Money on the Left

Rob and Scott return to their dialog about modernism, inflation, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s celebrated 1925 novel The Great Gatsby (click here for Part 1). During their conversation, our co-hosts forge connections between the novel’s many complications of time and space and the attitudes to money and identity explored in the first part of this mini-series. For instance, they consider The Great Gatsby’s unusual manner of imagining the spatial dis/connectedness of West Egg, the ‘Valley of Ashes’ and New York City; the strange ways in which characters seem to be passively ‘borne’ between these locations; the ambiguous role that bonds of various kinds play in the text; and Nick Carraway’s blurry impressionist method of narrating (or accounting for) the events of the story. Along the way, Rob and Scott revisit one of the text’s most enduring symbols, the elusive figure of the green light, which burns bright from the end of Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s dock on Long Island Sound. Associated both with U.S. money and the marvel of electricity, the novel’s green light points to the powers of public provisioning that conduct modern life and serves as a mysterious beacon of hope in which, we’re told, Gatsby continues to believe until the end. For Rob and Scott, this green light reveals the novel’s “political unconscious,” here understood as the process by which a repressed history of public provisioning nevertheless comes to contour the modern novel’s many formal and affective constructions. Finally, our co-hosts point to the U.S. government’s mass printing of copies of The Great Gatsby for its G.I.s during WW2, an act of public provisioning that proved foundational for the subsequent widespread popularity of Fitzgerald’s book and its canonization of as a classic of American literary modernism. Novel printer go brrr…!

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening to Anyone but Me” EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

We speak with Tim Ridlen about his new book, Intelligent Action: A History of Artistic Research, Aesthetic Experience, and Artists in Academia (Rutgers University Press, 2024). Ridlen holds a PhD in Art History from the University of California, San Diego and is currently Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Film, Animation, and New Media at the University of Tampa. In Intelligent Action, Ridlen challenges dominant readings of mid-20th Century art preoccupied with critiques of the commodity form by shifting critical focus from the familiar spaces of the gallery & museum to the contested scenes of US higher education. 

Through archival research and analysis of artworks by Gyorgy Kepes, Allan Kaprow, Mel Bochner, and Suzanne Lacy, among others, Intelligent Action examines how these artists brought alternatives to dominant conceptions of research and knowledge production. The book is organized around specific institutional formations—artistic research centers, proposals, exhibitions on college campuses, and the establishment of new schools or pedagogic programs. Formal and social analysis demonstrate how artists responded to ideas of research, knowledge production, information, and pedagogy. Works discussed were produced between 1958 and 1975, a moment when boundaries between media were breaking down in response to technological, cultural, and generational change. In the context of academia, these artistic practices have taken up the look, feel, or language of various research and teaching practices. In some cases, artists bent to the demands of the cold war research university, while in others, artists developed new modes of practice and pedagogy. Reading these works through their institutional histories, Ridlen shows how artistic research practices and artistic subjectivity developed in the long 1960s within and alongside academia, transforming the role of artists in the process.

During our discussion, we consider the significance of Ridlen’s theorization of "intelligent action" for a democratic politics centered around public money, educational provisioning, and aesthetic experimentation.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

This month we are re-publishing our conversation with Steven Attewell along with a new written transcript and episode graphic. Attewell is author of the incredible book, People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America from FDR to Reagan, published in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania Press. The book examines the history of job creation programs in the United States from the Great Depression to the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978.

Unfortunately, Attwell passed away last spring. Yet his work endures as historically robust and eminently humane approach to public policy. We dedicate this re-publication to his legacy. 

