Hi and Welcome to Episode 13 of Beautiful Losers.

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For this very special episode we were in conversation with the poet Roger Reeves. Listeners of the show will remember Reeves from Episode 8, where we spent the majority of the episode examining his poem “Domestic Violence.”

Reeves joined us to discuss poetry, protests, and his recent essay in The Yale Review, “The Uses of Memory.” We were overjoyed to converse with such a dynamic interlocutor and we look forward to continuing the conversation. Amidst all the chaos and confusion that the nation has been going through, Reeves thoughtful examination of a concept like ecstasy provides a useful and necessary heuristic for balancing the difficult and sometimes contradictory forces at work in contemporary culture. After we said goodbye to Reeves, we continued the conversation and tried to tie Reeves’ work within the frame of the questions that our show has been focused on from the outset: what is the basis and value for critical thought? How can one establish a strong appeal to norms or morals without relying on a metaphysics of presence? These questions will continue to animate our discussions and we look forward to the next opportunity we’ll have to think along side Roger Reeves.

Below is the written version of the intro we put together for Roger. We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did while having it:

Our subject today is poetry. What is it. Where is it. Why must it. Ezra Pound said of his epic The Cantos - that the epic is poem containing history; of his work as a whole, in Canto 116, he wrote “the beauty is not the madness / tho my errors and wrecks lie about me / I cannot make it cohere.” T.S. Eliot said of the the lyric poem that it is neither “didactic nor narrative, nor animating any other social purpose” — it is the poet’s expression of the pursuit of pure verse, “an obscure impulse.” Theodore Adorno, contrary to Eliot, says “Today, when individual expression, which is the precondition for the conception of lyric poetry, seems shaken to its very core in the crisis of the individual, the collective undercurrent in the lyric surfaces in the most diverse places: first merely as the ferment of individual expression and then perhaps also as an anticipation of a situation that transcends mere individuality in a positive way.” Adorno argues that the lyric expresses the universal experience of no universality, and this negative expression may become the basis of a radical version of sociality.

Our guest, Roger Reeves, is a poet. He has written epics and lyrics. We asked Roger what we ask all of our guests: what are you reading and what are you thinking about? The epic of Gilgamesh. the jazz of Ornette Coleman. The essays of James Baldwin. The lectures of Audre Lorde. Perhaps the answer to our questions of poetry may be found 4700 year span of human culture.

In his essay, The Uses of Memory, Roger develops and political aesthetic theory of ecstasy, an essay that among its many virtues also redeems Eliot: “Ecstasy as inhabiting as beyond that liberates from future and past through non-attachment. Ecstasy as that which can detach us from the teleological.” Later he adds… “Ecstasy is a pinching, a theft of beyond-pleasure while being surveilled, prodded, and poked, and persecuted.” Reeves writes of ecstasy because like all great poets and thinkers, he is searching for another pattern: “we are constantly embarking upon a process that is amorphous, vanishing, renewing, and transfiguring itself into another pattern, even as we seek to make one.”

And with that said we welcome Roger Reeves to Beautiful Losers…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beautifullosers.substack.com

Hi, and Welcome to Episode 12 of Beautiful Losers: Melancholy! This episode was delayed slightly due to technical issues, apologies.

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And now back to our episode…

“One pristine example of the philosophical struggle for presentation is melancholy, a word whose presence can be traced to the inauguration of thought. Melancholy’s meanings extend from the personal to the collective, from body to soul, and from pathology to inclination. Melancholy has always been marked by acute contradictions in its depiction, invoking an expansive array of meanings: it encompasses positive, creative facets— such as depth, creativity, and bursts of genius—as well as negative qualities—including gloominess, despondency, and isolation. The history of the term is saturated with different and at times conflicting articulations that, paradoxically, seem to consistently point to more or less the same set of features. Notions of closure, contemplation, loss, passivity, sloth, and genius have always been linked to melancholy in one version or another, referring to body or soul and vice versa.” -Ilit Ferber, Philosophy and Melancholy 

The most dogged question that follows melancholia is “what is melancholy?” Sigmund Freud framed the concept as a perverse form of mourning. Whereas the mourner mourns something lost - like a loved one - as part of a healthy grieving process, the melancholic mourns something that she never possessed to begin with. The distinction between mourning a lost object versus mourning an imaginary object is the key difference. The mourner can eventually learn to let go. The melancholic cannot let go, because there was nothing to hold on to in the first place; in fact, the melancholic holds onto this loss to the point of internalization. The imaginary loss becomes a part of them. The melancholic thus exists in a permanent state of loss, a kind of loss that itself becomes its own kind of object or obsession. Imagine a person who desperately holds onto a memory or an idealized memory of the past they can’t let go of the past because the idealized memory never existed—a popular person from High School, 20 years after graduation, still trying to relive the old glory days. It’s a fantasy structure.

We begin with this psychoanalytic perspective because it distills some of melancholy’s key themes: loss and memory, reality and fantasy, knowledge and nostalgia.

Walter Benjamin’s work on melancholy is conceptually difficult and situated within a deep study of Baroque-era German plays. These barriers to entry ward off many readers, but intrepid readers get to enjoy one of modernity’s greatest meditations on the nature of melancholy. Benjamin’s work speaks to our present moment in a very profound way. The Baroque era that he wrote about was in a period of recovery from the 30-Years War. A world-historic event of violence and suffering on the same level as the American Civil War and WWI. Benjamin, writing in the wake of WWI, explores the baroque period in an effort to understand his own post-war moment. For readers today, in the wake of endless wars overseas, financial collapse, and global pandemics, Benjamin’s study appears especially relevant.

One key distinction for Benjamin is between forms of knowledge: knowledge from the world and knowledge from books: “The brooder’s knowing and the scholar’s learning are as intimately blended in it as in the men of the Baroque. The Renaissance explores the wide world; the Baroque explores libraries.” The Baroque, as an avatar for melancholy, only gains access to knowledge through texts, whereas earlier ages gained knowledge through empirical exploration. 

Benjamin observes that our idea of what counts and knowledge and the knowable changes when the primary metaphor for knowledge becomes the text itself. It’s no accident that his period of study follows in the wake of the reformation, a time when protestants championed the value of the literary to empower people to read the Bible, as opposed to the Catholic tradition of having the Bible read aloud (in Latin) to largely illiterate masses. Benjamin’s point is not that we ought to return to a pre-literate society, instead he offers a pointed account of how the scope of knowledge, language, literature, society, and politics change in this moment. These are the changes that define modernity: the discourse of knowledge becomes the discourse of risk management and power brokering. The “heroic” figures that arise from this age are either melancholic scholars (not sages) or political advisors (not kings) or military strategists (not warriors)—it’s in this moment that Benjamin reveals that the primary dramatic subjects are no longer kings and queens, but instead advisors who manipulate the systems of power offstage. The age of melancholy delivers unto the world A Game of Thrones.

Benjamin’s melancholic subject is burdened with knowledge. Their knowledge is twofold. First, they learn of the world and its problems, and then they learn that they and the systems of power are not up to the task of fixing the world. The gap between these two domains of knowledge creates the emblematic form of sadness that colors the melancholic. This melancholic subject is also more committed to ideas than to people or individuals. In this sense the melancholic is another version of The Beautiful Loser. The advisors to the king are not loyal to the king, they are loyal to an idea of the “the kingdom.”

“For those who dug deeper saw themselves interposed in existence as in a rubble field of half-completed, inauthentic actions. Life itself lashed out against this. Deeply it feels that it is not there merely to be devalued by faith.” Benjamin, writing in a time of national socialism, would have observed the early stirrings of nationalism, but this was a form of nationalism that refused to recognize the people of Germany, instead preferring an idealized form of the “the Aryan.” This is the irony and the tragedy of the melancholic subject. Their idealism can be committed toward some kind of utopian future, but it comes at the cost of actual people. It sees the nation as an unrealized potential, but remains blind to the fact that a nation is nothing more than a collection of individual actors, all with diverse and disparate interests.

