Rev Left Radio - Post-Structuralism, Postmodernism, and... Metamodernism?

Episode Date: November 16, 2018

Austin Hayden Smidt (Political philosopher, filmmaker, actor, writer, podcast host, and all around wonderful guy) joins Breht to discuss the philosophy and political relevance of post-structuralism, postmodernism, and post-postmodernism aka "metamodernism". They explore the connections between these philosophies and Leftism, exploring both the contradictions between postmodernism and Marxism as well as the connection between postmodernism and post-left anarchism! Topics include: Liberation Theology, Sartre, Irony, Sincerity, Neoliberalism, Post-Postmodernism, Meta-Narratives, how social media shapes our psychology, and more! Check out Owls at Dawn (one of Breht's favorite podcasts) here: http://www.owlsatdawn.com Check out Austin's Medium here: https://medium.com/@austinhaydensmidt Follow Austin on Twitter @austin_hayden Austin Hayden Smidt is Co-host @wisecrack (Show Me The Meaning), @owls_at_dawn & @idigthismovie and a producer @inventfuturedoc. NEW LOGO from BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical. Please reach out to them if you are in need of any graphic design work for your leftist projects!  ---------------- Intro music by Captain Planet. You can find and support his wonderful music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com Please Rate and Review our show on iTunes or whatever podcast app you use. This dramatically helps increase our reach. Support the Show and get access to bonus content on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center. Join the SRA here: https://www.socialistra.org/  

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and Comrade Brett O'Shea, and today we have on Austin Hayden from Owls at Don, Wisecrack, and I dig this movie to talk about post-structuralism, post-modernism, and metamodernism. It's a fascinating conversation on a very difficult set of topics, but I hope that we did it justice. and Austin is a very capable, articulate, and intelligent guest to have on to tackle this big topic. But before we get into the episode, I wanted to give the results of our logo contest. So in second place, is C.J. Bones. He is built by Bones on Instagram, and he created the logo that we are using for our Patreon. And in first place, we got a new collective, a communist collective from Canada called Barb, B.A.R.

They are a radical collective of communists who do graphic design work. They just started their social media presence. And they're on Instagram and Twitter at Barb a Radical. Barb A Radical. So go check them out, support them. If any leftist project has any need for graphic designers, you can go to either one of these comrades. We'll link to them in the show notes to get that work done.

And before we move on, I wanted to read the reason for the design that Barb created. because I think it's really cool and it shows how much thought went into this new logo. So they said, we are all dedicated listeners of Rev Left Radio and have so much affection for you, your show, and what you're doing with it. Your human kindness is palpably genuine

and when listening, we often get emotional right along with you. It's with that strength of emotion and solidarity that we have attacked this project. In thinking about your show, we thought of amplification, punk, energy, rawness, DIY aesthetics, and your personal authenticity. And we wanted your logo to reflect all of that. It could never be corporate or slick.

The lightning bolt comes from a lot of places, such as signal cork badges from Red Army and the PLA and old radio tower dishes. Lightning bolts have always been associated with radio since the invention of the medium. We opted to have the Rev Left woodmark expand the way it does to imply it's a voice coming out of a speaker,

but clearly coming out of the left. We added the gritty texture as a callback to your current logo and its lo-fi punk appeal. It also references the woodcut aesthetic of old IWW posters. So all that wonderful thought went into making this wonderful new logo, and we thank Barb very much for their help on this front. But we did receive some criticism, some really principled criticism about how we went about conducting this logo contest. And I was totally unaware of this.

Obviously, I'm not in that world. And I made a mistake here, and I had a comrade email me and sort of show me my mistake now. We had already basically picked a winner at this point, and the contest was more or less over. so we can't really go back and change the past. But I wanted to read this criticism so that anybody out there listening can kind of internalize it and vow to all of you that moving forward we will never make the same mistake again. And after I read this criticism, I was like, damn, we did kind of fuck up. So I'm just going to read the email and the criticism and they'll get into the episode.

The email started, hi, my name is Mitchell Malloy. I'm an illustrator in games, entertainment, and publishing. I'm also a big fan of Rev Left Radio and the work you do there, putting forward different leftist perspectives. So in the spirit of good faith criticism and raising concerns with comrades, I wanted to say that hearing the terms of your logo contest, I was immediately a little bit repelled. The terms of, as they've been broadcast, are, quote,

submit an image, and if we like it, you get paid so we can use it. The problem with this conduct is at its spec work. Now, I'm assuming that, like most folks, you're probably not super tied into the working art scene and our specific labor conditions, which is totally okay. We're a real niche market with a really specific relationship to capitalist exploitation. The term spec work here refers to work done on speculation.

That is to say, work done without guarantee of compensation for your labor. Companies hold art and design contests all the time, and the result of those contests is that they get a high volume of solicitations from artists who are laboring for them, and only one person gets paid out for said labor. Additionally, all the submissions act as free advertising for the product in question, and since many, maybe most, working artists primarily work as advertisements, advertising artists. This is essentially them providing their labor and services as such for the chance of pay with no guarantee. There is a large movement of labor activism within

art decrying spec work and art contests because it effectively devalues our labor and asks us to do it for free. Many of your contributors may be hobbyists or junior artists, but in those cases those people are unknowingly driving down the labor value of our work and allowing themselves to be exploited. Often, this delegitimizes professional art as a career choice and drives our wages lower. In the future, I'd urge you to please hire a qualified graphic designer of your choosing at the fairest rate possible for their work. That way, you're compensating artists for their time, being sure their labor is valued, and further legitimizing their career in labor. I hope this letter comes across in the spirit of camaraderie. It's intended. If you have any questions

about art or art labor, I would be happy to explore the issues we face with you more in depth. Now, thank you, Mitch, for that wonderful criticism. And, you know, when that criticism is so pointed, so informed, so constructive, and is done in this good faith way, it really strikes a chord with me. And we don't ever want to, you know, even if it's unknowingly, contribute to exploitation of workers, especially in the art realm. So we apologize for that, and it will not happen again. We'll make sure of that. And anybody out there who's thinking about doing something similar in the future should think about that as well. But having said all of that, let's go ahead and get into our interview on post-structuralism with Austin Hayden. Here we go.

Thank you for having me on. Yeah, so my name's Austin. I co-hosts a podcast that you were on. Thank you for coming on. It was wonderful. It's called Owls at Dawn. I co-host it with a buddy of mine who's also a colleague. He's a philosophy professor in Southern California, and we went to undergrad together.

And then I also co-host a movie podcast. with the Wisecrack YouTube channel called Show Me The Meaning. I'm kind of the resident commie and psychoanalyst and crazy philosopher, I guess. And then I also produce and research for some of their videos on their YouTube channel as well. And I'm currently a researcher in political economy here in Sydney, Australia. And I guess my background in research, which will probably come out through the course of the conversation, just because I kind of come at political philosophy from a sort of strange trajectory. but started off studying theology in undergrad, and then grad school was philosophical theology, philosophy of religion, did my master's dissertation on Latin American liberation theology, which is actually how I found Marx, really.

And then PhD research in philosophy, really concentrating on, I guess we would say, current trends in continental philosophy, political philosophy. But, you know, history of philosophy and stuff like that as well as it pertains to kind of. of grounding a critique of political economy. So I've got a book coming out next year that'll be on like Sartra and his later Marxist turn in his book, Critique of Dialectical Reason. And then my current research is hopefully feeding a follow-up to that, which is kind of like I'm calling it a pro-legomena to any future political economy. So it's sort of like a critique of the critique of political economy. But it's mostly like a philosophical critique or analysis of the critique of political economy.

Very cool, yeah. So a lot to say there. One is the last few episodes we've had, if you sort of look at it, it kind of forms a chronological thrust. So we started with state and revolution. Then we did Stalin. Then we did sartre and Camus and existentialism.

And now we're doing post-structuralism, which if you set them all by each other, they take place in a certain order. So I think that's incredibly interesting. And we'll definitely get into some of the connections between our last episode regarding existentialism and this episode regarding post-structuralism. But you said you worked at Wisecrack, and one of the things that I use, one of the things I use in preparation for this interview was a video, I believe Wisecrack did on Bo Burnham and Postmodern comedy.

Oh, yeah, that was my video. Was that your video? It was wonderful, wonderful. I highly recommend it. Oh, yeah, I like, I love the idea of that you put in that video of going, not recoiling from postmodernism, but pushing through it to see if we can, if we can gain new meaning, you know, beyond postmodernism. I don't know. I highly recommend it. What would you say, based on your podcast, one of them, Ows at Don, how would you describe that?

Because it's not technically just political philosophy, but there's politics, there's music. What do you think the overarching theme of Ows at Don is? I mean, we kind of say it at the intro, and it's a little tongue in cheek, but we say, you know, we're just two dudes from Southern California who studied philosophy, politics, and religion around the world, and decided to start a podcast where we could bullshit with impunity. I mean, we went to undergrad together, and we were at a private evangelical university studying theology, and both of us came to philosophy and then kind of political theory and political philosophy during our time there. And it was an environment that was a little bit stultifying. There weren't too many people that were engaged in the types of conversations that we thought were important. necessary. People weren't willing to really challenge the dogmas of the statement of faith, which was, you know, pretty much a standard evangelical, but with Calvinist leanings. And we

wanted to question those dogmas or unpack them, deconstruct them, whatever. And so we had a group of friends that used to get together at a restaurant, this Chinese restaurant called Mandarin Wong, and we used to go there, you know, once a week and we would just sit around and we would talk philosophy, politics, religion, we would talk life, love, sports you know and so the podcast is really an extension of that same camaraderie but just over a digital medium because my co-host is in Los Angeles I've been bouncing around the world because of school and grad school and research and work and stuff like that and so this is actually like part of it is a wonderful way for us to connect and still challenge each other and think about things

and then another part of it is just we wanted to disseminate information in a way that we thought was kind of, from a unique perspective, a sort of post-evangelical, we're still in a midst of, or at least I am in the midst of a crisis of faith that I've been dealing with for the last 10-plus years and kind of figuring out how we would kind of work through that, you know, many years later. That's fascinating. Yeah, I'd love to talk about that, but we got to focus. We got to focus. So this is sort of like getting into this bigger topic. How did you first get into post-structuralism? How did you first get into left-wing politics and how, if at all, did the two influence each other?

