Superstructure

This Money on the Left/Superstructure teaser previews our fourth premium release from Scott Ferguson's "Neoliberal Blockbuster" course for Patreon subscribers.

For access to the full video lecture, subscribe to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure. If you are interested in premium offerings but presently unable to afford a subscription, please send a direct message to @moneyontheleft or @Superstruc on Twitter & we will happily provide you with membership access.

Course Description

This course examines the neoliberal Blockbuster from the 1970s to the present. It focuses, in particular, on the social significance of the blockbuster's constitutive technologies: both those made visible in narratives and the off-screen tools that drive production and reception. Linking aesthetic shifts in American moving images to broader transformations in political economy, the course traces the historical transformation of screen action from the ethereal “dream factory” of pre-1960s cinema to the impact-driven “thrill ride” of the post-1970s blockbuster. In doing so, we attend to the blockbuster’s technological forms and study how they have variously contributed to social, economic, and political transformations over the past 40 years. We critically engage blockbusters as "reflexive allegories" of their own technosocial processes and pleasures. Above all, we think through the blockbuster's shifting relationship to monetary abstraction and the myriad additional abstractions monetary mediation entails.

Blockbusters:

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)

Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999)

Avengers: Infinity War (Joe & Anthony Russo, 2018)

Contra leftist praise for today’s seemingly anti-capitalist papacy, co-hosts Naty Smith, Maxx Seijo, & Will Beaman offer a critical close reading of “Fratelli Tutti,” Pope Francis' third and most recent encyclical. Unearthing the austere logics that inhere in Bergoglio's ideas of encounter, charity, and reconciliation, Naty, Maxx, and Will take on the pope’s not-so-lefty Jesuit career and Peronist history, as well as the Franciscan ideology and history that inspired his Covid-era message to the world. Framed by readings of Scott Ferguson’s work on the symptomatic search for solidity in the modern and neoliberal moments, the gang exposes the deeply toxic nationalistic impulses behind the Pope's metaphysical, theological, and political exhortations. Superstructure, in other words, cancels the pope

Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.

http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com

Twitter: @actualflirting

The Money on the Left Editorial Collective is proud to present a recent talk by English literature scholar Rob Hawkes titled, “‘The Power of Money is so Hard to Realize’: Literature, Money and Trust in George Gissing's 1891 Novel New Grub Street.” In it, Hawkes draws out urgent, though regularly overlooked linkages between modern money and modern literature. In particular, he explores British novelist George Gissing’s reflexive and genre-bending book to pose the problem of social trust from a neochartalist or MMT-informed perspective.

Dr. Rob Hawkes is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Teesside University in the United Kingdom; a Fellow of the English Association; and a member of the Executive Steering Committee of the British Association for Modernist Studies. He is the author of Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns: Edwardian Fiction and the First World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and co-editor several related books on Ford Madox Ford. Recently, he contributed ‘Openness, Otherness, and Expertise: Uncertainty and Trust in Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle’ to the collection, Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak, edited by Helen Davies and Sarah Ilott (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). And he is now working on a monograph on literature, money, and trust from the 1890s to the 1980s.

To contact Dr. Hawkes, email him at [email protected]. Or, you can find him on Twitter @robbhawkes.

Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.

http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com

Twitter: @actualflirting

Thank you to the English and Creative Writing Research Seminar at Teesside for hosting and giving us permission to sharing Dr. Hawkes’ lecture.

https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

This Money on the Left/Superstructure teaser previews our third premium release from Scott Ferguson's "Neoliberal Blockbuster" course for Patreon subscribers.

For access to the full video lecture, subscribe to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure. If you are interested in premium offerings but presently unable to afford a subscription, please send a direct message to @moneyontheleft or @Superstruc on Twitter & we will happily provide you with membership access.

Course Description

This course examines the neoliberal Blockbuster from the 1970s to the present. It focuses, in particular, on the social significance of the blockbuster's constitutive technologies: both those made visible in narratives and the off-screen tools that drive production and reception. Linking aesthetic shifts in American moving images to broader transformations in political economy, the course traces the historical transformation of screen action from the ethereal “dream factory” of pre-1960s cinema to the impact-driven “thrill ride” of the post-1970s blockbuster. In doing so, we attend to the blockbuster’s technological forms and study how they have variously contributed to social, economic, and political transformations over the past 40 years. We critically engage blockbusters as "reflexive allegories" of their own technosocial processes and pleasures. Above all, we think through the blockbuster's shifting relationship to monetary abstraction and the myriad additional abstractions monetary mediation entails.

Blockbusters:

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)

Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999)

Avengers: Infinity War (Joe & Anthony Russo, 2018)

Cohosts Will Beaman, Natalie Smith, & Maxximilian Seijo are joined by Ian from Twitter (@tweet_boxian) to visit America’s favorite socialist family, the Bruenigs. They begin with reflections on a New York Times piece by Elizabeth Bruenig on the need to forgive the recently canonized Franciscan friar Junipero Serra, who oversaw the torture, enslavement and murder of indigenous Americans in California during the 18th century. Next, they consider Matt Bruenig’s “Family Fun Pack” policy paper. They critique the paper's exclusionary economic premises and natalist aesthetics, and suggest an alternative political economy based on public creation rather than zero sum redistribution.

Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.

http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com

Twitter: @actualflirting

In the wake of the release of Rep. Ayanna Pressley's (D-MA) job guarantee resolution, Maxximilian Seijo invites Andrés Bernal to reflect on this historical moment in intersectional left-wing activism.

Link to the resolution: https://pressley.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-pressley-economists-advocates-unveil-historic-federal-job-guarantee

Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure