Rev Left Radio - Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Episode Date: December 23, 2018

Jon "TheLitCritGuy" joins Breht (for the third time!), this time to talk about Fredric Jameson's seminal work "Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism". Jon has a brand new Gothic Marxist podcast called the Horror Vanguard. You can listen to and support that project here: https://www.patreon.com/horrorvanguard Follow the Horror Vanguard on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/horrorvanguard?lang=en Follow and support Jon here: https://www.patreon.com/TheLitCritGuy/posts   ----------------------------   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 O'Shea and today we have on John the Lit Crick Guy for the third time, this time to talk about postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism by Frederick Jameson. John has been on our Gothic Marxism and our capitalist realism episodes. This is kind of like a really cool three-part series. I mean, I'm sure you could listen to all three back to back. find something really interesting, or you could listen to our capitalist realism episode, our episode on post-structuralism and post-modernism, and then this one, and get a really

cool overview of some of the deeper issues here at play. But yeah, we're really excited to have him back on. And as always, if you like this episode, if you like our show, you want to support us, you can support us at patreon.com forward slash rev left radio. We have a bunch of different stuff, including a Discord chat, a private Facebook group, and a book club. And this month's book club, we're going to be reading the social basis of the woman question by Alexandra Kolentai from 1909 so Marxism feminism it's really interesting I'm really excited to do it so yeah if you like the show you want to get dope shit in return check us out on Patreon having said all that let's go to our interview with John the Litkrit guy on Frederick

Jameson's famous work of Marxist theory postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism Back on the show, it's always great to be on Ravel-Left. For people who maybe haven't come across me before, my name is John. I am a writer and a teacher from England. I'm on Twitter as the Lickrit Guy, where I sort of write and research on things like the Gothic and Marxism and the intersections of culture. and politics. Yep, and, you know, we've developed a pretty good friendship and camaraderie over

the probably year, I think. I don't know when we did a Gothic Marxism, our first collab together ever, but we definitely kept in touch after that. We did capitalist realism, which still to this day is one of our most downloaded and a complete fan favorite. So if people listening are unfamiliar with John and you really, really love this episode, there's two other episodes with me and John talking, so you could have a hat trick of Brett and John talking about this sort of stuff.

of if you're interested. So John, before we get started, I know that you recently launched a brand new podcast project called The Horror Vanguard. I've listened to the first two episodes, and of course it's great. I love you and your co-host. Can you talk about this project, how it started, what the theme of the show is, and what you hope to accomplish with it? Well, as you pointed out, that one of the first times that we sort of gotten know one another is through the Gothic Marxist episode that you invite me on to talk about. And so I was talking to a friend of who is also someone who works on the academic side of horror and we were both talking over the fact that like certain parts of culture can't be just left aside for reactionary forces

in society to kind of take ownership of them you could say like that we have to contest culture right we have to make it useful for a left-wing project and so we decided that we would we would start a podcast where we would talk about horror films from an explicitly leftist anti-capitalist point of view we called it the horror vanguard because we want to we want to kind of help build a a spooky left we are we are gothic Marxists well I am my my co-host is an anarcho-communist and we yeah we're we're trying to show that even culture which is seen as like maybe even a bit morally questionable kind of low brow, has still got really interesting things to say in it, things that can be

important for raising political consciousness, doing education on radical theory, all through really approachable texts. So we try and make it fun, we try and make it informing, but if you are into tearing down capitalism, if you understand that the greatest monster of all is the systemic monster that is capitalist exploitation, then you should be listening to the horror van god absolutely yeah i highly recommend it the last episode was on the movie gremlins a classic for people roughly our age as children but you really took it in a really interesting direction kind of blew my mind i have to now go back and rewatch that entire film talked about lenin talked about lecon talked about gothic marxism talked about jizek as a gremlin which i laughed incredibly loud at

so yeah very fun very personable very endearing show and very as you would expect from john intellectually rigorous and fascinating. So I highly urge people to go check that out. I love this blossoming of left-wing culture of voices on the left. We kind of got lucky and got a big following here at Rev Left, and we're doing everything we can to pay that forward and help these other projects get off the ground too. So Horror Vanguard is definitely one of those.

Yeah, and I just want to say thank you for what you've done because I don't think Horror Vanguard and so many other kind of new bits of leftist culture would have emerged if you haven't. shown that there was a real market. There were people who were kind of desperate for radical knowledge for a genuinely left-wing alternative to the direct that gets passed off as entertainment, as culture, as education nowadays. I will humbly, humbly take that compliment. Thank you so much. All right, let's get into it. We did kind of like capitalist realism where we took a text and John and I worked through it, deconstructed it, analyzed it, pulled out its implications.

We're doing the same thing, but this is, this work is postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism by Frederick Jameson. And perhaps the best way to start is just to ask you, John, sort of setting the background. Who is Frederick Jameson? And what did he set out to do generally in this work? Yeah. Okay. So Fred Jamison is maybe the biggest name in American Marxist's cultural theory. He has been writing and researching for about since at least the 1960s. And he's covered so many different things. He's written books on science fiction, on Raymond's. and Chandler and the American detective story. He's written works on Sartz and Odorno and all the other kind of giants of 20th century Marxist thought. And so in this essay, which was later turned into a huge book by the same name, what he's trying to do is sketch out the historical contours of the contemporary moment. He wrote this in the 1980s. And so what he's trying to do is analyze the ways in which culture has undergone something of a change that we see. seem to have entered what appears to be a new configuration and to understand what that might mean.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's important to note that this was an essay in 1984 for the new left review. And then Jameson took that and turned it into a full-length book, I think, over 400 pages in 1991. So just out of pure practicality, we've basically just used that original essay, which is the core theme and argument of the overall book as the thing that we're going to cover in this episode. It would just be impossible. to do an episode on 400 pages. Every chapter could really be an episode of its own. The point here is not to go over every single detail of the book, but to pull out some of the main themes, help people orient themselves to what he's trying to do. And then hopefully urge, you know, a segment of you

to go on and actually dive into either the essay or the full book because there is, there's a lot there. I was reading before we started this interview, just his chapter on film and nostalgia. And I absolutely loved it. So again, we're not going to be able to get to all of that. We will talk about history and nostalgia a little bit probably but I really recommend people if you like this episode the book is is you know way way way more and you can dive way deeper into this stuff if you're interested totally and one of the things I would say is that Jameson has this reputation for being a really complex and challenging writer and like I won't I won't front like some of his stuff is really dense and quite abstract but if you want to kind of really

understand culture if you want to have your kind of perception of how the world functions like quite quite genuinely transformed he's a great guide to appreciating the world around us in a little more depth and detail yeah you know it is it was kind of challenging you know sort of part of it I think is the way that he writes but part of it is the subject material is complicated in and of itself I mean we've done a few episodes now on the concept of postmodernism and it's sort of famously difficult and so there were parts when I was studying for this I just like would read a random like paragraph to my to my partner just to kind of convey how sometimes this can get very difficult.

I was like, oh, God, I don't know if I can tackle this. Yeah, but I mean, you know, that's kind of the problem with theory overall. Challenging yourself and diving into complex texts, you learn to sort of speak the language of the author as you go through the work. And so it gets easier than the initial page or two might seem to be. Oh, yeah, totally. So let's go ahead and dive in. But before we get into the details of the work itself, I do, I always have to address this

because it's kind of a buzzword in today's. culture. And again, we just did an episode with Austin from Owls of Dawn on post-structuralism and post-modernism. So if you want to entire episode on just the philosophy of post-modernism, you can check it out. But the way that Jameson uses it here is a little different, perhaps broader. So basically, John, how is how is Jameson using the term in this work? And how does his use differ from the other uses of the term, maybe in just philosophy or just film, etc.? Yeah. So the problem with postmodernism as a term, right, is that it's so highly contested. And if you ask, you ask any sort of a group of intellectually curious people to come up with a definition, they'll give you like 10 different definitions. And so you'll have particular things for a certain cultural field like film. You can have the aesthetic markers of what a postmodern film might look like. Postmodern writing tends to be pretty, pretty well defined. And the problem comes when you try and abstract those definitions into a kind of general,

more philosophical one, right? So one of the issues that people run into is you go, well, you try and you try and extrapolate a definition by comparing all of the things that are called postmodern and seeing what they have in common. But the problem is that gives you something quite nebulous and quite critically problematic. I've said this quite regularly online if you follow me. that like, this is what a lack of historical materialism does to you, right? It prevents you from grounding philosophy and anything concrete.

And so what Jameson does is he gives really the best definition of postmodernism, which is to treat it as a historically contingent phenomenon, right? So he's a Marxist. He proceeds from a historical materialist starting point. And when you do that, you can suddenly stop worrying about the differences in form that post-posterical, modernism takes from from film to music to architecture to literature and instead what you can start to do is offer some explanation of a particular cultural epoch I mean people reactionaries especially who bandy around this term postmodernism not only do they quite obviously not know what they're

talking about but what they have to say has no potential to explain anything right they can't all they can do it kind of sketch out the problem and tell you they think it's bad but in jameson's case, what he can do by saying, no, we need to understand postmodernism as something that is historically specific, depends upon a certain configuration of capitalist economic and cultural production, you suddenly are able to kind of unpack the shifts of culture and economics as they proceed historically. So, again, you know, if you want to try and understand the world, if you want to try and understand postmodernism, you begin from this starting axiom of historical materialism because it's that, which actually allows you to have a definition

which can explain something rather than just get bogged down in describing the minutiae of different aesthetic forms, right? Yeah, exactly. Sort of summarizing that is like Jameson is talking about postmodernity. And I think in an interview after the book's been published, he said that he would have used the word postmodernity instead of postmodernism because the ism, like a general set of ideas isn't really as exact as postmodernity because what he's getting at is

the postmodern or postmodernity as a cultural condition, right? And as Marxist, we take a base and superstructure analysis here. Now, every time I mention base and superstructure, I want to go on like a 20-minute diatribe about all the implications of it, the criticisms of it,

the extensions that other Marxist thinkers have taken it, but most people are basically familiar with just the base superstructure sort of metaphor in Marxist theory. And what he is doing is analyzing the superstructure. And you probably know more about this than me, John, but correct me if I'm wrong here, there was before what we know as the cultural turn. Marxist did have an emphasis on the base, the economic activity and then would explain the superstructure in terms of

that. The cultural turn was Marxist theorists sort of saying, we can analyze the superstructure with just as much intensity and rigor as we do the base. And this work, if I'm right, is sort of a blossoming of that tradition and one of the one of the best in that tradition is that is that correct i mean i think that's a pretty good way of understanding this and understanding why if um if you are a if you are kind of orthodox marxist you should be interested in this because as jameson points out in the book which is much longer and much more um sort of in-depth like that distinction between an economically productive base and a culturally determinate superstructure doesn't necessarily um appear to be as clean cut as that, especially in an age where culture becomes something that is so closely

entwined with the economic means of production, right? You can't consider culture as a kind of nebulous, autonomous realm of existence when, you know, the biggest cultural products are huge financial successes for massive multinational corporate companies. So I think the cultural turn is a great phrase, a way of kind of encapsulating. what happens to Marxist theory in the 20th century when it stops this kind of rigid focus on just economic base and starts to try and take a more expansive view of exactly how capitalism has changed in the kind of post in the era of the post-industrial in the era of post-modernity. Yeah. And you know, Frederick is a dialectician and so there's a dialectical

relationship not only between the base and the superstructure as such, but even about the sort of analysis of the basin superstructure through Marxist tradition back and forth, and they deepen each other. So after the cultural turn, you have maybe too much of a focus a little bit on culture that takes some weird, you know, detours, I think, that might turn some Marxists off. But then you also have this sort of bringing in the old Marxism and mixing it with the new and coming to like a sort of a synthesis of just a deeper Marxism. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's one of the things I said at the top of the show that, like what Jamison offers is a way of understanding those, that kind of global network of

connections between cultural production, economic production, between the things that we sort of read and enjoy and watch and listen to and the extraction of wealth from working people. And I think his way of looking at the world is incredibly compelling. Yeah, 100%. And I'm only going to read one thing from the book and this is going to be right now because I think it sort of clarifies what he's trying to do and it makes an important distinction between the term postmodernism and sometimes how it's used. So this is the only thing I'm going to read from the book,

but it's important, so I'm going to read it. Frederick Jameson says, The conception of postmodernism outlined here is a historical rather than a merely stylistic one. I cannot stress too greatly the radical distinction between a view for which the postmodern is one style among many others available and one way. which seeks to grasp it as the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism. The two approaches, in fact, generate two very different ways of conceptualizing the phenomena as a whole. On the one hand, moral judgments about which it is indifferent, whether they are positive or

negative, and on the other, a genuinely dialectical attempt to think our present of time in history. And this is really important. This next part sort of puts him as a dialectician in a really interesting way. He says, the distinction I am proposing here, knows one canonical form in Hegel's differentiation of the thinking of individual morality or moralizing from that whole very different realm of collective social values and practices. But it finds its definitive form in Marx's demonstration of the materialist dialectic, most notably in those classic pages of the manifesto, which teach the hard lesson of some more genuinely dialectical way to think historical development and change.

The topic of the lesson is, of course, the historical development of capitalism itself and the deployment of a specific bourgeois culture. In a well-known passage, Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible, namely to think this development positively and negatively all at once, to achieve, in other words, a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism, along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought and without attenuating any of the force of either judgment. We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one in the same time,

the best thing that has ever happened to the human race and the worst. The lapse from this austere dialectical imperative into a more comfortable stance of the taking of moral positions is inveterate and all too human. Still, the urgency of the subject demands that we make at least some effort to think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically as catastrophe and progress altogether. So I think what he does here is highlights an aspect of dialectics that might even be counterintuitive to some, some Marxists, especially maybe younger comrades coming up who don't maybe have a really good grip on dialectics, and he's rejecting, critiquing postmodern for its moral failures, right? We're not trying to take a subjective judgment of postmodernism as a cultural condition, whether it's good or bad. We're looking at it as Marxists and dialecticians.

We're not moralists. Exactly. And this is, this is something that, you know, I didn't, I didn't necessarily want to bring him up, but like someone like Jordan Peterson who rails against postmodernism, right? All he can offer is this bourgeois moralizing, this, this, um, theologically inflected conservatism that goes, this thing is bad because. But as a, as a dialectical thinker, Jameson, and I think the challenge that he lays down is for us, we don't get caught down in this, in this trap of, um, subject. moralization. Instead, the challenge is to understand that the huge changes that have been wrought in the cultural sphere as both catastrophes and opportunity, as both progress and disaster. Yeah. And the important part of being in Marxist is also to historicize capitalism and historicize our current moment. And we're going to get into later how the postmodern condition sort of creates a psychological and cultural a historicism. And Frederick Jameson taking that and applying Marxism to it and historicizing it

is liberating and probably like an essential part of being a Marxist. It's to not let people forget that history still fucking exists. We're not at the end of history. It's still ongoing. And, you know, capitalist realism struggled with this concept as well. How do we break out of this confine, this cultural milieu of late capitalism? and offer a vision that can actually be meaningful and rally people to our cause. But, again, we're probably getting a little ahead of ourselves there.

I guess the next step would just be kind of talk about base and superstructure a little bit. So what are the three periods of capitalism or the three stages of capitalism that Jameson outlines in the book? And what broad forms of cultural production predominate in each epoch? So, yeah, this is a really interesting, this is a really interesting idea. And it's one that connects back to the to a term that lots of people kind of trip themselves over, which is the use of the term late capitalism. Obviously, because late implies sort of like this might be the end of capitalism, but I'm going to, I'll touch on that in just a second. So, Jameson borrows this, this idea from the Marxist economist Ernst Mandel, who wrote back in the 70s on late capitalism and Mandel and Jameson. and both kind of posit these three periods

in the development of the capitalist mode of production, right? So firstly what you have is a kind of competitive capitalism, which occurs depending on the kind of historiography you take from around 1700, maybe a bit earlier, to about the 1850s and is marked by the growth of a kind of industrial capital within domestic markets. now that's also the emergence of something like the novel as a recognizable cultural form and so that's probably a good way of connecting the economic shift that happens with a cultural one from there you shift into the stage known as monopoly capitalism which lasts from around the middle of the 19th century all the way to the kind of halfway point of the 20th century And this is characterized by a huge growth of international markets, right?

Lenin writes about this in imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, massive exploitation of colonial territories. And so at this point, those domestic markets suddenly become less important because greater profits can be extracted through that imperialistic capitalism, through that monopoly capitalism. finally then you get a capitalism which emerges out of the wreckage of the Second World War and really Mandel was trying to sort of understand what why and how capitalism survives this disaster and so the dominant features that he picks up are things like multinational corporation right so suddenly you've gone beyond the the concrete confines of a national border suddenly corporations

corporations have freedom of movement now when people don't right capital capital moves freely across borders you have a globalized not just an internationalized but a globalized labor market you have globalized supply chains you have mass consumption and instead of seeing this in kind of rigid terms he uses like there's a kind of fluidity to it there's this liquid flow of capital that rings the entire globe Jameson takes things a little further and says that actually this isn't this isn't late capitalism as in a capitalism that's about to die this is the capitalism of late you know it's the capitalism that happens to be around now and he says for the first time what you see is you see a genuine worldwide capitalism as

capitalism starts to um as he puts it it starts to undo the kind of pre-capitalist agrarian and naturalized economies and it starts to colonize places like the subconscious the psyche, the mind, the imagination, they become areas which capitalism moves into too. So what you have is you have a huge expansion of capitalism proper, as it were. So those three stages, I think the thing I would try and point out is that Jameson's not talking about a kind of radical break, but an acceleration of capital, right? Capitalism has exploded and has gone into every single aspects,

every single facet of our lives and our existence. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's very interesting. And you mentioned something that I think is just worth sort of reemphasizing, which is the idea that, you know, capital can move between borders, but labor can't. And when capital can move across borders, it means, in part, that it can go to the global south, for instance, and exploit cheaper pools of labor. And so that's why borders are still very much needed for labor, but not capital, because capital needs cheap labor, but it also needs other countries. with higher standards of living that can consume the products that those cheaper pools of labor create. And so you see in the 21st century a militarization of the border, and it is in service entirely to global capital. And just recently, on the border, the border patrol basically killed or neglected to the point of death, a seven-year-old girl named Jacqueline Rosemary. She's a little seven-year-old girl trying to cross the American border from the south,

trying to, with her parents to make a better life. And because of the neglect that she got under the auspices of the U.S. Border Patrol custody, she died of thirst, shock, and exhaustion. So, you know, the border situation, we can talk about on the abstract level of capital versus labor, but we also have to understand the very material consequences of what it means to militarize those borders and just whose shoulders and heads that militarization falls on. And just recently in the U.S. this week alone, it fell on the head of a precious, innocent little seven-year-old girl. So we should keep that in mind when we talk about borders. I mean, this is important to drive home, right?

Like, it's very easy to think of cultural theory and a Marxist take on culture as being abstract, but there are vicious violences that underpin the cultural present. And we need to be aware of that. Jameson says as much in the essay when he says that any any take on postmodernism whether you condemn it, whether you approve of it, is at the same time implicitly or explicitly an argument about contemporary neoliberal capitalism. So again, we're not we're not moralist, but there is a kind of real and concrete connection between these these kind of abstract philosophical ideas and life or death. Yeah, absolutely. And that's important to keep in mind for all of us. But moving on, can you explain what is meant by postmodernism as a cultural dominant, as Jameson, as Jameson calls it? What does that mean? And why is this concept sort of important to Jameson's overall argument?

Yeah. So he says this about postmodernity. It's the, it's the culturally dominant form, right? it's the what this means is that it isn't the only form that exists in this particular moment he points out that there are kind of anachronisms and there are things which don't necessarily um fall under that rubric but it is the dominant mode of cultural production um which has markedly different stylistic manifestations and developments in fine art in video games in music in architecture they all have different aesthetic markers but the logic which underpins them with the the mode of cultural production as it were is post modernity rather than an earlier um rather than its predecessor that that's what jameson refers to as kind of high modernism um which has a variety of different forms and maybe we can get onto that in a little bit so it isn't to say that it's the only um it's the only mode of cultural production but it is a It is the dominant one. It is the one that is determining the vast majority of cultural artifacts and cultural products that are produced and are created in this particular moment. Yeah, so I think the role it plays in his argument is just basically to not make too stringent of a claim, to not say that all cultural production in this period of late capitalism is inherently postmodern. It's just to argue that it's the dominant cultural

force and the logic underpinning all cultural manifestations at this period. Did you want to talk a little bit about high modernism? Yeah, I think it's worth kind of bringing this up because like, if you say post-modernity, right, that implies that we've come, it's what comes after modernity itself. And here, Jameson is quite orthodox and Marxist by saying, like, there's a long tradition of Marxist criticism that says, like, the modernist move of culture had a kind of revolutionary potential to it. It was doing things which are brand new. It was formerly sophisticated, stylistically complex. It was trying to get away from old forms of culture and reinvent them and redefine them. You know, what does it mean to be a novelist? And, you know,

Joyce would write something like Ulysses and you'd have the birth of musical forms like jazz and new forms of painting and art. So the modernist movement is a kind of utopian one. It's implying that there is a new way of exploring what it means to be a human being. And it's that project, which Jameson says ends with the advent of post-modernity. Yeah, and then Jameson goes on to kind of argue that there are certain characteristics of post-modernity. He's trying to sort of zoom in on this stuff. And a few primary ones are the concept of depthlessness and what Jameson calls the waning of effect and its connection with what he calls intensities.

