Not School Digest #4: Sartre, Heidegger, Zizek, Marx, and Theater

0:23 Unknown speaker: Partially Examined Life Offers Not School as a way for listeners to read collaboratively and discuss texts of their choice on forums on our member site or via audio and video discussions in Digest episodes like this one. We present short selections from these recorded discussions which are available in full to citizens for a $5 a month donation. Whether you want to participate yourself, listen to our many bonus recordings, or just support Pel Go Become a Citizen@PartiallyExinedLife.com Our hope is that even for those who don't want to join, these excerpts will provide you with a quick glimpse at many works we haven't had time to cover on the regular podcast.

Hi, this is Mark Lintonmeyer and you're listening to not School Digest 4. We've got an action packed lineup for you, including in the order that hear them the beginning of my recent discussion of Sartre's novel Nausea, Dylan Casey and others talking about Heidegger's essay the Question Concerning Technology, a group I participated in discussing Slavoz iek's 2012 book the Year of Dreaming Dangerously. Then I just now recorded a brief conversation with Hilary Sidlowski about the introductory readings in Philosophy Group, since that is one of our most popular groups but doesn't record their discussions.

We'll then hear two segments from the Philosophy and Theater Group, the first on Peter Schaeffer's play Equus and the second on Cormac McCarthy's the Sunset Limited. Finally, we'll hear a little of our Marxism group introducing the Communist Manifesto. Each of these discussions is something like

1:42 Mark: an hour and a half or two

1:43 Unknown speaker: hours if you listen to it on our Citizen site. These clips are all between 5 and 15 minutes long and come from right at or near the beginning of the discussion so you can hear the summary of the reading and or the participants overall reaction to it. And now return with me to a chilly January afternoon.

2:02 Mark: All right, this is the Not School discussion Jon Jean Paul Sartre's nausea. So this is Mark Linsenmeier.

2:07 Unknown speaker: Introduce yourselves.

2:08 Sean: I'm Sean Webb, hailing from Washington, Seattle

2:11 Stan: and I'm Stan Martin in Columbus, Ohio.

2:14 Mark: All right, thanks for making it guys. I got through the whole book. I'm very excited. I really didn't think I could do it.

2:20 Sean: It was hard.

2:23 Mark: It picked up, it picked up. Although then when it got to like the last 15 pages, I was like, the thing that was gonna happen already happened.

2:29 Unknown speaker: What?

Yeah.

2:30 Mark: Do I really have to read the rest of this?

2:34 Sean: It could have been a lot shorter. I feel like I thought I read

2:36 Mark: somewhere that it was actually supposed to be a lot longer, that it was gonna be like an epic novel and that he just kind of cut it short. And it does seem sort of a random spot to do it. I don't know. With some artsy books like this, I feel I could stop at any point and I wouldn't know the difference. Yeah, it starts with him having this experience of really the world starting to look hinky, that things starting to disgust him and this hand in front of me looks like a fat white worm and being disgusted by his own image in the mirror and other things like that. And then it seems to dwell on that a lot and just describe different things in his environment. But then it seems to evolve a little bit so that it's focusing more on his relationship to the past. That at the beginning of the book the character Rokuten is writing a book

3:20 Stan: about Marquis de Roulevant.

3:22 Unknown speaker: There you go.

3:23 Mark: He decides at some point that the past did not exist, that his nausea evolves so that it all seems equally sort of weird and random to me. But at least there's some variety in how the environment is showing up to him. And then at some point he says, next week my ex girlfriend's going to be in town. So okay, something is going to happen eventually in the book. And it turns out that that's the thing.

3:45 Sean: Right?

3:45 Mark: It doesn't happen until page 80 or. But it's pretty much the climax of the book is her visiting. And you think that he's so withdrawn, he's cut off from society, that he's not going to be able to relate to her. But then it gets to the point where it's really not even his fault. It's that she has an equally fucked up.

4:03 Sean: I know, I was going to say she's as weird as he is for sure. Yeah.

4:08 Mark: But in any case, it doesn't. It looks like maybe love would have allowed him to rise above his self immolation or whatever's going on here, being able to connect with somebody, but the one person that he wants to connect with won't connect with him. And then he's already had a conversation right before that with this self taught man who is one of the only other real characters and another guy that hangs out at the library with him.

4:30 Stan: And what a character he is, yes, yes.

4:33 Mark: The self taught man sort of reaches out to him in the same way and he is very unsympathetic and he's the self taught man to embody a lot of the bad faith characteristics of humanism.

4:45 Unknown speaker: And.

4:45 Mark: And then pretty much he reaches, I think, the logical conclusion to where this nausea has been going, which is that seeing the world as individual things just. They just exist. They don't have a past, they don't. They're just these solid masses. But yet there's something repulsive about that. So that's something we can try to figure out. With that discovery and the rejection by his ex girlfriend, he decides he's going to leave this place, stop hanging around in the library and move to Paris. And it'll probably be all the same there as it was here. And the nausea is permanent. But at least sometimes, sometimes he can escape into some nice music.

5:20 Stan: Yeah, it seems like at the very end he's come to the conclusion that he can somehow justify existence by writing a novel. Right. By some kind of artistic, I guess, endeavor more than anything. I don't know if it's going to allow him to escape from his existence or to justify his existence, but I found that odd. I found that difficult to, I guess, make sense of the rest of the novel.

5:44 Unknown speaker: Right.

5:44 Mark: He comes to that realization after he has this final experience with the song. But even just the page before that, he has that experience. He says, this is page 174. To think there are idiots who get consolation from the fine arts like my aunt Bigot. Chopin's Preludes were such a help to me when your poor uncle died in the concert halls overflowed with humiliated, outraged people who close their eyes and try to turn their pale faces into receiving antennae. They imagine that the sounds flow into them sweet, nourishing, and that their sufferings become music.