We also look at Wendy Brown, whose essay “Resisting Left Melancholy” offers a sharp critique of the left under the aegis of melancholy. For Brown, the left has become too enamored with its own past. The halcyon days of pre-WWI workers movements and social organization that brought about important reforms and protections for people are now long gone. Those on the left who continue to trumpet these visions of an idealized past that never was fail to understand that the visions of total revolution that drove the New and Old Left can only restrict contemporary and future political imaginaries. Brown’s work partakes of a Foucaultian tradition that wants to dispense with the Marxist theories of power that are top (bourgeoisie) vs down (proletariat). This theory of power envisioned a teleological form of resistance and triumph (the communist revolution) that is incommensurate with the way that power actually works—that is, as the diffuse, micro-level force that Foucault is famous for articulating. The more we hold onto the mottos and visions of total revolution that mobilized the Old and New Lefts, the more we remain behind the ball politically and theoretically. In this way, Brown’s challenge is equal parts unsettling and damning: can any progressive movement call itself progressive if it remains mired in its own past commitments, visions, and slogans? Brown encourages a more imaginary, forward thinking program. 

Our interest in concepts like melancholy, cynicism, and the beautiful soul betrays our commitment to a phenomenological project, as opposed to an idealistic project. For us, the import of perspective and experience cannot be disentangled from any form of inquiry - be it philosophical, economic, political, or cultural. And so terms and concepts, like melancholy, help us understand and color what it means to be in the world. An idealist approach would focus more on the categories of experience. For example, a utilitarian will develop models on how to maximize human happiness, but the condition of happiness itself is treated as a given. Just as Plato himself treated eudaemonia as the given ideal of human experience. In a very basic sense, the study of melancholy requires own to acknowledge that what drives human action is not simply “the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of displeasure.” If one takes the claim that desire and drive and action are themselves complex subjects, then one must engage more directly and personally with the various dynamics that shape these experiences. Thus, phenomenology.

To our listeners committed to idealism: we hear you, we see you. But we find that the most persuasive version of idealism emerges from a pragmatic study of power, interest, and systems. Language philosophy’s ability to separate word from action from meaning from usage is an invaluable tool, especially when it comes to a topic like understanding how the system of media operate. 

But even so, as the sign of Saturn rises in the west, we ponder these parting words from Walter Benjamin: “Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But its persevering absorption takes the dead things up into its contemplation in order to save them. The writer concerning whom the following has been transmitted speaks from out of the spirit of melancholy.”

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beautifullosers.substack.com

Hi and welcome to episode 11. This week we continue our engagement with Peter Sloterdijk’s book The Critique of Cynical Reason.

We begin the discussion by thinking about cynicism as a comedic practice. What is the role of comedy in political discourse? For us, and for other listeners born in the 1980s, one of our formative political developments occurred through Jon Stewart’s run on The Daily Show and the media critique he provided, especially around the war on terror. Although our politics have grown beyond that particular commentary, the role of comedy as a means of engaging with power remains a fundamental tool in analyzing and understanding the operations of governmental power. 

The rise of new movements such as #metoo has introduced invaluable forms of social commentary, criticism, and change regarding the status of patriarchal power today. A question remains, though, about the role of comedy within the current political moment. Irreverent voices are actively removed from public discourse, but the jurisprudence appears uneven. It feels like the stakes have never been higher: public recordings of killings, mass demonstrations, the cancellation of media members. By any measure a new form of political consciousness is emerging. The tone has also never been more humorless. Sloterdijk’s subject—cynicism—never abandons its commitment to a formation of comedy as essential practice. He provides a lengthy study into one of the darkest periods of human history, the slow rise of racism in Weimar Germany. His critical distance as an author writing in the late 1970s allows him to balance both the tragic and the comedic. It remains unclear to us how to best balance these terms today.

We focus on the section “In Search of Lost Cheekiness,” where he develops his theory of the “kynic,” an actively passive formation of an irreverent comic, philosopher, or quasi-buddhist guru. This outsider figure resists the descent into philosophical resentment. Sloterdijk’s kynic reintroduces a form of comedy and humor into the overly-serious discourses and traditions of philosophy and political theory. This form of comedy is ambivalent and multi directional. It seeks to “punch upward,” and it refuses to act on behalf of any particular formation or political identity; in this sense one may frame it as the universal value across time of resisting power by laughing at it.

Sloterdijk’s central figure in this analysis is Diogenes, contemporary of Plato who famously farted in the Athenian marketplace. Diogenes is a different kind of philosopher. He was known as the “anti-Socrates,” an inversion that indelibly links him to the founder of Western thinking. Insofar as Socrates’ abstract theory of the ideal state has force, then so, too, Diogenes’ concrete emphasis on the body and its excretions wield a universal form of critique— another sort of force that no empire escapes. 

Kyncisim exists in contradistinction from idealism. It is, at its core, an anti-metaphysical form of humor that points to the materiality of the body to puncture the abstract idealisms that support oppressive and unjust forms of power. In this way, Sloterdijk reverses the relationship between the philosopher and the sophist. He implies that most inequitable power relationships are grounded in an invisible, idealistic abstraction. The cure, it seems, is to uphold the pragmatic force and reality of the world that we actually engage in—despite the fact that it smells, is broken, and often doesn’t live up to our expectations. We can access this version of reality through bawdy, lewd humor—moments of laughter bring us back to the experience of merely existing in community with other people. 

The criticism of idealism crystalizes when we consider the ways that the great works of political theory, like Plato’s Republic, end up in a place where a type of philosopher-king emerges as the ideal leader. The kynical analysis points out the set of interests and biases that undergird any idealistic system. President Trump presents the slogan, “Make American great again,” and then adds to it that “I am the only one who can fix this system.” Plato writes a careful analysis of metaphysics and politics and arrives at the “logical” conclusion that people like him are the ones that should be running things. In both instances, evocations of idealism are used to mask a very plain and ordinary set of interests and power relationships. The kynic’s commitment to focusing on the material and not on the idealistic allows her to see clearly how these interests operate. Plato says the human is a featherless bird, so Diogenes plucks a chicken and tosses it in the Academy only to say: there is Plato’s human. If there is a kynical commandment, it is to lay bear the interests and rationality of any argument in order to understand its material and pragmatic consequences.

Kynicism is also the answer to diffusing some of the most egregious and violent forms of political totalitarianism. Sloterdijk frames the kynic in a Von Clausawitz tradition: politics is a continuation of war by other means. The history of philosophy and politics is therefore a battleground to argue for the very foundations and legitimacy to act in a political economy. Into this scene steps the kynic, who seeks disengagement from the world of abstract argumentation in order to help people understand the various ways that the game is rigged from the start. The attempt here is an earnest one, for although it is dressed up in a cynical attitude, people have been arguing with each other for thousands of years and the world is defined by the very same problems and dynamics that were present in the time of Plato. The kynic humbly suggests that the very tradition of arguing, of sophistry itself, is endemic to the problems that philosophy and political theory seek to solve. By presenting kynical action as a form of passive engagement, Sloterdijk seeks to create different sort of intellectual tradition. This is not a whole cloth new tradition, the point of the book is that these traditions have co-existed, under the surface of our culture, for as long as people have been reading and engaging with texts like Plato’s Republic.

Sloterdijk, at the end of the text, argues with the idea of objectivity itself. He does so by presenting it as merely the subjectivity of the dominant power structure. As a result, he claims that the idea of objectivity is not the best way to critique power. Instead, he offers a kind of “wise passivity,” which he derives from a Buddhist tradition. He argues that this is how you can defuse the negativity of the enlightenment. This strikes us as both naive and also sneakily powerful. In the context of self-help culture, another formation that dominates public discourse, why can’t one develop a politics that expands the stoic-inspired self-help discourse into a macro politics? 

In an effort to practice our own form of kynicism, we end the episode by trying to bring to bear the very tools of kynical analysis to Sloterdijk’s potentially naive conception of politics. Our discussion then leads into a broader analysis of contemporary political and cultural discourses and communities, especially those framed as outsiders, like the “anti-woke left” or the “dirtbag left” and also, in the more conservative tradition, the “intellectual dark web.”

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beautifullosers.substack.com

Hi! Welcome to episode 10. We’ve got something special for our 10th episode. For those dying to hear Part II of our discussion on Peter Sloterdijk and cynicism, it will come out on Monday. Matt was kind enough to join us this week and we didn’t want to delay the episode.

This week your Beautiful Losers talk with Matt Stoller, author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. It goes without saying that you should order a copy from your local bookstore. He’s also the author of the famous 2016 Atlantic article “How the Democrats Killed their Populist Soul.”