Can you talk about some of these characteristics of post-modernity, what they mean, and sort of how they manifest in post-modern culture? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that Jameson is really good at is like changing how you think about arts quite a lot. And he gives in the essay, which he gives this long reading of a really famous painting by Edvard Munch called The Scream, which people have probably probably seen. It has been memeified countless times. And it's this kind of semi-realistic figure with their hands clasped to the side of their head. and the mouth open in this kind of terrifying scream.

And Jameson talks about it as being emblematic of these kind of modernist themes of alienation, of the stress of subjectivity. And he describes it as this incredibly powerful work of art, which has a sort of huge potential of being affective, you know, producing an affect, producing a response in the viewer, in the, in the reader, as it were. And he says that modernist art aimed for that intensity of affect, and that's communicated through its aesthetics and through its structure and through the kind of wealth of signification of detail of depth within the image. You could write a whole book on something like The Scream, you know, academics spend their careers talking about writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. But in contrast, when you get onto post-modernity, what you have.

is you have a kind of a depthlessness of of affect what you have is he talks about this in terms of Lacan and and the sort of breakdown of signification you know we've we we we stumbled through the wreckage of of World War II and suddenly nothing seems to make sense anymore. A great example and a really famous example of a of a depthless example of of subjectivity is Mary Harron's film adaptation of Brett Estin Ellis's novel, American Psycho. So in American Psycho, Patrick Bateman is this violent capitalist. He's this misogynist who delights in inflicting pain on sex workers. But he's also constructed a sense of self in tiling out of brand products.

There's this really famous sequence in the film where Bateman, who's played by Christian Bale, talks about his morning routine and the only way he can make sense of himself as a person is by listing off all of these branded cosmetics and his exercise routine and his suits and where he gets his hair cut

and the gym that he's a member of and so there is a connection here right between the violence that he doles out his position within the capitalist system because he works on Wall Street and the fact that he seems to have no coherent sense of self anymore so that's a really

great example of what we could call a depthlessness, a lack of affect in postmodern art. Yeah, another, just to kind of flesh out more examples, one thing that comes to mind when I think of like modern art and, you know, talking about the scream, something like that is like Picasso's Guernica, which very much comes out of the Spanish Civil War and the sort of murderous intensity of that historical event and the rise of fascism. It's deep, right? The piece is getting at something deeper about human life and about this historical event. It's trying to say something about it. And compared to that might be what many of us know as like Andy Warhol's commodified sort of lack of depth art. Is that a fair comparison? Yeah, totally. I mean, Jameson actually

mentions, I think it's in, I think it's in the book version. He talks about Gerneker. And he makes the point that the artist like Picasso used to be shocking. You know, their work would appear and it would be dangerous. It would be, it would be so disturbing to what people assumed art was, that we would have to try and wrestle with it and try and understand it. But now, you know, Gernica is a print that you can buy and put in your house, right? It's been memorialized. It's been turned into a monument. And so it's now kind of dull almost.

Yeah. In fact, it reminded me, because last episode we did together was capitalist realism. And in capitalist realism by Mark Fisher, he has like, I think the first few pages are about this movie that I just recently saw called Children of Men. And Guernica has a role in children of men. I'm not going to get into the entire argument there, but it's really, really incredible. And Arsle highlights it because we're going to talk about a little bit

the connections between Mark Fisher's capitalist realism and this work by Frederick Jameson. But certainly there's a lot of interplay there, and I would highly recommend people go check out that film, Children of Men, especially. But my favorite quote about Guernica, Picasso, you know, for as problematic as he was, he was also a communist. And he has this quote where, you know, Guernica is basically the tragedy and misery inflicted on people by fascism.

And he had this situation where German soldiers once came up to Picasso and they looked at Guernica and they asked Picasso, did you do this? And Picasso said, no, you did. Kind of flipping it on his head and saying, you know, the horrors of this are fascist, you know, they're fascist horrors. And I just love that story. That's one of the reasons why this is so important, right? And one of the reasons that someone like Adorno, the great thinker of the Frankfurt School, would say after Auschwitz to write poetry as barbaric. And the reason being, because that modernist project, that idea of a kind of utopian new way of living was also coincided with and was contuminious with this mechanized death cult, this this loser ideology of fascism. so we get to the end of modernism and so like where do we go you know what what do we have to

return to what do we have to kind of pick up and and salvage from the wreckage and try and carry forward into the rest of the 20th century up to the present day yeah exactly and I think a lot of people sort of just one last thing on the depthlessness of it a lot of people are familiar with this if you just turn on here in the US FM radio or you turn on cable television the content of what's being given to us on these major channels of cultural production are very shallow and there's not there's not any real depth there and that's a manifestation of the condition of postmodernity, the cultural condition that we're living in. Yeah, totally. I completely agree.

So moving on to commodities and commodity fetishism. Karl Marx famously talked about commodity fetishism whereby the social relations between human beings become perceived as economic relationships between objects and Guy Debord in his famous work The Society of the Spectacle takes that concept

and applies it to advertising and television in the middle of the 20th century labeling the mediation of social relations by images the spectacle Jameson following in both their footsteps I would argue

has talked about commodification as quote unquote the logic of social life today so with all of that in mind what role does commodification play in the cultural condition of postmodernity And how is it, quote, unquote, the logic of social life?

Yeah, I think this is really important. And I sort of touched on this a little bit earlier when I talked about the way in which Jameson argues that what's happened in contemporary capitalism and late capitalism has been a kind of a territorializing of areas of life which once seemed to be immune from it. I mean, at some points he writes with kind of horror that like the logic of surrealism, the earlier surrealist artists who are now being turned into adverts and posters to sell products. But now that's that's so commonplace we would hardly think it worth remarking on, right? I literally have a a melting clock from Salvador Dali's surrealist painting on my bookcase.

