. That's where philosophy can happen. And so I did not want this to be an academic book, right? It's, in fact, it's precisely for people who might otherwise never want to pick up a book about block or buy block.

Yeah. Yeah, like, I, there's like with the way that, especially in academic libraries, when we do instruction to like undergrads about like how to do citation, it's like full Foucault, mode. It's always like in the framework of punishment. If you do not cite things properly, you are doing a plagiarism and you will get kicked out of school and you'll die. Like, it's very, like, serious business. If you don't format your MLA fucking work cited page correctly, then you're going to be put in the stocks for three days. Like, it's all a framework of punishment. And so I feel like citational practice is not about this connected network of where you're you get your ideas and who you're in conversation with, but it's an act of, like, punitive,

like, it's always punishment. It's a torture, almost. So I just, I, I'm always telling librarians, like, rethink how we are doing instruction around citation and not through punishment. Yeah, the bibliography of the back is, like, these are all the people I read, and that fact, I thought were really useful. But this idea of, like, like, this, Block's philosophy is so interesting. and it's so appealing precisely because it isn't, it's, it's, maybe in places kind of esoteric and a bit weird and like, but it is never like arcane scholasticism. It's like this, like, it's, I'm sure everyone's had this where you pick up a book by like someone that you really like and admire and it's like, it's like, you know, it's like intellectual drugs,

right? You put it down and like, you feel like you are looking at the world differently. Like, that's, that's what it can be like. You feel like suddenly existence itself is kind of like open. up in front of you and you go, I kind of get it now. And for me, that's what reading, particularly blocks work over the past few years has been like, and this is like, this is a kind of small attempt to kind of passing that onto someone. Nice. So 45 minutes in, now let's talk about how like utopianism with libraries. So like when I had this idea for this episode, because when I

wanted to help you promote your work, right, but I was like, okay, how do we tie this to libraries? And I think I've mentioned it in podcast episodes with you before. But the scholar for Bazi Itar, who we've had on here before, wrote this wonderful article called about this concept of vocational awe. Right. And it's actually, she brings like a religious framework to it. If you haven't read, I think you'd really like it, John. And it's like librarians view librarianship as like a literal, like, religious vocation. like monks and shit.

And so like the profession is this like big nebulous thing that like it literally that like creates like this like religious terror and awe that it's beyond critique, right? Where we view it as like perfect as it already is. And so this is how like racism is allowed to just flourish in librarianship because white librarians aren't critiquing the system that they're in. But part of this is fed by the way that non-librarians talk about libraries as like this utopian space. You know, libraries are the last bastions of democracy. And I'm making a jerk off motion into the camera right now. Like, you know, libraries are like, oh, my library when I was a

kid, it was magical. And it wouldn't be where I am today without it. Like people, like the public kind of reinforce our vocational awe sometimes because they have this view of libraries. Like, libraries are the living utopia right now to them. And I'm like, no, they're not. No, they're not. No, they're not. And so it's like when I was reading through this, like the way that Block talks about utopia, it was like this sort of like, what was the, there was a quote about like it being like naive liberalism of like utopia versus like what he went. So it's like, how would according to Block or according to you trying to, you know, interpret Block, like how can library workers like push past this like naive liberal utopianism and vocational awe? Like,

to actually bring about this sort of like more revolutionary utopianism that Block is talking about. Solve all over problems. Well, like, I'm kind of, I'm kind of curious about what you, Justin, and Sadie think about this. Like, in as people, so there's a phrase the block uses quite a lot, which is the process is made by the people who are made by the process. Yes. Right. So, like, there isn't, there isn't an end of like, what is the, perfect utopian library look like or what does it mean for their libraries to exist under utopia?