So they kind of, they co-constitute one another. It was actually during my time at this evangelical college in Southern California. And I was hearing a lot about people talk about postmodernism. There was a movement in the United States at the time in the evangelical community called the Emerging Church. And the Emerging Church was really willing to embrace. the resources of deconstruction, of post-structural critiques, of post-modern critiques, post-modern art. They were trying to really engage in ecumenical, where it's like you don't just, you know, hunker down into your denomination, but you cross-denominational divides within the Christian community.

And so this emerging movement was called the emerging church, and they wanted to embrace all of these things, to kind of create a more holistic understanding, a more what they would have seen as authentic understanding of Christianity. But the evangelical church was really scared of this because they saw it as a threat to their legitimacy and so they were constantly talking about the dangers of postmodernism and so it was this huge controversy i'd say from about 2002-ish 2003-ish to around 2010 when it kind of died out and now the movement doesn't really have as much steam it's kind of either just become normal or maybe it's fizzled out or whatever um or it's become a new fat i don't really know i'm not as connected with the church these days but um it was at that time when i was like well i want to know what

the fuck postmodernism is. So I read Jean-Fransoil Leotards, The Postmodern Condition, and then a follow-up to that, which is a collection of letters that he wrote, sort of clarifying his ideas to colleagues and friends called The Postmodern Explained. And it was that that was my real intro, because I basically realized that everything that had been taught to me as being the boogeyman of post-modernism was a mischaracterization, that that wasn't really what post-modernism was. And this, not to get too far askew, but this really reminds. me of what's going on with like the Jordan Peterson phenomenon. It's logically the same sort of tendency.

It's people creating this boogeyman that are scared of this word. And I get it. It's a fucking slippery term. And so it kind of causes some confusion and sometimes confusion can be scary. But instead of creating the boogeyman, I wanted or instead of just accepting the boogeyman, I wanted to explore it. And so I explored it and I started to realize that, well, these things that the church were telling me.

And then, of course, now I think we could say by extension, the things that like Jordan Peterson and his friends in whatever fucking his group is called are espousing that they're kind of just creating false characterizations about what postmodernism is. And so they're creating these monsters. They're creating these boogeymen. And so I wanted to like demystify that boogeyman. And that was really what set me on the trajectory of studying, I guess, what we could loosely call postmodern critique or post-structuralism or whatever else kind of fits within that nebulous world. Yeah. And you know, there's bad faith critiques from the right, the reactionary right, certainly, and I think a lot of people will be familiar with

the way Jordan Peterson recklessly uses terms that he clearly doesn't understand. But there's also some of that from the left as well. There's also this anti-postmodernism on the left, and sometimes it's very principled, right? And we'll get into some of the differences between leftism, anarchism, Marxism, and post-structuralism in a bit. But sometimes it is this caricature, right? It's almost mirroring the ignorance of the reactionary critiques. And so part of the reason I wanted to have you on and do this episode was precisely because, one, you are a good advocate or at least explainer of these concepts so people can actually understand what they're critiquing. And two, I think those sorts of bad faith criticisms of things we don't understand are just

sort of undermine our project and undermine our ability to think critically. And I don't ever want to be in the position where we're doing the same thing as the reactionary. So, you know, I wanted to learn about this. But I guess the second part of that question, you know, how did you get involved in left-wing politics? And then I'll combine that with this question. How do you identify politically? Yeah. So I would say that my foray into left-wing politics really came through Christian charity,

which was basically going out on Friday nights and like giving out sandwiches to the homeless. And then, I mean, I guess you could say I grew up in a family. My mother really wanted to introduce me to poverty growing up. Her mom was paranoid schizophrenic. actually homeless her whole life. So we spent a lot of time in downtown Los Angeles. I'm from the Southern California area. So we spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, you know, at food banks and things like that. And so I think my mom kind of always raised me as being like trying to be like a nice dude, right? And then so Christianity was was kind of an easy fit for me many years later when

I eventually converted and I wasn't raised that way. But again, another story for another time. But so I kind of always had that idea of like charity of taking care of the orphan and taking care of the poor as being a sort of central good that was something that should define our social lives and then extend to our social systems. And then it wasn't really until I found liberation theology, Latin American liberation theology when I was in England doing my master's degree, that I kind of started to realize that the charitable interests that I had and the understanding that I had cultivated around love or Caritas in Christian theology wasn't all that dissimilar to what these Latin American

liberation theologians were trying to articulate, they just wanted to radicalize it within a very sort of particular or explicit political, or towards political ends. So for them, they take the idea of Christian salvation and Gustavo Gutierrez, who is kind of the guy that coined the term liberation theology, basically says that salvation is liberation of the oppressed. And so I started to then pay more attention to left-wing political activism as sort of an extension of my understanding ending at the time of Christian love. And as I further and further moved away from my confessional Christian attachments, I started to kind of answer some of the early Marx's questions, which were how can we realize the same concerns of religion and Christian desire, but within a political

frame. And, you know, the early Marx and his essays on like unity and Christ were things that were very influential. That was like my first real, like, exegetical research into Marx. And then it was kind of then getting involved with certain political parties. Most recently, I was a member of People Before Profit in Ireland, which is a revolutionary socialist political party in Ireland while I was living there. And just being a part of that kind of community and seeing, I guess, the fruition of those same Christian desires that turned into political desires and see them hit the street level in actual solidarity. It was kind of like seeing the root turn into a stock. turn into a bud, turn into a flower.

And I guess that's kind of my trajectory. That is so incredibly fascinating and unique. I mean, as far as how you came to left politics through Christianity, I absolutely just kind of love that. I'm fascinated by that. Before we go on, do you consider yourself a post-structuralist? I mean, I don't even know what that would entail. I loved your interview with the dude from existential comics because he said he was like almost, resistant to label himself and he said I'm just going to describe things that I like or that I am and I'll let you guys put the label on me because he's I guess I was really I mean my research has really been influenced by Sartra and the existentialist tradition so I guess I kind of like the idea that you are what you're not and you're not and I also dated a girl one time that told me something I thought was so profound she said tell me what you think you are so I know exactly what you're not and I fucking loved that so I'm gonna steal that because I feel like we're a little bit

self-delusional. So I don't, I don't know, I'm heavily indebted to post-structuralist critique is what I'll say. But whether I am a post-structuralist, I mean, I think, I think I have a lot of post-structuralist tendencies. But at the same time, I, um, there are some things lacking that we'll get into that, that I want a little bit more from a theoretical frame. Okay, fair enough, fair enough. So let's go ahead and get into definitions then. I think the best way to like start this kind of, right? The best way this is, oh, was that audible? I thought it was in my mind. Absolutely audible. But, you know, I do want to do that 101 approach to things.

And I think before we get into post-structuralism, it behooves us to talk about what structuralism is. And I know these are big questions, but, you know, try to simplify them down, I guess. But first off, what is structuralism? Sure. So, I mean, I always feel such a burden to try to articulate these things because I want to be clear. But at the same time, I don't want to overgeneralize or conflate things. So bear with me as I try to struggle through this. Structuralism might be the easiest one for me to define.

It really comes out of the structural linguistics of Ferdinanda Sassar, Jacobson, Emil Benvinista, and a primarily Sassar who wanted to understand how language operated as a structure. And what he meant by that was that words or what he would call a sign, for example, they don't have like an independent autonomous meaning within themselves, but they have meaning in their differential relations within the structural network or the system in which they reside. So, for example, the word cheese is not just a word that has a positive ascription embedded within itself, but has a sort of negative differential definition based on every other sign that it is not. It's not milk, it's not a fan, it's not a global capitalist economy, it's not a tsunami, it's not the planet Mars. Cheese then is that thing, I guess we would say, that is remainder or that is the remainder or that is left over. And it has its meaning in that differential relation.

And every sign has that meaning. There are other things as well in Sassorian linguistics that are important. He makes this distinction between Le Long and Parole. Parole is basically like what we speak when we're actually speaking language. The long is the sort of semiotic structure, the system of the signs that exist kind of within that network. And parole is the enactment, the speaking of it. And then he wants to make a distinction then within the sign. So we'll say cheese again, that there's a distinction between what he calls the signifier and the signified.

The signifier is the sort of vocal enunciation of the term, right? The sound that is coming out of my mouth. And then the signified is the abstract concept that is supposed to relate to that sound. And then, of course, there's the referent, and the reference is like the block of cheese that's sitting in front of me or whatever. For Sassur, there's an arbitrary relation between the signifier and the signified, between the sound that's coming out of my mouth and the concept. It's not a necessary relation. They don't imply one another necessarily, but that rather they're arbitrary. And that's why, you know, you could really make any sound.

We could go, flibroa is now the new word for the concept that previously was the concept for cheese. There is this arbitrary relation between the signifier and the signified. Take that idea and all of those concerns and then look into the fields of like anthropology and political philosophy. And what you get are these figures like Cloud Levy Strauss, who's probably the most famous structuralist, who was an anthropologist, who wanted to analyze human cultures within a similar sort of framework. He wanted to say that meaning is not something that is created by human beings, not that. This is coming after existentialism. So if people listen to your existentialism podcast, they'll know that for existentialism, the human subject is the active agent that creates the meaningful world into which he or she is thrown at every given moment.

Structuralism comes after that and says, no, I don't like that idea. Rather, subjects aren't the ones that are the active agents that are creating meaning. Subjects are created within a system, a structural system that exists independent of them that constitutes their very subjectivity. And that structural system that constitutes their subjectivity is the really real. That's the really real that stands behind all the individual sort of points of meaning within that system. So, for example, Levy Strauss is looking at systems of kinship and marriage within what he calls the savage mind, which is obviously a terrible term anymore. But he's looking at sort of like non-industrialized cultures and he's kind of analyzing their systems of kinship.

and he's seeing how it is that they kind of have these consistencies that remain throughout them. For example, the incest taboo is one that he talks a lot about. And he says this incest taboo is something that seems to be universal. So there must be some sort of structural truth to this incest taboo that exists beyond the subjects and they're practicing the taboo, but that rather constitutes the subjects within those structural systems that makes them sort of follow, if you will, the demands of the taboo. And so structuralism kind of wants to do that. It wants to say that human subjects aren't the ones that create meaning.

