Towards a Dialectics of Aesthetics w/ Gabriel Rockhill

M2 May Gant: Welcome to Within Our Gates, a podcast where we look at cinema and the arts through the framework of dialectical materialism. I'm your host, M2 May Gant. Peace, comrades. Welcome to Within Our Gates. I'm your host, M2 May Gant. This week I have with me Gabriel Rockhill. Many of you might know his work with the Critical Theory Workshop, also his book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? That's been making the rounds out there. Gabriel comes to the show this week to discuss aesthetics, Marxism, dialectical materialism. Subjects that are very, very popular on within our gates. And we try to find, you know, a synthesis and make the discussion about how these things actually are all connected and looking at them as a totality, not as these like separate pieces of, That, you know, the vulgar ways of our current discourse tries to make them. It's a really robust conversation. The first of many that I plan to have on these types of subjects, even episodes that are coming after this, it's kind of really going to become the big theme for Within Our Gates this year, really chiseling in. So if you're enjoying this stuff, make sure you like, share, subscribe for people. Give a five star rating if you're on your podcast, whether it's Spotify or Apple, whatever you get this on. It really helps boost it for other people to see, you know, and for everyone who has already done that type of stuff. Really, I truly appreciate it. The last year this project has grown and has really been quite something, and I'm really excited. If you also want more from me and the work that I'm doing, you could also check out my Patreon, which has tons of other stuff in terms of study groups that I do, different projects that I preview when I highlight, different video-type essays that I do periodically. There's a lot going on there. It also just helps support the show. I don't have... any sponsors and stuff like that. It's really all listener funded. And for the listeners who have been funding it for these couple of years that I've been doing this, I truly appreciate it. It's been truly an honor and You know, for someone who doesn't have a big machine behind me, the fact that people will give what they have to help this project keep going is truly an honor. And I'm just really, really excited. Also, if you haven't been in checking the Imperial 80s, my series on millennials and killing capitalism, we're still going. We pretty much go every Monday that we can with some times off here. Subscribe over there. I have a link in the show description towards that. So you can check that out as well. But generally, I'm going to take a pause for the cause here and I'm going to let my conversation with Gabriel Rockhill go. One. Peace, everyone. I'm very, very happy and excited to have with me Gabriel Rockhill. gabriel is someone that i have been following his work for a few years now actually and um i'll talk about how i discovered it in a second because i think it actually directly goes into the topics that we want to speak about here um but first gabriel could you introduce yourself to the audience you know what do you think is most pertinent or relevant for them to know about you and then i'm sure other things will definitely come out in the conversation

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, I'm a philosopher who really focuses on the question of culture broadly construed. So obviously kind of art and cinema, but then also I consider the theory world to be part of the broader cultural world. And I understand culture as a really important site of class struggle. And so I would say that a lot of work over, definitely over the last five years, but arguably longer than that, has been focused on culture as a major site of class struggle and mapping out the terrain so that we can intervene more forcefully in order to advance an agenda that's much more progressive, let's just put it that way, than what's commonly on offer. That's it in a nutshell, I guess.

M2 May Gant: So I discovered your work really through two fronts. The first... and I will admit I paid attention more to the piece than I paid attention to you because I really liked the piece, was your piece on Zizek that you wrote a few years ago. Because I had, by I think the last decade, had grown a very, very kind of antagonistic response to the work of Zizek, who was, like you said in the piece, someone that I looked to when I was younger in my kind of theoretical journey. And I'll talk about this a little bit. And I also think I was pushed towards Zizek within the arts community as a kind of figure that for my intellectual development, if I wanted to be a politically charged or politically minded artist, that Zizek could be someone that could help flower my thoughts. And I followed him for a while and I found him fun. Those pervert guide films I found very provocative. But then I will say... after a certain point, and I don't have to really get into this too much because your piece does, and I'll link it in here very, very well. I became very disenchanted with his work. So when I saw your piece, I said, oh my God, Gabriel, this guy is knocking it out the park. He's saying everything I want. I would just send it to my friends and say, hey. This is what I've been saying about Zizek. I appreciate, you know, read it and respond. And, you know, of course, I get the variations of responses to yes. And of course, people who are very much a part of that Western Marxist tradition who want to hold on to those. But the other was through reading the work of Domenico Lucerto, who I discovered through his liberalism book some years ago, a book that has been very formative for me. And then around the time I was picking up again for some references in a piece that I was writing, the Western Marxism book was released. And, you know, I saw you do various talks around it, and I was just really, you know, Lucerto has been a huge eye-opener for me. And... seeing you develop these, these, these, these concepts, you know, that were kind of akin or in that kind of wheelhouse of like the Lacerda was really exciting. So I've been following your work and it's been really exciting. And then we had the pleasure of meeting at the spine conference. This, this, this recent recently, it was September, October, my goodness, time, time just flies with me. And, but one of the things that I've been really interested in is your idea of the global, theory industry. This is like a phrase that I think has been really important for my own thinking and kind of digging. So I'm going to throw a question out here, because I know your work, you said, covers many grounds, but it's always rooted in Marxist analysis. Can you give me a description kind of further of that area of focus, but also the global theory industry, anti-communism and knowledge production in the imperial core, and whatever else you think would be relevant in this conversation attached to that?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, I guess I would say, and this also picks up a little bit on the very brief self-introduction that I gave, that when I say I'm interested in culture as a site of class warfare, I understand culture as the principal form that composes us as ideological subjects. It teaches us how to think, how to perceive, how to speak, how to name things, how to feel about things, what to desire, what to find repulsive. Ideology really does fashion our entire sensorium, our entire interface. at a very profound level. And so it gives us the very nature of our experience, if you will. But culture doesn't fall out of the sky, and it certainly doesn't just arise naturally out of human interaction, although it has arguably in the past. We live in highly developed societies where culture has been harnessed by those who own the means of cultural production and it's become extremely centralized and controlled in a monopolistic fashion so that the culture that most people are trained into at again every level of their existence isn't something usually that they fully own themselves It's something that, at least within capitalist societies, is owned by those who own everything. The ruling class that is a very, very small portion of global humanity. And within that kind of what I would refer to as the cultural apparatus, right? In Marxist analysis, there is a relationship between the socioeconomic base, right? The mode of production, capitalism being the dominant one currently. and the superstructure, which is a metaphor, right? It can't be understood in like crudely architectural terms, like there's a base and then there's something that sits on top of it. But it's clear that culture grows out of the socioeconomic relations that are operative under capitalism. And the cultural apparatus is one major part of that superstructure. And the cultural apparatus is basically comprised of the entire material system of cultural production. We're talking about universities, publishing houses, production studios, both for sound and for cinema, everything else that goes into cultural production. But I'm also talking about sports culture, broader culture, food culture. We really have to have a very expansive understanding what culture is. But it's also the material system of distribution, how that culture gets out there. and the system of consumption. It's all three of those aspects. And so a lot of my work has focused on the way in which culture under capitalism has been formatted, controlled in various ways by a cultural apparatus that's in the hands of the ruling class, And a very good example of this is what I used to refer to as the global theory industry. But as we're lifelong learners and constantly, hopefully improving on our apprehension of the world, I now greatly prefer the much more precise term of the imperial theory industry. It's not just global. It's not just all over the place. It comes from a place, and that is the imperial core and the capitalist countries themselves. that have overdeveloped themselves by underdeveloping the rest of the world. And that imperial theory industry is an aspect, really, of this broader cultural apparatus. So my analysis of intellectual life, and for that matter, the example of Zizek that you just highlighted, doesn't begin like bourgeois cultural analysis does or like western marxist at least some western marxist cultural analysis does and that is by focusing on isolated individuals and their privileged usually isolated products of production i'm interested in the system that produces the subjects that then produce the products because then we can upstream understand how that system tends to reproduce very similar subjects who create very similar products. And once you have this more materialist mode of analysis, you engage in a kind of political economy of cultural production. And you raise questions like, well, who's funding what and why? And why is certain type of intellectual or cultural work promoted and other forms not? And the imperial theory industry indexes very specifically that. The type of theory that is promoted under global imperialism driven by the United States is the leading imperialist power. And I focus more specifically on the kind of left fringe of that. Because if you look at the whole imperial theory industry, we're talking about the dominant products being Samuel Huntington and Fukuyama and Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley. It's like liberal to reactionary, basically. But I've been quite critical of the left fringe of the imperial theory industry because of the role that they play in shoring up what the Central Intelligence Agency calls the compatible left, right? So they have articulated discourses that sound leftist, that certainly use all of the radical symbology that goes along with revolutionary politics. But actually, as soon as you dig in and you look closely at them, like I have in the case of Zizek, you realize that these people are really quite systematically anti-communist and they tend to be capitalist accommodationist. And many of them even either accept imperialism implicitly or they vociferously support it. And so all of this, sorry, it's a bit of a long response, just kind of coming full circle. All of this, I think, brings to the fore that the imperial forces driving the dominant culture in the world that we live in tend to promote a type of culture that is not in the best interest of the overwhelming majority of humanity and the planet, precisely because it is in their interest. And it's this kind of resolute, you know, capitalist accommodationist and often pro-imperialist and certainly anti-communist form of culture that needs to be called out for what it is so that we can then have a much clearer map of class struggle so we know what we're fighting. Now we have to fight it and what power we can mobilize against it because the last thing that I'll say is ultimately the project that I'm invested in is a very positive one. It's not just saying that there's lots of problems with the imperial theory industry or the imperial culture industry more generally. The way to formulate a real critique dialectically is to know what the positive project is. And the positive project is developing democratic people's power around the world and defeating the imperialism that is destroying life on planet Earth at an absolutely rapacious pace.

