Rev Left Radio - Teaching the Actuality of Revolution: Unlearning, Aesthetics, and the Sensations of Struggle

Episode Date: January 21, 2023

Re-Upload: The book is out now! You can get it here: https://www.iskrabooks.org/teaching-the-actuality The People's Forum Book Launch Here: https://peoplesforum.org/events/book-launch-panel-teaching-the-actuality-of-revolution-aesthetics-unlearning-and-the-sensations-of-struggle/ Derek Ford returns to the show to discuss his upcoming book "Teaching the Actuality of Revolution". Topics discussed include: Marxist pedagogy, sensory perception, education, Althusser, Marx and Engels, ideological struggle, aesthetics, and much more! Learn more here: https://www.liberationschool.org/ Check out our previous episodes with Derek: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/capital https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/communist-study   Outro music: "Believe These Blues" by Christone "Kingfish" Ingram Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio    

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have back on the one and only Derek Ford, this time to talk about his newest book, Teaching the Actuality of Revolution, aesthetics, unlearning, and the sensations of struggle. We talk about sensory perception, about the historical materialist account of sensory perception. We talk about aesthetics and how capital shapes the way we see and view the world. And we talk about revolutionary education and what the role of education is as compared to near learning. What's behind the reactionary attack on education, which has become more acute recently, but is a longstanding object of reactionary's hatred and disdain and attacks. And just cover a lot of ground in a really fascinating, wide-ranging conversation

with somebody who expertly takes complex material and makes it accessible and approachable to people who are not necessarily scholars or experts in any given field, lay people, if you will, like myself in this regard. So I couldn't have asked for a better guest to talk about this, and it's a really fascinating text. And so whether you're an organizer or a teacher or just somebody interested in ideas and the Marxist tradition, I highly recommend this text and getting it when it comes out. So without further ado, here is my discussion with Derek Ford on his newest text, which by the time you're hearing this might not be out,

but we will probably re-upload it when it does, called Teaching the Actuality of Revolution, Aesthetics, Unlearning, and the Sensations of Struggle. Enjoy. Yeah, thanks for having me back on the show. It's really great to be here. So my name is Derek Ford, and I'm a teacher, educational theorist, and an organizer based out of Indianapolis. And I've been involved in political organizing since the late 1990s, but really seriously beginning in the, beginning in 2007. And then I've been interested in writing about and researching the relationship

between education and politics since about 2012. Yeah, well, welcome back to the show. We've had you on a few times. I'm sure a long-time listeners and core audience members of RevLeft will remember you. And you do really fascinating work on many fronts, but specifically on the front of education and pedagogy. And this newest book that is, is it coming out or is it out already? When does it drop it should be coming out later this year probably within a couple months okay and that book is called teaching the actuality of revolution unlearning aesthetics and the sensations of struggle um and i found this to be you know incredibly interesting and a really interesting unique take on a area of sort of thought and struggle that i myself am not fully caught up on or have

really doven into so as i told you before we started recording i'll be kind of learning along with the audience, as it were. But let's go ahead and just get into it because it really is fascinating. And let's start by just talking about this book. Mostly, what is it about? And what do you hope to accomplish with this book? Yeah, well, I mean, really researching and writing this book was also an educational experience. For me, it really started earlier this year when I started reading the work of Gabriel

Rockhill and Jennifer Ponce de Leon on aesthetics. And, I mean, you know, so it's sort of intervening in some of their, you know, their work, which is not educational, but entails educational projects. And I would say, like, summarize the sort of crux of their project as understanding, like, capital and capitalist ideology as a censorial world. In other words, not just one that engages the mind, but that engages, you know, all of the senses that the, you know, that through which we collect data that the mind would then use to understand or, you know, produce new ideas, et cetera, et cetera. And in their collective article from, I think, 2020, they end with a call for, you know, education. And, you know, they're saying, we need to move beyond just, like, critically. analyzing capitalism and we need a kind of education that helps people not only understand you know the capitalism is bad and that there are alternatives but that actually demonstrates to

people that alternatives are possible right so like in other words revealing through educational experiences that alternatives are already possible within the present and basically what I what I wanted to do in this book is to try to develop some educational concepts and theories and even practices that we could use as organizers and as revolutionary educators to produce those kinds of experiences. Yeah, that's incredibly fascinating. And just the idea of capitalist ideology is not merely sort of an intellectual or cultural superstructure, but as actually shaping and forming the censorial world or our basic perceptions and sensations. Before I move on to the the next question. Can you just say maybe a little bit more about that, about how capitalist

ideology can manifest at that seemingly, you know, non-ideological level of human experience? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so I think that one of the examples that they give is commodity fetishism, right, which actually Marx in capital introduces as an aesthetic sort of phenomenon In, you know, when he's introducing it, for example, right, he, well, you know, commodity fetishism for those who aren't familiar is basically the way in which our labor under capitalism, which is thoroughly social and collective, appears to us, right, in the form of objects. So social relations sort of, you know, take the form of objects. And so in capital Marx, you know, he says that it's, it operates just like, you know, social things. And there's a quote, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. And he says, you know, it's how, quote, the light from an object is perceived by us, not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as an objective form of something outside the eye itself, end quote.

So in other words, it's not as if, you know, the object is coming to, the commodity is coming to us, right? but actually there's an interaction between the two. And so there is, and the other thing too is that that's important is that commodity fetishism, it isn't a misunderstanding of reality, right? Marx writes that commodities appear as what they really are, right? In other words, capital produces a world in which certain things make sense to us, and making sense isn't just like a conceptual thing. It's also an aesthetic thing, and that it's about like what we touch, what we don't touch, what we hear, what we don't hear, you know, what we smell, what we don't smell, and basically like the sort of division of the senses, as well as the hierarchy of the senses.

So I'm not sure if, do you want a little bit more? Sure, yeah. I mean, this is really interesting. You can keep going. Yeah, okay. So I think one example actually is. is, and this is what I write about in Chapter 1, is actually how Marx's pedagogy is, it both illustrates the perceptual world of what I call the perceptual ecology of capital.

But in doing so, Marx's writing actually takes the form, right? Two, in order to help us sense another perceptual reality, right, by illustrating, for example, the gaps in capital's perceptual ecology. And so one of the examples that I'm most interested in is primitive accumulation, right, which, you know, comes at the end of volume one. And, you know, here, I mean, Marx is sort of, you know, he's doing a historical inquiry into how did the original capital in England's, like, come into being, right? But what's interesting is that, and it's usually read as a reading or an account that presents primitive accumulation as like something that happened in the past. and, you know, it's like a finalized thing. But actually, you know, Marx never says that.