Matt Stoller is the director of research for the American Economic Liberties Project, a think tank that focuses on anti-monopoly policy solutions. The AELP is non-partisan and non-profit, and they are supported financially from a mix of foundation grants and individual contributions. They receive no support from corporations.

Goliath grounds its intellectual and moral framework in both democratic and republican traditions of thinking while simultaneously criticizing key missteps on both sides of the aisle. Its chief insight is a historical argument about how conceptions of political economy have changed over the course of the 20th century. Spoiler alert: the populist democrats of the early 20th century are, in Stoller’s account, replaced by democrats who facilitate a tremendous consolidation of monopoly power—this internal transformation is both a reflection of broader postwar economics as well as a failure to nurture the legacy of early 20th century democratic populism. As Stoller argues, this transformation suggests more than mere differences in generational politics across time. Rather, this is a seismic shift within a theory of government and political economy. Appropriately enough, this history of American finance appeals to people from a broad range of political backgrounds and identities. There are conservative republicans who oppose monopoly and there are progressive democrats who oppose monopoly. One of the central figures of the book is Wright Patman, an early 20th century Texas congressman who stood up to monopoly power. Patman’s journey, and his eventual removal by the democrats in the wake of the Nixon resignation, offers a critical parable to understand how these political economic transformations trouble our pat distinctions between the political Left and Right.

A couple of themes emerged during the course of our conversation. First, Stoller’s analysis of monopoly as a power formation within the political economy allows one to reorganize political discourse vertically, rather than horizontally. This means that instead of organizing issues around “right/left” partisan terms, which are arbitrary and tend to shift from one generation to the next, we can organize issues around the idea of monopoly itself—how it empowers some at the expense of many regardless of political affiliation.

Organizing politics around monopoly gets to the heart of what it means to have a government that works for broad social and national interest. Pro-monopoly conservatives deftly make the case that “smaller government is better” by appealing to the many ways that government is a hinderance and an annoyance. Their argument reduces a complex issue to a simple rhetorical question: “why do you want to give more power to an incompetent organization, like the federal government?” This is a deft argument because it elides the question of accountability by framing the issue around services. According to this logic, corporations are better service providers, therefore they should be allowed to act freely. This argument does not attend to the problem of accountability. If a politician governs poorly, you can vote them out of office. The only accountability that a corporation faces is from its shareholders/board or its government via regulation. If you work under a system of monopoly power, there is simply no recourse you have, as an individual, to make that system more economically competitive or diverse. This is why organizations like the AELP are important, but their success depends on their ability to appeal to a base broader than a single political party. 

Second, we consider the ways that monopoly and democracy are oppositional structures of power. By power we mean that force which organizes, enforces, and establishes systems of order. In this sense, corporations and government represent different systems of power. If government does not regulate corporate power, then corporate power will continue to expand by taking on more monopoly-like features. To put Stoller’s challenge in pragmatic terms: if government is going to regulate monopoly, it has to do so in a way that also delivers social and economic good to the people. The legacy of the new deal is not merely financial regulation, but major public investment in infrastructure and the individual advancement of all citizens.

Finally, we think about what a more sustainable political economy could look like in the 21st century. Matt surprised both of us by offering Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican party as an alternative—only this time without racism. Grounded in a concept of individual freedom, economic ownership, and local production, this party appeals to a broad set of values around which Stoller wants to organize a new politics. We found this idea especially intriguing, so much so that after Matt left we continued to sketch out some of the features of what this party could look like.

For us, the appeal to a historical formation like the democratic-republican party highlights the challenge of a global capitalist system. In many ways, the current corporate ecology can be understood as a predictable outcome from the post-war system of global capital, ratified at The Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. Matt frames this issue early in our conversation by observing that our society has become one of consumption rather than production. He’s right. But part of that is priced into a global system where the U.S. dollar stands as the global reserve currency, effectively requiring that the U.S. consumes more than it produces. The challenge, then, can be understood in the following terms: how can a production-based political economy, like the democratic-republicans, emerge within a global financial system that all but requires a federal trade deficit? We’re eager to puzzle over this problem and are looking forward to the next time Matt can join us to continue this conversation. 

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beautifullosers.substack.com

Welcome to episode 9! This week we discuss Peter Sloterdijk’s 1983 opus, The Critique of Cynical Reason.

In order to do some justice to the breadth and depth of this work, we are offering two episodes dedicated to this text and its ideas. This first discussion focuses on its big picture themes and intellectual genealogy. Next week, we’ll dive into a more nuanced understanding of cynicism and its sister concept, kynicism. 

This discussion begins with the intellectual tradition that Sloterdijk is writing within. How does a theory of cynicism engage with the long history of enlightenment thought? We offer a couple of ways to think about how this book speaks to some of its intellectual forbearers, namely Immanuel Kant and Theodore Adorno. Sloterdijk argues that even from the beginning, the enlightenment was a mixed bag of goods and bads. Yes, the scientific method ushered in a new world of commerce, creativity, and class mobility, but it also facilitated systems of alienation and exploitation through logics of quantification and statistical analysis. 

Cynicism, defined as “enlightened false consciousness,” attends to the ways that this tradition of enlightenment-style thinking has failed. According to a Marxist tradition, ideology operates as a camera obscura that inverts our experience and perception of reality in ways that benefit the most powerful sectors of society. The primary “benefit” is the simple belief that the hierarchical structure of individuals and wealth is “natural.” The purpose of ideology critique is to shine a light on this distortion, offering the benighted (those occupied with “false consciousness”) an opportunity to understand the nature of their oppression and social reality, namely that it is merely the reification of an otherwise arbitrary distribution of capital. This moment of revelation, so the promise goes, is supposed to catalyze social revolution.

But what happens when we all understand that we are being duped, but all the same do nothing about it because we are convinced of our powerlessness? This is the figure and condition that Sloterdijk terms “enlightened false consciousness.” Sloterdijk suggests that this is the primary form of thinking and subjectivity today—that is, that we all know we are pawns in a game we cannot control, but have resigned ourselves to this depressing reality. The primary evidence for his position is fact that despite generations of ideological critique, political economy is still largely organized around systems of inequality. His goal is to figure out how to replace this form of cynicism with another, one that is more deeply rooted in the rebellious strain of cynicism found in the Greek figure Diogenes, who Sloterdijk calls a “kynic.”

Our initial discussion offers distinctions about different levels of cynicism and cynical reason. On the level of the individual, cynicism may provide a powerful tool of critique and an analysis of power; however, on the level of the institutional, cynicism may reify or justify staid power relationships and systems of injustice. How does a philosophical attitude like cynicism transform under different scales of social organization (from the individual to the institutional)?

We also point to ways that cynicism can help us understand some of the major discussions of our particular political moment. This conversation was recorded just as organizations began promoting police policy reforms like “8 Can’t Wait.” We take up these policy suggestions within the context of Sloterdijk’s cynicism in order to show how cynical reason can reveal blindspots in contemporary politics. 

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beautifullosers.substack.com

Hi and welcome to episode 8 of Beautiful Losers.

The emergence of reading lists about racism and anti-racism in the weeks following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor is a promising response in a post-literary era. Given that many are doing their best to practice social distancing, it makes sense that Americans are turning to texts in order to better educate themselves about the deep structural injustices that have shaped our political economy. Not all books are created equal, as Matt Taibi has recently explored in an article about the book White Fragility. Despite this, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time have topped Amazon best seller lists for weeks now. But what does it mean to read a book? Does reading itself liberate us from a system of violence? Does critical reading yield a better understanding; does a better understanding yield better results?

Your Beautiful Losers offer a different kind of reading for this week’s episode. We take up Roger Reeve’s 2017 epic poem, “Domestic Violence,” which presents a Dante-inspired journey into the underworld from the perspective of Louis Till, father of Emmett Till. Ezra Pound plays the role of Virgil, his guide through histories, cycles, and systems of violence. Richly wrought, this poem rewards careful reading and rereading. In the public fervor to pick up new books by authors that engage with race, we find Reeves’ poem stands alone in presenting the complex psychological, social, structural, and cultural systems of violence that have defined African American culture for hundreds of years. The poem collides this history with a specific literary history, and in doing so shows how cultural institutions that seem to operate independent of social and political spheres of influence can also unknowingly participate in and sustain this system of racialized violence.