M2 May Gant: So when I started reading your work and listening to your work, What I was really appreciative because you were giving credence to conversations that various people have had. You know, I think of my colleague Jared Ball over in Black Liberation Media. You know, he's had many critiques about this. preferred black left that is used within black studies. And he's not the only one. And often he's been criticized and other people like him have been criticized. You're being hyperbolic. This is just you wanting to... advance your own career. I'm sure you've heard it, you know what I'm saying? And so forth and so on. And your work is now adding another angle to what has been systematic critique, a systemic critique of this. And it's so robust and so important. And I... think it's it's truly important that we understand that all of this stuff is socially produced because as an artist that's one of the things that you know i i i've been dealing with for a long time as an artist i you know you may not know i i came up in theater school yeah as an actor i have a yeah as an actor i have a bfa in acting and i studied all the classics you know um the the Chekhovs, the Shakespeare's, but also the, the sixties turns, you know, and of course definitely things like group theater, Strasburg and all those. And, you know, I don't want to really litigate the, the greatness and not greatness of all, of all those things. But one of the things that kind of came out of it, was this idea that, you know, you need to find a way to become an exceptional individual, right, through the art. And the greatest artists were these kind of like exceptional individuals who maybe they came out of a group, but... the group didn't really have any bearing on their greatness, right? Or if anything, they took a little thing and it made them better. Or maybe they could connect it to like, you know, when they talk about Al Pacino, his connection to Strasburg, but it's still connected about like two individuals, right? So, you know, Because when you dig into this kind of political economy of the entire thing, I have seen this promotion of this elevated cultural thinker as the kind of height. Like liberal ideology, cultural thinker, you are like the height. And how I'm using liberal for people who are listening is exceptional individualism, these idealist tropes such as you know all thoughts came from myself i didn't get it from anyone else there's no acknowledgement that knowledge you know and culture is created socially that's what i really began to kind of you know realize and that's socially produced but then as i became more of a marxist right and i got more into into my marxism i realized how anti-communism anti-communist it all was right and you know communists because we're both cold war kids right like Unfortunately. Unfortunately. And I know you probably relate to this denial of self if you're a communism. Communism means you can't have a self. You become a group thing, right? Marxism is this deformed science that denies cultural development. So kind of like wrapping up, I'm curious your response to my critique. And I can say... I'm curious how your work helps deepen this critique that I have here. The work that you're doing, the work that you're studying about the preferred left, the preferred kind of thinking or the preferred kind of individual. How does this help deepen the critique that I am kind of like throwing here about the artist and the knowledge and the cultural elevated thinker?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, these are really great points. And Jared Ball's work like Adolph Reed Jr., Cedric Johnson, there's a number of other figures who I think are doing really significant work on these and related issues. And so I share a lot of your concerns. I would say that it's very important to understand the history of bourgeois ideology. And one of the things that the bourgeois ideology of culture has done is it has severed the producer qua genius from the social totality and the system of production, right? This is precisely what you're talking about. The elevated genius who often will tap into some type of transcendent set of ideas or experiences that nobody else has had, could have. They find new modalities of production it can be many different things, right? It can be expression, it can be feeling, it can be desire, and that in doing so, they bring to the masses something that the masses couldn't otherwise have access to. So we also have to recognize in this particular structure, the way in which bourgeois ideology is, it developed historically over the last five centuries, but it really took on a lot of power over the last 250 years or so. It was grafted onto the dominant ideology under feudalism, which was religion, right? There's a very religious motif here, right? The genius and the messiah aren't too distant. Let's just put it that way to keep it simple. But it's also really important that under the bourgeois ideology of culture, it's not just the producer that's individualized, it's also the product, right? So they make something that nobody else could possibly make with their genius intervention into reality. And that is also often severed from the social relations of production, from political economy and all these crass things, as well as the consumer, who's simply supposed to then worship the producer and their product. And all of this operates, of course, within the bourgeois hierarchy. law of intellectual property, right? And it's monetized according to this, and there are market mechanisms that drive all of it. And there's excellent historical work on, you know, all of these concepts that I just mentioned, like the genius for the producer, the masterpiece, right, for the product. These are of recent invention. There's great scholarship that demonstrates that the constitution of the genius qua artist has been retrospectively projected back onto artistic and cultural history. So Michelangelo wasn't considered that. He was doing a collective practice in which it was produced by multiple people and there wasn't the elevation of the genius qua owner of the product that then is also isolated in the same way. And a lot of this overall system is based on what I have referred to in some of my scholarship as cultural commodity fetishism. So it might sound like a bit of a complicated concept, but it's actually very simple. Marx explained in the first volume of Capital how commodity fetishism operates. It's that the commodity as a product has this enchanting power that invisibilizes all the blood, sweat, tears, extractivism that went into producing it. So you see the iPhone or the new computer or a car and you want to buy it and you don't think about all the child labor and the mining sites in Africa or elsewhere that actually produced it. And so what commodity fetishism does is it severs the product from the social relations of production. And that's precisely what cultural commodity fetishism does, is it tries to sever the individual producer and their product from the whole material system that's driving the, well, first that produced the producer, right? But then also is the system within which the product takes on a life and then is circulated more broadly. Against that, and just to touch on the kind of final aspect of your question, of course I've been exposed to this idea that Marxists in general don't care about the individual, they haven't given us any account of subjective experience, we need to therefore supplement Marxism with psychoanalysis or with phenomenology or all of these other discourses because Marxists don't take the individual seriously. This is just fundamentally wrong at so many levels, you know, just beginning with Marx's own writings. I mean, Marx said that the communists by no means want to do away with the private individual for the sake of the general selfless man. This is Marx's writing, right? There's a quote. That is a statement of the imagination. Communist theoreticians, the only communists to have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely by the fact that they alone have discovered that throughout history, the general interest is created by individuals. who are defined as private persons. And one of the goals of Marxism, because this is a theme you find throughout, you find it in Ilyenkov, you find it in Lukács, all of the really solid Marxists in this tradition say very, very similar things. They're critical, like you are, of the liberal conception of the individual. But they recognize that the goal of Marxism or socialism, you know, instantiated in the real world is the liberation of the individual. But the way to liberate the individual is by recognizing that we as individuals are a product of not only, but in part, our context. And that in order to change that material context, we have to engage in a collective struggle to do so. All of Ernesto Che Guevara's writings on the new man or the new human are precisely about this point. And that's where he starts that piece. Anybody who thinks that Marxists don't care about the individual should reread it and look at the opening lines where he insists on this idea that it is very false, that Marxists just want to shore up a strong state and destroy the individual. This is all very wrong. It's just that the individual is understood as a material reality that's part of a broader lived experience and part of a material world that is such that it's not isolated from that world. So the goal of liberal liberation is you just get liberation for yourself. It's opportunism, right? But the real goal of Marxist liberation is that, yes, you want individuals liberated, but not just one of them. You want all individuals liberated, and you want them liberated in such a way that they do have the freedom to be self-determined, and to live in a world in which they have not only access to basic goods and services to survive but very importantly across the marxist tradition cultural development is essential we don't want just a quality of misery and everybody you know just barely having what they need to get by we want people who are fully culturally developed of course the cuban revolution is a great example of this and everything that cuba has done in order to promote that at every single level. So what Cuba or socialist projects do is they promote the democratization of culture so that culture can be people's culture, a culture produced by, for, and of the people rather than by the monopoly ruling class and their cultural managers who are just doing their bidding, right?