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

We speak with Josefina Li, Assistant Director of the International Program Center at Bemidji State University and doctoral candidate at University of Missouri, Kansas City. Josefina’s dissertation research brings feminist and ecological economic traditions into conversation with Modern Monetary Theory. We first encountered Li's work at the inaugural “Money on the Left” conference, which was held at University of South Florida in Spring 2018. At that conference, Li delivered a paper that explored the prospects of developing community currencies and implementing job guarantee programs in tribal nations. We were thrilled to finally speak with Josefina on the podcast and to learn more about her ongoing project of envisioning a jobs guarantee program for an ecofeminist future.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Hosts Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) and Scott Ferguson (@videotroph) welcome Maggie Hennefeld (@magshenny) to the Superstructure podcast to discuss her essay, “Make America Laugh Again,” published in Minneapolis’s Star Tribune. Previously ridiculed, Kamala Harris’s signature laughter has emerged as an electrifying rallying cry for her last-minute candidacy for President of the United States. “Harris’ laughter has become a national symbol of collective healing,” Hennefeld argues, “affirming the powers of contagious joy to unite community across the bitter divisions of culture and identity. … [L]aughter is a lifeline for resistance against the global onslaught of authoritarian hate and fearmongering.” Analyzing the carnivalesque slogans and memes surrounding the Harris campaign, our conversation draws surprising parallels between feminist laughter in fin-de-siècle cinema and in contemporary online cultures. 

Maggie Hennefeld is a feminist scholar of silent cinema and professor in the Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature Department at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author of Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2024) and Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia University Press, 2018). She is also co-curator of the four-disc DVD/Blu-ray set Cinema’s First Nasty Women. 

Music: "Yum" from "This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening to Anyone but Me" EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

Rob Hawkes (@robbhawkes) and Scott Ferguson (@videotroph) kick off a new Superstructure series about money, modernism, and inflation by revisiting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s widely-read novel, The Great Gatsby (1925).  

In this first episode of the series, Rob and Scott complicate orthodox notions of inflation that treat economic crises past and present as mechanical results of excess money printing. They do so by reconsidering modernist art and literature’s fraught relations with notions of austerity and excess. While inflation has been associated, by modernist writers and scholars alike, with a crisis of faith in representation, Rob and Scott problematize reductive narratives that link economic, literary, and aesthetic exuberance to the relativization and loss of all value, offering limitation and privation as the only routes to sustainable creativity. Such narratives, they argue, not only mischaracterize the generativity of modernist experimentation, but also dangerously undermine modernism’s transformative challenges to unjust social orders, including hierarchies of race, class, gender and sexuality.  

Working out a heterodox alternative, Rob and Scott turn to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, well-known for holding the exuberance of the jazz age and the relativising effects of its cubist narrative in tension with the deflationary impacts of the various crashes the novel thematizes and attempts to contain. In the past, scholars and critics have interpreted Gatsby as a cautionary tale, one that apparently warns against the extravagances of the Roaring Twenties and even foretells the coming Wall Street crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression. In Rob and Scott’s account, by contrast, Fritzgerald’s text unleashes rich experimental energies that point beyond the rigid austerity/excess binary through which it is frequently framed. They acknowledge how the book’s preoccupation with private persons and desires can abet “monetary silencing,” Jakob Feinig’s term for the repression of monetary knowledge and participation. At the same time, however, Rob and Scott contend that the way Gatsby implicitly connects credit issuance to social critique and creativity harbors urgent lessons for contemporary debates about money, inflation and culture. 

Stay tuned for the second installment in this series. 

Music: "Yum" from "This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening to Anyone but Me" EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

We speak with Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the Open Markets Institute, about his forthcoming book, Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Democracy in Power is a highly detailed work of political and institutional history that recounts the struggle over electric power generation in the United States. It is also an agile experiment in heterodox economic and legal theory, which treats both political and electric power as contestable and malleable public goods. 

For Vaheesan, historical battles over electrification in the U.S. remind us that today’s green transition presents new opportunities for democratic participation and institution building. “Elected and other public officials in the United States who express a commitment to combating climate change … face a choice,” he writes, “decarbonize and maintain oligarchy or decarbonize and build democracy. Even as the net-­zero pledge has become a rallying cry in the fight against climate change, it should raise concerns for those committed to democracy.” 

During our conversation, Vaheesan lays bare the tragedy of “dirty power,” the concentration of inordinate powers to shape the global climate into increasingly fewer and usually unaccountable private hands. At the same time, he charts a clear and hopeful path for a just and democratic transition powered by clean and green energy. 