And not only does he say that, like, it runs through different phases and different, you know, countries and different time periods. But the whole thing is that he calls primitive accumulation an original sin. Because, like, you know, the original sin is something that, like, you don't think about, right, in order to, like, think about other things, right? So, you know, whatever, the tree, the apple fell from the tree and somebody bit it. That was the original sin. And so therefore, you know, we're born in sin and we have to, but we never actually interrogate the original sin, right? And he says it, it appears as primitive, right, because it forms the prehistoric stage of capital. But capital, this prehistoric stage, he doesn't mean that it was like before history or before capital. It has to continually

repeat itself because capital like you know it's not as if it had some particular beginning origin and then it just developed from that capital has to continually produce new outside to then enclose and does that make sense yeah yeah absolutely okay and so what um reading the text right you see that marks is using like a historical inquiry a philosophical perspective particular examples and of course motivated motivated by the class struggle to basically show us how capital's origins are like are violent and they continue to be violent and they continue to be reproduced and so therefore that's a weakness in capital right the way the capital presents its own history is not how Marx understands history nor how we should understand history history is something in which the past

continually turns up in the present that's of course linked with the future and so by engaging in these different sort of modes of writing right where in one point it's like it is a story there are concrete concrete examples and other parts there are philosophical principles about um the the origin which marks uh calls like a a vicious circle right that you can only get out of by basically like making something up right which is primitive accumulation And so he's kind of through the writing actually producing an experience in the reader in which we are sensing the possibility of other worlds, right, within the present, which is, you know, important in terms of really teaching for the actuality of revolution. Because in order to teach for the actuality of revolution, you know, one of the most crucial principles is really, helping people experience that revolution is possible and you know the the content of this book

isn't about particularly producing experiences that like immediately lead to a sense of revolutionary possibility but just even making that that leap you know from this is the world this is how it is you know that education teaches us and education not just in schools but in the media and so on by making the leap from there to like the world could be otherwise and actually it is otherwise that's like a step towards uh towards teaching the actuality of revolution yeah incredibly interesting stuff and i think this next question kind of allows us to go deeper and even kind of further than than what we've discussed so far so in the introduction of your book you say quote this book follows a route opened by tyson e lewis one where educational politics does not begin with changing a student's beliefs or raising critical consciousness. Instead, educational politics has its fleshy roots in the pre-reflective, pre-cognitive erotics

of perceptual foreplay, wherein the potentiality for sensing differently, sensing otherwise in the disciplinary apparatus of learning dictates, is not sacrificed, but rather nurtured. So that's a really fascinating sentence or two, but it can also kind of be hard to comprehend on the first go, especially listeners just hearing that for the first time. So can you kind of flesh out what this means, particularly in relation to how learning

is sort of conceptualized under capital? And then kind of zoom out and tell us more about Marx and Angles's thought on the issue of sensory perception, particularly in response to Feuerbach, which I thought was very interesting. Yeah. So, yeah, it is a dense, it is a dense quote for sure. But basically, you know, in general, most educational theory is premised on, you know, teaching, students to be critical of capitalism and sort of, you know, producing them as subjects who are critical of capitalism, who are then capable of participating in social movement. So it's really

about beliefs and ideas, right? And Lewis's approach is actually the politics of education happened sort of before we reflect and we understand things. And it has to do with like the very, the very sensations that we're taught. And if you think about like how much of our school experience and particularly like, you know, our earliest school experiences are really about enforcing a particular perceptual regime, right? So like, you know, if you're in a kindergarten class, like I remember as a kid, you know, it's constantly, I was constantly being told like, you know, look up here. Don't look over there, right? Don't lick that, you know, don't touch that. Right. And so we're learning what we should touch and what's touchable and what we, you know,

where we should look and where we shouldn't look. And obviously, on, or capitalism, you know, in education, that's really about inaugurating us into like a particular perceptual ecology, right? Capital's perceptual ecology. And so in response then to like just raising critical consciousness, Lewis proposes the politics of education in terms of opening up what we can sense, what we sense it with, and so on and so forth, right? There's a really great video by someone who passed away, their name was Mel Bags. And it's called In My Own Language. It's on YouTube.

You can see it's very good. And Bags was an autistic person. And there's a section in the video where they are basically demonstrating that they can touch things, they can look at things, they can, you know, hear things. But they say it's not enough that I can do that. I have to do it to the right things and not do it to the wrong things, right? So I have to look at a book. I can't feel a book, for example.

And basically, you know, I mean, the argument in that and its relevance is that bags as figuring autism as basically like a not, basically like a way of an or a perceptual organization that conflicts with the dominant one, which is capitals, right? And this relates to, you know, Marx and Angles' writing on sensations, which in particular the German ideology, right, which is a series of manuscripts that were written in 1840s. And so the German ideology, right, there are manuscripts written between like 1845 and 1846, and they're breaking with Hegel in them, and in particular the young Hegelians, right? And I contrast this with Marx's 1844 economic and philosophic manuscripts, also known as the Paris manuscripts, where Marx hadn't yet distanced himself from Feuerbach. And so for Feuerbach, we basically, like, liberation is achieved by directly sensing the world as it is, which he calls sensuous certainty. And Marx in 1844 basically affirms the idea that sense perception,

right? Truly sensing the world as it actually is constitutes true science. And then when we read the German ideology written, you know, the next two years, they critique Freud for this. And they reject even the possibility of sensuous certainty, right? Because even the most basic object of our senses, right, they say results from like a whole history of development, of industry, of commerce and they give the cherry tree as an example right of a of a simple you know sensuous object um and they note that like well it was only like a couple hundred years ago that commerce moved the cherry tree into four or box like you know uh sensual uh surroundings right and it was therefore only because of these particular actions this particular history of production distribution

and consumption that it can even be thought of as sensuous certainty, right? And of course, you know, in the German ideology, they're beginning to lay out historical materialism, and this is a historical materialist approach to sensing things, right? And so they go further, right? And they have this really, really great line about how, you know, basically like our sensuous world And our sensuous capacities, right, what we sense and what we sense with, as well as that which we can sense are, like, so historically produced that they imagine that if that production, right, were to be, were to stop for a year, right? that Feuerbach would basically, like, find that the entire world of our perceptual capacities, right, were missing because they would no longer correspond to his historical moments in which the writing. So the basic, one of the most important ideas here that I draw out is that there's no determined or unchanging relationship between any sensuous object and faculty, right?

So, for example, like sound, which I give, it interacts, you know, sound is basically like, I mean, it's vibrations, right? So it needs air. So we, you know, we don't just listen to sound, right? We feel, like, if you're in a car and you're blasting music, you feel the sound, right? And, you know, it actually was only, like, within the last 150 years or so that we really began to listen to sound without looking at sound, right? And so there's this book that Mark's Katz wrote. I think it's, like, capturing sound from 2012, where he talks about how, like, you know, when the, when the record, was introduced, people like literally stared at the record players because they were so used to only

experiencing music by looking at live performances. And so they were just like really confused about it. And so this is an example of how our perceptual, like the perceptual organization of our world, right? What we do with our senses, what we what we sense, what we can sense and what we sense with are historically produced. Yeah, I find that to be completely fact. fascinating, the historical materialist analysis and account of even basic sensory perception. And a thing that it makes me think about, and, you know, let me know if I ever get off base or if I give rise any confusions here. But we can also understand it, like, you know, we understand the phonographic thing by going

back in time. There's also interesting, like, stories of, like, the first time people got on trains, and they thought that, you know, your body would fall apart going at those high speeds or the first time they stood in front of a movie theater and you know we're like shifting in their chairs and recoiling when something came you know at them or whatever it may be you can think in the future we're already starting to see little hints of what could happen with the development of certain technologies and their impact on our on our sensory organs and our basic perceptual you know functioning day to day you can imagine i mean even with with silly things like google glass or

these various, or even just the iPhone itself is this extension of our sensory world or the extension of our intellectual mind outward. And you could, you could, you could fathom how that will, over time, especially, kind of, or could have the possibility of fundamentally altering things that we took to be sort of outside of history's contingencies, i.e. our basic ability to see, hear, think, and feel. But, but I think what you're getting at and what marks and angles is getting at is like these things are not just de facto default settings that you then go out and experience the world with but they themselves are shaped by the historical contingencies as are everything else am i kind of on point there yeah 100% i mean you know there's no such thing as

nature right it's like um because even if we could like think about any nature that's untainted by any you know kind of like human activity i mean you know we would be approaching it through the through our ideas, right, and our sensory apparatuses produced in human society, right? So basically, and of course, you know, nature is constantly produced and reproduced, right? And that includes the human body, right? And the sensory organs and the various ways in which we sense the world around us. No, I think that's a good example. And, you know, another one is like, look at how, you know, headphones.