Utopia is this, this kind of like creative process that is done and enacted and often deferred and defeated and rethought and reenacted through the work of, like, through the work of ordinary people. So I'm going to do the classic sort of academic thing and go like, well, that's a great question. What's the answer to that question? And it's like, what does that, what does that look like for the three of you in like in systems that like you, you know, at the end of that article, like, this idea of like, you might save somebody's life, but you'll never get the support that you need to deal with the emotional complexity of that situation after the fact. Like, you might, you might be the magical place for children who will go home to cold houses with no food in the fridge. But like,

you will be that magic whilst also being aware of that that's what's going to happen to them, right? So, like, what, because really, I think what you're asking is, like, what's the big, what's the wider system? There is no such thing as a utopian library system outside of a non-utopian world system, right? Yeah. So you have read the article, John? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I read it before. Yeah, yeah. I have criticisms of it, and especially the way that it has been kind of shallowly weaponized since its publication, but I feel like it's critical to the profession and that, like, now that we have this concept, of like that we put a name to this phenomenon it's been very helpful to like build on yeah it's it's a very

good i think there's i think broadly there is that's probably true of things like education or healthcare also have like or as part of vocational or is this neoliberal strategy of like a job creep and like you don't need to be you don't need to be compensated it sort of reminds me of it reminded me a lot of like the clap for NHS workers oh yeah during COVID where like everyone in the UK was told to go outside of their houses and clap to show your appreciation for doctors. And it's like, are we going to pay them any more money? No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, the essential worker thing, like, I don't know if that's how it was phrased in the UK, but that's how it was phrased here in the US. Like, like, we're going to, we're going to be very, like, we're going to be so supportive of our grocery workers because they are like, have to work. But like, we're not going to actually pay them any anything more. make their lives in easier or better,

no. Yeah, like, I feel like the way that we view, like, those professions and stuff right now is a perfect

example of the sort of, like, naive liberal utopianism that is, like, critiqued. But, like, what I'll say, and then I'll shut the fuck up

so everyone else can talk, is that, like, so one of the things that struck me was the sentence, we need art that can give expression to the possibilities and that which is,

quote, not yet, the, the no knech, right? And this, the way that, like,

that I related that to like what's happening in librarianship right now is like an actual like action thing that can do is so we've talked about this on many episodes before but like with all the book ban bullshit right now. So many of the reactions are accepting the argument of the book ban with like pornography and everything and then going like oh no we're not doing that. Like it's very reactionary and defensive. But what we've talked about before is like, We need to collect things so that people can see that they're there. Right. So that even if there's not a whatever in the community, like you kind of like are building the space that you want to have, like through your collections, like the library collections. I wrote this very Buddhist thing.

Library collections are empty and they have potentiality. Right. Like we should be viewing our collections as a way of building the not yet. Right. This is also a framework, like the, so I'm on the editorial board of the homosaurus. Listeners will know what that is, but it's this with subject headings, right? And it's a queer one and it's international. We've got a gay dinosaur.

I take Carlson got mad at us. It was good fun. But like when we come up with terms, it's not the traditional, quote, literary warrant way. Oh, a book has come across my desk and now I have to catalog it. Oh, there's not a subject heading that fits what this is about. So I'm going to make that subject heading, right? That's what literary warrant is. We go, what about this concept?

Even if there's not anything published on it yet, there might be, there might be something in an archive someday that this would apply to, right? And so we, we like, we'll like fill out so much stuff where it's like, I haven't seen anything published about this. I'm not hearing people talk about this, but we make the terms anyway. So I felt like that was like, though, that's building the not yet. That's the knock unique right there. that's a form of it. And so it's like I, especially with the book bands and like collections and instead of being defensive, this is a way that we should be viewing how we are creating like collections and systems in our libraries.

Building taxonomies of a world we might want to live in. I think it's probably, because yeah, if you're going to have a library within or any industry within the same system of relations like capitalism, it can't exist outside of it. You can't ask one industry to like get. give away what they're doing because they'll just go out of business, right? So asking authors to give away their books for free or asking artists to give away their work for free doesn't work because then you just have no artists who can survive, right? It's it doesn't change anything materially because the relationships between them and how they eat and live haven't changed, right? So you can want open culture all you want and like a piracy, politics all you want, but that doesn't actually change a system of relationships. So I think one thing you could try to build

in libraries is a politics of hope, which is a ruthless realism that exploits openings for making the world you want to see it. So when you see an opening for a smaller or large change, you take it. And, you know, particularly with climate crisis, there's going to be openings. Like, there's going to be disruptions in the world. There's going to be major political, social and economic upheavals, you know. We don't know when they'll happen. but you have to have a political consciousness that's ready for those openings because the capitalist class has one. They're ready to go. They're ready for it to further privatize and, you know, send into fascism, you know, animate the working class through promises of a freedom but not change in terms of who owns things.