It's been commodified and sold to me as a clock. Yeah, exactly. If you're interested in reading the book, I wrote a kind of commentary on the opening section of the whole book, which I'm sort of using as a way of trying to, I'm selling and kind of distributing to people who might need it. And I talked about this in the context of politics. And one of the ways in which Jameson talks about this at quite a length in the book, he talks about the ways in which culture has kind of expanded into every aspect of a life, but so too is capitalism. So kind of economic choices become ways of engaging culturally too. There was that famous, was it Kelly

Jenner and the Pepsi commercial yeah yeah the protest handing out handing out handing out Pepsi to to the pigs and it's like what what's being what's being told to us in that series of images is consumer choice is the way in which you exercise political agency right so so even your politics even the thing which is supposed to be a matter of principle a matter of dialectical materialist science become something that you purchase. Companies like Nike, which can run unexploited labor in the global South, can still give someone like Colin Kaepernick a huge ad deal.

So like commodification becomes something that we are pressured into at every stage of our life, right? This has become even more prevalent in the gig economy, right? Where even things like getting a ride from one point to another becomes an exercise in consumer choice. right that and now like everything has to you know if if you you have that moment of guilt where you're like I've got to give the Uber driver five stars because this this this simple interaction has now become imbricated in the logic of the market so even on the very basic levels right even on the levels of the unconscious surrealist art becomes something that's sold to us and put on our bookcase revolutionary adjit prop becomes a kind of cool commodity uh the very very the very fact of just trying to get around trying to exist in late capitalism become something that you you have to buy your way into I mean just think about the process of rent of renting you know like renting a place is paying money for the privilege of existing so like even the basic requirements for life have become commodified and this goes

and Jameson talks about this at length in quite a lot of his work and things like yeah the unconscious, our dreams, our imagination, have all become drawn into that as well. Yeah, I mean, exactly. If politics and culture and art is all a part of it, well, so is psychology, so is how you perceive yourself and others. That's all very much a part of it. And I kind of want to dig down on this a little bit, because I think there's a lot of really interesting stuff that we can talk about when it comes to commodity fetishism, when it comes to the spectacle, as Gita Board talks about, which is this mediation of social relations by by commodities and

sort of images, right? Representations of who you want to be. And, you know, you can find some of this in like punk lifestyleism where by, you know, dressing yourself perhaps in the adornments of a radical aesthetic, you know,

maybe having like, you know, the clash jacket and the purple mohawk or whatever. But how limited that is politically. And then also the idea that we're all familiar with, which I'm sure if you're, if you've been a communist

for more than two days, you've had some reactionary, bring this up, thinking they're the first ones to do it. But the idea of like, Che Guevar shirts where it becomes this global commodified symbol of something

but the symbol of what it originally symbolizes is now actually just extracted and you see people like... No long with that. Yeah, you see like celebrities wearing it and they couldn't even explain who Che is and that goes a long way and this might seem a little weird but I was trying I was watching something at the very end of last night

it was basically a vice documentary on Lean on what is known in hip hop culture as sip and syrup it goes back to like UGK and Pimp C rest in peace but basically this idea of how hip hop culture itself has taken on the drug lien and turned it into an image and a social status and a commodity such that people at parties, right, that want to be in this hip hop culture are participating in this in a very interesting way. One, the economics is the cost of it goes up, right? As more people demand it, you know, the cost rises. But a deeper

level is the status symbol that it portrays, right? When you go to a party and you have lean, Not only are you drinking the drug, but there's a whole aesthetic associated with it when it comes to two styrofoam cups stacked on top of each other and the lien goes in the top cup, right? It's very silly, but that's the most authentic, quote-unquote, way that you can consume lean. And what it becomes is you're representing to other people that you're in the know, that you're part of this culture. You're saying this is kind of who I am. I'm putting forth a representation of myself. And I know that I'm a part of this thing because I have the little nuances of the little nuances. of the commodity, of the image, the double styrophone cup, you know.

So I'm representing myself to somebody as that thing, but it's mediated, right? You're not actually having an authentic connection with somebody else. You're merely representing yourself to somebody else. And we can see it very obviously when you scroll through Tinder, for example, or social media. It's very obvious how this works, but on these lower levels that you might not even think about, it's always operating there as well. And I think we're all guilty of it, even if we're not aware of it. Yeah, no, totally.

And I think it's, I think it's really interesting that you choose that example because, like, I actually think that the kind of drug of choice of any kind of cultural movement tells you a lot about that age, right? Back in the 70s, it was like the psychedelics, you know, people would drop in acid. People were, like, trying to reimagine consciousness. I mean, Mark Fisher talks about this where he says, like, we're all on downers now, right? The only way that we can cope with this constant, like, assault upon our senses of the cultural logic of, like, capitalism of this society of the spectacle accelerated and intensified to the, to the nth degree is, like, lean, is Ambien, is Xanax. You know, like, you listen to a lot of mainstream hip-hop from a few years ago, and it was all these, like, glitchy down of beats, like, Drake was huge. And he's got that like real sleepy, depressed kind of flow. And it's like we're all on downers. It's the only way that we can cope is the only way that we can kind of try and preserve some sort of semblance of coherence.

When we're when all that all that is and all that we are is being reduced down to mediated images. We need a way out. You know, like I say back in the back in the 70s, you know, people would drop in acid. But like now, now it's like, we're death. for it to kind of numb ourselves. Yeah, and you said, you know, downers become, you know, the sort of ubiquitous drug, and that's true, but it's also two-sighted because downers are how we check out, alcohol, marijuana, you know, hardcore opiates.

We have an opiate crisis in this country for a reason. That's how we sort of check out and recoil from the aimless, abysmal vacuity of our culture. But speed is also something that we use to keep up, right? And in proportion to the increase in opioids and stuff is also an increase in stuff like Adderall, just came out recently that the president is pretty much fueled by it, which explains why his horrific health and old self can go through these blistering campaign trails during the election. He'd do three events a day, and he's sweating, and his face is all discolored, and he's, like,

getting all weird and saying incoherent shit, the dude is zipped up on speed. And so I think a lot of us also, especially if we're in grad school and shit, Adderall is known as a grad school drug. I've even heard Adderall discussed as a podcast drug, because it allows you, to kind of keep up with things, you know? So that's that dual nature of downers and uppers. That's fascinating. Yeah, you know, capitalism, we try and we try and sedate ourselves and then ethnicize ourselves to, to the cultural logic of like capitalism, but to just survive, you know, it's like you've got to have your coffee in the morning. If you've got to get, if you've got to get

through those finals, you've got to get the Adderall. If you've got to become the most powerful politician in, in the world, you've got to be sipped and diet coconut and throwing back handpoles of Adoroa. Like, you know, like this, this is why having an awareness of the cultural moment that we live in as Marxists, people on the left is so important. Because even in these seemingly insignificant things, right, we actually can come to understand things like alienation, things like the collapse in working class consciousness, things like the decimation of working class education and autonomy, you know, those are all connected. So even things that seem kind of frivolous,

even things that seem like, oh, maybe you're just overthinking it. You can kind of unpick a lot of truth from that, you know? Definitely. Exactly. And, you know, your situation, a lot of people out there might not be doing like hardcore opiates at night and doing Adderall. But a lot of us, like you said, if you wake up and you drink coffee, just get up out of bed every morning. And if at the end of the night you're smoking weed or drinking, you know, booze just to go to sleep at night, you're playing that, you're playing that game. We all are kind of forced to play it.