changed the world, right? And kind of individualized listening where, you know, I don't know, 30 years ago, it was not uncommon to just like hear boomboxes playing at parks or on trains and buses, you know, in public spaces. And now when you go into any of those places, everybody just got their earbuds in and they're just like, you know, listening to their own thing. And so that's like, you know, that's an example of how, in this case, right, technological transformations and listening, then impacts the very social organization of society and our social

relations, which would then, in turn, react upon our bodies, right? And in this case, right, reaffirmed the idea that listening is like an individualized thing and that it has to do with the ear rather than other organs. So this might be an impossible question to answer, but is there any sense of what, I mean, we understand how technology in the past or in the future could shift things. here. Is there any sense in which a socialist alteration in the mode of production itself, in and of itself, perhaps, would impact anything on this front? Or is it sort of impossible to say because we're sort of lost in the fog of our own, you know, current historical moment?

Yeah. I mean, I think that there's an example that I give towards the ends of one of the chapters where I'm engaging in Lafav and some critiques of Lafavv and basically drawing on some research that actually went back and looked at the Soviet production of housing and how it was organized through these various cities and micro districts, which were like neighborhood scale territories that existed in networks. And so they maybe had their own division of labor, But in each of the housing projects, there were like, you know, between 5,000 and 10,000 people, you know, and there were schools and libraries and parks and them. But different social groups, right, from factory workers to, like, you know, party functionaries, janitors to engineers, they live in the same housing units and the same micro-districts, right?

And so that, like, shows that we actually have created a radically different perceptual ecology, right? it's related to the organization of space and time and the mode of production because basically it was like a non-segregated society right one of the ways that segregation functions is not only by like you know containing certain people in space or controlling the movements of certain people in certain spaces but also by you know uh you know by having a road go or cut through uh you know a ghetto or something or a barrio right well it's sort of out of view because like when you're driving you're not really looking around you you're looking at the road ahead of you yeah yeah i also think of yeah i don't know maybe it's

not worth diving into that but i'm just kind of thinking about racism shaping people's perceptions of you know just like the i don't know the aesthetic jarring nature of let's say like a hyper-segregated community where a black person wanders into the white part of town or what what happens have you and there is a sort of immediate sense on behalf of like the white you know racists in that area of of a sense of something being out of place or different based on the social relations of settler colonialism and racialized capitalism but you know like a modern city paris new york city whatever um you know seeing seeing a person of a different race is just commonplace and doesn't have any implication really and so it's it's helpful in this sense to understand how social relations just the mere fact of various social relations can impact the basics of perceptions of even other human beings. Am I on point there or am I missing something? No, I think you're totally on point. And like a classic example in education that I'm sure a lot of people can relate to and have been in is when like, you know, the teacher asks a question and like, you know, a student of an oppressed identity.

Like, for example, like a woman gives an answer and then, you know, I raise my hand and, you know, I'm, perceived as a guy and I give an answer and the teacher's like yeah that's right thank you so much Derek for your contribution right because the teacher is like the the organization of the senses is such that like you know the the the voice of the press of the oppressed identity like isn't to be heard right it's maybe to be allowed to speak but it's not like the person can't literally hear it it's not as if they're thinking to themselves right because of this person's identity, I'm going to discount what they say, right? And that goes back to how the politics of education are pre-cognitive and directly relate to the distribution of the senses. Yeah. Yeah, that's

incredibly helpful. Absolutely. So earlier in that response, you mentioned this idea of the ecological regime or in your text you talk about an aesthetic ecological regime. And certainly we're getting at that, but maybe just to make it a little bit more explicit, can you talk about what exactly you mean by an aesthetic ecological regime and a little bit more about maybe what that regime looks like under capitalism. I don't want to drill down too much on this or be redundant, but if there's anything new there

you could mind, let me know. Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, I think in capital there's in all three volumes, right? I mean, there's so many examples in which Marx is telling us really that's, you know,

that ideology, it isn't false consciousness. it's not a misunderstanding of reality. There are material reasons why we sense things, right, in particular ways, right? I mean, so I think the wage from volume one is a really great example, right? Obviously, you know, nobody gets a wage by working alone and in total isolation, right? And the wage is a representation of value, which is social in itself. But because we receive the wage as individuals, we begin to sense ourselves as individuals, right?

And so part of the capital's perceptual ecology is absolutely sensing and perceiving ourselves as individuals who might come into relations with others, but those relations will be external to us and won't be part of us into sensing not only like, you know, physical goods, but everything. as a commodity and as an economic transaction, including teaching and learning, and also about organizing the senses in a colonial manner in which basically our sensual capacities are organized and directed in such a way that they are like focused on taking what is outside of us and bringing it inside of us. you know, thereby also reinforcing our individuality, but also kind of reproducing us as colonial subjects where the world exists for us, you know, in order to know it. Yeah, very helpful. Interesting. So let's kind of shift away from this a little bit and towards

something else in the text, because later on you say, quote, the reduction of education to learning is a significant educational victory of the capitalist class in the U.S. But it's probably, you could talk about that more broadly as well outside the U.S. So can you talk about this distinction between education and learning, how the reduction of education to learning is a victory for the capitalist class, and what the socialist response to this could or should be? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think this is a really, you know, really important part, right? Because, you know, the argument of the book is that capital's perceptual ecology is reproduced, right? We're wedded to it educationally, right?

in terms of like formal education in particular, but, you know, education and society were large. And over the last couple of decades, basically education as a term and also as like a process has been reduced to learning. And learning is different than education. I mean, maybe it's a component of education. But learning is, one, it describes a process, right? It doesn't actually describe like your end goal or the purpose of it you know i mean one can be one can learn to be a great organizer one can learn to be a great counter-revolutionary you know one can learn to be a great business leader or can learn to be an effective you know serial killer i mean all sorts of things right it doesn't act so it detaches it from any goal and so therefore right when when the goal of

education, right, is sort of abstracted away through learning, then what's the default goal going to be, right? It's going to be to adapt us to the ever-changing needs of the capitalist market, which is why we, you know, like think of ourselves and oftentimes pride ourselves on being lifelong learners, right? Like we never stop learning. And because, you know, the job that I'm in today might not be available tomorrow or it'll shift rapidly, you know, through the introduction of some new technology that I'll have to learn and relearn these skills. And so we're basically produced as people who are like, you know, constantly learning and we feel it neat. Like so even in our leisure periods, right? Like, you know, are they really leisurely

or are they about learning something to make us more competitive on the labor market, you know, and periods of unemployment are periods of learning where you've got to go and get new job training or take some courses or get a new certification in order to get a new job. And so learning really weds us to capitalism, right? And also learning is really student-centered, right? It's really about like what the student wants to learn because it eliminates the needs for need for teachers and teaching. Because the whole thing about being a teacher is that, yeah, okay, you want students to learn.

but in and do other things but insofar as you want them to learn you want them to learn particular things and for particular reasons and in particular ways right but you know i can learn by you know um you know watching a ted talk i can learn by reading an article or whatever right i don't need a teacher with the expertise and so this has been one of the things that's facilitated really the attacks on teachers on their wages on their social status um and public education in general right Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about this attack on education and how it, how it in detail

connects up with this? Well, under the regime of learning, right, education is almost like an economic transaction between the student and the teacher, right? And also, like, just think about how much, how actually the language of education, teaching, and students has been replaced, you know, by like, you know, the teacher is now a facilitator of learning. students are now learners, you know, universities are now, you know, spaces for learning, right? But we can think about how learning is driven by the student's needs.