So you have to have a politics that's counter to that. But every industry needs it. Something that I kind of think about is like, especially when we talk about scope creep in libraries and how like particularly public libraries sort of become this sort of like mash up between social work and actual library work and how people want to push back against that. And I completely understand why library workers would push back against that. But at the same time, I kind of see this, I don't know, maybe a path forward where in, you know, in public libraries, we talk a lot about community partnerships. and et cetera, et cetera. And so much of it varies depending on what the local government is like and what the state government is like and all of that, what grants you can get, you know. And but to me, it seems like the only way to get, be able to get back to library work is to do things to support more socialist

social work to support people who are in, in like sort of in need of that sort of support that libraries have started to have to pick up the slack on. So like if we can as libraries help change what that aspect of government looks like, not only can we therefore start to ease the burden, the social work burden off of us back onto the services that are there for that and like say like have, hopefully have the structure to help people deal with, you know, the fact that the kid that you just helped find a book who it might help him like feel better or like, you know, have hope for now, but you know he's going home to a cold house that has no food in the fridge. Like, hopefully social work has more of the built-in way to support the workers who are doing that work than

librarians who afterwards, we have to live with the fact that we can't really help that kid, right? Because that's out of our scope. But I guess what I'm trying to say is, is the push of social work in libraries doesn't necessarily seem like a negative thing to me or necessarily a scope creep thing to me, because once we can get that up and going, we can start to go back to library work and then we'll have a partnership and an understanding there too. And again, that's not a perfect necessarily utopian thinking because that's still within sort of the greater state structure. But that's kind of what it makes me think of talking about vocational awe and scope creep, especially because there's so much of that in there, if that makes sense. When all of you were talking, there's this amazing idea from the philosopher Tom Moyland, which came to mind. And so this is a quote from them, we need to remember that the deepest vocation of utopia is to remind us of our constitutional inability to imagine utopia itself. And this, not owing to any individual failure of imagination, but as a result of the systemic cultural and ideological closures of which we are all in one way or another prisoners. Therefore, we have to remember the first move in the utopian process must be one that refuses this totalizing closure. The first step is that of negation.

And they talk about, like, to be a utopian is to be caught up in this double process of denunciation and annunciation. So we are denouncing the world that is, and in so doing, that is the first step of announcing the world that could be. And I think so often we think that like it's enough or like the kind of thought stops at like the critique, right? If we just critique harder. And it's like, well, we just do grad school at each other. Yeah, we just do grad school at each other. Then we will solve all of the problems. But it's like actually, like to be a utopian is to recognize that that really is only the very first step, right, to go.

And actually the far harder point is to be like, okay, what takes us beyond denunciation into the announcing the enunciation of something that has yet to come into being. Yeah, I think also about what Sadie was saying with other services, that's, I think, a combination of industrial unionism and library socialism as intuition pumps can also be a way of, if we had other services that acted like libraries, even if they're just at the municipal level, if we can start having, you know, more tool libraries, and then having more fanciful things like, you know, boats you can borrow by the river for free, which some park departments already do. Running these things and maybe even library workers moving out of libraries and into other fields that are modeled on library socialism because they're going to bring the ethos of what a library is there to do, which is to collectively create and maintain goods.

Because we also maintain things, you know, I saw a report from our cataloger the other day about how many, labels they fixed on books and how many spines they fixed. And it was just like thousands, you know, over the span of the year. So we maintain this stuff that we buy as well. We don't just buy it until it wears out. Like there's also labor and fixing things. That means maintaining tools, maintaining, you know, snow shovels. Why not cars? Why not, you know, e-bikes? You know, stuff like that that you could just be loaned out for free and maintained by a professional and just moderately funded, which the police budget's right there. But, you know, they get, You know, they get all kinds of free equipment from the federal government from war surplus.

You know, why can't I borrow an MRAP? Why not? I want a tank. Let me fucking take it muddying. If libraries a bobcat. No, like put some public land or mudding. You put all the MRAps there. You can go in, you sign a waiver.

You get in the NMRAP and you go mutton in it. Why not? Redneck socialism. Hell yeah. This is a Florida man's like response to the library socialism. Well, like, this is the good point, right? Which is like this idea of like utopianism is so naive. It doesn't accept the world as it truly is.