They are themselves the product of the systems of meaning into which they are embedded. They are embedded within these social systems, in these structures, and they are constituted therein. Okay. And so the next question would be, and this is just sort of me trying to understand this along with listeners, in the same way that Nietzsche or Kierkegaard can be talked about as proto-existentialists. Is it fair to talk about Marx and Freud as proto-structuralists and that they see these deeper structures at play in the way that subjectivity is constructed? Yeah, so Freud is oftentimes a lot of times considered as being a structuralist

because of the way that he articulates the unconscious. Now, Lacan will later elaborate this as he takes up the Freudian project, And Lacan will literally say the earlier Lacan is much more structuralist. He becomes a quote-unquote post-structuralist later on. But in his earlier concerns, he basically says the unconscious is structured like a language. And what he means by that is he's saying the same thing that Sassur was saying, is that these sort of bits of meaning and information that are inside the symbolic, which is this idea of the sort of like the unconscious field or structures of meaning,

are structured in the same way in this negative difference. relation, that there is no positive meaning or positive value that exists within side the human mind. Now, Freud, I think, wouldn't quite go that far. He does seem to think that there are some sort of like natural proclivities or maybe sort of like innate capacities that Lacan would probably disagree with. But absolutely, the seeds are there. Marx, is he a proto-structuralist? Only in the sense that he's carrying this mantle that comes out of German idealism that then gets kind of carried through to phenomenology, that then gets carried into existentialism, that's then responded to an instructionalism. So there's a through line, but I mean, I think that Marx is much further removed. The only reason that I would say that he would be the proto-structuralist is because he is interested, obviously, in the material conditions that constitute our social relations.

The difference being that Marx clearly believes in a distinction between nature and culture. Marx clearly believes in some sort of capacity of human agency that is the site, let's say, the agent of history that is the site of meaning creation that structuralists would disagree with. But sure, there's obviously, there's a trajectory there. It's just modified quite a bit. Okay, yeah, fascinating. Okay, so then the next question asks itself, what exactly is post-structural This response to structuralism.

I mean, first of all, it's a terrible term is what it is. It's a confusing term. In philosophical circles, a lot of times they like to speak of post-phenomenology, as opposed to post-structuralism. And the reason is because certain thinkers, like Jacques Derrida, for example, who is sometimes categorized as being a post-structuralist thinker, whether or not he is or he is a deconstructionist or post-phenomenologist, I will let the academics debate about that.

But the point is that he grew up reading Heidegger and Husserl. That was what inspired him. And they are both phenomenologists and existentialists. Well, Heidegger is an existentialist. But they are within the phenomenological tradition. Husserl is really the guy that invented phenomenology following Franz Brintano. So Derrador comes out of that. And so his deconstruction isn't necessarily.

responding to Claudelevy Strauss as much as it is responding to Heidegger, I think. Now, it is responding to Claudeleby Strauss in so many ways. He is really challenging the idea of there being like a sort of center of meaning, this like absolute universal structure of meaning that exists, that is what determines meaning within a given social system. He absolutely is. But what I mean is that his actual intellectual trajectory is much more out of the phenomenological tradition. And so he's kind of a post-phenomenologist in that sense where he is really responding to a lot of issues, particularly in Heidegger. But then you get people like Foucault. And Fouca isn't as interested in responding directly to Heidegger. And Foucao is more interested in responding to, I guess

what we would call the existentialist and the structuralist traditions. And so I guess from his perspective, I think the label kind of sticks a little bit better. And what it would be basically is rather than saying that, okay, there is some sort of universal structure of a given social system that is the really real that constitutes subjectivity, but there's this co-constitative relationship between the structures and between subjectivity, that human subjects are constituted, that there's kind of like a post-humanism. that I think you find in a lot of post-structuralism this idea that there is no like autonomous human agent but that humans are created insofar as they're also

creating their structural system and then but the structures aren't universal themselves they are these contingent processes so what you get in Fouca in particular is the genealogical method that he borrows from Nietzsche which is

sort of like scraping back the origins of every given or of given power dynamics in order to kind of expose their radical contingency. And so there's this commitment to contingency as opposed to universality. There's a commitment to an anti-humanism, which you also will find maybe in a structural critique as well, but definitely not in the existential critique. And so post-structuralism is kind of more, I guess, committed to that, some sort of contingent,

anti-human co-constitute of understanding of power dynamics, of social systems, and of human subjectivity itself. And it actually contests whether or not human subjectivity is a meaningful category, really, as well. Absolutely. And I think a lot of this stuff will be continued to be fleshed out as we go through some of these questions. But you said that the term post-structuralism sometimes is unhelpful or in precise. And I'm going to even push that further and talk about postmodernism. Oh, gosh. Because I think this is the buzzword, right? So what is postmodernism and is it even a useful term to apply to thinkers? If so, how does it differ from post-structuralism? Yeah. So I think there's some real confusion and I don't and I don't mean

to be pedantic here at all. So give me as much of a charitable reading as you can on this. But I think there's a lot of confusion among popular audiences as to what postmodernism is. And this is largely the fault of people who are just bad at distilling information and academics who are, whether intentionally or not, just extremely obscure in their writing style. But I think that we need to realize that people who are generally considered postmodernists like Jean-Baudouiard, Gilles de Leuze, Felix Guattari,

they're not post-modernists. They're critics of post-modernity. They're critics of a tendency that they were articulating or attesting to in capitalist Western capitalist society at the time. So when Jean-Fransoil Lietar writes in 1973, I believe, in the postmodern condition, that post-modernism is incredulity towards metanarrative.

And then he clarifies that later, and what he means by, it's incredulity towards self-legitimizing metanarrative. What he's talking about is that there is a sort of tendency within the world, post-World War II, you know, right around the rise or the emergence of neoliberalism, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a bit, that sort of calls into question the legitimacy of these narratives that had previously been uncontested. And the legitimacy, particularly of the nation state, the

legitimacy of modernity, that human subjectivity is sufficient for accessing truth, or the legitimacy of institutional power, the legitimacy of legal systems and jurisprudence. And so these systems or these structures,

they're all kind of being, they're thrown into disrepute after World War II a little bit. And then even more so as the 20th century is rolling on and as economic crises are kind of bubbling up and you know, this is post 68 now as well when Leotard's writing and

post like post-colonial revolts are starting to to they're kind of kicking off all over the world and so you've got all of these there's like this sentiment across the world that those fucking old stories that we just kind of assumed were real yeah we don't believe those things anymore and so leotard is writing what is this condition in which we live this anxious ridden condition where we no longer believe these grand stories that we were told before and then of course the problem is okay so then what the fuck do we do about it if we're living in the wake of the sort of de-legitimation of these metanaries

what does that mean for us and so then you get thinkers like badriard who comes along a little bit later and i think it's important for people to know too baudriard started off as his PhD supervisor was henri le feb who has a contested relationship with the french Communist Party very much like Sartre did, like you guys talked about in the previous episode. But he started off as a sort of like political philosopher interpreting Marx. And his first couple of books are all about Marx. Before he goes off and starts talking about simulacra and like Disneyland and how the Iraq War didn't happen and things like that, which are kind of provocative terms.

But he has a particular meaning for what he means by that stuff, which is kind of confusing and kind of ridiculous at times. But yeah, I think when we think about postmodernism, we need to think of the figures that are generally attributed with that title that they're critics of postmodernity. They're critics of a sort of like tendency that's unfolding within Western late capitalist societies. And so then what is postmodernism? Well, I think we're going to talk better in a bit, but postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism. I fucking fully agree 100% with Frederick Jameson's little pithy remark on that. What does that mean?

I know you're doing a full episode on that in the near future, so we don't need to spoil that. But there is, I think that's exactly what it is. And that's speaking from a philosophical perspective, because then it's different, too. Like postmodernism and art means something different in film. It means something different. You know, poetry, postmodern poetry can mean something different. They all relate. But when we're speaking philosophically, when we're talking about what is postmodernism,

I think we're talking about a sort of cultural condition. that many people have responded to and tried to attest to and then explain or handle the implications that are derived there from, if that makes sense? It does, yeah. And, you know, it's slippery concepts, but I can start to see the outline of what exactly this is. I guess in what ways do postmodernism and post-structuralism relate, then? Are they synonyms? Is one embedded in the other?

How do you think about the differences there? I think the best way to think about this is that post-structuralism is a particular theoretical framework for analyzing social systems or socioeconomic systems or political systems. It is a political philosophy or a social philosophy. Whereas post-modernism, let's say as a discipline, is more of an approach to our, articulating the conditions of late capitalism less than it is some sort of like heuristic device to try to then like apply I think now I know some people disagree with that because there are people like Richard Rorty who I guess is sometimes called like a postmodern theorist in the sense that he is like a postmodernist you know um but I I'm just not as comfortable

with with that with that type of with I think it's so slippery that it just I'm not as comfortable with articulating it at that level. I tend to think that postmodernism is a sort of, it's a cultural condition, and there are people who respond to that cultural condition. And I think you can be a post-structuralist and respond to the condition of post-modernism. Okay. So then the next question, and I think you touched on this a little bit, maybe we can dive in a little bit more here. What political, what political and historical context did post-structuralism come out of, and what concerns were these thinkers responding to? Yeah. I mean, Foucault in particular, he's, you know, writing right in the 60s, 70s, right around the time when people in the West are starting to become a little concerned maybe with communism in the world, not Marxist theory, but let's say the Soviet Union in particular.

And for certain figures like Henri Lefebvre, the later Jean-Paul Sartre, it was the invasion of Hungary in 1956 that really set things off. So Sartre is not considered to be a post-structuralist thinker, but in my book, which will be coming out in next year, I kind of side with certain thinkers that say that there was a shift in Sartra's development. There's a book written by a guy named Nick Farrell Fox. It's called the Postmodern Sartra. And it basically tries to look at him as having this turn towards like postmodern concerns or post-structuralist concerns. And it's because of a sort of crisis of legitimation that he really struggled with. And it was the idea that in particular that that Marxist theory up until that point in Sartre's mind, particularly in the form of Lukach, who he was extremely critical of,

created a frame of thinking that legitimized the Soviet Union or absolved them from any sort of criticism because the Soviet Union was able to sort of delineate the lines of legitimacy themselves even though they were outside any sort of possibility of critique. So they were standing outside and they were able to have like some sort of, what's the word, like a subspecies a eternity like a view from eternity like some sort of godlike view where they were exempt from any criticism and he thinks that that is embedded within certain marxian articulations uh that really defined the soviet union and that because of that um that's why they felt like they could just do whatever the fuck they wanted and particularly with regards to the invasion of

hungry and sartre thought that was bullshit and uh and and i think that many other young activists at the time agreed. And so I think that post-structuralism in a lot of ways, politically speaking at least, in terms of the sort of like criticism of power and a sort of re-articulation of power, I think it kind of comes out of that. And it kind of wants to look at how power is abused, how power is understood, how we ought to understand power, how do we understand centralized power structures as opposed to maybe other forms of power structures.