And so kind of paradoxically, actually, one of the ways that learning came to dominate education was actually through progressive discourses that were against, like, you know, authoritarian or one-way models of teaching, like lecturing, right? And so the idea is that, like, the learning, has things they want to learn and the teacher is there like as a service provider to help them learn those things. But education is different because education isn't about like meeting students' needs because and actually in many ways education, the most like important educational moments are those that tell the students things that they need that they didn't even know. that they needed, right? And it might be very painful, right? I mean, you know, the example of like,

you know, a white person learning about white supremacy, uh, for example, like might be something that maybe they, you know, they wouldn't have like voluntarily signed up for and paid money in an economic transaction to get that information, right? Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Or even, or search for it online, right? Because that's another idea is like with the technological advancements of information and Wikipedia articles and you can find anything online, there is this sort of sort of, I think, you know, kind of reactionary idea of like, you know, you don't need to go to school or half the shit you're taught at school is useless, you know, this idea of these useless degrees. You know, nowadays, everybody can just sort of educate themselves by just going online and looking up stuff. But of course, if you're doing that, your prejudices, your blind assumptions, your biases will be at play, often unexamined in such a way that you would never look up the article, let's say, in your example, on, you know, white supremacy or the colonial history of whiteness and what it means, right? And so in a properly educational context, those things could be brought to you in a way that you would never necessarily,

out of your own impetus, go out and search for or, you know, educate yourself on. And that's one of the differences here between education and learning. Yeah, definitely. And also, like, think about what you would come across. You know, like, let's say, you know, I do learn about white supremacy because these protests are taking place, and I Google, you know, white supremacy and how to fight it. Well, you know, what are the articles that are going to come first to my attention, you know? Are they going to be liberal articles? Are they going to be revolutionary articles? Are they going to be articles from the black liberation tradition? Well, that's going to be determined by multinational corporations that have no transparency and basically would then dictate, right,

the content that we would learn about things, even if we did want to learn about them. Absolutely. Absolutely. And the structuring of the algorithms themselves and where they push you. Right. So with this in mind, and I think this distinction is very crucial here. And that's kind of the last part of the question is what could the socialist response to this be? Is it as simple as just the emphasizing of this distinction and the siding with education over mere learning? Or is there something even more to it here? Yes. No, definitely. I think that there's more to it, but it includes that for sure. And so this is why the subtitle, is about unlearning, right? Because if learning, you know, reproduces and ties us to capital's perceptual ecology, then we have to unlearn that perceptual ecology. And so, you know, critique is important, description is important, but also, you know, sensory encounters that are educational are really important, right? And so what I am interested, and here I'm drawing on the work of Garrett Bista, who argues that teaching is really fundamentally the act of bringing something

that's outside the student to the student, not so the student can incorporate it into their own understanding, but so they can be sort of provoked and disturbed and that they have to respond to it in some way. And so he defines education as like the act of teaching. And what is teaching, right? Well, he says it's basically pointing, right? It's the act of pointing. You point a particular students in a particular direction towards particular content for particular purposes, right? I mean, think about the syllabus, right? That's basically like me pointing students to directing their gaze to the content.

And so I'm calling students to attend to the intended content in precise moments for a definite reason. But there's never any predetermined end to this because learning always, I mean, even though learning as a whole it describes a process without an end right i mean obviously there are aims and objectives and those are dictated by the global market and those can be fluctuating but it's only because and i think i talked about this the first time i was on your show and i had just done my book on studying right it's only because um if i if i want you to learn you know or if i wanted to learn how to be a good podcast right and you were going to teach me well it's only because you know what a

good podcaster is at the beginning that you can therefore evaluate can measure my progress as I actualize my potential to be a good, you know, podcaster. And so against that, right, unlearning doesn't have any predetermined end in mind. And so therefore, the teacher can't really, like, you know, measure any progress, right? And so you also then mean, it also then means that the teacher can't guarantee any particular outcomes. And so in terms of the educational experience itself, I think unlearning is about organizing encounters where students, teachers, encounter educational objects and matter in a way that opens up unexpected and unforeseen paths.

And the teacher's task there is to sort of tell the student to like keep going, right? So oftentimes in class a student will like maybe raise their hand and they'll be like, they'll start saying something and then be like, well, actually, never mind. I don't know if that makes sense, right? It doesn't make sense maybe according to the ways in which our sensual capacities are organized under capitalism, but maybe it can make a different kind of sense. And so then my task as a teacher is to say, no, no, no, keep going, right? Let's see if we can make a different kind of sense of this, right?

In other words, like the initial reaction is like, wait, what I'm about to say doesn't accord to current common sense, so therefore I shouldn't say it. And the teacher's task is to say, no, you know, like let's produce a new common sense or let's show that other forms of common sense are possible. And that's, again, you know, an experience of other potentials within the present that can then be harnessed towards the actuality of revolution, right? helping people actually not only believe in their minds, but sense with all of their bodies, the fact that we can overthrow capitalism in the U.S. and create a radically different society.

Yeah, yeah. Beautifully said. It's really interesting, and that makes a lot of sense. And I think it's precisely this element of a good education, this element of unlearning and provoking and possibly even disturbing. people, you know, settled or ostensibly settled narratives or ways of understanding the world or forms of common sense. It's precisely this that so much of the reactionary backlash to education broadly right now, but also, you know, throughout the years is really centered around. Like, you know, the hysteria and the moral panic on the right recently about CRT. You know, it's just this catch-all term for like teaching, usually American history, but really teaching anything. in ways that provoke and disturb the white majoritarian conception of themselves. And so, you know, that is a crucial component of education.

And it is one of the things that makes it such a ripe target for reactionaries of all stripes. Absolutely. And what are they basically saying, but that no, that, you know, body of work, you know, that amorphous body of work is not to be looked at, right? It's not to be listened to. It's not to be touched. It's not to be sensed in any way. Right. So that's like, yeah, that's a great example of, you know, a very clear and very sort of like authoritarian approach to organizing capital's perceptual ecology. And another example that jumped out is in Florida under DeSantis.