M2 May Gant: Right on, because it was reading the works of revolutionary Cuba, looking at Mao and his works on culture, his writing on culture and the need for the cultural development post, even post the revolutionary moment, right? That you're on this kind of long process that I began to just get full on distrust because the other thing that I noticed is that especially when I came up, that artists were really pushed towards a kind of anarchist bent, I had noticed, which I think kind of really dovetails well with individualism, right? If you wanted to kind of go into a politics, you had to kind of go into this kind of anarchistic tendency, right? And that became the kind of dominant, you know, path through, right? And... I quickly grew disenchanted with that because of the many things that we could talk about with anarchism. I don't really want to litigate that. I think people couldn't see. But I'm curious, in the work that you did, did you see a similar kind of push towards like a kind of anarchistic kind of look at approaches and like the kind of cultural and knowledge production spaces?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, no, in all the work that I've done and just as a kind of side note, I guess, I came up in a family of artists and at a certain level, my highest aspiration other than doing philosophy and being involved in organizing and trying to change the world is to be a writer. And I consider that an art form, right? And so in many ways, I've been living in the kind of art theory world for all my life. And that if you're on the left end of that, right, because there's plenty of and we should never forget about that. Plenty of liberals and plenty of reactionaries. 100 percent. Yes. As soon as you're going to the lefties in the room, what are you going to find? You're going to find for the most part. Yeah. These this orientation that tends to be anti-capitalist, but. or anti-corporate in certain ways, but is very hesitant to point out solutions that would be the solutions that have actually proven themselves to be able to fight and win in the big picture by gaining state power. And I've been very taken by, it's actually part of a big research project that I've been working on, diagnosing where that anarchism comes from, right? Because anarchism is a petty bourgeois ideology, right? meaning it's very prevalent within the middle sector. And it's people who want to, on the one hand, identify with, and sometimes legitimately so, because I had my own anarchist phase, even if I wasn't fully aware of how much it was prevalent. They want to identify with the left, but they also, given their class position, they organically are led to identify with and desire a bourgeois lifestyle. And so they want a leftism that doesn't really change the material relations of production because they're comfortably situated within them. And so petty bourgeois radicalism is a great way of doing that. You can posture as a leftist without ever empowering people to enact the strategies that would really change class relations and a lot of petty bourgeois radicalism you know domenico de sordo is great on this in the book we were just talking about western marxism or you referenced briefly because one of the things that he points out is rebellionism and populism right you always want to be on the side of the revolt and the radicals is a good example of this you never ask the question of well what are they revolting against is it legitimate and is there an organizational strategy by which they could gain power? And so most anarchism tends to be anti-state, anti-party. And in doing that, anarchists often then give to the imperialists precisely the type of compatible leftism that they want. One time I was giving a talk, actually it was in an artist space in Hong Kong, and somebody was bringing up anarchism as like a legitimate version of revolutionary art. And my counterexample was, well, you know, just imagine that there is a war going on. And on one side, you have a highly disciplined army that is trained and there is a hierarchy that keeps everything in communication and everyone in communication and then also everyone. ushers orders in order to make the group of uh soldiers function as well together as possible and the people that they're fighting reject hierarchy reject organization and they allow everybody just to do whatever they kind of feel like doing that day on the battlefield Now, who's going to win in that war? The kind of clownish group that's shooting left, right, and center? Or the really organized collectivity that has a shared objective? Obvious who's going to win. And so there's also a lack of the primacy of practice under anarchism. right and a recognition that to fight and win we have to get organized it's just a material reality you might not like it there might be problems with organizations i have plenty of criticisms and there are many valid criticisms of various organizations but it is absolutely true we can't change the world individually and we certainly can't change it acting in these atomized individualistic ways in kind of focal activities we have to get organized

M2 May Gant: Yeah, and I have a further, I think, question that I'll ask about this because the other thing that I noticed was that the artist should not be part of organization, right? Or should be allowed to be somewhat above. And I actually recently did an interview with Jared Ball about this. In the early 2000s, there was a movement in hip hop called the Black August movement. political prisoner movement, which was a very important movement in advocating for political prisoners. But they'd made this deal that I think was, was, eventually not really good for them with very prominently known underground hip hop artists, right? As a kind of being their advocate, but they were not within the organization. They were just people who came on top. And I said that, you know, and I, and the people that I know who were involved with it now believe that they understand that look, they were not held to the standards of our organization in terms of a political education and, so forth and so on. They were allowed to just kind of roam freely and it ended up becoming kind of chaotic, you know, kind of thing. And you did not have like an organization based on principles and ideology that was clear, cogent, and could be unified and be able to be enacted in a powerful way when needed. So another interesting thing that I also see is this distorting of individuals. So When I was a theater student, I would say probably the first Marxist that I probably read without even knowing it pretty diligently was Brecht. I was introduced to Brecht in theater school. One was his play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Uy. I remember was given some scenes. We were doing some scenes from it. We went and saw a production of the Caucasian Chalk Circle. They did it at my school. school. And I first just loved the Brechtian form. I was just really just kind of taken by it, right? I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. So, you know, being the kind of, you know, nerd that I was at the time, I was like, well, let me go. He wrote things about theater. Let me go read what he wrote because the form and the way he presented theater was just so alien to anything that I had been seeing in the kind of bourgeois, you know, close to self, emotive kind of theater. And then when I was reading his work and finding out he was a Marxist, I was just like, this is incredible. So I went to my teachers. I went to my teachers. I said, hey, look, so what is this thing about Brecht and Marxism and communism? One of my teachers looked at me like, oh, yeah, you know, that's a thing about Brecht. The response was that it was a kind of vulgarity of Brad's that we should kind of forget about, right? And the other, or sometimes when people had no clue, they would just read the plays. Yeah. they would kind of reconstitute them. I mean, I saw this heavily with like Mother Courage. I feel like has gotten that a lot. And of course, Three Penny Opera, like this lives in that kind of perpetual kind of bourgeoisification of that piece, right? But this distortion is not just him. Because even when I found out about Paul Robeson, and I brought up his communism, they either didn't know or didn't want to talk about it. And then even in cinema, when some of the films that come out of Cuba, I remember there's a great memories of underdevelopment. And I read a review of it once that was really interesting, where they said, you know, it's a great film in spite of its communist lean, its politics. Same thing with, like, the I Am Cuba, Soy Cuba film that was made. They do that in spite of its propagandistic, you know, politics. Yeah. So I'm very interested first in this distorting of individuals, how you've seen it played out. Why do you think it plays? I mean, I think some things are obvious, but I'd be curious your thought. And then I kind of a follow up question that I'll ask kind of ask after, because I also just don't want to focus on how they've been distorted, but also like really what they've contributed.

Gabriel Rockhill: largely yeah but yeah but i would like to start with maybe the the distortion end first yeah no i share your appreciation for brecht because i think that anyone interested in art and politics should spend a lot of time reading uh brecht and just learning from him because he's an incredible truly incredible resource and the way i see it is that the bourgeois cultural apparatus that we were talking about a moment ago it purges leftist politics, meaningful leftist politics from the work that it decides to canonize. And it does this systematically. You see it in the theory world, you see it in art and culture, you see it in cinema. They try to purify the reified and isolated aesthetic product of from the social totality out of which it emerged, which is political. And in doing that, they really destroy the work because they destroy the fabric of its meaning. You know, how can you understand anything about Brecht without understanding that he's making plays that are self-declared didactic plays? And his understanding of art when he kind of theorized it at one point in time was that art should be able to give us an adequate picture of reality. And this is not some... reductivist and banal idea. It is that art should give us the tools by which we understand the complexity of the material reality within which we are situated and provide us with the skills necessary or at least the approximation of a skill set to transform that world. Otherwise, what it's doing is obscuring the real nature of relations. And that is a very powerful understanding of what culture does or is capable of doing. Bourgeois culture, though, tends to want to present itself as apolitical. Right. As if it were isolated from the realm of politics. And there's lots of reasons why it does this. But one of them is precisely to provide cover for its political agenda because it says, oh, this isn't a political issue. Everybody knows, for instance, that Cuba is a communist hellscape. It's not politics. It's just reality. And so the making of liberal, or I should say the liberal ideology about aesthetic products being apolitical is often just then invisibilizing their deep-seated political orientation. And I think against that, one of the things that we need to do, and it's unfortunate, the Anglophone scholarship on Brecht is very bad. I've looked at a lot of the secondary literature, most of the introductions to his work. They're basically almost not worth reading. And so there needs to be better Anglophone scholarship on him. But we also have to be able to resuscitate Brecht. these forms of analysis and cultural production, but then also reveal the extent to which the liberal apolitical approach is actually political through and through. Just as a quick side note, I investigated a long time ago, I'd always heard the The stories about the CIA funding abstract expressionism in the New York art scene and all of that. And I was like, wow, that's kind of weird. Did they do that? And then so I did a deep dive at one point in time years ago and found out that, yeah, the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in funding the New York art scene. And the New York art scene, of course, is particularly the time period that we're talking about. The early Cold War was quintessentially apolitical. It was just about the male macho subjects and their expressivity in relationship to the paintings that they would make. And even some of them in the 30s were actually kind of lefty, but they lost all their politics. So what you have here is the CIA promoting apolitical work for a very explicit political agenda, and that is demonstrating to the world that the West is the realm of the free, where subjects can do whatever, even just make meaningless things. It's not like the big bad Soviet Union that is claiming that artists should actually take positions in global class struggle. And I do have my criticisms of some of what the Soviet Union, particularly as it evolved, did in relationship to some cultural production. So it's not in order to exonerate it quickly, but it was recognizing that art is political