And I think it kind of comes out of that. I mean, I know that that's just like, I don't want to overload the causal explanation, but I think that that had a huge amount to do with it. So you have a situation here where post-structuralist or proto-post structuralist thinkers are wrestling with power in the wake of, you know, some of the more disastrous policies and actions of the Soviet Union. Yeah. But that seems, at least on the face of it, to match up to some extent with a Marxist or left-wing critique of power, right?

This idea that we need to figure out how power operates and get at the roots of what power is. But, you know, that surface-level understanding is clearly false. So I guess talking about the relationship here, what is the relationship between Marxism and post-structuralism, namely, in what ways has the former influenced the latter? and in what ways are they intrinsically incompatible? Yeah, this is a tough one. So, I mean, in the way that they influenced each other, I don't know to what extent I am a Marxist, but I know one thing for sure that I'm a Marxist in disposition. And what I mean by that is that there's a logic to a Marxist analysis that is critical

of asymmetrical power relations per se, right? And I think it's most strident in Marx, obviously, in the relationship between capital and labor, Right? That there's an asymmetrical relation and social value is then not distributed equitably, but it is inscribed and enclosed and extracted by a few to the detriment of the many. And I know that's a very terse, maybe superficial explanation, but in that sense, I think that most post-structuralists are like, fuck yeah. Asymmetrical power relations are bad. The difference is, is that Marxists are much more comfortable with, viewing power as being either in the, it's a zero-sum game for most Marxist analysis. Not all, but let's say sort of orthodox readings of Marx. That power is, these people have it and these people don't. There's proprietary power relationships, property power, right? These people have the

power, these people don't. They have the property, they don't. And because they have control over capital and land and resources, the means of production, et cetera, et cetera, and the proletariat do not. And the post-structuralist critique looks at that as being an oversimplification and partly based on a sort of like rejection of sort of underpinnings of Hegel that are within there and a sort of a different way of understanding metaphysics. And this is where I think Derrida is extremely important to understand in this tradition where a Marxist might want to still hold on to a sort of standard of judgment by which we can determine how it is that power relations ought to function. Derrida is much more skeptical of there being that

standard in the first place. Sometimes it's called a transcendental signified, this external objective barometer that stands over all social systems that dictates this is exploitative and this is not exploitative or this is oppressive and this is not. Derrida is kind of confounding that. Not that he's saying that there is no way to make a judgment about whether or not there's exploitation and oppression, but it takes place within a different frame and not to bounce around too much to different figures, but then I think you get someone like Fouca who then wants to come in and say, and part of the reason is because we need to articulate power within a different frame. And he follows Nietzsche and this idea that power isn't something

that is a zero-sum game, but power is everywhere. Power is everything from me lifting my arm right now above my head to make some sort of stupid, you know, shallow point over a podcast to a car like slamming into somebody to a soft coup in Brazil that outed Dioma Husef, right? Like those are different expressions of power, but they're not mutually exclusive. They're just kind of different degrees of the expression of power. And once you start thinking of power in terms of being like this decentralized swirling field of forces, then what that really does is that change. changes how it is that we articulate our response to power. And if people are interested, there's a guy named Todd May, who is a political philosopher,

who I think he's just a really lovely human, for one. But he's also a really good reader of this type of school. He wrote a book called The Political Philosophy of Post-Structuralist Anarchism. And in it, he talks about, in particular, Jean-Fresua Liatar, Michel Foucault, and Gilles de Loz. He also wrote a book on DeLuz, a really good introduction if people are interested. And in it, he basically talks about like the Foucodean criticism of Marxist conceptions of power in articulating what he believes is not a strategic political philosophy, but a tactical political philosophy because a strategic political philosophy has a singular goal, whereas a tactical political philosophy, which is much more aligned with a post-structuralist anarchism as he defines it, is much more about experimentation and play and positivity as opposed to a sort of, let's say, a negative dialectical zero-sum game of power. And so he would advocate for that sort of post-structuralist anarchist idea of experimentation and creation as opposed to the sort of strategic approach that

he criticizes Marxism for. And I think that's kind of how they relate. And maybe that might be the point of contradiction between them, is how they conceptualize power. And I don't know that it's reconcilable at the theoretical level. Not that anarchists or let's say post-structuralists and Marxists can't join arms in solidarity and they can't align pragmatically, but I think at the theoretical level there is a fundamental contradiction there. And then there are other things too. The centrality of the human subject.

Most post-structuralism is post-humanist, whereas I think Marxism is clearly a humanist philosophy. You know, post-structuralists would freak out at the idea of, species being as being like an essential identity marker of the human. And then I think also the divide between nature and culture is another big important contradiction. Marks clearly makes a distinction between nature and culture. Post-structuralists sort of reject the binary altogether. So going back around to this idea of power and, you know, from a Marxist perspective, I'm speaking, you know, kind of drenched in that tradition more than anything. And right away, there does seem to be a problem here from the Marxist perspective, which is this idea that if power is way more

diffused, and there's not a real foundation by which we can make these standards of judgment, the Marxist concern, I feel like, is that this approach obscures and diffuses the ability for people to organize and confront the totalizing hegemony of capitalism. And I feel like, and correct me if I'm wrong here, because I'm struggling to understand this stuff too, that Occupy Wall Street can almost be seen as the logical conclusion of what post-structuralism has to offer politically, right? Which is this consensus decision-making, this fear of power exerting itself, even in the confines of radical left-wing organizing movements themselves, where everybody's experience is equally valid, everybody's concerns about what they have to do the next day, or everybody's

ideas about what needs to be done next, all those things are taken equally into account, and that makes a movement rudderless, right? It's sort of like you start spinning your wheels in the mud. So from a Marxist perspective, is that concern, is that concern valid on our part? Yeah, I mean, we kind of talked about this in our podcast when we went through the Accelerationist Manifesto. For people listening, I'm actually producing the documentary adaptation of a book called Inventing the Future post-capitalism in a world without work, which is the follow-up to the Accelerationist Manifesto by Nick Sernick and Alex Williams. And in it, one of their firm criticisms is towards the precise tactical approach that you just outlined,

which they call folk politics, which could sometimes be called either micropolitics or horizontalism. And in very terse terms, Marxist strategy tends to be macro-politics. political. It tends to be vertical, take state power, you know, transform the material conditions at a vertical level from base to superstructure, even if we don't like that sort of articulation, which I'm not a huge fan of, but just for an example at the moment. But there seems to be this like verticality that is of central concern for Marxists. Whereas a lot of anarchist action and a lot of the concerns of the post-structuralists that we've talked about, particularly Foucault and DeLos and Leotard, they are much more concerned with the micropolitical.

They're much more concerned with the idea. I mean, this is where the idea of how everything is political or the personal is political comes out of, right? Like who you fuck in your bed, that's a political action. And I think a lot of Marxists are like, well, it's important. And like, we shouldn't discriminate against it, but is it political? political, you know, or like the idea that if you take public transportation one day or you walk or you write a bike or, you know, you write a fixie or you shop organic or you, you know, buy local groceries or something like that, is that necessarily political? It could be. It maybe has political implications. Definitely has socioeconomic implications. But is that sufficient for like genuine social transformation? And Marxists would say, hey, that shit's important. like yeah let's eat better food and let's support local businesses as opposed to like exploitative corporations like Walmart if we can and yeah let's support that anyone can fuck whoever they want in bed and that the law shouldn't infringe upon that sure but they would be like but that's not necessarily politics at least that's not sufficient that might be necessary but not sufficient whereas for the micro political activists that tends to be where they're comfortable with just saying hey let's just change that stuff let's just shift our

our expression of power within our ethical frameworks. And so what Nick Sernick and Alex Williams write about is that there needs to be a sort of bringing together of the horizontal and the vertical in what they call about like creating counter-hegemonic strategies. So it's resisting the hegemony of capitalism and creating counter-hegemonic strategies that don't just rest in the folk political level. But at the same time, that don't ignore the importance of an open-endedness, which is, I think, a valid criticism of the micro-political activists, is that they would tend to say that if you are so concerned with the macro-political and the vertical and the teleological and the strategic, that there is an end, that this is the sort of end goal, it's, you know, the sort of communist utopia is the vision. And if that, if you're so rigid in that, then that can suppress difference and that can suppress the manifold that might emerge in the future that needs to be like apprehended and incorporated into the political struggle. And if you're so rigid and fixed, then it can kind of stifle the possibility of difference. And I think that's a concern that is valid. So there's like a tension here that I'm not really sure how to navigate.

I mean, what are you feeling? Well, absolutely. So I think that critique of sort of orthodox Marxism that you just ended with is important and valid and oftentimes true. And still on the Marxist side of things, you'll see these, you know, I always talk about them as like sort of reactionary orthodox Marxists, these crude reductionists, you know, who try to dispel, you know, let's say the LGBTQ concerns on the grounds that it's bourgeois decadence or whatever. That is a strain in Marxism. but it's a increasingly small and isolated and like generally rejected and discussed, like people were repulsed by it,

even like principled Marxists are. So I think that that might have been even more prevalent in earlier times, but I think we've been informed by this discourse and Marxism has sort of improved in that way. And I'm interested to talk about that synthesis between horizontality and verticality that you were talking about in that book.

But I guess another criticism or idea that I'm having when you're talking is this, postmodern, and I'm sorry for the imprecise language, but this post... No, no, no. Yeah, this... Don't apologize, homie. This is, this sucks.

It really does. Language is tough, man. Yeah, it is, it is. But this postmodern rejection of meta-narratives and this focus on the multiplicity of experience and the multiplicity of perspectives and that there shouldn't be any totalizing, you know, force that tries to wrinkle out this multiplicity. And from the Marxist perspective is like, And we'll get into it a little bit when we talk about neoliberalism and late capitalism,

but this idea that a multiplicity of perspectives can fit very well into the neoliberal world order, right? The neoliberalism, capitalism can easily cater to basically what ends up becoming subcultural interests, right? This is valid, this is interesting. You like this sort of music. You like this sort of politics. Everybody can have their own little niche, and capitalism will market its products to you based on what niche you prefer. And without a quote unquote metanarrative or a totalizing, you know, confrontation with what is already totalizing global capitalism, it seems like neoliberalism or capitalism can just sort of internalize, embrace and enfold this multiplicity of perspective position in a way that that would sort of undermine, you know, big organized confrontations with it. Does that make sense?