You know, there's this wide, wide ranging attack on education. And the obvious one is this like this don't say gay bill, this trying to get the very idea of LGBT acceptance out of the school room. often under these perverse ideas of like grooming or whatever it may be. And also in Florida, there's this new policy under DeSantis of to respond to the teacher shortage by letting military veterans without bachelor degrees be teachers in Florida as a way of addressing not only the ostensible teacher shortage, but I think also to sort of reaffirm this mainstream, you know, patriotic, Americana, you know, white settler colonial lens through which things are apprehended, you know, if you have a somebody who's really only credentials as I went to the military teaching your kids, you know, and plus there's this all this stuff, you can't talk about all these topics that are taboo. It really is an effective, I think, way of clamping down on education and sort of, you know, this reactionary ability to sort of keep the lid on it as it were, or this attempt at least to keep the lid on. on these other ways of thinking and knowing

and, as you said, even feeling. Yeah, precisely. And that's also like what charter schools do, right? Because to be a chart, you know, to go and to teach for America, all you need to prove is that you're like a great, you know, leader from, you know, an elite university. And so therefore you have, you know,

have the potential to like, you know, finally solve the educational problem and of poor black children, right? And so basically they take people who have zero experience teaching who oftentimes have zero knowledge, of education at all. And not only do they like, you know, put them in in schools where like the most experienced teachers are needed the most and the most like, you know, long-term teachers

are needed the most. But, you know, also the teachers, because they don't, because they're not actually teachers, right? They never studied education. They are therefore basically like just delivering scripted curriculum that even more strictly reinforces and, you know, reteaches or whatever, through which we relearn capital's perceptual ecology. It's like, yeah, but that's why the attacks, you know, the reduction of education to learning and the attacks on teachers are important to the overall argument of the book. Yeah, absolutely.

And oftentimes those, you know, teachers with no actual education in education itself are products of the perceptual ecology, unthinking, uncritical products of that very perceptual ecology that capital seeks to reinforce. course. It's really only through critical engagement with that idea and the process of learning how to educate and all the dimensions of education that come into play. And I think a big thing I talked about with my teacher friend on a recent episode is also this idea that teaching is not even primarily about understanding and communicating content. It also is a bunch more, you know,

there's many more things to it, including classroom management, mentorship, being able to deal with the family problems that a student might bring into the room. And this is a much more multifaceted skill set than merely being able to understand and adequately regurgitate a specific curriculum or set of ideas. Yeah, definitely, definitely. So let's go ahead and move on. And in the third and fourth chapters of your text, you dive into Al Thuzer and you analyze his thinking on aesthetics and politics. You know, this is multi-chapters and you do a lot of work here. So, you know, you can take this question in whatever direction you want, but can you kind of summarize what you find valuable or worth critically engaging with in Al Thusserre on this front, as well as your just

general analysis of his positions and approach? Yeah, for sure. I mean, one thing is I think that Althusair is probably the most like, you know, misunderstood and, you know, I wouldn't even say misread because I don't think a lot of people really read Althusair, but, you know, they do read misinterpretations. Basically, like, you know, all these, you know, very schematic and sort of, you know, incorrect interpretations came out, especially in the field of education. David Backer has a good article on this in the journal Critical Education, where he goes back and traces like how Giroux and others, like the founders of critical pedagogy, you know, like just basically totally misrepresented Al Thucer. And that's the only way that people don't, you know, really,

in education, don't really read Althusair. They'll read the critiques. of Elthusser, or if they read El Thucer, it's after, and therefore, through the lens of the critiques. And so, and I think that Althusair's writing couldn't be actually, like, his actual philosophy couldn't be any more different than, you know, the idea that, like, he thinks that, um, you know, we are just like continually interpolated as capitalist subjects and, you know, we're totally subject, like, you know, we have no agency and whatever. And so, like, one of the things I'm interested in doing also is kind of like, you know, showing how much more there is to Alcucerre and how this is such an incorrect interpretation. And in one of the chapters

I do this by thinking about the, like, what's called the, like, you know, the academic word is like epistemology, which comes from two Greek words, one of which episteme is knowledge. The other one is logos or reason, right? So it's basically like the reason of knowledge. And so I'm thinking about, okay, with unlearning to teach the actuality of revolution, to teach a different perceptual ecology, what kind of logics of knowledge or reasons of knowledge do we need to engage? And this is one of the reasons why I turn to Althusser's work, because he, through in particular his writings on art, but also other works, he distinguishes between knowing and thinking and also experiencing.

So knowing something is when we understand it, right? When I've, you know, I've sort of, you know, mastered or whatever, I've produced some knowledge about some kind of object, right? Thinking is different because thinking can result in knowledge, absolutely, but it's kind of an experience in like the pure state of thought and wonder where you're just like everything is open-ended. It's sort of, you know, you can come to unforeseeable conclusions. It's more like wandering through a labyrinth than it is, you know,

going to pick up a particular book at the library. And so for Al Thusser, art doesn't produce knowledge, but it also doesn't replace knowledge, right? It has a relationship to knowledge. But art, what it does, he says, it lets us, and there's a quote, see, perceive, but not know something which alludes to reality. And that's an end quote. And so science produces knowledge, and obviously that knowledge is ever changing, right?

And aesthetics or aesthetic education produces the experience of knowledge in the making or an immersion in thoughts, right? And thought is never true or correct or right or wrong. it's only ever possible. And so that's, you know, one of the reasons why it kind of made sense for me to turn to his work in this argument. And I give a couple of examples, but one is in an essay that's in his 1965 book for Marx, in which he's analyzing Brecht and also this play, El Nost Milan, and not only the play, but his specific experience of the play, right?

Because one of the assumptions that I lay out at the beginning is that, and this is based again on Rock Hill and Poncello Leon's work, is that there's no such thing as art, right? There's no, you know, Gabriel Rock Hill's 2014 book, like something about the politics of art or art and politics is like, look, you can't, you know, most approaches the relationships of politics and art, they start out by assuming there's something called politics and there's something called politics and there's something called art. But there's no such thing. Those are concepts or ways we make sense of society that are result of various social struggles, you know, like the struggle for something to call, to be called art, right? And then to have a political effect, as if the political effect is like inherent in the art object and not the result of struggles over its production, consumption, and distribution, right? And so this is the reason why I emphasize that Al Thusser is reflecting on his experience of the play. right and not the play in general and so in the play there's three acts and he writes that each act has two different senses of time in it right so the first sense of time is like what the empty

or a historical time of capital you know that the time that that we're in where we think that like you know the future isn't going to be anything but like a different form of the present right like maybe we'll have different you know we'll have different technologies and this will replace that but you know it'll be capitalism it'll be the same and so like in the play there's like a bunch of characters that are just kind of like standing around waiting for something to happen right and then all of a sudden this other time comes crashing in and in the act it's when we see a young girl uh who's watching a clown and uh like the town pimp right is eyeing the girl right and so all of a sudden in that moment there's like the possibility

of something in this case i mean you know i would i would think like terrible that they could potentially happen right but for him what's interesting is the juxtaposing these two senses of time right the historical time of capital and the historical time of revolution and by juxtaposing these two times we can feel the possibility of history right does that make sense yeah yeah yeah okay yeah that's really interesting and it's a really fascinating use of Althusair just before we move on is that a personal curiosity. I'm actually

working on an episode on Althusair to kind of wade through some of like you're talking about you know these misconceptions and misreadings and misunderstandings of him and so I'm kind of working on a project to kind of assess that and work through it but if you had to just like kind of say there's

one major misunderstanding of Althusair or a particular misunderstanding that you find you know particularly noxious what would you say that is? Yeah, well, oh, geez, that's a tough question. That is a tough one. Let me, let me focus on the main educational one, right? So Jacques Roncier's first book, Jacques Roncier was a student of Althusser. You know, he co-authored Reading Capital with him, amongst other students of Althusser. And his first book was, you know, called Roncier's lesson. And it was,