We’re extremely pleased by the recent call to read more; after all, critical engagement with texts is what drew us into the study of English Literature. This episode begins in this tenor, reflecting on why we chose to pursue advanced degrees in literature (instead of in discipline like philosophy, for example). For us, the tradition of critical inquiry in literary studies offered a greater appreciation of discursive complexity. The inherit interdisciplinary approach that literary studies requires—because the objects of study themselves engage with fields ranging across aesthetics, anthropology, psychology, economics, political theory, and countless other domains and methodologies—demands a mode of reading that can accommodate multiple and sometimes contradictory views. 

Despite the polysemous modes of reading listed above, what unites all of these discourses within the frame of literary studies is the practice of close reading itself. Our engagement with Reeves’ poem is an example of this practice in action. We don’t present a grand unifying theory of the poem, nor do we assert that our reading is the only viable one, but we do defend our position by grounding our claims in the images and mechanics of the text itself. We encourage everyone to read and listen to the poem to engage with the text for themselves. We hope that our discussion exemplifies a way of reading that critically engages with texts; develops new ideas and ways of understanding; and constructively adds to a broader conversation about race, culture, and violence in the United States. In an era where discourse is defined by 280 character screeds, nuance and analysis are put aside in favor of bald assertions and polemic claims; have no fear, dear listener, for although the practices of listening, understanding, and critically engaging with ideas are fading away, your Beautiful Losers will continue to sing their swan songs: shanti, shanti, shanti.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beautifullosers.substack.com

Welcome to Beautiful Losers episode 7! This episode was recorded a few weeks ago, before the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and protests that followed.

We take up a handful of texts that exemplify or interrogate the limit of critique, namely the practice of inquiry that has developed within the context of the university and the humanities since the enlightenment. This episode is both a capstone of a unit of thinking as well as an introduction to a new set of themes that we will continue to explore. As always we are perpetually concluding and beginning anew.

Three texts are under discussion today: Francois Furstenberg’s op-ed “University Leaders Are Failing,” Bruno Latour’s “Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” and Adolph Reed, Jr.’s “Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism.”

Francois, Bruno, and Adolph make for an odd threesome, different as they are when it comes nationality, academic discipline, theoretical foundation, and methodology. These articles don’t talk to one another as much as they speak to overlapping themes and questions: What is the purpose of the university? Who does it serve? What form of discourse can appropriately adjudicate matters of difference and disagreement?

Beyond a particular focus on the university, these questions lead us to a more foundational relationship between the systems and structures of knowledge, on the one hand, and the often surprising and unexpected fruits of those systems, on the other. We make the case that another discursive formation is needed to help adjudicate and manage this relationship. We acutely feel the loss of a common cultural ground in the face of increasingly isolated and systemically specialized social systems. Your Beautiful Losers know too well that calls for a “common cultural framework” can also lead to reactionary outcomes; we do not think that pandora’s box can re-furl itself.

Our modernist question: How to best manage a variegated socio-political landscape? While we don’t have an answer at the present moment, we are receptive to misleading answers and frameworks that distract from the fundamental, systemic dynamics at work in our society. 

The University Without Finances

Furstenberg’s Op-Ed makes a case for the mishandling of university financial resources, evinced by his institution’s capital management strategy during the pandemic. This piece is emblematic of the “bad thinking” often displayed by beautiful losers. To us, Furstenberg’s complaint sounds like a dressed-up version of grad students complaining about their stipends.

While we’re sympathetic to his plight, Furstenberg makes his case by appealing to a higher morality, one that values the material conditions of professors in the way that Furstenberg does. A technical analysis of financial risk mitigation and management, an appraisal of balance-sheet strength, an analysis of university asset allocation, or even a basic understanding of how the financial operations of a modern research university management company operate are all absent. Furstenberg wants a seat at the table, but doesn’t provide any reason for management to take him seriously. Nor is he making a case for his colleagues to make a radical break from the university until their issues are meant. The result is, as they say, “a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Criticizing Critique: Are we all conspiracy theorists now?

Latour’s landmark 2003 essay examines how the intellectual tools of critique can fuel and shape the very politics that critique itself, as an enlightenment project that celebrated the powers of reason and science over superstition and prejudice, sought to eradicate via the methodology of evidenced illumination. Think here of how the contemporary Right employs anti-racist arguments against the Left, who they accuse (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly) of prejudice in its many varieties. Celebrated though it might have been by Enlightenment thinkers, the objectivity of science does little to help political argument and analysis when the legitimacy of science itself crumbles under the weight of pessimism in a postmodern age that lacks legitimating grand narratives. Think, for example, about longstanding debates about the legitimacy of climate change. These debates have already been won, but we continue hurtling toward the precipice of a disaster. 

En route to sketching out this state of affairs, Latour makes a prescient observation about the relationship between critique and conspiracy. Latour spent his career as a theorist of scientific knowledge who questioned and challenged the epistemology of modern science. He did so in order to help improve science from within—to help us become better, sharper, and more sensitive critical thinkers. In this article, then, he grapples with the fact that the same intellectual moves he made to better critique and scientific knowledge can also be used to undermine the entire Enlightenment project of science. 

Critique is an inherently negative project. Critics break and pull things down in order to put them back together in a way that produces better or more accurate understanding. Nothing within the methodology of critique demands that what follows the act of critique must adhere to a specific moral or political outcome. It’s a process and a methodology, not an ethics or a moral system. There is no guarantee to critique.

Latour turns to Martin Heidegger’s use of “the thing” and the way that Heidegger’s phenomenology burdens an object with a host of phenomenological, historical, social, material, and economic conditions. The attempt is to tie an analysis so deeply within a specific framework that it can’t be decontextualized. This effect is something like super-contextualization. Can we provide enough context, and make context so important and essential that no one believes their understanding is complete without context? The idea is compelling because it seems to offer a positive alternative to the negative project of critique, which you can see today in the negativism that pervades all political discourse on and off social media. Latour seeks to build rather than tear down, and to him this means channeling Heidegger’s call to re-contextualize the world in a way that escapes how humanity tends to oversimplify, desacralize, and disenchant objects, ourselves, and the relations between those two phenomena. Still, we remain skeptical: bad faith actors, or good faith actors that disagree with your context will always be able to deploy critical thinking tools toward other ends. 

Despite our skepticism, we admire Latour’s effort to turn criticism from a negative practice into a positive one:

“The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly between antifetishism and positivism like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya, but the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution. I am aware that to get at the heart of this argument one would have to renew also what it means to be a constructivist, but I have said enough to indicate the direction of critique, not away but toward the gathering, the Thing. Not westward, but, so to speak, eastward.”

The call to engage in a more positive program strikes us as correct, but it remains to be seen what that positive program will look like. Pragmatically, it seems to us that it must move outside of the domain of the university proper and into the broader social world. Week after week it seems that your beautiful losers lament the disparity between the kind of thinking available in university vs. the kind of thinking taken up in publicly available media. There needs to be a more active engagement with the world. But how to do this without turning the university into a big consulting firm remains to be seen. 

Essentially Anti-Racist

Finally, Reed Jr.’s article disentangles and demystifies the ways that race and class become intermingled and essentialized through modern civil rights programs and business structures. 

This conversation was recorded before the protests, before the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and many others. It continues a theme we had been discussing for a number of weeks: what is the relationship between race and class and how do these two discourses interact with each other in ways that are both productive and unproductive?

Reed makes a strong case against the ubiquity of race and racism as an “essential” framework. In this case, “essential” refers to the ways that any idea (race, gender, identity) is positioned as a constant, universal feature of human existence. Reed points to the ways that thinking about race essentially was a specific 19th century strategy meant to include a poorer white class into the power dynamics of the southern aristocracy. Elsewhere Reed has taken this argument to speak out against organizations like the 1619 Project and Black Lives Matter. Reed’s point is not that these power dynamics don’t exist or aren’t pernicious, but rather that they must be understood as specific strategies that are deployed in order to protect material interests. Similar to Walter Benn Michaels, Reed argues that the progressive versions of anti-racism, insofar as they are focused on addressing the essential characteristic of race and not the material conditions of racist policies, will always fail to address the class-based problem that is racism. 

If Latour outlines some of the shortcomings of critique from within the vantage of the university, then Reed does the same, but more forcefully argues and grounds his analysis in contemporary cultural dynamics. 