And it's, you can kind of become conscious of it as you're doing it, but you can't stop doing it. it because god damn you got to keep going you know yeah and there we see there we see the the commodification the mediation of image as the very logic of social life absolutely so and we've been kind of touching on mark fisher and capitalist realism because these two works are so connected the last time we had you on we talked about that and in many ways what fisher was doing in that book is akin to what jameson is doing in this one in fact i think fisher mentions jameson in his work throughout his book capitalist realism seeing himself kind of is like taking jameson's critique and analysis from the 80s and 90s and applying it to the post-financial crash 21st century.

Can you talk about how their projects overlap and how capitalist realism and post-modernity as the cultural logic of late capitalism are both getting kind of the same thing, are both kind of working along parallel lines? Yeah, totally. And I think in capitalist realism, Fisher himself admits that you could quite easily subsume his idea of capitalist realism into Jameson's overall rubric of post-modernity. But he says there are a couple of reasons why he chooses capitalist realism as a new term. One of them is historical, which is that when Jameson is writing, there are still some kind of viable flickers of something alternative to capitalism.

You know, he talks about this that, you know, maybe we could find a new way of doing something, maybe in the echoes of that modernism that still links. as we could find a kind of alternative to capitalist culture. Fisher says in capitalist realism that those things no longer exist, right? They've been extinguished or alternatively like the aesthetic markers of modernism of that utopian radical cultural project, which is what modernism was at its very best have been incorporated into the structures of capitalism itself. So there is no kind of confrontation now between capitalist culture and that modernist, revolutionary culture you know there is no modernism is done like it's it's over we can we can maybe go back to it but it it's it's not the model for kind of cultural life anymore it's a sort

of cool aesthetic style that maybe if you want to win a prize you might decide to dust off and so fisher is in in some ways a lot more bleak than than jameson and he says that actually the processes that Jameson describes back in the 80s and the 90s have intensified. They've accelerated. They've expanded. And the vestiges and ruins of that utopian modernism have been commodified themselves. So whilst we could absolutely just take Fisher as sort of writing a new spin on Jameson's postmodernism, there is a sort of like bleaker, more urgent streak to what Fisher is saying, I think. It reflects the optimism and pessimism of their respective times. Jameson, although he's a Marxist, and to be a Marxist in Reagan's 80s is a horror show of its own.

Still, the 80s and 90s, relatively in the imperial core, were a little outburst of basically economic growth that led to some optimism. And, you know, Mark Fisher operating after the 2008 financial crisis, given all those accelerations you talked about, and given the sort of economic base just imploding on itself, And still, even after that, none of these motherfuckers went to jail. None of these bankers, none of these white-collar criminals had to do anything. And the banks were bailed out while regular proletarian people were being kicked out of their fucking house. And so even in the face of the worst economic global capitalist crisis since the Great Depression, we can't muster anything in response.

We can't do anything meaningful, given all the literally capitalism collapsing. And we still, in that moment, that moment of huge. opportunity are unable to make anything of it. And in the same way, I think, you know, members of the Frankfurt School were, we're struggling with this, you know, why is, why is this revolution not happening? You know, let's look at culture. Let's do all this stuff. You know, Mark Fisher's kind of doing the same thing. It's like, here's another opportunity where we could have done the thing, but we didn't. And that needs to be explained. So you're right. It's not just taking Jameson and just updating it. It's also, it's developing that line of argument inside, you know,

leftist or marxist theory yeah absolutely i mean he talks about like jameson writing before the fall of the berlin wall right there was that there did seem to be still a kind of viable alternative yeah but when the wall comes down you you have the the expanse of american the american capitalist empire with mcdonalds going into the former soviet republics and it's like well you know now those Those spaces, those little flames that were burning in various places around the world have been viciously stamped upon. Exactly. And it's also worth noting that although the 90s might have been a period of optimism and economic growth in the Imperial Corps in places like the former Soviet bloc and in places like Cuba, the 90s were an absolute horrific time of like chaos and suffering as capitalism reprivatized and asserted itself across the globe.

the areas where, you know, Soviet socialism had collapsed and disappeared from. So there's that dual nature there. I don't mean to say that the 90s were optimistic for everybody, of course. Yeah, yeah. But moving on, this might be one of the last questions. This is one that I struggle with because I'm simultaneously, like, deeply fascinated. And I really want to fully understand this critique. And I think we're lunging at it on our last episode of capitalist realism.

But at the same time, I feel like there's still, I'm missing something. I'm still trying to put together exactly what this critique is, but one particular thing they both talk about Fisher and Jameson is time and how it functions psychologically in late capitalism and essential components of any Marxist analysis, as we noted above, is that it is rooted in history and therefore it historicizes capitalism. Capitalism thus ceases to be human nature or the end of history and becomes just another epoch of human development. But a peculiar aspect of postmodernity and capitalist realism is the way in which time and history and the future itself is obscured or collapsed or even negated. In fact, Jameson says in the introduction that, quote, modernist history is the first casualty and mysterious absence of the postmodern period, end quote. So can you talk about time and history and what happens to our perception of both under the reign of postmodernity? Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I think this, this is really, it's quite complicated, but it's an important thing to sort of accept and maybe do be prepared to sort of examine ourselves a little bit in the ways in which we are maybe not aware of how the ideology of capitalism affects how we think as well.

And so Jameson talks about the notion that what happens in postmodernity with the absence of depth is the absence of history. right so old old buildings are torn down and some sort of plate glass monstrosity is thrown up um and even even in the u.s you know there's this constant need to renovate to build something new to replace to replace and there is you know you pave over history literally we pave it over and so all we have is what we can see around us you know if you walk through any post industrial city in um the UK, what you'll see is like, for example, my city, Manchester, it has an old historic quarter, which if you, if you walk through now, what you'll see are these huge holes punched in the social fabric of the city where a bulldozer is just like demolished a building that's been

there for 120 years. And what we're promised is like luxury flats, luxury apartments are springing up instead, maybe with like the cotton mill as the name of this new apartment block. Right, right. As a kind of nod to its history, right? So history disappears. We forget the past and all the, and it becomes impossible for us to imagine something that's radically different from the present. And so all we have is a kind of seemingly endless series of now. You know, it's a sense of history where today seems the same as yesterday and it's going to be the same tomorrow and it'll be the same the day after that and the same the next year.

after that. And even when we have, I mean, maybe an easy way of describing this feeling is like, have you ever noticed that people on Twitter will say things like, oh, remember this wild news story? It was only three months ago. Right. All we've got is the now, you know, 2018 feels like it's gone on for like 15 years. Yeah, people are, people are already talking about like the Trump miniseries or like the movies that we're going to make about Trump in the future while we're still living through him. It's like, yeah, this weird, this weird engagement with with our present moment and like constantly trying to only understand it in terms of having it represented it back to us in the form of cultural production at a later point.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, in a way, social media is a good model for understanding this. With chronological timelines, it becomes impossible to sign, kind of even remember what happened last week because it's scrolled past and it's now gone. And because of the structures within which we live, we kind of struggle to imagine radical breaks in the continuity of our cultural experience. So this is what Fisher called the cancellation of the future. You know, all we can imagine is the stuff that we have now.