it was a critique of Ronsier's pedagogy. And basically, you know, the idea here is that, like, Elth is there was the master who had the knowledge that the students needed. And so, you know, his whole thing is it like, you know, it's based on an inequality between intelligences and it presumes, you know, an inequality from the very beginning. And because of that, it can only ever reproduce inequality. And so, but what's interesting, and this is based on, or comes from a book that Tyson Lewis wrote about Roncier, is that it's actually very different than how, Roncier describes Althusser's actual teaching, because they actually, like, evidence that Althusair

really doesn't say a lot, right? There's a lot of silence, and students are actually left to sort of construct things with themselves and with Althusair. And one of the ways that Ransier figures Althusair's pedagogy is as, like, the dotted lines in an elementary school textbook, right? so you know if you can think back to elementary school if you went there or you know like an introductory text or a workbook right you know or like learning language right you know say you're learning Korean well you know there's going to be a sentence in Korean and there's going to be like a dot dot dot where you're supposed to fill in the blank right and so they're like that's his model of healthy Sarah's pedagogy right because Althusair knows what's in the blank and you know the

student has to prove that they know the master of the teacher. But Lewis is actually like, well, the dotted lines of the textbook are more like the falling rain that Althusser begins his essay on the philosophy of the encounter in which, you know, he says like, you know, basically like before the world happened, there were just all these atoms falling in parallel. And then there was like, the tiniest swerve where one atom crashed into another and it eventually like, you know, kept on piling up until there was a world. And so, you know, Althus, and this relates to Althus there's overall project, which is really to reclaim the contingency and complexity of Marxism against the reductionism of Marxism that was taking place, for example, like, you know, through,

you know, Stalin's book on historical and dialectical materialism, where it became a set of, you know, prescriptive, you know, like unalterable things, right? Right. And so, um, so Althusair's theory of the encounter is that basically like, you know, there's no, we can look back historically and we kind of, room can kind of say like, okay, this happened and that happened and that happened. But beforehand, there's no way of knowing it's going to happen. There's no way of knowing that the encounter will take place, that it will take hold or what it results in. And so Al Thusser's philosophy is a Marxist philosophy,

and that is explicitly and always, you know, organized, you know, through the party, right, and the revolutionary communist organization, the collective knowledge of the class struggle. It's oriented towards the working and oppressed people taking power and, you know, defeating their class enemies, creating a communist world. But in order to do that, there's not a set of prescriptive laws or procedures to follow. And instead, what we have to be open to is the like heterogeneous, diverse, you know, contradictory complexities of the world around us. It's not as if there's one antagonism or contradiction between, you know, it's not just like between capitalism and humanity or between, you know, the modes of production and the relations of production, right?

there's actually like a million contradictions that come into combination at particular moments in history that produced revolutionary opportunities which is precisely why as Lenin said you know we can't predict in or you know when and we can't make the revolution come yeah yeah incredibly interesting and so that's kind of Althus there's pushing back on the rigid dogmatic hyperdeterminist forms of articulation of the Marxist tradition where oftentimes he is seen Al Thusair is often seen as this determinist in a lot of ways, right? But actually he's kind of highlighting the contingency and open-ended nature of the tradition.

Is that right? Oh, yeah, precisely, yeah. And he's rereading Marx. His whole thing is like, look at, Marx teaches us that what appears as simple is only the result of a long and complex and, you know, process that isn't teleological. It's not like it was bound to happen, right? it's only afterwards that we can sort of like trade some kind of causal connections between things but there aren't always causal connections between things absolutely yeah i absolutely i love that and i resonate a lot with with that um interpretation of of the marxist tradition absolutely so yeah

i'm excited for that episode and maybe i'll have to have you back on to to talk more althus air in the future because i really appreciate your uh your sort of knowledge of him and your breakdown of him and his thoughts so i i really love that but yeah i love it too And I'm definitely looking forward to that episode. Cool. All right. Well, I have a few more questions for it. I know we're over an hour.

I want to be respectful of your time. But there's one more concept before we get into the sort of conclusion part of this conversation that I want to explore. And that is the concept that you explore in chapter five called rhythm analysis or rhythm analysis, one word, which you do to fascinating effect. So can you kind of discuss this concept, how it helps us make sense of capital's domination and the role that uncertainty and unpredictability play in all of this? Sure, yeah. So, Henri Lefebvre, and it's interesting, right, because this is the chapter that comes after a few chapters on Althusser, and usually Althusair and Lefeb are pitted against each other because Lefebvre was like not a communist party member or he was before a very brief time. He was like a humanist, Marxist, and blah, blah, blah, but I make the move and I justify it. And he's mostly known for his work on space, right? The production of space is his most well-known work. in the English-speaking world that came out in 1991. And I read, but obviously, you know, and his analysis is really, really great about how space and the production of space is so important to capitalism and so important to the revolutionary struggle. But obviously, you can't analyze space without analyzing time, right?

And so this is why he actually ends the production of space with this notion of rhythm analysis, and then he develops it further in a book that was posthumously published as rhythm analysis. And so all rhythms, right, involve repetition, right? Like, you know, or else there's no rhythm there. There has to be some kind of repetition. And so he distinguishes between linear and cyclical repetitions, which I think, you know, linear repetitions are like the repetitions of learning. They're about exchange value and cyclical repetitions are the rhythms of use value. And it's the sort of, you know, the pulse of on. learning, right? So linear repetitions or linear rhythms, they're like developmental, they're repetitive, following predictable patterns, right? I get up at this time. It's like the time of watches and clocks, right? Which, you know, was a time that is a sense of time that, again, was historically produced and actually, like, violently enforced on so many populations. And then cyclical repetitions are those that are open to and they're actually defined by, like, interruptions and they can go in undetermined directions right so cyclical repetitions are like you know

places where like difference can be uh you know entered into in order to change the rhythm right and so at the time of writing lefeb's project i mean he wasn't against linear repetitions he was against the way that they dominate over cyclical repetitions right the way that abstract time dominates over concrete or lived time. And so he wanted to reclaim them. But I argue that in our current conjuncture, right, which includes like post-Fortism, for example, that actually capital finds profitability

precisely in the openness of cyclical repetitions, right? In that, you know, capitalism today, like in general, in the, like what we might call the advanced capitalist countries, which means the countries in which capitalism is, like, most dominant relative to other countries. It actually, like, you know, capitalists don't always want standardization and, like, routine, right? They want innovation. They want creativity, right? Like, everybody, you know, like, nobody argues for an educate, like, very few people argue for, like, a totally standardized scripted education, right?