This is not to say that we feel that the answer to the problems of critique are found in the work of Adolph Reed Jr., but his writing offers a powerful testament to the power of critique and critical thinking—namely, the ability to demystify the operations of culture in order to point to the underlying dynamics that are motivating action, duplicity, and the like. 

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beautifullosers.substack.com

Welcome to Beautiful Losers Episode 6! 

We decided to take a break from our usual format and offer a more extemporaneous episode. With only a handful of notes and a couple random articles, your beautiful losers examined their intellectual scars from graduate school, considered how “genius” is a word that should be returned (especially as it relates to Elon Musk), and mused about some of the empty rhetoric of comfort provided by both corporations and politicians.

One theme that cuts through most of this episode is the cost of an intellectual life. Your beautiful losers share a certain melancholic spirit. In the medieval period, melancholy was the disposition of the intellectual, so it’s fitting that our own self-assessment can lead us down this path. For us, melancholy describes a state where one is burdened with two knowledges. First, the knowledge of the workings of the world and its shortcomings. Second, the knowledge that our first knowledge is inadequate to provide any substantive change. 

The first half of our conversation is an honest examination of some of the difficulties of graduate school training set against some of the glaring blindspots that are present within the modern university. We have trained ourselves to be among the very best critical thinkers and writers that this society and its institutions can produce, but was the cost of such training worth it? We find ourselves at a paradox: our intellectual prowess was hard-earned and difficult, but what does it matter if it can’t be better integrated into a more expansive concept of a career? This tension is felt acutely in the humanities, not only because the job prospects within humanities departments are grim, but more importantly because the humanities are stewards for the modes and means of thinking that underpins all social frameworks, including business, politics, and culture. We not only study the arguments, claims, systems of logic, and practices of society and culture; we provide the language to communicate these ideas to different audiences.

The conversation about our education is foundational and incomplete. While we both believe there is an invaluable resource found in the intellectual tradition that we come from, we also believe that the institution does a very poor job of preparing people to take that tradition out of the academy itself. This is a problem that is quickly coming to a head, as departments shrink and tenure track lines disappear, there will be more and more humanities PhDs that are looking to enter the professional business community. We would all be wise to consider the role that the humanities will play in these non-academic contexts. For us, part of this work begins with acknowledging the strange history of the modern university. While it has layers of 21st century corporate and non-profit business design and performance metrics, it also has flashes of historical aristocratic privilege and is also, at its heart, a medieval institution based around an ascetic and monastic version of “the life of the mind.” These contradictory forces make for a confused and confusing social and business ecology, one that must be seriously reexamined and ultimately reformed. We also feel it would do most colleges and departments well to understand the basic dynamics of a supply/demand-based economy. 

This episode is marked with doubt, self-examination, and careful consideration. Those traits are curiously absent when it comes to a figure like Elon Musk, a “genius” who is hailed as a “real life” Tony Stark and now rebranded as an anti-coronavirus crusader. For us, Elon is just another person. Not a genius, but not a fool. While we strongly believe that the word “genius” needs to go away, we also take some time to point to the specific business incentives that Elon is working toward. For us, the work of intellectuals is not to be swayed by a public-relations media blitz, or to be seduced by the siren song of the handsome entrepreneur. Similarly, we should avoid demonizing or vilifying these individuals. We are all motivated by various incentive structures. Understanding the systems that motivate individual action is more productive than arguing from a place of emotional fervor. In this light, Elon is a merely person that is trying to hit certain corporate benchmarks in order to make a lot of money. His moves in welding public sentiment remind us of other populist political figures, and he has a canny way of positioning himself as an outsider of the state, while it is the state’s subsidies that have allowed him to grow a vast personal fortune. If these behaviors are odious, then one should work to change the incentive structure; the rest is just noise. 

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beautifullosers.substack.com

Hello and welcome to Beautiful Losers episode 5! Some housekeeping items:

Follow us on twitter @beauty_losers and feel free to send us things to look at or just give us a hello. We’ll repost good writing and things we can’t get to on the show.

As promised, we have a very special episode today, featuring an interview with Zachary D. Carter, author of The Price Of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes.

Zach was a joy and a delight to put up with our barrage of questions about Keynes’ idealized economic and social vision: Bloomsbury for all. Our excitement to engage with a writer like Zach is palpable on the episode, we may have even startled him with our enthusiasm (to misquote Cpt. James T. Kirk: Overthinking is our business).

Afterwards we recorded a little post-interview reflection and worked out some of our own ideas about Keynes and contemporary notions of political and fiscal power.

Keynes was many things to many people, but Zach’s book presents him in a particularly modernist frame. Like the rest of his modernist cohort in Bloomsbury, Keynes was broken by WWI. He, thanks to his role in the treasury ministry, saw the breaks at all levels of government and society. In matters of politics and public engagement he maintained his optimism and continued to push for economic reforms to grow welfare for all. His positive program was not only an economic policy, but a personal virtue. He maintained a deep respect for human dignity and intellect, even with his critics and economic rivals.

Besides presenting a case for Keynes as the last philosopher of the enlightenment; a thinker who did for economics what Wittgenstein did for philosophy, Keynes is also written under the sign of Saturn: he is a person of deep melancholy. He was a Cassandra. Fated to know the future, but powerless to bring about the vision of public-investment and monetary policy that could dial the clock back to 1913; to his idyllic days of salons with Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russel, and Duncan Grant. 

Zach’s book is an instant classic, surely and one that demands serious engagement and careful consideration. It is also a page-turner, with moments of great drama, personality, character. Never did we think we would sympathize with someone like Friedrich von Hayek (founder of the modern conservative movement), yet under Zach’s careful hand even those who inspired your ideological opposites are drawn with compassion and care.

While we loved every moment that we had with Zach, we regret that we didn’t get to ALL of our questions. Further examination about the role of the military and force as a tool that works with state power (and money) to maintain international trade and increase of wealth is a complex issue that deserves its own conversation. What would a program of public-investment look like today? Does MMT break with foundational tenets of Keynes, or does it make a 21st century case for his theory? And the questions could go on and on and on….

After the interview your Beautiful Losers made some additional observations about the importance of Keynes and why we think it’s time, a hundred years later, to seriously engage with his ideas. 

Keynes’ theory of money and his engagement with Wittgenstein’s landmark Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus strikes us as a particularly “systems-theory” approach to thinking about the money system. By systems-theory we’re referring to the interdisciplinary intellectual movement in the postwar period that sought to provide a meta analysis of how all systems work (biological, ecological, social, physical, etc). A key distinction that systems theory makes is to understand the limit or boundary of a system. In systems theory, this distinction is presented as the system vs the environment (the inside vs the outside). The system determines for itself what counts as information (your thermostat is designed to recognize the information of temperature; it does not recognize the information of music that may be playing in the background). Importantly, the system emerges as (or is designed with) its own rule-set for what qualifies as information. 

This simple distinction has massive consequences for how we think about the purview of different social systems. When we consider Keynes’ engagement with Wittgenstein, it seems to us that Keynes begins to make a similar distinction with how he thinks about the system of money and the system of politics.

Zach frames the import of the Tractatus nicely:

In Wittgenstein’s view, there are some truths that can be investigated, discussed, and debated meaningfully—things that can be “said” intelligibly. That realm is essentially the world of facts which can be uncovered by empirical science. But nearly everything that philosophers concern themselves with — the good, rationality, logic—is outside the territory of meaningful linguistic expression. Even logic is part of the internal architecture of language itself. No one can speak meaningfully about anything without logic, but there is nothing meaningful that philosophers can say about how logic itself works; that is ultimately mystical.

Zach notes that Keynes major work at this time was A Treatise on Probability was reconciling GE Moore’s Principa Ethica. Zach positions Keynes’ work between Moore and Wittgenstein:

At its heart, A Treatise on Probability was an attempt to apply the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment to probability and uncertainty, hoping to reveal deep truths about rationality itself. Wittgenstein, by contrast, argued that this entire enterprise was nonsense—literally non-sense—an effort to express something with words that language could not in fact express. Keynes, according to Wittgenstein was attempting to provide rigor and precision to realms that were fundamentally mystical. “Whereof one cannot steak,” Wittgenstein wrote, “thereof one must be silent.” Keynes could examine patterns of human behavior and study trends in the way people actually made decisions; that was science, a subject of meaningful inquiry. But he could not investigate rationality itself. Rationality simply was—or was not. (116)

Although Keynes didn’t achieve his objective with Probability, his engagement with Wittgenstein’s arguments set him on a path that would eventually lead him to consider a foundational question of economics: what is money?