M2 May Gant: Yeah, the abstract expressionism thing is something that hit me pretty hard because it also... solidified a kind of understanding, especially post when you get into the kind of neoliberal era and the kind of destruction of art and, you know, this kind of enterprise culture that we have here now, right? And I remember I was working on a play and someone who was brought in to be a dramaturge told me and the co-writer that the problem with the play is that it had too much of a direct political message and framework, that it needed to be He didn't use opaque, but opaque is really what he desired. And this idea that that, you know, was not this taking kind of political stance. And honestly, to be perfect, to be self-critical, our political stance wasn't even that radical. We weren't making some kind of like, you know, burn it all down or, you know, install a communist government, you know, you know, declaration. We just had a precise critique that had a very, very clear message. that you could not mistake with what it was. And he felt that was a fundamental mistake as an artist. So I remember I got very interested in looking backwards. I was like, where did this kind of come from? Where is this? And I had internalized some of it myself. in my kind of, I think, my most liberal, captured kind of ways. And then some work that I had read from various people, one of them was more recent, was Orosami Burton's book, Tip of the Spear. And he talks about it a little bit in the... the changing of new york with the the political prisoner system and the all kind of things that kind of happened and this kind of this big giant web right government controlled state controlled to change and to influence ideology away from revolutionary politics and they knew culture was one of those places that you had to do it because so much of revolutionary culture within the imperial court was supporting the prisoners They were supporting the political, the Sada Shakurs and all those, and the Weathers and the people like that. They were like, go on. They were like, no, no, no, no. We can't have this anymore. The artists have to be fundamentally, you know, pushed away from that. So one of the other things, because I also know... While we're talking a lot about culture, you also have these critiques of the kind of culturalist turn, I think, in Western Marxism. I remember talking about that a little bit, I think, with your piece with John Bellamy Foster, which was a really great read, you two going back and forth about Western Marxism and the history and the tendencies. It was great. Because this cultural turn became the way that I was also told that Marxism was cool. So Adorno was thrown at me, right? I was told... I remember I got into Adorno pretty heavily, the culture industry. And I'm not saying that some of the Adorno stuff is irrelevant. I actually think some of it... When it comes to a kind of analysis of the systematic kind of construction, it can be quite strong. But what I noticed about Adorno was when I read it, I fundamentally became more individualistic. I told someone, I said, it never made me become more collective. Right. I actually felt like it was advocating for a kind of personal elevatedness over the entire kind of thing. And being a cultural critic was what you needed to be as a Marxist and as a dialectical thinker. That's what you had to do. You had to be a critic of everything, not necessarily a part of an org, so forth and so on. Right. Yeah. But I know also you study culture. I'm curious, how do you play with this dialectic of studying it, but also understanding that there has been a bourgeoisification of culture, bourgeoisification of Marxism and culture? How do you ride this dialectic of not also going too much in that direction? What do you do to stay accountable or stay... know fundamentally grounded in a tradition that is really marxist and not this you know reified marxism that is so popular in many sectors yeah it's a really fascinating question i mean it's an interesting conversation so thanks thanks i probably should have said this at the beginning but thanks for having me on i really appreciate uh connecting on all these issues because it's nice to

Gabriel Rockhill: not just think out loud, but have a living conversation about these types of issues because they really go to the core of my own life, not just my intellectual trajectory. And I could say for sure that the form of theoretical practice that I was involved in and trained in was highly individualistic. The goal, I remember when I was doing my dissertation years ago, that I actually, at my dissertation defense, kind of made a joke about this. I realized that what I was being trained in is that I had to come up with a new concept that was different than everybody else's concepts, but similar enough that it was legible to everyone so that I could brand myself as a unique thinker and get a job and publish the books and climb the ladder. This is the way that we're trained to think. opportunist individualistic way of thinking it was deeply rooted in me because it also grabs you psychologically right it grabs you and makes you feel like what is important for you is how you market yourself as an individual and how you hawk your wares on the marketplace of ideas and culture And if you succeed in doing that, then you're told by the whole system that you should feel better about yourself, right? Rarely people would feel bad if they got a Hollywood deal to make a movie or signed a big book contract, you know, but it's supposed to be the opposite. But in my own kind of trajectory realizing, and this was in fits and starts, and also I have to say at great personal cost and there was pain involved, like it did not feel good to break with that system and recognize that I had kind of whored myself out to it in ways that were perverting what I was doing intellectually, culturally, and politically. And so, I mean, we're having fun and talking about the conversation, but to be real about it, it's painful to change yourself. And it's painful to recognize, I've always loved this quote that's been attributed to Mark Twain. It is that it's easier to fool someone than convince them that they've been fooled. And that was the problem with me. I was recognizing I've been fooled. I was had. And the process of reorienting myself has taken years. A lot of that has to do with recognizing that there's so much more meaning in being part of a collective project that is aimed at working with other people to improve the world that we're in and that you can make individual contributions within that. But the level of fulfillment comes from contributing to that. It comes from being a team member, part of something that's meaningful. It's much more than a team member. That sounds like a bad sports metaphor. It's part of being the community that is at the vanguard of changing the course of human history on planet Earth. That is meaningful. Who doesn't want to be part of that? And then it's a matter of identifying really what that is. And for me, studying the material history of humanity on planet Earth, it has become very clear that the imperial ruling class and their minions are destroying the conditions of possibility of human life and the planet and the people who have been struggling against that and finding in very difficult circumstances ways of winning. are the ones who have identified theoretically and practically with a tradition that has a name. It's called dialectical and historical materialism. The name might sound complicated. It basically means the struggle for human liberation and the development of a science of human liberation that's collective that is ongoing, that is constantly in negotiation. There's lots of internal and rich debates. And being part of that is so much more meaningful because it has palpable, it's being part of something much larger than yourself. And anyone who's been an opportunist or involved in those individualist ways of producing knows how hollow it feels at the end of the day. It really does. It's like being a billionaire and being able to buy any sex that you want and not having a loving relationship where you can actually make love with someone and have it be something that isn't based on exchange value. It's not based on using someone. It's based on the most humane and human aspect of your existence. That, that feels good. That makes you feel like it doesn't matter if there's a crowd out there. It doesn't matter if a million people buy my books or two people buy my books. I'm part of something that really, really matters. Now, I didn't answer the first part of your question because I got pretty passionate about the second one. But I imagine we'll get back to it. The cultural turn. I don't know if you want me to cycle back.

M2 May Gant: Yeah, no, but I'll just say one quick. I'm glad you shared that because I agree it is painful. I mean, it does come at great personal cost. Some people who know me and have heard me speak on various platforms, I went through similar trajectories where I realized because of a certain kind of political development that I was honestly suppressing happening naturally to be able to live within industry of art and entertainment, I was in this constant internal struggle, but, you know, also letting it go. And I don't do this to kind of for self pity, but letting it go also calls a lot of, you know, stress and at times, but I will say connecting yourself to something bigger than yourself is, is the greatest potion or antidote or, you know, anything that helps you make you feel better about, you know, what's happening here, you know, and thinking about the possibility that can happen here if we do collectively organize and do these types of things. You know, I'll say one last thing, and then we can get into the cultural turn, is... I remember I was in a movie that did okay. And everyone was like, you're in this film. I was like, yeah, it's fine. They were like, oh, but people are seeing you. And I was like, it's fine. It didn't do much for me. About a year later, I produced an Amiri Baraka play with a friend of mine. It was a small collective. We had good audiences. It was really powerful. I was able to work in this kind of work, this work that I was really interested in. We were reading a lot of different sources and combining things, and we did it collectively. And I told them, I said, always, that will be a much more preferred experience than this Hollywoodly recognized piece of cultural product or entertainment that's just out there for mass culture. That like, I got a paycheck that like is eventually gone and I get some residual income, but it does nothing for me personally. If someone recognizes me in the street from it, it does nothing for me. And that's something that I think I always kind of remind myself of. But yeah, I would definitely love into the cultural turn part because I think this is really interesting. And I'll add one other little thing because like I said, like Adorno and then even things of certain kind of decolonial theories were kind of thrown. We go back to the kind of anarchistic turn is individual kind of stuff was always pushed but i'm curious yet thinking about the cultural turn as a and as cultural analysts as we both are how do we find that dialectic of not kind of going too much into that space yeah i mean i would just say picking up on the uh thing that you said about the movie that as a materialist