Like, we want to teach students to be creative and flexible and open. And because we know that the, the, we can't prepare them for. specific jobs because the jobs in 10, 20 years might be totally different than the ones that they are now. And whenever we produce something new, right, capital profits from that. So capital actually like loves innovation, it loves creativity. Those aren't inherently revolutionary things. And so at the end of his book, he briefly introduces this basically like a notion of a polyrhythmic society where you know there's different kinds of rhythms that coexist and then he says that um there is something called arrhythmia right which is like when a rhythm breaks apart basically

you know a repetition whether it's cyclical or linear breaks apart and he says it's thickness and we have to create preventative cures right to create a polyrhythmic society but i'm saying well if capitalism today in particular countries and i'm writing really in the the U.S. and for the U.S. in this book, it's important to know. If capitalism today, like, you know, likes polyrhythms, right? It wants even more diverse polyrhythms because it can then profit from them and coordinate them in new ways and it can, you know, compel them to produce new technologies to coordinate those polyp rhythms, then arrhythmia, unlike Lefebvre thought, isn't a sickness

but actually a potentially like revolutionary opening or rupture within the world as it is that can again help demonstrate and help us experience that the world could be otherwise. And I should say here, my colleague Jason Wozniak is the one who really started doing this work on arrhythmia. And so the pedagogical rhythms of unlearning, right, are defined by interact. and new beginnings. But the task, the pedagogical task for resistance, right, is to

like sort of suspend our normal functioning, right, our sensual and cognitive functioning, which reproduces capital's world of common sense. And so this can happen through a lyric disruptions, right, or moments of suspension that hold open the gap

of possibility, right? Because so much of capitalist like pedagogy of learning again is about you know orienting our perceptual capacity so as an example I give something from a

book that's called the ugly laws right or unsightly beggar laws in U.S. cities which were like in R these ordinances that criminalize the very presence of certain bodies disabled bodies or bodies non-white bodies in particular places right

and one striking example is is the epileptic, right? Like, because epilepsy, right, it's like a, you know, it stops routines. It's like an arrhythmic interruption in capitals functioning, which is, again, why, you know, disabled people are segregated in, in our society. And so, but of course, you know, so I think that the educational encounter that opens up unforeseen and new experiences of alternative potentials within the present can be generated, right, and can generate these moments.

of suspension in which it's not as if we, you know, are totally beyond capital and totally like, you know, in some socialist mindset or sensual organization, but we're between the two because capital's perceptual ecology is suspended in time. Wow. Doesn't that make sense because I know that, I mean, it's very hard to write this chapter because Lefeb is like a really, he's not a good writer in the sense that I think that he actually didn't write. He just dictated his thoughts.

to, I think, you know, whoever he was dating at the time, whatever woman he was dating at the time. So he often, like, you know, will be like, oh, this is such a central concept, but then he'll never come back to it again. And then there's, you know, a lot of the jargon and stuff like that. So hopefully that was like understandable. Yeah. Let me try to toss it back and summarize and see if I, if I understood it. So there's the basic breakdown between, you know, polyrhythmia an arrhythmia in your analysis is the difference between breakdown and innovation. Polyrhythmia or the multitudinous instantiations of various different forms of rhythms isn't necessarily anathetical to any foundational aspect of capitalism because of the innovative and

creative aspects of that can be easily absorbed and even used to the benefit of profiteering within capital. But it's this arrhythmia can represent this actual ruptial break from the normalcies of the capitalist rhythms of life, if you will. And, you know, you could think of it in terms of, as you said, too, it's not this necessarily self-consciously socialist thing. It could be various things. We could see maybe, if I'm correct in understanding you, the COVID lockdowns and then the eruption of Black Lives Matter as the sort of breaking down of the rhythms of daily capitalist life brought about by the pandemic itself, you know, know, shutting down to a large extent, the global economy and then this ruptural opening for, you know,

the largest protests in American history against racial injustice. Is that example in my recapitulation of your idea on point? Am I understanding it? Yeah. I mean, I kind of want to, I kind of want to quote you now in the book, so I feel like it's a better explanation than I gave. But yeah, I mean, just to, you know, speak on those examples, which I think are really good, you know, but I mean, for me the one main thing in the U.S. and especially as an educator is that the pandemic was like a potential arrhythmia obviously distorted things but really what was so striking to me is how everything like you know classes continued dissertations got defended people graduated you know like all these it was basically an attempt to overcome arrhythmia which I think therefore like you know

provides more evidence to my claim that capital hates arrhythmia right and I I think the Black Lives, the summer 2020 rebellions against the war on black America are another great example of that. And really, what are revolutions, but total, like, interruptions in the overall spatial and, like, rhythmic organization of society, you know, they suspend rhythms of capital. They also allow suppressed ones to come into being without being absorbed by capital and so on and so forth. Yeah. Really interesting point about capitalism's rejection of arrhythmia. because not only do you see it, you know, in the get back to work and get back to school mentality of a lot of the business leaders and, you know, the representatives of the capitalist class, but we also saw it after 9-11, right? 9-11 is this intrusion of the real in Lacanian terms or, you know, this ruptural arithmic moment where all of our not only daily patterns of life, but, you know, really the conceptual and ideological apparatus of the average American mind was disrupted.

in a very profound way. And you remember the response by the capitalist class through the mouth of George Bush is get back out there and keep shopping. You know, like this breakdown in the rhythm of capitalist, you know, daily life has been, has happened. And what we need to do now is to immediately get back to those rhythms, immediately put those rhythms back into to daily practice. And that was both the response to 9-11 and in a lot of ways the response to the pandemic, which is interesting. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think, you know, this is another way that I can understand the formation. of the Answer Coalition that I'm involved with. You know, it was founded days after September 11th because, you know, like a lot of activist groups, even communist groups, like they canceled their protests that they had planned.

They put up American flags, you know, on their websites, outside their offices. And then, you know, a core group of like, you know, 10 or 11 organizations formed and we're like, no, we're going to like, we're going to keep this arrhythmia going, right? To inaugurate a protest movement that eventually became, you know, historic and multiple senses. And the fact that, one, it was the first mass movement against a war that started before the war started.

And two, it was the first time that Palestine was actually forefronted in the anti-war movement, which didn't even actually really take place during the Vietnam War. Nice, yeah. Anti-Vietnam War movement. It's true. And just as a side note, I really think the Palestinian liberation struggle was advanced in the minds of a lot of Americans through the Black Lives Matter uprising. and the ability for, you know, revolutionaries of various sorts to connect these two struggles. I feel like there was, I just saw a lot of movement towards the Palestinian direction in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement

and the work that revolutionaries have done to try to connect these two struggles. Exactly what you're dealing with, you know, Black Lives Matter is in a lot of ways the sort of structures that, you know, Palestinians are dealing with white supremacy, settler colonialism, the imposition of, you know, the settler colonial state upon these, you know, oppressed nationalities within their borders or just outside those borders or whatever it may be. So that's neither here nor there, but I just, I do find some optimism in even though Black Lives Matter as a movement was in many ways sort of dissipated and co-opted, there were some things that it generated that are very beneficial. and I would argue we'll pay dividends in the years to come as, you know, struggles continue to to emerge and reemerge in the face of compounding crises. Oh, yeah. I mean, and obviously I would love to say a lot more than that.