Carter charts the geopolitical forces and attendant central bank actions that lead to outlier events like hyperinflation. Keynes is constantly wrestled with the problem that money, as a symbolic object tied to a certain commodity price (gold) is also subject to forces that are untethered to the material world (central banks can print more of it, and also set interest rates for it). 

It wasn’t until after the great depression that Keynes begins to fundamentally rethink money. And it’s thanks to his study of Babylonian currency that he does so:

Keynes has discovered an ancient history that upended some basic tenets of economics going back to Adam Smith and undermined nearly three centuries of Enlightenment political theory. Ever since Thomas Hobbes ad published Leviathan in 1651, most European philosophers had imagined government as an artificial imposition on what Hobbes called “the state of nature.” For Hobbes, the state of nature was a nightmare of violent disorder where life was “nasty, brutish and short,” making government—specifically monarchy—a source of human salvation. Even thinkers who rejected Hobbes’ politics accepted his history. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith had presented markets for trade as a primordial force that came into being long before the development of the political state. Commercial life had started with people bartering goods, trading goats for wheat or cloth for buttons. They eventually adopted money as a medium of exchange, since passing tokens to each other proved to be more convenient that toting wagonloads of cumbersome goods. All of this activity had taken place among free individuals undisturbed by the machinations of capricious, meddling sovereigns, who entered the scene much later. The market was natural, why the state was a relatively recent artifice that intervened in or distorted the indie-dented rhythms of trade.

Studying Athens, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, and Rome, Keynes concluded that this history was all wrong. Capitalism itself was an ancient creation of government, dating back at least as far as the Babylonian Empire of the third millennium B.C.” (187-8)

Keynes flips the received history on its head. There is no “natural” market state, rather markets are a function of political decision making. Markets are a system that have always been the product of  This inversion of Smith’s argument, which supported with historical evidence rather than fiat, and his rejection of a Hobbesian worldview that makes a distinction between nature and culture represents a fundamental break in economic theory. 

Smith and other thinkers had been led astray by confusing the development of coinage with the invention of money. Coinage, according to Keynes, was “just a piece of bold vanity…with no far-reaching importance”; money had existed in “representative” form much longer. Its real significance was as a “unit of account” —the demarcation of best and “the legal discharge of obligations,” with governments had been maintaining in legerbooks, scrolls, or clay tablets for millennia. Powerful, economically sophisticated empires had developed without using coinage at all.” (188)

Money, he argued, was an inherently political tool. It was the state that determined what substance—gold, paper, whatever—actually counted as money—what “thing” people and the government would accept as valid payment.” (189)

Carter continues to trace how Keynes’ thesis about money as a political tool has survived further historical scrutiny. Even anti-keynsian economic historians accept this fundamental relationship between state and money.

Keynes’ thesis owes much to his historical research of ancient currency, but it also owes something with Wittgenstein’s work on logic. Rather than prop up ideas like “nature,” which inform metaphysical notions like the invisible hand or justify a laissez-faire approach to monetary policy, Keynes demystifies money into what it really is: a tool of the state to manage debtor/creditor obligations. Think of it like other state-managed resources: military, water, electricity, oil.

The choice is not between a regulating philosophy and a deregulating philosophy, but rather because money is always a tool of the state, how should we best manage it? Advocates for light regulation often refer to an Adam Smith/Thomas Hobbes informed theory of “nature.” Phrases like let “the market decide outcomes” rely on a notion of an ahistorical force called “money” and an ahistorical system of natural exchange called “the market.” Neither of these assumptions are true. Arguments for laissez-faire approaches to monetary policy are not based on philosophic belief, they are based on the pragmatic and beneficial outcomes to those that make the argument. The metaphysical claims are nothing more than an effective rhetorical tool.

Why is this important today? We are seeing unprecedented action from the Federal Reserve. We are seeing politicians debating and passing legislation that is pumping in trillions of dollars to help stabilize the economy. Government is making choices about how to manage this resource, and we fool ourselves if we rely on premodern notions of money and value and the metaphysics of “the market.”

Government actions are important, but they do not serve an abstract end, they serve very real and tangible political and social ends. The best way to serve your interests is to understand what these new policies do and how they work. Like Keynes, the path forward must be first grounded in understanding and analysis, and then followed by a positive program of reform that builds toward the vision of society that you want.

The deployment of arguments like “how are you going to pay for it,” knowingly or unknowingly fail to account for Keynes’ discovery about the relationships between money, state power, and financial policy. Such questions draw a person into an argument about balance-sheets and tax policy, instead of pressing what the terms of the debate really are: money is a tool of government, how are we going to use this tool to maximize benefit across the entire social sphere?

This is the debate we should be having. There are compelling arguments across a wide spectrum of policy choices and political outcomes. Scarcity is not the force that is driving our monetary policy, thanks in part to the wealth of American resources and the rich history of our industrial expansion; the program of management, public-investment, and the question of how to best use the tool of money given our wealth is the real issue. 

We hope this small engagement with Keynes and Zach Carter’s book is enough to get you to go out and grab a copy. If you take issue with the above, we would love to hear your case in the comments below.

Stay Beautiful,

Your Losers

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beautifullosers.substack.com

This week we consider the hit Netlfix TV show Never Have I Ever and then later launch into an examination of race, class, and neoliberalism, with help from some essays by Walter Benn Michaels. As with many of these early episodes, we’re laying a groundwork for future thinking. We hope you enjoy the episode. If you haven’t yet, subscribe to our substack (beautifullosers.substack.com) and join in on the conversation. Rate us on Apple Podcasts (or elsewhere) and share the show with your friends. We’re looking forward to building the community with you.

This discussion is a great lead-in to a VERY SPECIAL episode that we’ll be dropping tomorrow night. So keep your dials tuned to your Beautiful Losers because we’ll be hitting you with a double feature.

Also, the people have spoken and we have answered: you can find us on Twitter @beauty_losers - hit us up with recommendations, ideas, articles, and cat memes.

The Uses and Abuses of Morality as it Relates to SARS-CoV-2 for Life 

We begin our discussion by examining the various social and public health pressures that color life in the age of SARS-CoV-2. How does one best mitigate the risks associated with SARS-CoV-2? Do we have a responsibility to police each other? What are the ethical and moral implications of acquiring PPE that could be used by frontline workers? 

Since we recorded this conversation in early May, the debate has only become more acute. The culture wars of the 20th century rear their ugly head once again. Every perspective and opinion is warped according to a binary distinction: pro/con.

It feels like your Beautiful Losers must make this point every episode: thinking along an axis of binaries serves no one. In such an environment, no productive dialogue is possible. The battle lines are set and each side engages in a war of attrition where everyone loses and nothing changes.

Alex poses the question in its social context, which is important because so much of our actions are based on a politics of appearance: how does it look to peers if you take actions based on a different understanding of risk and risk mitigation? 

For us, the issue raises a series of issues about how individuals relate to political power. What is the responsibility of the state and what is the responsibility of the individual? When the state abdicates its leadership role, must the individual take on that responsibility? Our position is no. State power is different than individual power because it has the ability to coordinate vast amounts of resources and people. Individuals have a right and responsibility to do what is good for them, but they are not responsible for the health and well-being for all citizenry. 

As it relates to this issue: Given the ubiquity of the virus, and given that flights and interstate travel are still occurring, the question is not “should I travel yes or no,” but rather, “if I choose to travel, how can I best mitigate the risks of SARS-CoV-2?”

The pragmatic features of this situation are drawing us into a privatization of personal resilience, what we see as a more-pernicious form of a generally good doctrine regarding self-efficacy and work-ethic. 

Public frustration about individual choices should not land at the feet of individuals who are just trying to manage a risky situation. Instead, this frustration must land on the government (federal, state, local) and the government alone. 

Recent videos of people harassing each other about inadequate PPE or people harassing others because they ARE using PPE reveal a fundamental lack of understanding regarding political power and authority. However, individuals you disagree with are easier to call out than faceless bureaucracies, and so our frustration reduces us to the lowest common denominator: each other. We are all the poorer for it. 

Our opening remarks also briefly engage with how China is being deployed as a rhetorical tool to redirect responsibility from the White House. The use of a foreign power as a scapegoat for mismanaged affairs is a story as old as politics itself. This is a story that we have our eye on, and we’re keen to see how it plays over the course of the summer and into the fall. 