Gabriel Rockhill: I don't think there's some type of spiritual world that my soul is gonna sail off to at some point in time. And as a philosopher, I would say, well, the meaning of life is what we collectively make of it. And making a meaningful life with other people is the best thing that we have. And let's get involved in doing precisely that because that's what's going to give us sustenance. That's what's going to give us fervor and really connect us in meaningful ways. Because when you work in opportunist worlds, everybody else is an opportunist and they treat you that way. So all they want is exchange value. They just want something from you and you want something from them. And it's all I'll give you a lift up. You'll give me a lift up when you're working with people who are ethically and politically dedicated to a common cause changes everything. You're in it because you're in it, and it doesn't matter if you're cleaning the bathroom or if you're at the mic or whatever, you're part of something meaningful. And so I just want to cycle back to that. But the cultural turn, you know, most people will date this, you know, there are different manifestations of it, but within the Marxist world, a lot of the institutionalized forms of Western Marxism gave up on political economy. They gave up on political organizing. And they said, well, all that we can do is analyze culture. And you should pay attention to what type of culture they analyze. Almost systematically, it's bourgeois culture. I was a culture muncher throughout like decades of my life. I was just reading theory and I would go and I'd see every movie and go to every opening. And I was just munching, munching, munching until at one point in time, I realized it's all bourgeois culture. Like no one that I was reading ever referenced third cinema, for instance. No one was ever talking in a political manner about Cuban cinema or about Brecht or Eisenstein was made apolitical. How do you do that? And so the cultural turn really did just focus on the culture at the expense of class struggle and political and economic analysis as if you could study the superstructure without understanding the base that's driving it. And when you do that, then cultural forms purportedly just spin on their own and they aren't actually anchored in forces that are driving them, not determining them rigorously, but they're driving and conditioning what type of culture is produced. And I did want to address the specific issue of, well, how do you orient yourself in this world? Because I'm a cultural producer living in the world's most powerful empire. And so in order to do that, and this is work also that I've been doing with Jennifer Ponce de Leon, we're working on a book that has taken a long time because we were trained as Western Marxist cultural critics and we've been retraining ourselves. And it takes years to do that if you're really serious. You got to plumb the depths, you got to take out all the ideology, and then you got to learn all the stuff you were never taught. So a lot of autodidacticism. We're trying to finish a book on Marxism and aesthetics that actually gets to the things that we haven't... It's the book that we wish we could have read because it doesn't seem like anybody that we know has written at least the type of book that we're looking at. And so very quickly, we've identified kind of two tactics in one strategy. The tactics are tactics that are operative or that one can draw on when one is a cultural producer within a capitalist world. One is a Trojan horse tactic. And the Trojan horse tactic increases the visibility of the culture you produce, but you often have to make compromises. Because it's a matter of getting a message out there, but through the framework of the dominant bourgeois culture. We were just talking about Boots Riley before we got on. I think Sorry to Bother You is a brilliant film. It is produced within a network that has exigencies that impose themselves on the film. What Boots Riley decided to do is to try to Trojan horse it. I mean, the basic message of the film is we need a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. We need workers organization because capitalism subhumanizes, bestializes the working class and racializes the working class in these horrific ways. So it's an implicit critique of the dynamics of imperialism. That's a powerful message and I don't know where else you can find that in a movie that's available on mainstream sources. It's a great example of Trojan horse tactics. but you do often have to compromise. And when you write prose like I do, it's much more difficult. I've written, I wrote a piece years ago called The CIA Reads French Theory. I tried to place it in the New York Times and they were like, what, you don't understand what our platform is? Get out of here, kid. So there are ways it's really difficult to get certain things true. Another tactic is when you develop counter-hegemonic Cultural Systems of Production, Distribution, and Consumption. So when we met, you gave an excellent, brilliant presentation that I think is online or soon to be online on Third Cinema. It's a great example, right? Third Cinema produces its own material system of production, distribution, and consumption. that isn't dependent on the studio system, and it allows you to maintain your integrity, democratize art and culture, reach different types of audience, and build power. But ultimately, if we want full power, and this is actually the exchange that we had when we were talking at this conference, in the world that we live in, you need state power. And so the strategy under imperialism is to develop a socialist cultural apparatus that isn't the capitalist cultural apparatus. Cuba is a great example of that. It's strangled, strangled by an illegal blockade. But at the same time, it has developed some of the most incredible forms of art and culture in the 20th and early 21st century. And so using these two tactics and this ultimate strategy, I think that we have to recognize that culture is a really important site of class struggle because just look at how much time, energy, and resources the capitalist ruling class puts into using culture to indoctrinate us, to misguide us, to redirect and misdirect our desires, our potentials, to just render us stupid. right, to stultify us to an incredible degree. We need to be able to harness that power in the opposite direction. And obviously, I think in the work that you're doing and the work that I'm doing, we're both involved in a lot of collective projects. It's not just about us as individuals. It's about working with other people to develop, even if it's at a micro scale, you develop the institutional frameworks that can carry these forces forward. What we need in the United States, in the Valley of the Beast, is we need a real culture of leftism, where people can have access to these ideas, where we can actually democratize these ideas. People aren't scared of them. Like, oh my God, Stalin, we can't even talk about him. Oh, Cuba, oh, Fidel was a dictator. Why don't we just democratize culture and look at the real history and not just the propaganda so that we can have an adult conversation, not this kind of, you know, boomer ideology conversation that gets just hijacked by propagandistic thinking.

M2 May Gant: Yeah, it's funny because I have more, but we could totally dig into this. And I'm like, ah, you know, because, you know, there's, I totally agree. And having been in the industry for so long, There is a way that my faith really lies in that counter-hegemonic, but not in an anarchistic way. In this specific understanding that you have to create a systemic apparatus that is aligned with the revolutionary potential and trying to unlock the revolutionary potential of people. through ideology, growth, and really utilizing, you know, audience as an interlocutor, right? Because, you know, the bargain that has to happen with the larger apparatus, as you know, you know, in your work in knowledge and cultural production and, you know, and then in my work, As a filmmaker, it's a tough bargain. And, you know, once they're no longer into you, they will discard you very, very, very, very quickly. So you begin to wonder about that compromise, right? Like, how deep can I go with that? But I think that's a... Yeah, we could totally have a little longer kind of back and forth on this one. But I agree with you that you also have to... You have to be opportunistic at times when you're in actual literal war with the Imperial Corps. You have to if you find the lane. You have to navigate it. And if you think you could find something that might be a one-time movement, a one-time opportunity, and you think you might be able to, you must give it a shot. you must give it a shot, right?

Gabriel Rockhill: I mean, you have to analyze the whole situation and figure out whether or not the intervention is worth it. Exactly. But, you know, Lenin has all these great lines in Left-Wing Communism and Infantile Disorder where he talks about the need to, you know, work with the most reactionary institutions, the most reactionary parties, the most reactionary unions. And we can add to that the most reactionary universities, the most reactionary production studios. It doesn't mean that you just, you know... sell yourself out to them, but you recognize that they have a lot of power in society and you figure out if there are ways of intervening in them, using their interstitial space for yourself. I mean, not yourself in an egotistical fashion, but for the political project that you're collectively part of. All of those, I think, are really live and important questions.

M2 May Gant: Yeah. So I want to dig into aesthetics a bit because within my... kind of development when I was a student and then even as a practitioner, you know, I've had a very hostile experience when it comes to aesthetics coming up in bourgeois culture, right? You know, I was trained in a particular way with aesthetics that there are prescriptive codes that I must understand for proper aesthetic creation, right? analysis, right? This is how you judge good aesthetics, and this is how you do not. They were very rigid. And I'm not one who doesn't believe in technique. I'm actually a stalwart of technique, and I'm a dialectical materialist. I believe in tools. But there was this way that I was told, this is how you must operate, right? And then, you know, you would get your kind of side, these types of aesthetics. But I always found I was going back up to the bourgeois kind of framework, right? You gave me a piece written by yourself and Jennifer Ponce de Leon, and you made me think about aesthetics in its original etymological form. And you talked about sense perception, which I really like because I've been using sensory experience a lot, but not thinking about aesthetics. I would just use that as a phrase. But I like sense perception actually more because there's something about... the um potential of analysis in it that i think kind of just elevates it it could just be a a verbiage thing but i i was really attached to that because it's a descriptive model right like a uh it's a heuristic that has a materialist possibility i would love to you to talk about your approach towards the analysis of aesthetics even your critiques of it historically and and I'll finish it off with this, is there is an idealism that I've always, an idealist approach that I've always experienced when it comes to aesthetics. As materialists, how do you kind of reorient yourself or look at it historically, as a tool, as a heuristic? I'm very curious, you know, your approach.