Sure. Yeah, dude. And to be honest, I mean, that's one of the, I think, most post. potent criticisms that would come from the Marxist left that's addressed towards figures like Deleuze and then all the people that come after. In particular, Deleuze and Guatari, who are, they're fucking, they're hammered on this idea that their capitalism and schizophrenia volumes are just handmaidens to the proliferation of capitalism, you know, and there are certain strains of accelerationism, which Nick and

Alex kind of come out of that but not not not bad accelerationism you know I mean there's there's a real bad accelerationism you know guys like Nick lander kind of like these right wing accelerationists that are like yeah let's just speed up the contradictions but not in a way that has any sort of like grand mythos or or a vision for like the overcoming of asymmetrical power relations it kind of takes a much more nefarious uh nefarious look and they kind of dabble with some weird shit now. I mean, we don't need to go into talking shit about people, but it just, it can lead towards people like embracing things like ethno-nationalism and whatnot, you know, really weird way. But, but yeah, I mean, and I get that criticism. I do. I do get that criticism. But my concern

is, is, as I think a lot of it comes from the difficulty of reading to Lozengwateri, for one. Two, I think it comes from just that fundamental theoretical contradiction. that we talked about earlier with regards to how do we understand power. And four, I think it has to do with a sort of imprecision of like De Lozen Guateri and people who come in their wake of being able to articulate what would a tactic or a strategy be that is built on this idea of like micro political experimentation or something like that. And so what I mean is.

by that is like one of the things that they talk about is they say that um in anti adipus in particular i think uh is that uh that capitalism essentially is not creative enough it's creative and it is able to incorporate these vast new potential resources you know datification of fucking everything for example and it's able to incorporate that into the system of a financialized capital, for example. And it's able to do that. But it's only able to do that within certain limits. And those limits are predefined based on the logic of the market, the logic of capitalism itself. And it's not able to actually really exceed beyond that. So it's a sort of false freedom. It's a false creativity. It's a false speed is kind of something that they would

think about. Whereas they think that power itself, and they use like these weird terms sometimes like they use the idea of the schizophrenic as a sort of model that exists beyond any sort of these like these repressive power structures whatsoever and the schizophrenic for them is what they say someone who can draw these lines of flight that exist outside of any sort of coding or incorporation or enclosure or what they call territorialization that that capitalism will tendentially impose and so what they want to articulate is some sort of what they call a schizoanalysis which is an experimental approach that allows us to truly engage in these lines of flight, these activities that would exceed

and go beyond these delineations and these boundaries that are imposed upon us by the logic of capitalism. So even if capitalism can be accused and even if post-structuralists can be accused for this idea of its ability to incorporate, that it has like this amazing power to enclose within its homogenous grasp, their argument is that it, but it still doesn't do it well enough because it still is bound by its own sort of internal rules of or logic of despotisms. And, you know, it's wedded to, you know, contract security by the state and it's got, like, juridical codes that frame it and things like that. And they want to say that actually to truly kind of be revolutionary as opposed to reactionary is to follow the model of the schizophrenic, which is just this pure realm of free creation and experimentation. The problem is what the fuck does that mean?

Does that mean that you just like go fucking crazy and like, I don't know, throw a gorilla mask on your head on Tuesday and run through work and start screaming in the streets? Like maybe. But that's why like, you know, like your homie that you do the guillotine with like gonzo journalism and stuff like that. That's kind of like creating these crazy lines of flight that break the bounds. But the problem is there's no like predefined way of what it means to embody the schizoanalytic or the schizophrenic frame. So you're always trying to exist within this kind of responsive state where you are tapping into the potential flows of creativity that are ultimately going to break whatever new delineated bounds the social system impose upon you, including any sort of like structural limitations that capitalism can impose, that you can always find something that exceeds that. There's always like, you know, they use the word interstices. There are always those spaces that capitalism doesn't have its grubby claws in.

And those are the places, those are the points where you start experimenting. And for me, there's something kind of sexy and romantic about that, but I know that that isn't always satisfactory for people who want to build, like, class solidarity. Right, right. Yeah, definitely. And you mentioned, you mentioned right there my co-host for the guillotine Dr. Bones. And that leads incredibly well into this next question, because Dr. Bones, you know, identifies as an egoist, an insurrectionary anarchist,

and it kind of comes out of that post-left anarchism. So it seems to me that one could draw the straight line from post-structuralism to what is called post-modernism to some forms of modern-day anarchism, especially post-left anarchism. So like anarcho-communism, anarcho-sindicalism, maybe not so much, but other forms of anarcho-nihialism,

egoism, any form of post-left anarchism. So actually, in fact, I've heard Foucault, specifically be described as a principled anarchist. And when it comes to the ruthless critique of hierarchy and especially the connection between Foucault's analysis of prisons and power and the anarchist commitment to prison abolition, for example, I can understand that description of him. So what are your thoughts on the connections here between post-structuralism and anarchism and why it seems more conducive to anarchism than it does Marxism? Yeah, I mean, I think that's absolutely right. that's why I mentioned that book earlier by Todd May for people if they're interested. It's M-A-Y, and it's a pretty short book.

I mean, and I think it's only like maybe 150, 200 pages. It's not super long. It's really accessible. And it's called a political philosophy of post-structuralist anarchism. And in it, he has like chapter one on like delineating the difference between like strategic political philosophies and then tactical. And then chapter two is he's like looking at the failure of Marxism. And then chapter three is he's like looking at the failure of Marxism.

And then chapter three is he's looking at anarchism in the sort of like traditional historic understanding, you know, Prudon and various other figures kind of, you know, that were around, we'll say, in the 19th century. And then he kind of looks at post-structuralist figures. And then he ends on a chapter on ethics. And this is the chapter, I think, that probably explains kind of why it is that post-structuralist anarchism or left anarchism. Would you call it post-left anarchism? I mean, there is a strain of anarchism called post-left anarchism, but it sort of deviates in interesting ways from traditional anarchism, which is more rooted, I think, in Marxism. But, yeah, the terms get kind of blurry here as well. Yeah, I mean, because you get guys, like, in Marx's day that were basically Marxists, they just had different theories of the state.

Right, exactly, exactly. I mean, but they're called anarchists, and that is very different than, like, Gilles de Luz and Felix Guantartheir, talking about like the schizophrenic and micro political action and people talking about like horizontalism and eating local and shit like that like that's very different um but yeah i mean i absolutely do think that there's a through line that kind of goes through the the lineage that you laid out post structuralism into postmodernism into these kind of other forms of like tactical horizontal micro political action and then it kind of just diffuses into all of these different

like you have like anarcho-primitivists and like John Zerzan and shit like that who are you know kind of doing something very different that want to like go back to these sort of like pre-industrial states and so their anarchism is really conditioned by stuff like that and yeah I mean

I don't really know what to think about like how to categorize that stuff but I think you're absolutely right to say that there's clearly some sort of lineage and they're kind of, again, I think if there's a through line that connects all of this, it's that, hey, man, like, exploitative power structures suck and asymmetrical power relations need to be confronted wherever we find them. And then the question is, okay, then how do we identify them and how do we respond to them? Like, and in order to identify them, you have to have a framework of analysis. And then in order to respond to them,

your analysis has got to be pretty good and then you have to have some pretty good fucking strategies to one uh be viable and two to appeal to a bunch of people to be like hey don't you want to join this like this is a better way of life like come and be apart and let's create a better world together and the problem is is everyone just like with the rise of protestantism if you give everybody a bible there's going to be a billion interpretations everybody is going to have like a different nuance to take and I guess like one of the things that just like is a real passion of my heart and I know for sure it's a passion of yours is uh is trying to cross those divides and create a real sort of like for lack of a better term like a left ecumenical movement that can bridge Dr. Bones with some sort of like hardline leninists with fucking you know trotskyists and koutskiists and all the other isms and ists out there um because really it is about fighting against asymmetrical power. Yeah, right. And, you know, people that are still kind of struggling to understand some of this, especially the connection between post-left anarchism and post-structuralism. And thinking about Dr. Bones, sorry Bones, but we're kind of using you as an example here. But part of Bones' thing and, like, part of his thing is occultism, right? And I've had long conversations with him where he props up this skepticism towards scientific materialism as distinct from, you know, I mean, this might not be distinct to Marxist, but this idea of, like, a materialist analysis of events and then the in the scientific world materialism meaning

you know like everything is ultimately reducible to physics and chemistry and biology and mind and ideas are rooted in that material base and ultimately at the end of the day the universe is materialist he has a skepticism towards that and I guess as I said he's into occultism which to the modern person who's into science and scientific thought we sort of recoil at what does it mean to believe in fucking magic you know and and this is this is this is is, I think, this is coming out of this sort of post-structuralist direction, right? This skepticism, and correct me if I'm being unfair here, but there is a sort of skepticism towards all of science, because at the end of the day, science becomes, in the post-structuralist

or post-modernist eyes, a totalizing meta-narrative in and of itself. So what do you think about the connections between post-structuralism, post-modernism, and science itself? That's so interesting, man. Yeah, I love that. I think one way that you can interpret these like these philosophical orientations to the world is looking at them as like legitimation crises, right? So you get the rise of modernity, which is like calling into question the legitimacy of like the divine right of kings and that somehow like the church derives its authority from a transcendent standard. that is revealed to us in a sacred text.