Seth links up the bellicose rhetoric regarding China with the bellicose international rhetoric in the early 20th century, explaining how the logical conclusion of that rhetoric lead to the greatest and most tragic military conflict of the 20th century: World War I. 

While we fully admit that using China as a rhetorical strategy is both dangerous (if we’re to learn lessons from the past) and dumb (because such rhetoric doesn’t actually address the crisis at hand), we must also admit that blindly defending other nations merely because your political enemies are attacking them, or in the name of a very weak-cosmopolitanism, is equally misguided. We want to avoid war at all costs, but we also cannot absolve nations that are explicitly in competition with America’s hegemony. The challenge is how to provide critique without slipping into jingoistic rhetoric.

SPOILER ALERT: WE WILL ALWAYS GIVE SPOILERS

Before we get into the show and the texts, we take a small detour to talk about our show’s relationship with spoilers. This is your spoiler warning for all episodes. Our show talks about culture, politics, society, and economics. To do so fully means we must discuss texts in their entirety.

As it relates to narrative, we vehemently reject the culture of “no spoilers” because we believe it assumes a facile understanding of narrative. In the words of the best book of the Bible (Ecclesiastes), there is nothing new under the sun. Listeners and readers have already been exposed to all forms of narrative. Protagonists seek something, they either achieve their goal or they don’t. Along the way they encounter obstacles. Sometimes they learn something. These three sentences effectively “spoil” every narrative.

Furthermore, it is our belief that the reason we consume narrative is NOT because of the novelty of plot, but because of the way in which the stories are told. Characters, setting, themes, ideas, relationships—these comprise the soul of narrative. Our appreciation of such narratives is not dictated by whether or not you know what happens in the third act or during the denouement.  

Never Have I Ever…Thought about Race and Class

This week’s episode introduces themes of race and class. Under discussion is the hit Netflix show Never Have I Ever, as well as a selection of interviews and essays by Walter Benn Michaels. 

Seth loves the show, Alex less so (spoiler alert: he grew to like it by the end). Regardless of our personal taste, we both acknowledge and appreciate how the show makes a good faith effort to add complexity and depth to every character, often in ways that resist TV comedy stereotypes. 

Never Have I Ever…Enjoyed Hysterical Realism

Alex accurately describes the genre of the show as “hysterical realism,” a genre distinction developed as a way to describe the early work of Zadie Smith. Hysterical realism presents a very difficult needle to thread. The text must hit on two levels: deliver a realistic and universal experience, but also indulge in absurd excess for humor. What makes this style so difficult to effectively manage is that the misappropriation of either the hysteria or the realism can “knock someone out” of the narrative and cause them to reject the narrative. Such reactions are almost visceral and not unlike Neo rejecting “the real” after being awoken from the Matrix. 

Seth agrees with the description but makes a case for how the show successfully manages the balancing act of hysterical realism. For him, it all comes down to the subtle motivations and character choices that inform the various worldview in the show. For example, the jock’s macho attitude is revealed to be grounded in a duty that he has to protect his sister with down-syndrome.

We present this nuance as the show’s parallax view on character. A single set of behaviors is presented in multiple ways and toward multiple ends. True motivations, influences, and structures are not revealed on the surface, but only emerge after characters are able to pierce through the veil of their own perceptive biases. 

Alex considers the way that the show engages with what Stuart Hall describes as “the politics of representation.” Hall considers how minorities are almost always represented in relationship to dominant forms of power. A presentation of racial existence may be presented as either inferior (essentially racist in a bad way) OR superior (essentially racist, but in a good way), but never as just another mode of being. Examples of this inversion are legion. The Oracle in the Matrix, for example. Spike Lee has described this formation as “The Magical Negro.” We find that individuals with “outsider status” do have special purchase on understanding forces of power and culture, but the trend to inscribe the experience of minorities within an exclusively outsider frame (for good or bad) is problematic because it forecloses the possibility of presenting minorities or marginalized subjects as actual people rather than iterations of positive or negative stereotypes. 

The Politics of Representation is a very difficult binary to escape, because it structures so much of how we’re conditioned to think about race in our culture. We find that Never Have I Ever makes a good faith attempt to resist this category. Devi’s struggles are both universal and specific to her. And though neither of us have ever been teenage girls, we found ourselves seeing the world through her eyes in a way that only a rich narrative can provide. Ironically, if there is a “magical” ethnicity, it’s presented through the voice of John McEnroe, perhaps the whitest of white men.

What further complicates the politics of representation is what becomes known as standpoint epistemology. Namely, the way that the subject of oppression becomes the essential category through which one must view power relations. This mode of reading was an essential tool in 60’s and 70’s scholarship that sought to further complicate how we consider issues of race and class. The zenith of this scholarship culminates with a demand to “hear the other speak,” to make room for the actual, first-hand accounts of oppression that were previously silenced.

Our own intellectual formation emerges in the wake of standpoint epistemology. While we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, we are also not blind to the ways that these 20th century critiques can themselves be weaponized against any other discursive practice that seeks to understand relationships between race, class, and power. 

Never Have I Ever…Been an Anti-Racist?

This discussion leads us to a number of readings by Walter Benn Michaels (WBM). 

For all the reasons that we love the show—and there are many—we identify that the show’s blind-spot is class.

Before diving into our thoughts on class, we feel it important to acknowledge that it is not the responsibility of a text to talk about all themes with equal depth and nuance. Such an expectation is unfair and impractical. The show doesn’t talk about class in an explicit way, but that doesn’t make it a poor show. We find that the ways in which it avoids a class-discussion to be symptomatic of a greater cultural trend, one we want to explore. 

As it should be clear to readers and listeners now: our mission is to resist binaries. A show’s merit is not based on its ability to speak to everyone’s pet interests; however, the ways that it engages with various themes should merit careful consideration and thought. 

Never Have I Ever presents a nuanced and empathetic look at ethnic and racial culture. It is both funny and at times heartwarming. It also deftly makes fun of contemporary culture by focusing on how ideas and assumptions about cultural difference are more operative than the cultures themselves.

The show struggles in its presentation of class. WBM notes that class is not an identity with the same robust appeal to metaphysics carried by the term “ethnicity.” One can imagine an impassioned plea to protect a cultural or religious symbol that decorates a person’s lawn by claiming that “this is my culture and we live in a pluralist community.” We struggle to imagine making a similar case for a rusted-out car with no tires and a person claiming that “my culture is poverty and it demands your respect.”

So, is class an identity category that deserves a place in an acronym that reduces identity a set of capital letters? In tracing the story of a girl growing up in America, what kind of work does the show do regarding our conception of class? The show presents the story of a person who wants to forge her personal identity while navigating multiple cultures. The logic of the show operates on its own without any explicit reference to class. Class is the invisible signifier that allows viewers to orient themselves as upper-middle class subjects. 

WBM argues that today we’re all—Left and Right alike—“anti-racist.” No one with any kind of visibility or legitimacy identifies as a racist in an explicit sense, and discourses of explicit hatred of the pre-Civil Rights era variety are difficult (but not impossible) to find. And yet we see the marks of racism everywhere we look. How, then, does anti-racism actually bolster contemporary forms of racism?

WBM answers this question by arguing that anti-racism’s appeal to a now largely defunct form of racism helps to naturalize wealth disparity by drawing our attention away from a form of oppression that doesn’t fit within the identity-political acronyms that limit our political imaginations and abilities to understand more subtle, post-racial forms of class oppression.

Here we pivot from Never Have I Ever to the WBM essays in order to better understand this thesis.

The show is crafty in its deployment of class vis-a-vis a certain tradition of neoliberal thinking. Beyond celebrating a cosmopolitan vision of race and ethnicity, the show’s characters betray an awareness of the limitation of this cosmopolitan utopia. Their commentary is refreshing for its insight, but ultimately offers no vision for what to do with cosmopolitanism beyond offering it a gentle ribbing.

In a particularly rich and complex moment, Devi the protagonist is guilted and bullied into snapping an Instagram with a young girl who wants a picture with Devi in her traditional Indian costume as a testament to her (ethnic) beauty. The gentle version of how the celebration of diversity can be weaponized to erase an individual subject hits hard and feels authentic. This is a great example of the show’s complex treatment of race and culture. It mocks cosmopolitanism while also celebrating it. 