Gabriel Rockhill: That's a great question and series of thoughts that you've just shared because I definitely see bourgeois culture as well as trafficking in a pretty profound idealism And a lot of what bourgeois culture has done historically is it's elevated the realm of culture above material existence and above labor, right? You see this in the art world all the time. Nobody's talking about all the underpaid or unpaid artists who are hanging shows or stretching canvases or running artwork across Manhattan. And all that they're talking about is the artist, right, or the work. And what that does is it creates a kind of two-tiered reality in which there's the material realm of crass economic relations and then this higher spiritual realm of bourgeois aesthetic experience. And much of bourgeois culture is premised on this basic dichotomy. Labor's over here, the body's over here, work is over here, and then spirit and culture are on a much higher plane. And what this does is it invisibilizes the real history of bourgeois culture insofar as bourgeois culture is the result of the development of new material institutions of cultural production and dissemination. We know that the modern museum dates from the late 18th, early 19th century. In the French case, it kind of came out of the bourgeois French Revolution. The Louvre was founded because, well, they had, you know, all this aristocratic art that had been sequestered in certain spaces. They had palaces. And then they thought, well, what should we do with it? Well, why don't we kind of open it up and let the public come and look at it? Then you also have, you know, public libraries, the evolution of the modern university, other sites of cultural production and dissemination. And a lot of what the bourgeois cultural apparatus has done kind of materially is it's tried to present the bourgeoisie as being a civilized society. It's tried to communicate to people like we are the ones who appreciate the finer things in life, the spiritual realm. And this spiritual realm isn't political, right? It's what we as the bourgeoisie, well, we ornament ourselves with it. And so, of course, you can also see in this relationship that one of the ways of understanding it is it's not just that there's this ideal realm of spiritual culture and the crass realm of material relations. It's actually that this realm of spiritual culture is there in order to obfuscate the material class relations that are operative within society. so that a lot of bourgeois culture is the ornamentation, if you will, the disguising of bourgeois social relations, which are drenched in blood, sweat, and tears, so that they appear as if they're a spiritual society that is probing the deep meaning of human existence and other such things. So that's one just kind of general comment that I wanted to share. But the other thing is I wanted to pick up on an element in our earlier conversation about Because I think he's really helpful here. And aesthetics, you know, in the Greek sense is, it's about the whole sensorium. So how we as subjects interface with the objective material world. And we don't. incorporate that world in the form that that world has. That world is mediated to us by our sensory apparatus, by our perception, by our language, by our sense perception, every aspect of it. And the mediation between the objective outer world and the subjective inner world, that mediation is ideologically constituted. So we need to understand that ideology isn't just about ideas. Often when you read people like Zizek or a lot of Western Marxists, people tend to feel really smart because they're like, oh, this is a stupid way of thinking. And I just got to think in this really smart, like Lacanian way of thinking. And then I can understand how the world works. Ideology fashions us in every dimension of our existence, including our entire sensorium. And so if you perceive the world and you look out at the world, like the racialization of humanity is a great example of this. You look out at the world and you see yellow people and brown people and black people and you're formatting. human beings and the incoming data of your experience in terms of ideological categories that have a history, that are the result of global class struggle, and that have been inserted not only in people's minds, but in how they perceive the world almost innately, because it feels innately, right? It's like second nature. And what that's doing is it's conditioning your very experience at a brute and fundamental level that's not necessarily mediated by your mind. One could say that when ideology has you by the guts, it has your perceptions. I mean, I could use another metaphor, but we'll try to keep it clean. It's really got you, if you know what I mean. When ideology's really got you, then it's not mediated. It's not a matter of out-thinking it. What you have to do is recompose your ideological sensorium. You have to learn to not only think differently, but feel, desire, you know, situate yourself in the world differently. And so the point that I wanted to pick up on in Brecht, I think Brecht brilliantly describes how art is, in any case, it gives us a depiction of reality. But the best art gives us an adequate picture of reality and teaches us how to change that reality. But it also does something else fundamental. And this is the Brechtian question of form. You can have the most brilliant analysis in the world, but not be able to connect to people and bring them in and not just connect with their minds. You got to connect with, you know, what ideologues would call the soul, or, you know, we would call the kind of the inner, you know, being of somebody in a really materialist sense, how they feel, what they desire, what their insecurities are, what their anxieties about the world are, what they're fearful of, like all of that you have to connect to in a really visceral manner. And so the work that I'm doing with Jennifer Ponce de Leon, we're thinking, and this relates to Mao's On Contradiction, and it's reworking of Hegel's dialectics for anyone who's as much of a nerd as apparently the two of us are. Because one of the things that you find in Mao is the dialectic is sense perception, reasoned thinking, and practice. And this, I think, is what great works of art can do in the materialist sense is they connect to us in our visceral experiential level. They teach us how the world works or certain facets of it. And they give us tools by which we can transform that world for the better. And not all artwork does all of this in all of these ways, but non-narrative work can really grab people. I always think of the drum contingent at protests. They're not telling you what to think. They're not telling you who you're to fight. They're saying, we're here together. It's meaningful. And this is real. And I want everybody to feel it right now and get synced up. And so that's a very powerful aspect of aesthetics that we really have to not only understand, but there are really powerful artists who can harness all of that power to connect with people in ways that aren't just mediated by the mind. We have to go wherever ideology is. And ideology is deeply rooted in affect, in desire, in perception, and all of that.

M2 May Gant: No, that's wonderful. Because the thing that I got from Brecht, and it's funny you bring in this thing with Mao. We're going to have to talk more about that at some point offline. I would love to dig more into that because it is truly the Brechtian form because the thing that I've always appreciated about Brecht is this idea that the audience, while they come out more emotionally inspired, they're not drunk by emotion, right? Thus, they're able to be more empowered to have a better analytical capacity of what needs to happen to really enact revolution ultimately, right? And it's finding that balance. It's a dialectic, right? He's really playing with the dialectic. So that thing you brought with Mao, that's amazing. That's really, really – something special. It's so funny you say that.

Gabriel Rockhill: We should talk more about it because I have a piece that I wrote that's a review of Red Aesthetics by Todd Cronin that deals with some of this. This is all work in progress. I would love to read it, please. Let's make that conversation happen next time we hang out.

M2 May Gant: I read Cronin's book Too quickly. I need to actually reread it. I would like to go back through it. So y'all would love, love, love.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, I had some criticisms of it. So I'd be curious what your thoughts were.

M2 May Gant: No, similar. But I read it too quickly. And it's funny, I met him at a historical materialism conference, I think it was two years ago, but I wasn't able to really talk to him about it. But I need to read it again. I would love to read your piece on that.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, he's an interesting and smart guy. There's no doubt. Yeah, very much, very much. And definitely doing work that is in conversation with the things that we're both interested in.

M2 May Gant: Yeah, yeah. So it's funny, you bring up this ideology, right? And in the same piece you shared me, you bring up Marx's invocation of the camera obscura, right? Mm-hmm. And I think I remember correctly, like, false consciousness wasn't a phrase he used, but we've come to think about that false consciousness, camera obscura is, like, you know, related, right? A lot of us in our analysis. What I really like of it is it's not... that a person if they have false consciousness is like seeing a world that doesn't exist right but they're seeing the world upside down right like they're seeing it and their ability to to analyze is essentially distorted right they're actually recognizing what's happening in the world but their analytical and their ideological um you know framework is distorted so What I find interesting, though, and this is my opinion, and I'd be curious what you think is, I feel like in the West, this kind of chaotic camera obscura can often be celebrated, right? Because you're seen as a different thinker, right? I think of someone like Zizek. This is kind of the criticism that I have of this recent one battle after another film by Paul Thomas Anderson, which people will readily admit... is deeply problematic, ahistorical, racist, sexist, but because it has some kind of heterodox, just absolute flip of the reality, it's worth a billion dollars, right? And it's worth all of our attention, right? And we need to pay attention to it. So this ideological chaos is promoted as a gift. You know? And... All I see is a degradation of the possibility of a true radical approach to art, right? And I've heard other things. I'm just throwing that out there because I'm curious your response to that. Because the work that you and Jennifer Ponce de Leon did made me also then think about that on the flip side, how it's so celebrated, right? And I see this at film festivals all the time. And it's very frustrating, right?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah. You know, it makes me think of, there's this great line in one of Lenin's texts where he criticizes some of, I can't remember who he's talking about, it might be Kautsky, and some of the revisionist Marxists, and he says they use dialectics like a toy rattle. Right? So dialectics is just a game where you kind of go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, but it's devoid of anything significant because what it lacks is materialist grounding. And you find the same thing in Zizek, you find it in Ranciere, you find it in a lot of these trendy kind of bourgeois philosophers who they are constantly dialectically overturning things, saying, oh, and what if it was the opposite? But it's dialectics spinning unmoored. It's not even conceptually rigorous. I wish it was. But it's just spinning unmoored from material reality. And I think you're absolutely right. You find a similar thing, not necessarily mediated by the logic of dialectics, but you find a kind of very flippant uh ideological chaos in a lot of cultural production where oh it's this it's this it's just kind of bouncing around it's a little anarchist a little liberal oh now it's reactionary oh now it's making some reference to communism but it doesn't understand what it is it's all over the place because dialectics doesn't make sense as a thought form in the abstract or as a cultural form that would just be played with like flipping stuff over Dialectics, you see this, I used to be a big fan of Godard, but I have tons of critiques of Godard. And Godard is a good example of this. Oh, I'll just make a film and part of the screen is just going to be black because I'm just taking a norm and I'm flipping it. And dialectical cultural intellectual production has to be materialist in the sense that it needs to be grounded in an analysis of the material reality that is driving the mechanisms of reversal. And when it is grounded in that material reality, then there can be a reason for dialectical transformations. You can say things like, oh, the ruling class presents itself as creating jobs. But actually, they're the ones who are exploiting us, and therefore they're not creating jobs. They're creating immiseration and exploitation so that they can live without having to work a job. And that is the material grounding in which the dialectical inversion actually makes sense. You know what I mean? And so you need a materialism in order to make dialectics coherent. Otherwise, it's dialectics flying freeform, and it just becomes another form of idealism, including forms of cultural idealism.