And you go, well, if you can look at the world as it truly is and be like, well, it's probably going to be fine. Are you really prepared to settle for that little? Is that all you want? Like, should we not? Like, this is why a friend of mine said to me, like people who are optimists or just pessimists in denial. Because if you go, things will be okay. It's like, really? This is the limit of what you want.

You know, I keep saying this Mark Fisher quote, which is like, like, I'm not against change. I just wish it wasn't all shit. Like, I love the idea of change. I just wish it wasn't always changed for the worst. And it's like, I'm having a Sarah. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. It's like, it's also, it's also possible, right? When we, when you allow yourself the, the, the, the, the space to be like, this is not just like naive, utopian daydreaming. And even if it is, there's something so incredibly important and powerful within that, that is, is yet to be fully appreciated and catalyzed. One of my favorite quotes from Fred Jameson

arguably the greatest living American philosopher of all time and write about kind of most things is the amazing sentence Utopia is real but utopia has not been realized but utopia is real like these ideas of like

of just that very small exercise you all under took of like well what if like there is a kind of like reality to that right so Block has this distinction between the objectively real possible and the concretely possible. So there's stuff which just can't happen like tomorrow.

We are not going to wake up tomorrow and be like library socialism has arrived. But like the tendencies and latencies and the potentialities of everything that you just talked about are existent now, right? Those, those like, you know, like Justin's, the police budget is right there, right? The resources are already right there. And it's simply a case of like what potentialities and latencies and, and, and, and, and fracture points, can we kind of like splinter open to move the, the conditions of possibility into something better? That's actually very similar. So I'm involved with the like Boston, like Black Rose

chapter. And like the Black Rose writ large just developed a new program, right? And Black Rose does programmatic anarchism or organized anarchism, very similar to like the Specifismo and stuff like that. And their new program is very like you start with like, well, what is our, what do we want? What do we want the world to look like? You know, what like, it starts kind of utopian and then you go from there with like conjectural analysis. It's like, okay, what do we need to do to move in that direction? You can't fix it if you don't have any like goal of where you want it after it's fixed. Like, why are you even fixing it? Like, because if you fix something, it could be one way or it could be worse, you know? So like, It's this like utopianism.

It's like there's ways to do it. We just have to, you know, like, once we know where we're at, then you can start identifying what you can do to make steps to get there. Then I was going to say something else. And I forgot. Maybe it'll, maybe it'll come back to me. There is. Oh, no, I remember now.

Oh, there we go. There we go. I was going to say that I was having a very Sarah Ahmed moment when you were talking because I was like, what we need to do is we need to like complain and be selfish instead of being optimistic. It's not. that we have like basic needs, it's like, no, I want this stuff. I deserve this stuff. I deserve a better world. Complaint. Be selfish. You know, be Sarah Ahmed, be a feminist killjoy. Like, that's,

that's also, that's, that's not like, negative, like, it's a form of, like, negative negativity that gets you somewhere, because you deserve better, you know. Yeah. And even if that better is just, like, a more honest understanding of where you are, right? Yeah. And like, that's, that's, that is, that's actually useful to have your, to have our idealized notions or what institutions are or what they will do for us taken away is often like very emotionally or subjectively painful, but it's useful. And it's actually an important thing to have. And this is why, like, again, like if you are going to be a utopian, if you dream of a better world, you inevitably have to come to like the block talks about the cold and warm streams of Marxism, right? And this idea of like,

You have to have both. You have to have this kind of like this like deep-seated, like burning love for the world that has yet to come into being. This idea that actually the world can be better and can be radically transformed. But if you have only that, you end up, as Block puts it in the principle of hope, you end up in kind of like, either like revenge on the world or what you call like mindless Jacobinism, like a kind of like fanatical violence. Yeah. But you, so what you need is the kind of kind of very cold, very analytical, like critique political economy. And the block puts it, it's like, like, It's pouring lead in the shoes of utopianism. Like, instead of, like, flying off into nowhere, you need that to keep you grounded. But you have to have both of those things. And both of these things are these two, they're not even like, they're not even like, they're not even styles.