And they're like, no, man, like, Descartes is like, no, I can just rely on my own rational reasoning while I'm sitting in my fucking room here, you know? And then, like, the postmodern skepticism to modernity is calling into question the legitimacy that kind of came out of modernity, which is, one, the, like, autonomous self-subject. And then, of course, the legitimacy of, like, the nation state and the legitimacy of, like, law and things of that nature. and then post uh like post post modernism like some people call it like hyper modernity now it's kind of like well now there's even a skepticism to the things that we were skeptical about you know it's like like we're we're just like fucking can we trust anything like fucking look at the rise of flat earthers now right right how the fuck is that is that even a thing but it's it's common because people are saying like kairie irving actually gave like a really nice elaboration i thought even though i think he's wrong but a nice elaboration of why it is that he was skeptical about whether or not the earth was round. And he said, hey, man, I was raised thinking so many different things growing up as a black kid in the inner city about what the world meant and what was right and what was wrong. And as I've grown older, a lot of that shit has been thrown into disrepute. I don't think the cops of the good guys. I don't think

my country has ultimately cared about me, et cetera, et cetera. Why should I just trust the word of a bunch of other white dudes who have canonized a particular bit of knowledge unless I have seen it? Now, I disagree with his orientation, but the sentiment is something that I can actually sympathize with and I get that um and so I understand how that can happen and this is this is something interesting if pre-modernism uh was about like the connection between the transcendent and getting revealed knowledge or whatever coming from on high and then the modern was about some sort of like self-legitimation based on rationality or reason or whatever the postmodern sort of allows spirituality to come back in the back door that there's sort of like a mysticism that

characterizes a lot of the postmodern state, which is why I think you see the rise of so much spirituality or faux spirituality around the world. You know, I mean, I'm from fucking L.A., man, and I'm in Sydney now, and I can tell you, the amount of people who are quote, unquote, Buddhists, it's on the rise, you know? Yeah, for sure. I mean, like, everyone's doing kundalini yoga and everyone's fucking spiritual. And, I mean, I get it. And this is why I think somebody like a Jordan Peters. and actually has such a great appeal, because he's offering people that transcendent thing that they can grab onto in the midst of a world that can't offer it because the cultural logic

of late capitalism is shallow and banal and profane, and there's no depth. And so the fact that Bones is attracted to the occult into magic is something that I actually have a lot of, like it resonates with me because I come out of a religious background. So for me, one of my concerns is that Marxists are so atheistic that they don't, don't allow for there to be anything beyond a lot of times. Not all. You know, there's a tremendous tradition within Marxism that is also kind of Christian or pseudo-Christian. You know, I talked about liberation theology.

But like one of my favorite liberation theology or theologian is Jose Miranda. And this is what he says. He says, God doesn't exist. And he's a fucking Catholic priest. And of course he got excommunicated. But he says, God doesn't exist because God is justice. And there is no justice. So there is no God.

He said, but maybe God will exist one day when there's justice on the earth. Like, I fucking love that. Now, whether or not we take that to be like some sort of absolute scientific truth, I don't give a fuck. But even metaphorically or rhetorically, I think that's powerful. And he at the time was still a Catholic priest. And so I don't know. I think that there's just such a fear among leftists to give any sort of credence to the possibility of like metaphysics. physics, that which is beyond the physical, or that which is more than the material, or like the

beyond even within the materiality that is excessive and that is absolute, that isn't reducible to material conditions as we so articulate them, but that we can, we can still aim towards something extra, like the excess. What does that mean? I don't know, but let's not be so opposed to it that we foreclose, or that we, yeah, that we foreclose it and we disallow it entirely. Yeah, no, I agree with that. I really do agree with that. And I think, As Marxism develops and these other strains of thought come into, you know, the foreground and sort of mix with Marxism, you know, there are some lessons that Marxists pull out of this tradition that they might not even know they pull out of this tradition. And we'll get into that, I think, at the very end when we talk about sort of reintegrating some of these lessons back into a principled Marxism. But for now, and we've kind of been leading up to this question about the cultural logic of late capitalism.

So postmodern has been called that by the Marxist cultural critic Frederick Jameson in his famous work, which we are doing an episode on next month with the Lit Crick guy. Oh, that's going to be awesome, man. I can't wait for that one. I can't wait either. It's going to be, it's going to be really fun. But moreover, arguments abound which associate neoliberalism with postmodernism. So what are your thoughts and the connections between what people call postmodernism and what we know as neoliberalism? Oh, yeah, man. I love this because I'm just going to say this. And I know I've mentioned his name already a few times in this podcast, but this is one of the things that I love. love so much because like Jordan Peterson criticizes postmodernism so much but he is such a fucking product of postmodern culture right right he doesn't even realize it but the reason is because the cultural logic of late capitalism is this anxiety that results from a socioeconomic system that can only offer

commoditized objects of satisfaction. The psychoanalyst Todd McGowan wrote this amazing book. Hold on. Give me two seconds. Let me remember what it's called. It's called I think capitalism and desire is what it's called.

But people can check him out. He actually does a podcast called Why Theory. That's really lovely. But he is probably one of my favorite readers of culture and he also is a film theorist, and so he does some really cool shit on that as well. But he talks about the logic of the commodity as relating to what Lacan would call the object petea,

which is the object cause of desire, which is literally the small object outre, which is other. So it's the small other object, but for people who are interested in Lacan, you can go check that shit out. But it basically means the object cause of desire. And how Todd McGowan articulates it, which I think is fucking brilliant, he says it's the coat can. He says, if you had an unlimited amount of Coke, then you wouldn't desire Coke. But the Coke can is the limit that causes the desire so that you will drink the Coca-Cola because you can only have a limited amount, what, 330 milliliters or whatever it is. And that's the way that the logic of the commodity works, is it sets a limit, but that

limit imposes a demand upon you by eliciting a desire that you will want that thing. That's why it's the object cause of desire. It causes your desire to want it by imposing a limit. actually cutting yourself, cutting you off from it, so that you want it. But the problem is, is what it dangles in front of you is the promise of satisfaction. So you drink it, but it doesn't satisfy, because it's not enough. Because then what happens? You encounter another object cause of desire that has another limit that elicits desire out of you,

that says it's going to satisfy you, and then you consume it, and it doesn't. And now, in Coke cans, and candy wrappers, and food that makes a lot of sense, but we can add this to other things like social value, Like, am I getting enough likes on my Instagram post? And do I have enough followers on Twitter? And did enough people comment on my Facebook post that I thought I spent 45 minutes on and three weeks musing over? And did I get enough return on my investment? Those things can all be understood within this logic of the commodity.

And when late capitalism offers that as being the only way that we can relate to one another and that we can find satisfaction within ourselves, it produces a real superficiality. And I recently just heard a statistic, bro, that I fucking couldn't believe this when I heard this. It made me so angry. It was a social psychologist that was talking about according to recent studies, and I don't remember what the study was, so people can fact-check this for me. And I don't remember the exact number.

But it was something along the lines of there's an increase in suicide in young girls under the age of 13 by 70%. It was over 70%. I heard that as well, yeah. And I think the reason that he said was because you have young girls who are sitting at home and it's not young boys

which he said was really fascinating he said he has a reason why he thinks why whether it's true or not is interesting but it's because young boys they're sitting on their devices and they're playing games right and so there's still like a social element to it and there's still some semblance

of like investment and reward but young girls are sitting at home and they're just using Instagram filters and Snapchat filters and they're following Kim Kardashian and they are being they are being targeted by social media at a far greater rate of intensity than fashion magazines ever did and so the the

increase in rate of anxiety and frustration and self-loathing is is far greater now than than it's been in measurable history and I think that this is all because of this logic of the commodity that just simply consumes our our condition in the kind of like late capitalist world and how does that fit into postmodernism? Well, postmodernism, in a lot of terms, is oftentimes as understood as being like this proliferation of the simulacra, which are these copies, right? Copies of copies. It's not the real thing. It's not real satisfaction. You get a copy of satisfaction. It's not real, you're not really seeing somebody when you swipe left or right on Tinder. You're seeing an Instagram filtered picture of them. And so we're chasing these copies of copies

of copies. And then on top of that, the reason that we're on Tinder in the first place is because we have these images of like marriage and love from TV shows and then from history that are like imposed upon us that we're chasing after and those images are commodified images because the De Beers company is making shitloads of money off of that commodified image so that they can sell more fucking diamonds which are then based on their monopoly that they have in Africa that they have a sort of like forced scarcity over these resources while they're also exploiting laborers as well so there's this system of exploitation of commodification of simulacra that are all swirling around us and it produces this logic that we would call postmodernism, this cultural logic, which

is this, the way that we relate to each other at this superficial shallow level that really sort of separates us from any depth or anything beyond that would actually satisfy or that could satisfy. Yeah, you know, and as a father of a nine-year-old little girl, I can see some of that shit happening. And if you, you know, there's been studies and everybody knows these studies that like, the more time you spend on Facebook, for example, the more depressed or anxious you get. And this is, this is for people that are ostensibly should have more control over their emotions, more

self-awareness, more ability to regulate their own insecurities, adults, right? But imagine 13-year-old girls, girls that are just, especially in a patriarchal, you know, society like ours, girls who are told that they have to live up to some beauty standard. And then you add not only pop culture, but you add this social media world where everybody can sort of curate the way they look and present to the world an artificial or at least, you know, curated version of who they are and you're sitting back behind your computer screen being like, I'm nothing like that. And I heard it once described as comparing your behind the scenes to somebody else's highlight reels. And for adults, that depresses us and that fucks us up, for little fucking kids, little girls especially,

I mean, this is monstrous and this is horrifying. And this is not abstract to me. I'm seeing this happen. I'm seeing my daughter begin to engage with social media. Now, as a father, I'm presented with this weird dilemma, this challenge. How much do I let her explore socially the grounds on which social interaction takes place in our modern society and allow her to go to these things? And how much do I hold her back and try to restrain the amount of engagement she has with this world, knowing the damage that it's, causes and a 70% increase in suicides from, you know, adolescent girls is a fucking tragedy

and it's horrifying. Dude. Yeah. Dude, I know. I mean, and this is where I think a post-structuralist critique gets it right because it's really concerned with how it is that your daughter and how our daughters, I don't have a daughter, but I mean kind of hypothetically, the royal hour, the royal we, how our daughters, how our sons, how are they actually?

constructed you know like not not theoretically this isn't just some sort of like gestalt psychological thing but actually at the level of how their brain chemistry functions and how their embodied conscious experience that then will solidify into the habits that they carry with them for the next 70 years of their lives plus in what way are they being constructed by these other systems of meaning or by these other bits of information that are swirling around them um that that's the shit that that i think requires a very complex frame of analysis and not that marxism has nothing to say about this because you know we just talked about you know the relationship of uh like the diamond minds which is

clearly a class based relationship subject to a class based analysis but but at the level of subjective constitution, like who we are as beings and how we are made into humans, I don't know, man. I think that that is, for me, that's one of the reasons why I find figures like Foucault and the later Sartre and Lacan and Julia Christeva and Luce Erygare and other thinkers that have come out of this tradition to be so invaluable because they are centrally concerned with that stuff. Yeah. I mean, definitely fascinating. And you know, you mentioned a little bit earlier before we move on from this broad discussion of the cultural logic of late capitalism. You mentioned earlier this concept of copies, of copies, of this sort of directionlessness of neoliberalism. And that manifests itself, correct me if I'm wrong here, but that manifests itself, I think, in popular culture in the form of hyper-nostalgia, of this constant, these remakes of remakes, this list going back to the 80s and 90s and revamping cultural. cultural products of that time. Is that part of the sort of neoliberal paradigm that we're living, that postmodern neoliberal paradigm?