M2 May Gant: 100%. I mean, this is why you can see in certain parts of third cinema, you know, someone like La Barocca, right, who some of his work is just so, you know, it can feel very out of this world, right? But there is a grounding always to his understanding of his provocations, right? Because he's still keeping it materially grounded, right? He's still understanding that that's what's necessary, right? Yeah, it's an interesting thing, this promotion of chaos, right? And that's another end that I see aesthetics even also then, like, deployed as, like, a kind of last, as a last savior, right? Well, look, but look at these beautiful shots, right? Look how well this person, and it's such a cheapening of everything, right? You're like, well, come on. Now you're really, like, using, like, your last defense. You're now throwing the pebbles at the tank, you know? Totally, totally.

Gabriel Rockhill: I don't know if you know this line that got so much traction in the Cahiers du Cinéma debates where a tracking shot is a moral issue. Oh, dude, yes. I mean, it's just really taking formal mechanisms and then extrapolating from them this kind of political and moral import issue. That always remains incredibly vague.

M2 May Gant: What exactly does that mean? Yeah, and they did that to discount people like Elio Petri's work in the 70s. Oh, I didn't realize that. Yeah, the films like Working Class Go to Heaven, Investigation of a Citizen Beyond Suspicion, which I'm sorry, is an incredible, incredible film about fascism. Okay, I've got to see that. I haven't seen it. You have to see that film. And funny, because it'll dovetail to my next question.

Gabriel Rockhill: Wait, what's the title again?

M2 May Gant: Investigation of a Citizen Beyond Suspicion.

Gabriel Rockhill: Okay.

M2 May Gant: Right, and it has Gian Maria Volante, who was the great, really revolutionary actor, because he left doing those spaghetti westerns he was really famous for, such as Fistful of Dollars, um, with the, you know, what's his name? Um, Leon, right. And he, he, and he had deep criticisms of those films. He said they were, you know, I was trying to become an actor, but these are terrible works. He was really, really, and he did, you know, Marxist films. He worked with, um, Gio Pontechevro and his, uh, Operation Ogro film about the assassination, you know, the attempted assassination was the assassination of the, um, the, who was it? He was under Franco, um, in the late seventies, um, in Spain. I mean, Volante, he wasn't that kind of actor, but And that school of kind of, honestly, to me, Western Marxist filmmakers, they did this to people like Petri, who was connected to a kind of revolutionary tendency. They really wanted to kind of push, and they were like, well, the tracking shot, you're not thinking about this. And it gets into this kind of vulgarity of understanding, right? And it was part of that huge debate, and they totally looked to discredit Petri's work. that he was doing. And yeah, I have a fundamental disagreement with it because I find what Petri was doing truly connected to a really radical revolutionary tradition. And he was a committed Marxist in parties, right? He was committed to that. And I'm not that schooled in also continental Europe debates, but I also wondered there was a little bit of chauvinism happening. A lot of them came from the French to the Italians.

Gabriel Rockhill: It would be surprising if the French were chauvinist. Might be the first time in history.

M2 May Gant: I don't know. I can't judge because I don't really know the history that well, but I did smell a little bit of it, but I could be wrong. Getting into fascism, because I like to talk about fascism and aesthetics as our wrap-up in a couple of questions. First, I would love for you to talk about your work on fascism currently. Because first I'm thinking about the piece I saw you did a few years ago, I believe now, about the liberalism and fascism as partners in crime within the capitalist imperialist world order. And that's been a piece that I've actually been using when I show you some more of my stuff recently to kind of think about how we're looking at first, second, and third cinema as an analytical framework. It's really, really helpful.

Gabriel Rockhill: Share that with me when...

M2 May Gant: Yeah, I will. When I get there, I will definitely show you and get your feedback. And also... You also speak about the underdeveloped vocabulary on fascism. Can we start there? And then I have some kind of follow-ups that I kind of want to tease out in getting into aesthetics and fascism and stuff like that.

Gabriel Rockhill: The work that I've been doing on fascism is a book project. And one of the thematics is how there's a bourgeois ideology of fascist exceptionalism in a very specific sense. If you know the history of fascism, I'll do this quickly, but The people who lost World War II were the imperialist rivals. meaning Germany of course was identified as the principal rival in relationship to the US for who would be the leader of global imperialism. And so the term fascism became very strongly identified with the imperialists who lost the inter-imperialist rivalry. The bourgeois ideology of fascist exceptionalism tries to indoctrinate and has unfortunately very successfully indoctrinated people into thinking that the specific form of fascism in Nazi Germany and to some extent in Italy was an aberration under capitalist social relations and that it was a radical singular event that was defeated by the forces of democracy and the West, which of course is incorrect. It's the latest statistics that I've seen that I think are the most correct or 35 million Soviets and 35 million Chinese gave their lives defeating fascism. The communists defeated fascism, not the liberals. And that should be clear for anyone who knows anything about history. Uh, And in that regard, then, there's an attempt to make fascism almost into a proper name, not into a concept. So fascism is like, well, Nazism, you know, it's swastikas and jackboots and gas chambers and all of this. It's not an actual tried and true strategy of political management that has operated under capitalism in many, many different forms. And I just add to that, there's also a kind of ideology of fascist overgeneralization because most of the liberal literature on fascism will say, well, it's not really fascist unless it fulfills X, Y, and Z kind of categories. anybody who really resists imperialism, and especially those who have been the most successful in resisting it, namely the socialists, those are the real fascists. And nobody will get bent out of shape saying, oh, well, Stalin was nothing like Hitler. He actually fought a war against him and actually liberated Auschwitz and led to Hitler's death. Nobody's going to say that. They'll just be like, yeah, same thing. And so there's a lot of ideological confusion on that front, precisely because when the US became the leading imperialist power in the world, It inherited global imperialism on its heels. Communism had just defeated fascism. Fascism had been internationally discredited. And the international fascist struggle continued in the colonies across the third world and was redeployed by the U.S. empire in what, you know, when you actually analyze the material reality of it, looks like a veritable fascist international. And so one of the things that the US empire did and its strategy for empire building was to try to construct an invisible empire. To say, we're not like the fascists. We're not these evil people who put people in gas chambers. We're the people who have a Hollywood dream machine that runs cover for the things that we do in the third world. And so in that regard, a lot of the US version of fascism support for some of the most fascistic forces in modern history has been under liberal cover and under the cover of hollywood another thing that i've been doing a lot of research on is the role of spectacle culture in u.s empire building right the british empire just said we're an empire The US empire, at times, there's a little bit of a tradition that says, yeah, we're an empire. But there's a big tradition that consists in saying, no, we're the ones who fought the British empire and we're the ones who spread human rights and democracy and everything else. And so there's a really powerful aesthetic element to the very construction of US empire. It is the empire that has the most powerful cultural apparatus, imperial cultural apparatus in the history of the world. And this apparatus is absolutely integral to everything that it does. It's part of its power projection. It runs cover for it. It indoctrinates people. It brings people in on the wrong side of class struggle. It does all of this. And so this is a larger issue, but the diagnosis of of the entire material system of spectacle production and how it relates to the specificity of U.S. empire building is a really important research project that I've been invested in, but I know others have as well. And it's something that I think we have to develop a much more coherent account of to push back against this ideology of fascist exceptionalism and its overgeneralization when it's the enemies of empire.

M2 May Gant: So you started answering my question, and I'm going to try to do my best to wrap the final two into one. So I might be a little messy, but I'll get it together. Because one of the interesting things is, you know, there is this recognition of certain aesthetics when it comes to fascism, right? Like, you know, the Nazi symbol and and so forth and so on. And no one would argue that that's not a representation of fascism. We would agree with that, right? But... What I've been liking about what you're doing is, and I find it in the trajectory of people like M.A.C. Zare, George Jackson, is we have to really begin to think about what this is. Is it just this symbol or the sort of... I remember, I'm sure you saw those images of when they would try to juxtapose Trump and Mussolini, right? And I'm not saying that... Trump isn't or is a fascist. It's not really what I'm bringing that up here. What I'm trying to bring up here is that it was some kind of resemblance of his physical nature that would let us know whether or not he is a fascist. But then on the flip side, there is... there was this or is also this really big reliance on aesthetics when it comes to fascism. People like Leni Riefenstahl, who is a really debated filmmaker of how much she should be studied on many, many levels. The poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, who was also a general, right? And his very complicated history still to this day within Italy. But I'm thinking about... how do we think about fascism, its reliance on imagery, right? But I think you started to also talk about how it also confuses us by also deploying and over-relying on that imagery to kind of cover for what is actually fascistic tendencies, right? And I'll just add this last part because I'm beginning to also think about just this Janice face of liberalism and fascism.

Speaker 3: Right.