But, yeah, I mean, just to add on, I think that, yeah, it's just, I mean, really it was the latest iteration, right, in the centuries-long struggle for black liberation. So in that sense, absolutely, it'll, the next iteration will build off of all the, you know, gains, the political clarity. Yes. came about through not only the movement, but also like the divisions that came within the movement between like the movement for Black Lives and the Black Lives Matter movement, for example. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Well, let's go ahead and move in towards the end

of this conversation. It's been really fascinating. I really enjoy this stuff and I find your ability to break down this rather complex intellectual stuff into accessible and understandable terms to be really admirable. But, you know, kind of going towards the end here, can you kind of summarize and I hate doing this but you know when you're trying to break a text down into 10 questions you kind of have to ask big ones can you summarize the sort of conclusion of this text and then let us know what you really hope people take away from this text yes first thank you for that because that's one of the things that I strive to do is make these you know complex things a bit more accessible at least and yeah I mean I'll talk about the the conclusion because

you know my argument isn't isn't that we should never learn anything or never understand anything, you know, and only be on learning. Obviously, that would, you know, whatever. That's not, that's not the argument, right? It's about, like, in our current conjuncture, right? Unlearning is a crucial pedagogical, uh, uh, aspect of revolutionary political project. And in the conclusion of the book, like the actual conclusion kind of brings them together, right, learning and unlearning through what I call perceptual mapping, which is built on, uh, you know, Frederick Jameson's notion of cognitive mapping, which is basically that it's an effort to map the totality of capital, right, which is necessarily impossible because you can't know the

totality of capital. It's always shifting, right? But when you create a map of the totality of capital and your place within it, you both like learn content about, you know, about capital and about your relationship to it and all of its very structures of, you know, white supremacy and colonialism and imperialism, but you also create new unknowns, right? Because, you know, you can never, you can kind of sense the totality, but you can't know it. And so I then pick up on one of, Fred Moten in his book in The Break, which I just read this summer and finally kind of understood.

And because I just read Jameson, I picked up on this part where he critiques Jameson. And, well, he critiques him in a very generous way. But one of Jameson's examples of the need for cognitive mapping, which this is in the 1980s, by the way, right? So it's a little bit old, but whatever. One of his examples is of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, right? The Black Commerce Organization in Detroit that within like just a matter of years, made tremendous gains, like through wildcat strikes and workplaces, taking over workplaces, creating new media, dividing the corporate own press, even intervening in local elections.

And so Jameson is like, you know, he's not, he's acknowledging and, you know, really commending the league for the success. But he says, as their success, you know, grew, obviously, like, they were driven to other struggles across the country and the world. People wanted to invite them, right? And so he says that this is kind of when their project failed because they didn't

have a way to, they were focusing on the city, right, not the totality of capital. So they didn't have a way to understand that, right? And Fred Moten is like, but Fred Moten points out that Jameson actually only, I mean, he mentions of this film, but he really

actually bases it on a book that was written about the league, right? And so actually his critique of the league is not based on the league's representation of itself, but on historians' representations of it. And so Fred Moten turned to the film, finally got the news, which was directed by Stuart Byrd,

Renee Lickman, and Peter Gessner, in collaboration with the league. And he listens to it, right? So he takes Jameson's critique is an opportunity, right, to sort of further it. And he points out a really important moment in the film when what he calls the lectural voice, like the lecturing voice of Kenneth Cockrell, one of the league's leaders, right, is placed over images of factory workers.

And so Cockrell's voice is acousmatic, and the acusmatic is a sound that you hear, but you don't know what source it's coming from, right? Think about like the voiceover narrative in like a time. TV show, right? Like, whatever, okay, you got it, good. And he says that, like, I mean, one, I think it's important that Moten describes the voice as a lecture, because usually we think about the lecture as this like hierarchical form of education or whatever, which is not true.

And it's basically demonstrates that we have to listen, right, to the film and the representation because they actually show that all representations of the totality of capital are partial, right? And so they were both like mapping the totality, but because the acousmatic voice is disconnected from any particular location, right, which is precisely why the sonic elements of the form, right, change our senses. We have to, this goes back to Marx and Engels critique before it, right? And actually, one thing I didn't mention is that in 1844 in the manuscripts, Marx was very clear that each organ has a specific sensory role to play, right?

So sounds are for the ear, whatever, and that's another thing that changes. And so I developed basically, I don't know, the conclusion is that there's a politics of unlearning through perceptual mapping. Jamison's was cognitive mapping, right? So I'm interested in perceptions, which include knowledge. So basically, like, as we chart out, you know, in diagram, the impossible totality, we learn about the contradictions, you know, we learn about and we kind of experience the perceptual ecology of capital, how it produces misfits and fits between ourselves

and the world. But through that very process, we unlearn that order. We unlearn the maps that we have in our heads, right? Like when we experience our inability to know the world, we open ourselves up to the, you know, the possibility of revolutionary alternatives, right? And so I would say that that's really kind of like the summary conclusion, right? It poses problems and solutions, produces knowledge and thought, entails learning and learning, right? And it's about wonder, which is something I'm interested in, but, you know, wonder on a own isn't like i mean it's a good educational it's a good you know i think it's a good important

pedagogical uh principle but it's not political unless it's unless it's sort of tied to something right so it's not just wondering for the sake of wondering but wondering for the sake of teaching the actuality of revolution beautiful absolutely yeah and then you ask what the main thing i want people to take away from it right sure yeah yeah that's a great summary of the conclusion and then you let us know what you're like one thing people sit down and read it what you hope like the core lesson that they take away from the text is yeah well i hope to convince people of the need to rehabilitate rejuvenate and spread our belief in the actuality of revolution and i hope to succeed in making the argument that this entails understanding capitalism

as a, you know, a particular ordering of our senses in the sensual world, how that relates to education, and how the pedagogical theories and concepts and practices and examples I give might help us, you know, experience alternatives within the present

in our project towards accomplishing the revolution. My real goal, though, like my real hope, I should say, is that others take up the work done in this book and implement it and use it to, you know, reflect on and revise and develop new educational modes, whether they be teachers or organizers, which I'm specifically concerned with. And, you know, really that we as a collective revolutionary movement develop a common set of vocabularies and concepts that we can use to do so because we know that education is a crucial part of the revolutionary struggle.

And so when we share those common, you know, understandings and concepts and goals, that'll help us advance our project even more. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well said. I loved it. I loved listening to you, describe it and talk about it. This is a whole world that I haven't really dedicated a lot of thought and time to. So it was absolutely fascinating to get into the minutia of like perception and aesthetics and

education through a Marxist lens. This is a topic that you do absolutely. wonderful at. So I'm deeply appreciative every time you come on and can educate me and my guests about this stuff. I find it genuinely, deeply, profoundly interesting. But before I let you go, can you just let listeners know where they can find you, your work, and this book when it comes out online? Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm on Twitter at Derek R-4, D-E-R-F-O-R-D. And then I have a website, which basically just goes to my, like, school website, Derek R-Ford.com. You can find my work on Library Genesis, academia.edu for free.

And this book will be coming out through ISCRA and Iskra press later this year and it will be released as a cheap paperback like 10 or 12 bucks and it'll also be available for free as a PDF online on their website. Beautiful. Well, I look forward to that and maybe when the book actually comes out, we could like re-upload this episode on the day with the link for the book so people can get it when it comes out. But in the meantime, this should build anticipation and, you know, start people thinking in this interesting direction that I don't think necessarily a lot of Marxists

always, you know, pay enough attention to. So thank you so much for coming on. And let's absolutely keep in touch. You're welcome back on Rev. Left anytime. Thank you so much. Yeah, I really enjoyed this conversation and actually learned a lot about the things that I wrote from you. So I appreciate you teaching me that. As long as time keeps ticking As long as people have to cry When I see loved ones leaving Singing last goodbyes

I believe these blues are never going to die. When I say bad things happen to good folks every day, children going hungry. With nothing on their place I believe these blues Won't ever go away People try to end their troubles By drinking whiskey down

But I believe these blues We'll always be around Oh, oh. I can't tell the future But I can play my song I can tell the future What I show enough can play my song And I believe these blues will go on and on and on.

You know, and I'm going to be able to be. Thank you. I'm going to be able to be.