But these two, like, kind of sets of intellectual commitments that different thinkers can express at different times, work together kind of like harmoniously. There's a kind of like dialectical tension between this idea of like the ruthless criticism of all that exists. and at the same time the insistence of and the necessity of like this better future that's yet to be realized like those two things are that tension of like existing in that state of going actually the world is terrible the world is beautiful is that's the that is the very ground of like utopian philosophy yeah i i will admit that i predictably had very immature uh reactions when i first read the heart of the warm stream of Marxism oh yeah um yeah

listeners of Tinder subject, the Beemian episode with Kyle, that we did with Kyle, where I was like, wait a minute, what's this warm stream of Marxism shit? Is this pervert stuff?

I want to know what it is, because I'd never heard of it before. But, yeah, I think Beniamine was talks about it, right? That was how, or like I was like looking.

Yeah. Yeah. It's very funny. I like, I talk about a little bit in my next book, which is coming out in July. Don't, don't write and publish two books the year. Don't do that. I was going to be like, why the hell did you do two years? Because I made some bad choices. And yeah, don't do that. It's a bad idea. But this is kind of like,

in some ways, this is a bit more of a kind of like theoretical book of like trying to work out some ideas about like the necessity of thinking utopianly. And then the next book that's coming out is called capitalism a horror story, Gothic Marxism and the dark side of the radical imagination, and is kind of putting some of the ideas here into like cultural criticism and talking about film, which I'm very excited. I'm very excited by. And hopefully maybe, you know, maybe I can come back and we can talk about that one as well. Yes, I have pre-ordered it. I'm very excited to read it. Yeah. I guess my like closing question unless Sadie or Justin, hello Arthur, have other things to say would be like, so one of my favorite parts of this primer, hello Arthur, I need my, my laptop

buddy, thank you, is when you're talking about like if people are going to read block that he's got a very kind of distinct writing style, right? And you say, that said, it's often a difficult but undeniably exhilarating experience to read it. And to borrow a line of thought from Adorno, we need an adorno alarm, I think. The style is not something to get, like, the style is not something to get, like, the style is not something to get over, but rather the very first step on grasping what Block is doing. The bafflement, confusion, or frustration a first-time reader feels is not something to shy away from. We need to be shaken out of our old ways of thinking. And I guess my final closing discussion point thought would be like,

how can library workers be shaken out of our current ways of thinking via reading, or like other things, but like that was sort of like, oh, that's, that was the moment where I was like, this is our sort of call to action. How do we like shake people out of their current ways of thinking? Is this podcast a way of doing it? Like, what, what are, what all are we doing, you know? I think, I think sometimes there's a temptation to think that like, if knowledge is not immediately kind of like transparent to us, it isn't that. And like, if we read something and we go, I don't get it, you just go, well, I'm going to ignore this, like, because it's, it's not for me, or you kind of bounce off it really hard. But I, I actually think that those responses are worth

paying something, paying attention to, because there are opportunities, right? To, to go, okay, what does that, what does that tell me? Yeah, I will, I will say, please do read block. It's, it's really, like I say, it's honestly, sometimes such beautiful writing, but it is hard, and it's hard because he's trying to do something so like jaw-droppingly massive that one book does take 1,600 pages. And it is written, it is written in the style of like, like say, of literary modernism. It's, it's about, it's not just about kind of give you new knowledge. It's about trying to rewire your mind. But I don't know.

How do, how do all of you feel like, were there other bits of this book that you were like, okay, how does this apply to the life and labor? of librarianship. I don't know. Justin and Sadie, I've talked a lot. What do you all think? I think I got everything out. Or like other things that maybe like related to our work and stuff. I mean, really it was just sort of like thinking like not that anything was like specific to librarianship, but more just thinking how do we kind of now that I have these ideas, now that I have this knowledge.

Like that's like another like strategy. It's like, you know, you kind of insert yourself into places as like a seed. and then sort of disseminate ideas. So it's like, you know, building utopia, right, working towards it, like, is not just a, oh, I recognize how this applies to libraries, but more like how now that my way of thinking has been changed, how is that then going to shape my labor?

And how does them my labor affect other library workers and my patrons? Sort of what I took away from it. Yeah, I think it's important to do agitation when you get the chance. I mean, I do it in presentations and one of, one discussions and always look for an opening in some way. It's hard to move like a large organization at once. So if you wanted to get, you know, a consortia on board or something, then it's going to be a lot of work to get them all in on the same page.