M2 May Gant: And what possibly does aesthetics actually play a role in like, but you kind of brought it up, covering it or obfuscating it or making it opaque or making it clear only in certain ways. Right. This is kind of where I am. How do we think about liberalism's role, maybe further kind of going into that, in cultural production with an empire writ large? How do we have to now think about it and how we need to position ourselves if we do accept, which I do, that they are connected and they have a relationship of mutual need?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, that's a good example of materialist dialectics. Fascism and liberalism do not exist in isolation. They're materially connected because they're super structural forms of the same socioeconomic base. They are modes of governance of capitalism, right? One relying primarily on consent, the other more on repression, but they are fighting on the same team. I think that for... a coherent analysis of fascism, which you don't find within the liberal literature, which dominates, of course, the mainstream media, you have to go to the socioeconomic base and the forces driving it. There's not, in all of the cases of fascism that I've studied, a single case that I've found that doesn't involve the capitalist ruling class astroturfing mass movements. Meaning paying for them to make them look like they're grassroots movements coming out of nowhere. It's a cross-class alliance that has very material forces driving it. And so when people think of fascism, they often think, oh, you know, some racist in the street with baseball bats or guns or whatever. They don't think of themselves, oh, some dude in a suit. who paid for the guns and hired the thugs who were in the street, when you don't have the thugs in the street unless you have the financial backing, and very importantly, the complicity of the state apparatus that tends to operate in great synergy with the parastate forces. They allow them to do it. Sometimes they're, you know, cops who are donning a KKK hood, you know, so it's actually literally the same people who their day job is one thing and their night job is something else. And so part of the analysis of fascism has to be an investigation of the political economy of fascism and the tier of forces driving it. But the other thing I wanted to highlight is that fascism in the classical sense, right? Because in a lot of my scholarship, I've highlighted the fact that fascism, like Césaire and some of the other figures that you referenced, it has deep colonial roots. And I don't think we should get hung up on the idea that, oh, all of a sudden, you know, in the teens, there's an absolutely new and unprecedented way of ruling people. No, these come out of a material history and the classical fascism, as people call it, of Italy and Germany, and I would add Japan to that, it comes out of the deep colonial tradition. That's where it gets its roots from. And it picks up on that very explicitly. And they were all colonial projects. That was their goal. They were all colonial projects because colonialism is how you generate super profits under capitalism. But if we just look at classical fascism in the interwar period, what you have is it develops in a very specific material context where you have growing mass democratization movements across the long 19th century. You have... growing mass communication, right? Which is really changing how people communicate, how culture operates and how people interact. It's a very different world when you have the radio, when you have, you know, mainstream newspapers, cheap print runs and things like this. When you have train systems, like communications are really changing the nature of the game and human interaction. And on top of that, you have 1917 and the first world successful socialist revolution. And so part of classical fascism was a project of trying to bring the masses on board in the era of mass democratization and mass communication to fight the socialist threat, but on the premise of developing a rejuvenation, a revolution in society. And so there's something fundamental about that entire project that is about creating images of a false revolution and trying to get working class and mainly kind of lower middle class and some of the lumpen proletariat on board with a project of radical national rejuvenation, right? Through scapegoating, ultra-nationalism, and a lot of other tactics that are deployed in order to do that. So aesthetics is at the core of this type of fascist project, right? It's really about, as Walter Benjamin said, Benjamin, of course, was good friends with Brecht and Adorno always derided the savage influence of Brecht on Benjamin. What he meant by that is the Marxist, the real Marxist influence of Brecht on Benjamin. Benjamin, of course, talked about fascism being an aestheticization of politics. It was a little elliptical. Benjamin can be a bit idealist and mystical, but I think what he was getting at with that expression is that Fascism needs to aestheticize politics because it's tricking people into a project of rejuvenation that's actually against their best interest, right? And how we have to respond to that, he said, is through a politicization of aesthetics, meaning situating aesthetics within global class struggle and identifying it as a major battleground and using it as well as a site in order to fight back against that. Now, just to wrap up on the Janus face of liberalism and democracy, you know, liberalism, I'm sorry, capitalism has a bit of a problem on its hands. And it's the real contradiction that racks the bourgeois cultural apparatus and that we should exploit to all ends. It's that bourgeois culture has to appear free, open, and democratic. That's what it always says. All voices are open. It's the most brilliant, the most creative who will succeed in this open marketplace of ideas. Yet, very importantly, it has to extremely tightly control everything from behind the scenes by the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. That's a contradiction. And that contradiction creates space for us. It can be used in various ways. But that contradiction also means that in the cultural realm, what you often have, and you see it more and more clearly today, is you have the bourgeois facade of culture in which everyone's free, everybody can communicate ideas, and then all of a sudden, when certain ideas are being communicated, people are being shadow banned. People are being deplatformed. Certain journalistic outlets are losing their capability of being monetized. And the liberal facade of free and democratic culture reveals that the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is a dictatorship and they will control in a totalitarian fashion what is produced and distributed. so that ultimately the cultural apparatus continues to serve their fundamental interests. I would also say that you see this kind of, you know, one of the things that I'm interested in, and maybe it's a point to kind of wrap up a very fascinating conversation due to the richness of everything that you brought to it, the category of cultural fascism, right? That we have to be able to see the totalitarian nature of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in the cultural realm, but we also have to see that the dominant culture, it normalizes a lot of very fascistic elements, the most toxic forms of masculinity, right? Think of what the porn industry has done to people's psyches, to their sexual lives, to their interpersonal lives. It's just really destroyed them and very fundamental ways, all of the social chauvinism, the racism, the ultra-nationalism, all this stuff is largely, largely normalized, you know, so that it just becomes the lingua franca. I have two young boys, and sometimes they speak to me in ways where I'm like, where did you... And then I know how they learn to speak this way. It's because it's completely normalized. And there's also an incredible stultification of the population and a removal of their agency. They want to make people into little, unthinking people. obedient team members who will just line up and dogpile, this stuff's all bad, this stuff's all good, and just function in terms of this more or less idiotic mindscape that makes them very pliable, very usable by the bourgeois cultural apparatus. And so that is an extremely powerful mechanism, particularly when you add all the digital culture and all the penetration of personal lives, right? This is affecting people on anything from dating apps to social media to all of the kind of online social interactions that one might have. And so we also, I think, have to further develop a materialist analysis of all of these different platforms and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and how it does reveal a kind of cultural fascism that's operative at many, many different levels in spite of certain bourgeois democratic elements that are there that we should still fight to expand, right? We should fight to expand bourgeois democracy. We shouldn't give up. on fighting to expand that and fall into a kind of ultra-leftism of, well, liberalism and fascism are just two sides of the same thing, so it doesn't matter, so let's give up on everything. No, Domenico Lasorda taught me this lesson years ago. He said, look, they say all human beings are created free and equal. Let's take that principle and let's make it a material reality. Let's run with this and really spread democracy, really spread self-determination and build the type of people power that is truly, truly democratic, truly sovereign.

M2 May Gant: Wonderful. Gabriel, tell people where they can find your work. Anything else that, you know, I know you have a text which should be out in the next week or so, I believe. It'll probably be out after this episode drops. But yeah, anything people can follow or find what you're doing.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, I have a book that's called Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? And the first half of it is all a critique of the imperial industry of propaganda, the imperial cultural apparatus that we've been talking about. And then the second half looks specifically at Western Marxism. That's coming out with a monthly review press on December 1st. I have, I just started a substack. I didn't even know that was really a thing, but I'm apparently getting plugged into that platform. I have a website and a lot of my collective work, I, you know, I'm involved in a lot, but if you go to criticaltheoryworkshop.com, it's a kind of portal for a lot of those projects.

M2 May Gant: Yeah, definitely check out thecriticaltheoryworkshop.com. A lot of great talks. I watch them regularly when the new one comes out. So I'm like, yes, I get very excited and really, really great stuff. But yes, your book is on pre-order. I'm waiting for it so I can dig in and read. Well, I'll be up in New York for it.

Gabriel Rockhill: For a book launch. So if you're around, I think it's going to happen in March. We're working out the details, but there'll be, I'm doing a mini book tour in the kind of in the Northeast in January and February. And then we'll do an online launch here in December with Ali Kadri and John Bellamy Foster. So stay tuned for that. If people either follow me on Substack or check out the Critical Theory Workshop or both, there'll be plenty of posts about it.

M2 May Gant: Great, great. Y'all, great, great, great, great. I'll definitely try to make it out for that. Yeah, hopefully we can. I would love to see that, for sure, for sure. Gabriel, thank you so very much. This was a great convo, and I'm looking forward to having more. This is really, really great.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, I hope it'll be the first of many because I also appreciate learning from you and want to turn the microphone around a little bit more. Yeah, for sure. And so let's just keep the conversation going. Keep up the great work that you're doing. And it's really important. And I was thrilled to collaborate.

M2 May Gant: Yes, yes. All right, y'all. Take care.

Speaker 3: So I think that the sensitivity to the arts that has always,