This particular formation of “forced cultural celebration,” the ethical and moral demand put on nonwhite individuals living in a pluralist society, represents a certain genealogy of liberal theory, what Walter Benn Michaels calls a “left-leaning neoliberalism.” Whereas right-leaning neoliberalism uses racial tensions to double down on a xenophobic world-view of cultures at war with each other, the left version uses racial difference to erase an awareness of class. One is taught to celebrate their difference but not upset the social order. 

Walter Benn Michaels in his 2011 Jacobin interview makes a strong case for the failure of the Obama presidency according to its treatment of race, class, and cultural diversity. 

Important for understanding this critique of contemporary politics is the tension between neoliberalism (in all its forms) and populism (in all its forms). 

WBM differentiates neoliberalism between its left and right variances. In this view, Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton and Obama administrations represent a progression of neoliberal thinking — oftentimes a certain interpretation of Keynesian economic theory — that is not that dissimilar in its practical output from Eisenhower, Nixon, Regan, Bush I and Bush II. Trump is only a quasi-outlier; like Obama, he used a populist message to win election but his presidency to date has largely (though not entirely) fallen under the aegis of his neoliberal economic advisors. 

The shining example of left neoliberalism is The West Wing, but its antithesis is not merely a version of The West Wing with republicans in power. Its antithesis is best captured in something like Trailer Park Boys. 

As with neoliberalism, so too with populism. A reactionary populism helped Trump achieve an electoral college win in 2016. A similar wave of populist energy propelled the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 (when it accidentally became a national campaign) and in 2020 (when it was on track to win until all of the neoliberal candidates rallied around Biden after the South Carolina primary). Populism, as has been documented extensively everywhere, is a worldwide phenomenon, changing political landscapes in Europe, Asia, and South America. 

Never Have I Ever…Known What Neoliberalism Means

Alex situates multiple histories of neoliberalism with a handful of different figures. First with the British economist David Harvey, who uses the term to describe the form of capitalism that replaces Keynsian public-investment policies in the 70s and 80s. During this time, stagflation incites the working class due to low wage growth and a corporate trend away from public investment and unionized work toward corporate projects and non-unionized work. Harvey treats neoliberalism as a kind of revanchist strategy against the postwar public projects, and as a moral backlash against the excesses of the 1960s (think here of the rise of Thatcher and Reagan as “Moral Majority” politicians). Harvey synthesizes a set of traditions that WBM would refer to as the “right leaning” version of neoliberal practice. 

Another variety of neoliberalism comes from the work of Wendy Brown, who articulates a technocratic version of the neoliberal subject. Her work is largely indebted to the thought of Michel Foucault. Brown traces the formation of this subject to the 1920s and 1930s, grounding the intellectual genealogy of this subject in the Austrian school of economics, including that of the celebrated (by some) conservative theorist Friedrich von Hayek. In Brown’s interpretation, the subject that emerges in the 20th century is completely conditioned by a “business-oriented” way of looking at the world. More contemporary writers have reflected on things like the “financialization” of everyday life, or how everything that we do is presented in terms of work, efficiency, output, and optimization. Brown observes that this is fundamentally a different way of thinking about human life, and its one that curiously coincides with the emergence of these neoliberal strategies. Readers and listeners who have used online dating apps like Tinder or OKCupid, or those that have participated in something like CrossFit: consider how everything that you do is structured around certain criteria of performance and thinking according to metrics, success, and improvement. Your Beautiful losers are not advocating for the wholesale rejection of this kind of thinking, but we must become more attuned and aware to how these modes of thinking and being are not natural (no mode of being is), but rather the product of a certain economic logic. Our own position is that this logic can be quite effective, but must be utilized strategically, not as the base code for human life. 

Another version of neoliberalism appears in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History. He argues that the post-war liberal order is here to stay (for better or worse), and that our only way forward is to work within the structure of power as it has coalesced in the postwar period. This version presents a kind of triumphalism of the liberal order. Like it or not, neoliberalism here to stay. And indeed, when the options of capital are presented as a binary between a 19th century imperial worldview and a 20th century liberal worldview, most will choose the latter with ease. As Zizek remarks regarding climate change: it’s easier to imagine the end of the world via climate change than it is to imagine the end of capital as the dominant structure of social and political power. We agree with Zizek on this point, but on no other point (not really, but Zizek needs to come on the show so that we can hold him accountable for some of his theoretical excesses). 

Finally, WBM presents a critical view of Left neoliberalism. We might call this, to borrow from WBM, an anti-racist neoliberalism. This version highlights the left’s recourse to a theory of racial diversity that appears progressive and egalitarian in its celebration of intersectional diversity, but which erases class oppression by suggesting that the ideal model of a just society is one where the top 1% are still allowed to dominate so long as their demographics match those of society. This version of Left neoliberalism implies that economic domination is essentially okay so long as the wealthy are appropriately diverse in their demographic makeup. 

WBM suggests that this neoliberal formation is detrimental to the project of alleviating inequality. He argues that this version of neoliberalism turns a discussion about inequality into a discussion about not respecting difference. He is right to point out that you can respect difference until you’re blue in the face, but that respect is not going to help someone pay their bills or send their child to college. WBM argues that the issue of inequality is about the inequality of capital, not the inequality of respect. It’s both a banal observation, but an essential one. WBM poses a simple, but poignant rhetorical question: if you “eliminate” racism, but still have massive inequality, have you solved the problems of society? If not, then what was the ultimate purpose of “eliminating” racism? 

The purpose-driven and pragmatic features of the WBM critique are refreshing because they bring us back to defining the key questions that should be driving our political economy. How do we improve the state of inequality within the context of American capitalism? We celebrate the vision of the world that a show like Never Have I Everoffers; we just want more people to be able to access that world. It seems that the only way that can be achieved is by radically increasing the wealth and welfare of the lower and middle classes. 

Michaels also offers some strong words for the culture that has emerged in the university. He argues that that the academy and the corporation share the same motives and desires. Despite their surface-level differences, they are motivated by the same worldview; both reify and establish the same structures of power. Students flock to the university because they think it’s going to provide them modes and means of thinking that will allow them to challenge and critique structures of power. That work does happen, but it doesn’t happen by design. The design of each institution is the same and the general cultural output feeds the same Ouroboros. 

This framing leads us to take a deeper look at the ways that both mainstream political parties in the United States serve the same end. While we want to write off extremists who say “there is no difference between either party,” we are forced to reconcile the fact that if you look at the major economic policies from both the GOP and the Dems, a unified vision of American economic power emerges.

We want to emphasize that this is not the only vision of American power and leadership that is available to us. It is merely the version of power that has emerged in the last 80 years. Your Beautiful Losers consider themselves patriots (though we cringe to use the word), and we champion a forgotten tradition of American leadership, one that is based in a tradition of public-investment and the construction of a positive program that promotes wealth for all mankind. 

“Professors are indifferent to the phenomenon of exploitation.”

We conclude our episode by considering what options are available to us in the future. Like any discussion on this podcast, it ends with a diagnosis of the many failures of the left. While a right-leaning populism has been successful around the world (and we consider this to be a step backwards), we have yet to see a left-wing populism take root in any meaningful way. Perhaps the tension between neoliberalism and populism itself must become undone. The battle lines are too charged and there is no longer any hope of a productive dialogue. 

We agree with WBM that class will always be the most important issue for thinking about political economy. We also agree that this is the hardest thing to talk about in a productive way. It takes careful and dedicated study on topics like monetary policy, corporate structure, public and private investment, domestic and international finance, and how all of these forces help provide the financial bedrock for American life. 

WBM identifies the way that class lacks an aesthetic quality. This lacking aesthetic is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to talk about compared to something like cultural or racial difference.  WBM asserts that there is no aesthetic of the poor, and therefore there can be no aesthetic framework that can be integrated into a broader cultural paradigm. Titanic, the film, codes its treatment of class by presenting and Irish jig in the belly of the ship. Similarly, Jo, in the film version of Little Women, uses dancing with poor Italian immigrants to signify her alignment with the working class. In both cases, cultural ethnic markers signify class distinctions. The journeys for both characters toward their eventual maturity means leaving these cultural markers (and proximity to the poor) behind. Rose, Jo, and Devi all find themselves within supposedly classless societies, and we are all the poorer for it. 

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