What is vital for this project, Vaheesan insists, is to expressly politicize and reshape the present monetary order in a manner that serves democratic rather than oligarchic control and interests. 

Please preorder Democracy in Power today through the University of Chicago Press website.

For more on this topic, see our previous interview with Vaheesan on the Superstructure podcast.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Money on the Left is joined by Dr. Chris Martin to discuss Modern Monetary Theory’s vital importance for the struggle to provide adequate housing for all. A Senior Research Fellow at the City Futures Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, Martin is a long-time tenant’s rights advocate in Australia with scholarly training in law and heterodox political economy. He is closely familiar with the rhetorical machinations–or “contrivances,” as he calls them–that attenuate the effectiveness of national housing policy in Australia and beyond. In 2023, Martin and his team of co-authors (including Julie Lawsome, Vivienne Milligan, Chris Hartley, Hal Paswon, and Jago Dodson) published a report that argued the government can and should provide adequate housing for everyone in Australia. Titled “Towards an Australian Housing and Homelessness Strategy: Understanding National Approaches in Contemporary Policy,” the report makes several noteworthy contributions to housing-for-all discourse, including figuring social housing as an integral part of a nation’s infrastructure. We speak with Martin about this report and its reception in Australian housing policy debates. We also ruminate about what housing-for-all movements in Australia, the US, and across the world stand to learn from each other. 

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Andrew J. Douglas, political theorist and professor of political science at Morehouse College, joins Money on the Left to discuss his latest article, “Modern Money and the Black University Concept,” published April 19, 2024, in Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice. 

In the article as in the interview, Andrew stages critical encounters between the little-studied but tremendously potent concept of the Black University–an alternative vision for higher education oriented to Pan-African research and community development–and recent public money-driven proposals, like the Uni Currency Project, that aim to activate colleges and universities as sites for radical public provisioning and meaningful political participation. Proponents of both projects, Andrew argues, stand to gain much through collaboration and close study of each other’s work, with the prospective outcome of a revitalized 21st-century public money-driven Black University movement lingering just within reach. 

Toward the end of the conversation we discuss Andrew’s planned participation in a symposium on the cooperative university that was to be held later in the month at Columbia University. In solidarity with campus protestors at Columbia and across the world, Andrew withdrew in advance from that event.

Andrew J. Douglas is author of three books, including (with Jared Loggins) Prophet of Discontent: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Critique of Racial Capitalism (2021); W.E.B. Du Bois and the Critique of the Competitive Society (2019); and In the Spirit of Critique: Thinking Politically in the Dialectical Tradition (2013).


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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Money on the Left is joined by Grant Kester, professor of Art History at University of California, San Diego. We speak with Kester about his multi-decade career, researching and teaching the history of socially engaged art. 

Kester’s scholarship underscores the limits and contradictions of the dominant modern Western tradition of aesthetics. Such aesthetics value “autonomy,” insisting that the artist, the artistic medium, or art as an institution ought to stand alone and outside of society and its corrupting influences. Paradoxically, autonomy in this tradition is supposed to secure art’s political dimension by blunting and often deferring any claims to immediate social efficacy. Kester, by contrast, affirms what is variously called dialogical aesthetics or socially engaged art, a collaborative sensuous practice in public space, which aims to transform thought and action by forging complex relationships among artists and publics.

Here, we focus on Kester’s two recent books published by Duke University Press. In The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (August 2023), Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Beyond the Sovereign Self Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art (December 2023), Kester then shows how socially engaged art provides an alternative aesthetic with greater possibilities for critical practice. Instead of grounding art in its distance from the social, Kester demonstrates how socially engaged art, developed in conjunction with forms of social or political resistance, encourages the creative capacity required for collective political transformation. 

Throughout our conversation, we tease out affinities between Kester’s scholarship and heterodox theories of public money and provisioning. Problematizing unquestioned desires to cordon off aesthetics from political economy, we call on artists and activists to contest, reconstruct, and build anew the forms of mediation that heterogeneously shape a shared sensuous life. 

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com