100%. I mean, this is something that Jameson talks about in his book. This is something that Mark Fisher talked about, but it's this idea of the postmodernists, not the postmodern critics, not the barjuryards and the Deleuses and the theorists, but people who are conditioned by the logic of late capitalism, which, if we're listening to this right now, is probably all of us. So there's a tendency that's being imposed upon us. And that tendency is this, this idea that there is nothing that you can actually latch on to because your society is banal and superficial and shallow. But here you go. Here's this nostalgic image to give you a little bit of happiness and to motivate you to buy our Coca-Cola. So here's this old picture of Santa Claus. Or, you know,

here's this, here's like a retro pair of jeans that's going to make you be kind of hip and cool, James Dean or something like that, like those things are all packaged by, one, selling us some sort of idea of a past that can satisfy, and two, they're all based again on that same superficial logic. And the reason is because the cultural logic of late capitalism and that the logic of neoliberalism is driven by the logic of the market. And Foucault talks about this in his lecture in the birth of biopolitics from his lectures from the Collage de France.

And he says that the market is the site of verediction. And what he means by that is that previously. the market was run by a concern for like just prices, right? Like, is this a just price? Is this a fair price? Like, just as in terms of justice, right? And under the emergence of the logic of liberal governmentality for Foucault, that doesn't become a concern anymore. What matters now is, is this a true price? Is this the correct price? Is this the accurate price? And that's determined based on these other various market mechanisms. And the reason I think that we would say that neoliberalism is defined by this logic of the market as the site of verediction is because it's not just that the market is driven by that. But the way that we view each other is based on that same logic is, is this the true way of viewing things insofar as the market dictates that it's true, right? Is this the appropriate way to distribute resources? And I don't just mean water and housing and clothing, but I also mean value. value, your value as a member of a given society, your role within your age group, your demographic, your sex, your ethnicity, whatever, those things are all resources that are managed and distributed by the logic of the market under the conditions of neoliberalism.

And that's the shit that's super fucked up about postmodern neoliberalism is that it doesn't just manage grain and land and capital and labor, but it also manages every individual bit of meaning and identity. that a given society is composed of. It beautifully said, and that will act as the teaser for our episode, The Lit Crick Guy, when we tackle that entire work. But yeah, I mean, absolutely, and there's so much there that we could talk about. I want to kind of, like, zoom in towards the end here and ask basically two more questions. One, I just thought of when you were sort of talking right there, and we mentioned earlier you helped make that video for Wisecrack about Bo Burnham and postmodern comedy,

and in it you make this argument that there's something there's something like post-postmodernism that somebody like Bo Burnham in comedy is trying to get at but of course you're talking about post-modernism existing in all these different spheres of life so it doesn't really translate 100% over exactly to philosophy but what do you mean just for the audience what would a post-postmodernism possibly look like

and what role does sincerity and meaning play in that? Oh, I love this. So there's another way of kind of articulating the post postmodern as metamodernism. And so there are theorists now that are saying we're no longer actually in the epoch of postmodernism, if that was even an appropriate way to define an historical epic. But now we're in a stage of like the meta modern or the hypermodern. And for a lot of them, so the rise of neoliberalism is generally kind of attributed to, you know,

like the oil crisis of the 70s and then the rise of like Thatcherism and Reaganism. right? Like 70s into the 80s, that's when kind of like neoliberalism took hold. Postmodernism is kind of like post-World War II, whatever. A lot of people are saying, well, 9-11 changed some shit. 9-11 and then the great financial crisis in 2007, 2009 really changed some shit. And now we're seeing social systems respond to these crises and we're seeing people respond in different ways. And the wonderful political. economist, Alfredo Saad Filio, actually gave a series of lectures here called the Wheelwright lectures. For people who are interested, he actually just put up a summary of it on the

progress and political economy blog that the University of Sydney runs. Just Google Alfredo, Saad, S-A-A-A-D-H-O, F-I-L-H-O. He's a Brazilian political economist, and he talks about the rise of what he calls authoritarian neoliberalism. And he articulates this as being a sort of like a response to these other events that is a little bit different than the postmodern. And his analysis is different, but one of the things that how this like kind of latches on to the post postmodern is the meta modern is it seems as though that people now aren't just simply satisfied with bathing in that sea of, I don't know, mountain dew commercials and extreme sports or whatever it was that entertained us in the 90s

and into the 2000s. I was a big, I was in a punk band and so I was into like warped tour and shit like that. So, you know, like all that shit, you know, and, like, that shit doesn't entertain us anymore. And then, like, comedies and TV shows and whatnot were, you know, kind of playing with irony and satire. And there was, like, this disattached or disaffected approach to things that, like, no longer is that stuff sufficient. Now people are really starting to be concerned with different things in the world. And one of the ways that I think positively that people have responded is through, like, this post, postmodern or meta modern approach, which is trying to reintroduce sincerity to actually, like care about shit you know and and to not just bathe in disattachment and irony but to

really like like it's cool to be sappy and gooey right and as problematic as the dude may be david foster wallace is a lot of times contributed uh with kind of articulating this idea of the new sincerity and then figures like bow burnham in comedy um uh broad city is a wonderful TV show that would probably be understood as like a as a metamodern or post postmodern show because these are shows, these are expressions of a cultural ethos that aren't afraid of actually being like, hey, like we can still be funny and ironic, but at the same time, I'm still searching for deeper meaning. Yeah.

I still want like actual genuine human connection and I hurt and I'm going to be honest about the fact that I hurt and that I need somebody. And then in the same next minute, I'm going to make like a fucking dick joke or something. Right. Exactly. like it's okay to it's okay to still be a bit of a dumbass or to use like irony i mean dick jokes aren't like smart comedy but of course of course i don't know it seems like that there is a sort of like tide shift that um that you're definitely seeing in tv shows like a tv show like atlanta is i think

a perfect example of this is Atlanta is a tv show that is funny as fuck but at the same time there's a real sincerity there like urn is a sincere fucking character and and and even Paperboy is a sincere character and even fucking Darius who's a weird fucking surrealist I mean he even has a sincerity to him there's like a kindness and a sweetness about him that is authentic and I think that people aren't afraid of authenticity and the question is how are we going to direct our desires because we need that sincerity and we need that connection but we got to create we got to create opportunities for for that desire to like latch onto so that can grow and spread. Absolutely. And you know, you mentioned David Foster Wallace and, you know,

all the caveats aside, as a young 20-something, I was, I got very into him, you know, red infinite jest and all of that. And I really picked up on this idea, this criticism of irony and the fear that David Foster Wallace really articulated kind of ahead of his time a tad about, you know, where irony leads and how irony in and of itself can actually be destructive to the way we think about ourselves and the way that we engage with the world and I mean I think we're all sort of a part of it the shift from postmodern irony to post post postmodern sincerity we're all a part of it and I genuinely consciously think of the guillotine for example that the show with me and Dr. Bones as trying to do this on the political side right if if like something

like chopo trap house represents a real ironic approach to politics constantly being ironic ironic for you know humor's sake and there's a place for for irony i think for sure i think the guillotine tries to represent this this reaching back out and trying to re-grab some sincerity and there'll be times where i yes i cry on that show but there's also times where bones is talking about how me and him plan on filling a 50-gallon drum up with human feces and dumping in alex jones's compound so there's that absurdity and that irony but there's also real sincere anger and sincere sadness that we try to give rise to, authentically give rise to. And people are attracted to that because sincerity and authenticity in that way, it used to be seen

as a bad thing, right? To be sincere is synonymous with being naive. Oh, you're sentimental. Like, stop it, you know, be detached, be ironic. And that's how you sort of become cool and hip and distant from everything and nothing can really bother you because you're cool and edgy. and people are kind of getting sick of that and so sincerity is being re-interjected in this interesting way I don't know I'm just kind of working through it with you yeah man

I mean I think we would both agree that there are inherent contradictions within capitalism as a system and and the world that is conditioned by that logic is going to respond in different ways depending on

the complex variety of historical circumstances And I don't think that it's any surprise that fascism or authoritarian neoliberalism, that reactionary politics are on the rise after postmodernism. Because if postmodernism was like the rise of identity politics and like this dispersed narratives about power and skepticism towards meta-narrative and like large institutional politics. power structures, our epic now is looking more for the big things again. I think people now, post-9-11, post-global financial collapse, are grasping for something again that the post-modern epic wasn't defined by. People are grasping for metanarrative, let's say, for lack of a better term. And and I don't, I, I'm not surprised that one of the ways that capitalism is responding is by offering fascism as a solution. And, and not that like capitalism is an agent that's

offering that. Of course, of course. I'm saying that metaphorically, of course. But I'm not surprised that that that's an offer that is on the table right now and that it's taking hold now to a greater degree than since the end of World War II because if the end of World War II called all of these self-legitimizing metanarratives into question and we had like half a decade or I'm sorry half a century then of living in that sort of like rudderless world but now it's being reintroduced

well what were the very things that culminated at the end of the modern era you got World War I the capitalist imperialist war and World War II the fascist war. And if the very same conditions that led to those conflicts are now being brought back into play, it doesn't surprise me at all. And it's, so then this means then, okay, so if that's the case, and I don't know, I'm kind of just bullshitting, but if that's the case, then that means that also then from a revolutionary perspective, we have to have a response as well. And we are responding to capitalism in a particular way. And I think that also, while we're also seeing

a lot of momentum with fascism and authoritarian neoliberalism, we're also seeing a lot of momentum with leftist solidarity and leftist activities across the world in a way that at least in my adult life is radically novel and very exciting. And so I think that, I don't know, I think that this idea of living in a different epoch, this post, postmodern or metamodern epic, is presenting itself with different challenges,

but all in response to the same fucking bullshit, the same asymmetrical power relations that capitalism imposes upon us. Yeah, God. Damn, that is so fascinating. I mean, thinking about this stuff is so interesting to me. And I would just say, as you were talking again, I'm thinking, you mentioned the global financial collapse, right? And then I thought of climate change. And these are two events that happen, that are, you know, climate change has been going on for a while.

But really, like, in the modern psyche, it's really picked up in the last 10, 20 years. And the global financial crisis happened a decade ago. And in the postmodern view of a multiplicity of being in an anti-totalizing. anti-medinarrative sort of approach to things, when you have these big global things, right? And now they're global. Climate change is an existential global totalizing challenge. And that sort of recasts the problems of society and the issues on the table in a way that although we can learn and we should learn from the postmodernist critiques of modernity, that now there's a new global challenge that we have to face. And almost that necessitates some sort of global or, I'm using these terrible words, like totalizing response.