Yeah, definitely. And insofar as we try to understand history and correct me if I'm wrong here, like I said, I'm kind of struggling to understand this myself. But insofar as we can try to understand it, we usually do it via what is called past postiche. It's just like a remixing together of past forms. And some things that come to my mind when I think about that is like, The, you know, hipster has become like a sort of a meaningless term now, but we can all think of

what people mean when they say like a hipster aesthetic. If you're like, you know, in a certain part of Brooklyn or something, we know what a hipster looks like. And if you really break down the fashion and the aesthetic of what a hipster is, in a lot of ways, it is a re, it's like a taking from the past and just mixing things together. There's a little bit of like, you know, you got the turned up mustaches, but you also got like 90s like grunge stuff and you got some 60s sort of psychedelic stuff in there. It's very, it's very strange. It's not actually a new thing in and of itself.

It's a, it's a, just a reordering of old things. And another way that manifests in our culture, which all of us are familiar with, is this increasing obsession with nostalgia films, with films and television series that, you know, tried to take from the past, like, stranger things or all these remakes and reformulated and hand it back to us. I mean, fuck, Lion King is coming out now. And that was huge for me as a kid. Yeah, and I'm like simultaneously excited about it because it's like my favorite Disney movie of all time, but I'm also like I see in it like this sort of critique and I'm like, God damn it.

Yeah, I mean, Jameson talks about two terms. He talks about parody and he talks about pastiche. And he says in the in the era of modernism, what you could have is you could have parodies, right? Parody is a kind of mocking of a dominant style. So to have a parody, there must be a kind of not a normative, but a sort of common accepted aesthetic standard that you can kind of mock and you can hold it up. But like right now, what we have is we have, he says that postmodern culture, postmodern culture falls into revivalism and pastiche. And he exactly makes this point about the nostalgia film where instead of creating a genuinely, genuinely new cultural form, all we can do is because we can't imagine that. All we can do is we can go back to old cultural forms and try and find something in them that will speak to where we are at the moment.

he makes the point with Star Wars right that Star Wars when it first came out the original trilogy done by George Lucas is basically a pastiche of really old kind of grand narratives that's one like Joseph Campbell would pick up on and the kind of

Buck Rogers serials from like the 1930s to the 1950s and all he's done is kind of rework and reconfigure them but the pastiche is not kind of meaningless there's still something in there that seems interesting it kind of We get a kind of sense of pleasure out of experiencing these old aesthetic objects.

We get to kind of play with them one more time. But like these, you mentioned the Lion King, but Disney have been on this kick of like remaking kind of classic animated films and doing them as live action or as like very high-tech CGI in the case of the Lion King. Yeah. And I totally understand what you mean. There is this kind of nostalgic thrill at seeing a kind of familiar aesthetic form up on the screen.

But at the same time, is it not kind of tragic? Is it not kind of a sense of cultural lack of imagination, that all we can do, you know, it was the 80s that came back and now we're into the 90s. You know, Netflix shelled out $100 million to keep streaming friends. So we're desperate to keep reliving and re-exploring old cultural and aesthetic forms. And so that's it. That is a very seductive and very appealing and maybe even enjoyable. But there are things in there that we should be really cool. about because it shows that the kind of ability to imagine the different is a finite resource.

It's something that could slip away. Yeah. And, you know, it also begs the question. It got me thinking if what we're doing now is sort of like intensifying our nostalgia throwback and if we're going from the 80s to the 90s now and nothing really fascinating or new or truly progressive is being created, I wonder how that nostalgic impulse is going to operate 50 years from now. Like, what is the, maybe it's hard to see because we're in the fog of our own epoch, but I, I struggle to see what the aesthetic of the 20 teens are necessarily, you know, given so much as they are sort of recouplings and reorientations and reconfigurations of past aesthetics, it seems like what are we going to be nostalgic about, you know, when we're 50 years ahead looking back on the time we're living in now? I don't know.

I mean, one of the biggest kind of movie franchises is the Marvel Cinematic Expanded Universe, right? And that's that's that's that's based on 20th century stories retold with 21st century technology They're fun spectacle and we we they they appeal to us and maybe there's that maybe there's some stuff in value in there But are there breaks are there kind of radical changes? Is there is there like you know the the kind of shock of a cultural form this that seems like Genuinely transformative you know as I mentioned Picasso was was dangerous when it first appeared that art was so, so strange that people thought that this was kind of a shock to the system. And the worry is that maybe there are no shocks left. Maybe, maybe all that there is is what we've gotten used to. Yeah. It's very challenging. It makes me want to like sit down. I really try to think

this through. I mean, I've been trying to do it. It's, it's really interesting. I guess another thing that comes to mind is, and maybe I bounce this off you, the monotony of the work day, the sort of cyclical, tight cycles of our day-to-day experiences, given that they're in these 24 hour cycles of like wake up, go to work, come home, sleep. And on the weekends, they're punctuated by moments of going to the bar and then you start the cycle over again. I wonder if that monotony, especially in the heightened gig economy where you have maybe two or three jobs, that monotony plays in to the sort of a historicism and the lack of like a feeling of real time and progress that people feel because they're just running in these tight cycles of

nonsense. Yeah, absolutely. There's a talk Fisher gave that I remember watching where he's talking to a group of like students and he says to them, I don't understand why you aren't angrier at how much has been robbed from you. There were there were things that used to exist in in Britain which was like institutions, a kind of popular modernism is what he calls it, you know, a popular culture that was intellectual and was ambitious and was trying to do things, a social safety net that was that was well funded, education that was seen as free. And obviously none of that is kind of perfection. But it has been systematically stripped away and become unimaginable. And I think one of the ways out of this

is to kind of rediscover both a sense of radical history and to understand that that hasn't just vanished. It was, it was stolen. We were robbed in the wake of the Great Recession in 2008. There's a, you know, my generation is referred to as as the lost generation. You know, the generation that won't have a higher living standard that won't earn as much, that won't be able to retire, who won't be able to own homes. And it's like that happened deliberately. And it would be easy to accept that as something that is just natural in the state of things. And kind of culture encourages that, encourages that, you know, that sense of monotony,

that sense that capitalism never sleeps, that sense that we constantly have to be going and going and going. But, you know, I remember watching that video and thinking, yeah, you know, we should be angry. We should, you know, things have been stolen from us. Yeah. I mean, definitely. I feel that anger. I try to convey that anger to people. I try to like, you know, a lot of people just because of the life they live are kind of complacent and non-reflective about just how fucked up shit is. And I think people, it's sort of a manifestation of their internalized powerlessness where it's like nothing really we can do to change it. No matter if we get Obama or Trump, like the two like furthest, like almost furthest apart that the bourgeois system can vomit up. My day to day life as a as a member of the working class doesn't change. I'm still fucking struggling. I'm still trying to pay rent. I'm still trying to make sure my kids eat healthy food if I can afford it. So all of that stuff is just like, it's always there. And so

people kind of just clock out and sort of restoking their anger. And like, this isn't just some abstract situation we find ourselves in that we can't do anything about. This state of affairs exist for a very certain reason. It serves very certain interests. And God damn it, if we can all get together, maybe we can do something about it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Which leads very nicely into the final question and you gestured toward it a little bit in your last answer. But, you know, given this rather bleak state of affairs that we find ourselves in, how do we break out of it? How does Jameson suggest we break out of it? How do we transcend post-modernity neoliberalism in the late capitalist era? How can we overcome? So there are a couple of things that I would say and none of

these answers are exhaustive and Jameson doesn't really provide an exhaustive one. But there are avenues, right? There are a couple of things that I will point out. Firstly, as I said, that a kind of reengagement with radical history and not and this is not like the history of bourgeois politics or bourgeois capitalism but like genuine working class history it's often been preserved it's often been ignored and it kind of shoved into university of archives and one of the reasons i started doing the things that i do is as kind of public facing work was to try and sort of get information that was contained and kept safe within university structures outside of it.