But that's just how you have to do it is kind of one person at a time and one group at a time and put yourself out there because people will be more receptive to it than you think, especially for the right opening. Yeah. But even beyond that, it's beyond your one workplace. Like, this is more of a larger scale. You know, like a, you need to think of how are you going to change the industry? Because, like, you know, cops don't have one big union, but they initiate themselves into a culture of constantly pushing for higher budgets, higher salary, higher indemnification from all the crimes that they do.

They don't need a union to do that. They need a shared understanding of what it is their role is. which is usually based on traumatizing each other in police academy, and then the kind of trauma bond, which I wouldn't recommend for other industries. But as much as I am a syndicalist, you don't actually need industrial unionism to do kind of large systemic changes if you have the right opening and the right moment, right? All that can happen much quicker than it can have a sort of, what's the word,

it's a biological term I'm forgetting it, punctuated equilibrium, where something will change very quickly, much quicker, than you think it would from the ordinary process. Sadie, did you have anything else? No, I'm just taking a lot in already. I bought the primer. I know we have a PDF copy, but I bought it anyway. The cover is gorgeous.

Yeah, the cover is beautiful, isn't it? Designed by my friends Asset Horizon, who also have an incredible podcast talking about philosophy and theory and all that really smart stuff. And also are behind CritDrip, the amazing theory apparel store. that you can find on Etsy. Those are my Foucault shirts from. Like, I know, I know this, this, this, this might be a slightly cliched way of ending things.

But if I may, I think if we're going to talk about utopianism, I think we have to, the great utopian, and maybe this is a controversial thing to say, but like the great utopian book of the last decade has been capitalist realism. And the, the ending of that book is, is a quote I come back to all the time. And I think it's well worth holding on to, even as the conditions under which it was written, have not gone away and have maybe accelerated. So it ends with this very short paragraph. The long dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect.

The tiniest event can tear a hole in the gray curtain of reaction, which has marked the horizon of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again. I think that's the perfect place to close it out on to quote how y'all often end Horror Vanguard. Yes, look at the cover. It's so pretty. I love it. It's so, like, sensual for some reason.

I know, I know. It's like a real sexy looking book. It's great. I want you to go buy it. Librarians listening. Buy it for your library right now. Buy 10 copies. Yes, yes, yes.

And get your pre-orders, son. Yeah. Yes. Please, please get it for your library. Get more than one because it's small and hopefully people will take it home and keep it. Deal this book. Yeah, steal the book from your library and then buy, like, have patrons steal the book from the library and then buy more copies of it.

This is a steal things from libraries podcast. Cool. Thank you so much for coming on, John. Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. all of you for such a kind of invitation to come on and to like talk about, you know, weird German philosophy. But like, I really appreciate it. And it's like, I, I do firmly

believe that like theory is not this kind of like highfalutin, our abstract idea, but like, it's about helping us to like the kind of great power of theory in a practical sense is like, I don't know if you've ever had these feelings of like looking at the world and like thinking to yourself, am I, am I just, am I just wrong? Am I, am I, am I, Am I crazy? Am I imagining things? But it's like the great kind of reassuring idea here is there is this intellectual tradition that stretches back literally centuries upon centuries upon centuries are people going, actually, no, you're not wrong. The world is broken.

There are these, the world, you know, Kyle's favorite quote from Eugene Debs is the world is not right. And it's like, you know that. And like you are not alone in feeling like that. And suddenly there are all of these kind of tools and possibilities. and ways of thinking and looking at your own life and the life of the people that you love and care for, that you go, actually things could be different and things could be better. So yeah, thank you so much. Thank you so much for inviting me on. And do you have any like final plugs? Listen, listen to Horror Vanguard. It's very good. It's, it's very good. If you like, if you like talking about, as we always say, that it's about three things, it's about friendship, it's about

communism. And occasionally it's about scary movies too. And if you like any of those three things you should listen to the show. You can find me on social media, pretty much on every platform as the liquoric guy. And yeah, please, please check out, check out Utopia, a primer and utopian philosophy. And please in a few months, check out capitalism or horror story. All right. Hell yeah. Hang on the line for one minute and good night. Mark Fisher, Bencher. I hate you so much.