And I don't know. It has to. Yeah. Yeah. It has to. I mean, we're talking about the imminent, and by imminent, I don't mean tomorrow necessarily, but we are talking about the imminent demise of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who are going to be swallowed up by rising sea levels, by a greater frequency of hurricanes, by famine. and resource depletion. I mean, this is not a hypothetical here.

We are talking about the literal within the next decade, the radical displacement of millions of people around the globe. And if we don't, if we're not comfortable with now talking about a meta-narrative, if we're not comfortable about that now, then I think there's something deficient in our political orientation. And this is where I think a radical, micro-political or focal, political or horizontal approach is deficient because how do you build bridges? How do you fucking take care of refugees from Indonesia who are going to be displaced? You know, how do you deal with

people in the Caribbean whose homes are going to be destroyed? You know, how do you deal with Haitians who are, you know, going to be dealing with. How do you deal with people on the west coast in California, the east coast in New York, South Carolina, Wilmington, North Carolina. How do you deal with people? Fucking the state of Florida is, it's always been a goddamn swamp land. That place is going to be swallowed up in 50 years, man. It really is. Like, what are we going to do? And if we don't, oh, God, there's this amazing book series.

I mean, I loved it. It's by this guy named Sergei Prazerov. It's called Void Universalism. There's a one and a two. The first one is called World Polic. It's about ontology and world politics. The second one's about political subjectivity. But in the first volume, he says, he's very critical of, he actually calls like the sort

of post-structuralist, like, radical proliferation of just regional narratives and stuff like that. He calls it a nihilism. And I don't actually disagree. entirely, but one of the things he says is he says, we can't be afraid to actually articulate a genuine universal notion of world politics. He's an international relations scholar. He's from Russia, but he is in Finland now. And one of the things he says is he uses this philosophical, the existential quantifier and the universal quantifier. And the existential quantifier is like, it's like a backwards E. And then the universal quantifier is like an upside down A. And the

existential quantifier is there is or for like French people out there it's the Ilya ah which is so important in like existentialism it's like this idea that there is right there is a something there is a something and then the universal quantifier is for all and he says this is the motif that is guiding my project that there

is a for all that there really is a universal standard that we can talk about that can guide a narrative for all of us in the world and I as much as I am indebted to post-structuralist theorists, I find that to be right. And it has to be right

for me, you know? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Incredible stuff. Last question here, and I think this sort of is the nice bow on the top of this discussion. Is it possible for those of us committed to Marxism to reintegrate or partially reintegrate some of the works of people like Foucault and Derr and Butler and Deleuze and Guatari into a Marxist outlook without compromising our Marxism as such. Can there be, in other words, a bringing in of some of the lessons taught to us by these post-structuralists? I think you have to. I think you absolutely have to. The question is how and in what way? So there are various thinkers that I think can articulate this much better than I can. Jacques Badeghé is a French theorist who actually wrote a commentary on Marx's capital for people who are interested that has been translated into English.

And so you can find it online. There's a PDF copy. I don't know if you guys are members of ARG. If you're not, like, fucking DM me and I'll hook you guys up. But I don't know if we should be talking about it too much over the waves. But just Google it. His name's Jacques Bede, it's B-I-D-T, and he has a commentary on Marx's capital. But he also wrote a book called Foucault with Marx, in which he tries to bring them into dialogue

by analyzing what he thinks is like the guiding motif of Marx's analysis. which is property power or proprietary power and then fucco which he called knowledge power and i think i think if you look at the autonomia movement antonio negree michael hart and their series i think they are trying to do this i think uh leclaw and moof try to do this chantal moof i think is someone who's really important to look through um there's a book called uh post hegemony by John Beasley Murray John Beasley Murray

where he tries to bring together some of these things and he also does case studies on like Latin America I think that it's absolutely necessary I would even think that post-colonial thinkers oftentimes do this like you know Franz Fanon was a psychoanalyst

and I think a lot of his his articulations are you know they kind of verge from the path of like you know the critique of political economy a little bit because he's got just kind of different concerns. I think post-colonial narratives, you know, Giatri Spivok and, and various other thinkers. I mean, Arjun Apadurai is an anthropologist of finance who does some interesting

stuff that is looking at like performativity theory. And so I think that we have to look at like performativity, the Judith Butler's term. And I think we have to look at discourse analysis and we have to look at Foucault and we have to look at psychoanalysis. And I think we have to incorporate these things if we're going to really develop a sort of robust understanding of what it means to be subjects under historical materialist conditions that are dialectically in relation to one another and that subjectivity isn't this autonomous thing that exists in relation to the material conditions but that you are constructed like we were talking about with your daughter you are constructed based on the structural system in which you find yourself but at the same time

that structural system in which you find yourself is also constituted by the economic modes that sort of make up that particular epic or that particular social system. So there's this really convoluted co-constitutive dialectical relationship that

I think that we can and I think we must work through by incorporating structuralist, post-structuralist, post-structuralist, post-modern, metamodern, whatever fucking comes next, psychoanalytic, behavioral science, whatever, into our critiques of the political economy. Absolutely. I completely agree. There is so much here, even as somebody who is relatively an amateur at this side of things, there's so much here that I learn from and that I sort

of incorporate into what I consider my own principled Marxism. And the reason for this conversation is precisely to think about these things and to sort of destroy this idea, this caricature of postmodernism or post-structuralism, we can't have left-wing versions of Jordan Peterson out there talking shit about something they don't understand. It doesn't do us any well. It doesn't do our movement any well. And it's sort of this recoiling from learning,

from critical thinking, and from educating yourself. There is this dialectic of knowledge over time and schools of thought interact with new schools of thought. And if you can take some lessons from those new schools of thought, you can regenerate or make more robust the previous school thought that you're already committed to, et cetera. So I really appreciate you coming on. You are incredibly articulate and you have this beautiful flow. I love it. I feel like I'm bumbling like a motherfucker. I love it. And it makes this conversation easier to have because

of that talent of yours. So I really appreciate you coming on before I let you go. Are there any other recommendations you want to offer and then let listeners know where they can find you and all of your work online? Okay. I mean, first of all, I want to say thank you so much, man. I really love your podcast. I told you this when you were on our podcast. Like I'll laugh and cry when listening to your podcast all in like the span of like five minutes. So I love you're doing, you're doing the Lord's work as we used to say in my old Christian days. Thank you. And I think the one thing I would want to say real quick before I, before I like do any plugs or recommendations is that like this shit is hard, man. This is hard. Like this is hard. I've

been studying this stuff at at at least a college level in beyond for like 12. years and I'm still like lost in the sea and I'm and I get it so I think so many people especially if you're a principled Marxist you know the the Marxist Leninist type and you're like man I I just want to build solidarity with unions and fucking take state power I get it man I do too in some some days you know but at the same time like let's just be patient with each other you know and and I just I want to be patient with my brothers who are like hardcore Leninites that are Leninists that I may not quite fully kind of vibe with everything they're saying. And at the same time, I think that if we are committed dispositionally to this like

this resistance to asymmetrical power relations, then I think we've got to just be fucking patient with each other, you know? And I know it's fucking hard, man, but we got to try. For sure. Fuck, we got 80 years and then we're done. What the fuck else are we going to do, you know? Exactly, exactly. Got to fucking try.

I mean, if people want to hit me up, you can hit me up on. Twitter at Austin underscore Hayden, H-A-Y-D-E-N. And like I said, I do that philosophy podcast with my homie Troy, who I'm the Rambler and he's the sober professor who kind of rains me in, so we

work well off each other. It's called Owls at Dawn. You can find us on iTunes or you can go to Owls at Dawn.com. And recommendations, you know what, man, if people are, they want to know more a little bit about post-structuralism, it's going to sound super cheesy, but two things. One, you can check out my podcast that I

do with Troy because we talk a lot about this stuff. But there's a guy named Stephen West who does a philosophy podcast called Philosophies This. Yes, I was going to recommend this as well. Oh, cool. Okay. Yeah. He's been doing a series over, I mean, first of all, he's gone back since like the pre-Socratics. He's got like hundreds of these fucking things. But in the past like couple months, I think he's been going through like postmodernism and DeLuz and Derrida and stuff. So check out that podcast. Also, there's a guy named John David Ebert, who is kind of an eccentric guy, He has this series of YouTube videos where he's doing like the history of philosophy, everything from like shelling to like even guys like Oswald Spangler who I think if you're interested in like the alt-right and how that shit is kind of coming about. Like if you, a lot of them trace their like Richard Spencer in particular trace their intellectual lineage back to Oswald Spangler.

And so this guy, John David Ebert, talks about like his famous book. And then everything from like DeLuz to Derrida to like Hegel and Kant and stuff. So he's really good, like his elaborations of Derrida and Deliz are good. And then bookwise, there are these amazing, like, graphic guides that are out there, that they're basically, like, graphic novels, but nonfiction. And if you just Google, like, I don't know, post-structuralism, graphic guide, you will find a shitload of these things. And you could just Google, like, post-structuralism, structuralism.

You could Google, like, Foucault graphic guide, Lecon, graphic guide. And there's this whole series of these things. And they're actually, for as popular. of books as they are, they're actually really, really, really accurate. And so I would say, if people are interested in studying this stuff more, check that out, as well as all the other stuff that I kind of threw around throughout

the course of the episode. Absolutely. I'll link to as much of that in the show notes as possible. I'd also just reemphasize, philosophize this, a philosophy podcast. Stephen West is really, really good at explaining really complex ideas, and he has this whole thing where he's going through the 20th century of philosophy and working through it chronologically.

So you can, you know, start at the existentialist or you can start way back, you know, in the Socratic era, or you can start, you know, right here at post-structuralism, whatever you want, but it's fascinating. And then the second thing I would offer is our friends over at Partially Examine Life, they do a lot of really good work on philosophy. And they've also published this lecture series by this philosopher, I think in the 80s named Rick Roderick, 80s or 90s. And Rick Roderick does this really interesting set of talks on 20th century thinkers all

through this exact line. So if you want to learn more about these people in here, really engaging, interesting, understandable explanation of a lot of these things, I would check out Rick Roderick's lectures on YouTube put out by partially examined life. It's really invaluable and it's really wonderful. Thanks, Austin, for coming on. It's been a blast. Let's do it again sometime because I just fucking love talking to you. Cool, man. Dude, it'd be my pleasure.