This is why I think actually engaging with our history and knowing the fights that we've been through, knowing the ways in which kind of Marxist philosophy has shaped and has responded to culture is very important. Secondly, Jameson says that this is culturally dominant. He doesn't say it's culturally exclusive. there are still I think art forms where interesting things are happening and we should encourage that right we should be we shouldn't be passive and complacent people because sites of culture are deeply important and can be challenged and I mentioned that in relation to horror vanguard and I think that's you know important that we we contest culture that we don't just accept what we give in that we push back and we create and we criticize and thirdly I think the thing that

is really important is that meaningful political action reduces the anxiety of existence under late capitalism right i think anyone who is has like just talking to comrades like studying training yourself learning new skills organizing these are practical things that we can do we are encouraged and conditioned to be passive but one of the things that's maybe interesting in in your episode on uh with austin you talked about this the potential for something that's coming after the postmodern, right? Yeah. Austin said it could be called metamodunism,

but one of the ways in which we could conceive of it is something like the new sincerity. Postmodernity is all about irony, lack of affect, and a lack of genuine desire. And I think tapping back into that genuine desire that great quote that any revolutionary is guided by feelings of great love and doing things

and not just staying at home and thinking, but like doing stuff like things which are practical things that involve connection with other people with our comrades is a way of not only just reducing of not only kind of raising our class consciousness but and training ourselves equipping ourselves but it's a way of reducing that crushing passivity and anxiety that neoliberalism that postmodernity seeks to inculcate in us yeah incredibly well said and and the atomization that loneliness that comes with the with bourgeois individualism Overcoming that in the form of organizing politically is a treat in and of itself, but also, you know, as Marxist, we understand how truth is constituted. It's constituted communally. And as revolutionaries, it's constituted through practice. So, you know, organizing politically is not only a way to help yourself psychologically get lifted out of this malaise of postmodernity. It's also the mechanism, if we have any at all, that we're going to be able to use to truly transcend it. And, and like, I I always say, you know, we're up against the clock because of climate change.

So, you know, we don't have centuries to make this happen. We have to start doing it now. And so I always urge people on whatever platform I'm given to really take organizing incredibly seriously. This is the only fucking way out. And the last thing I would say is, you know, making the working class conscious of itself as a class, which you were talking about. And Marx talks about, you know, there's like the proletarian class in so far as it's just the working people. you know, with a certain relationship to the means of production. But there's also the proletarian class as a class conscious of itself.

And that requires historicizing itself. It understands itself as a historical product of capitalism, as a sort of dialectical product. And talking about history, talking about proletarian history, which is something we obviously focus on very extremely here at Rev Left Radio, is one way of sort of re-inspiring people. You're not disconnected and cut off from the past. If you are on the radical left, you have this amazing, beautiful, proletarian history and tradition full of fascinating human beings

of all stripes and that in and of itself is incredibly inspiring. It raises class consciousness and it helps in that process of the working class waking up to itself as a class and as the mechanism that can actually challenge the hegemonia of global capitalism.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think this desire to be alone, to be atomized, to be irony poisoned, And to be extremely online, you know, it's, it's, it's way that we are, you know, nothing more than kind of aesthetic radicals, right? Lifestyleism.

Lifestyleism. You know, let's, let's, I, I genuinely think that, like, one of the best things people can do is find things that they genuinely care about, not things that they pretend to care about or they disavow the things that they're passionate about, but things, you know, the injustices that we see around us should, should bring out a kind of genuine desire to change things. And it's that which burses into action, you know, that's, that desire is, is a key, I think, to really overcoming where we are. Yeah, absolutely.

And last thing I'll say, I always say this is this idea that, that social media is not politics. Social media has a limited use. I mean, it helps with networking. It helps with propagandizing. But if you spend hours every day on social media arguing with even just right-wingers or arguing with other leftists about ideas about how the world should be, And that takes up more of your time than actually thinking about how you can educate the apolitical,

how you can organize in your community, how you can become a better revolutionary in and of yourself, then you're not actually doing politics. You're actually just the perfect neoliberal subject because your politics now has, as have you said, been reduced to an image to the spectacle. It's just, it's a lifestyle thing. It's a, it's a posturing thing that you do online. And capitalism is fully fucking content with the entire left spending all day on Twitter, cutting each other's throats over 1917. If we're doing that, capital is winning.

They love to fucking see that. So I really, really hope people take that seriously because the temptation is there. It's so strong. But we have to resist it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like if we want to escape the postmodern,

it won't be done through more posting. Yeah. Exactly. Well, John, it's always, always a pleasure and an honor to have you on to just talk to you, to be your friend, to hear your hot takes. I'm so glad that you've started. this new podcast, the horror vanguard.

I think the most, anybody's been on the show is three times, maybe you and a couple other guests have had that hat trick, if you will. But I don't see any end in you and I working together. And it's just, it's always a pleasure. Well, thank you. Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. Thank you so much, Comrade. I am always delighted.

I am at your disposal. But yeah, please do do check out Horror Vanguard. We're at Horror Vanguard on Twitter. If you want to get into the spooky left, come find us. Let's build Gothic Marxism together. For sure. And one day, I still hopefully, I believe that the day will come and you and I will meet in real life and share whiskey together.

Hell yes. Hell yes. Again, just to reiterate the horror vanguard on Twitter, at the lit-crick guy on Twitter. You Google the lit-crit guy. You Google Horror Vanguard. You will absolutely find it. Go check it out and support different left projects.

We're all sort of talking about theory and history and trying to increase class consciousness, but the thing about it is that all these different shows come from different perspectives. They all have different emphasis, and it's a fucking beautiful thing. The blossoming of a left cultural media landscape is good actually and should be encouraged, not shit on, and we should encourage as many voices coming out of the left, reaching people, especially as younger people are growing up and searching for alternatives. We have to be there on every front And John does that

We try to do that And all the people that we work with And talk to are trying to do that And it's a wonderful thing So again, it's a pleasure, John Thank you so much All right, comrade, talk to you later Thanks a lot, man

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