They think that beauty is compassionate to them mugs. And then he says a little more about why that's a mistake, but then the very next page, oh, he is able to have an emotional experience through art. And that seems to be what prompts him, Stanley, for this last move, that, oh, well, I'm not into writing this history, but maybe I could write a novel.

6:34 Stan: Well, he's even thinking not just about the artistic process, but he's actually thinking about the person who may have written

6:41 Mark: this song and the singer.

6:43 Stan: And he somehow, by his remembering them or thinking of them, it's somehow justifying the endeavor that they did in the past. Right. Because throughout most of the book he seems to Be kind of criticizing how the past people cling to it or they let it influence them in a way that really it doesn't. And so then all of a sudden he just seems to almost kind of reverse himself a little there. I don't know.

7:06 Sean: He seems to enjoy the connection he feels with the songwriter and even the moment that the songwriter was in when he wrote song. This book is a lot about moments. Annie talks about moments a lot. And he spends pages describing moments that are really not too long. I mean, he spends a long time describing one little scene, you know, in a coffee shop. So that must be part of the existential, like experiencing things very vividly and dramatically.

7:34 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

7:34 Mark: He says the two of them are saved. Maybe they thought they were lost, irrevocably drowned in existence. Yet no one could think of me as. I think of them with such gentleness. They are a little like dead people. Like the heroes of a novel.

7:45 Unknown speaker: They have washed themselves of the sin of existing.

7:47 Mark: Not completely, of course, but as any man can. And he feels a sort of joy. So I don't know from that whether he feels like. He certainly doesn't feel like he's benefiting them, although he's. I think he said before, and even in this context, he kind of would like to be thought of fondly.

8:02 Unknown speaker: He.

8:02 Mark: You know, one of the things that makes him unrooted is that nobody seems to give a crap about him, that he has not laid down ties throughout the book.

8:10 Sean: There's a feeling of separation from the rest of the humanity.

8:14 Stan: Yeah. But on one hand he seems to be justifying why that is. But on the other hand, he seems to admit that he wants that. Right.

8:22 Mark: Yeah, they're all shallow, but I want them to love me anyway.

8:25 Sean: I hate them. I want to be this.

8:27 Stan: The only character that he could have tried to connect with was the self taught man. And I mean, he totally just blew him off.

8:33 Sean: Right.

8:33 Mark: I mean, well, until the end. But I don't know if that counts as a connection. Volunteering to wipe the blood off his nose.

8:44 Stan: So what do you think of this self taught man?

8:47 Sean: Is he the one that liked the little boys or is that a different one?

8:50 Unknown speaker: Yeah, no, that's.

8:51 Stan: That's him.

8:52 Mark: At least the narrator describes it as. He just loves everybody. He doesn't necessarily think that the guy is a perv and like wants to do anything more with the little boys.

9:02 Sean: He touches their legs, like.

9:04 Mark: Yeah. So it's not really clear, like what would. Yeah, you know, what this guy does in other circumstances. But he seems so timid about everything that you kind of feel like maybe he's harmless and he's just the child molester character and family guy. If you've ever seen that. There's like a really elderly guy with a walker, admires all the boys in

9:24 Sean: the neighborhood,

9:26 Mark: but he's too feeble to do anything about it. I'm sure that was a direct influence on this.

9:31 Unknown speaker: From that

9:34 Stan: the Self Taught man describes himself as a humanist and Ro Quentin despises humanism and despises it. Exactly. I guess it's that whole essence versus existence problem when it comes to humanism. And maybe that's why he's trying to contrast the character with the Self Taught man and maybe even showing how humanism can go too far. I don't know.

9:57 Sean: Right. I didn't really get exactly what he hated so much about humanists. He just kind of said, ew, they're disgusting.

10:04 Mark: I think he just thought they were full of crap that they profess to love everybody. And certainly if the Self Taught man is an example, they don't actually have a real connection with any particular people. I love man in general. I don't love individual men.

10:18 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

10:18 Stan: And when he maybe expresses that love, it's a little inappropriate.

10:23 Sean: Yeah.

10:24 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

10:24 Mark: He obviously doesn't know the first thing about how to actually relate to somebody.

10:28 Sean: Yeah.

10:28 Mark: I'm looking on page 116, 117 where

10:31 Unknown speaker: he's talking about humanism, where the Self Taught man.

10:34 Mark: He's at lunch with him and Self

10:35 Unknown speaker: Taught man admitted he's a socialist and

10:37 Mark: thinks that this is a very risky thing to admit.

10:40 Unknown speaker: But the narrator seems to say, okay,

10:43 Mark: he's being pretty agreeable despite what's going on in his head. People don't generally think that he's a freak. The narrator, that is unlike the Self Taught Man. He nods in the right places. He's able to have surface level relationships with his landlady and things. People aren't scared of him, as ugly as he may be. I don't know. He mentions his own ugliness sometimes and maybe this is just Sartre.

11:04 Sean: Well, yeah, but he likes his red hair.

11:06 Stan: It's.

11:06 Sean: Yeah, it's when he's looking at his face in the mirror. So that's not. That's the opposite of objective. Especially when we're talking about Roquenton.

11:13 Unknown speaker: Right.

11:13 Mark: You know, since the beer looks like piss and the.

11:15 Sean: Yeah. The plants are invading everything and zits turn into eyeballs. That was my favorite part.

11:22 Stan: Probably that happens all the time.

11:24 Mark: I would kind of like to see a movie attempt at this, even though it couldn't be made, but just like

11:27 Sean: a really surrealist film, it would be unwatchable. Well, I did read Existentialism as a Humanism right before I read this, and it was so, like, upbeat and lighthearted and. And then I. Then I read Nausea, and I was like, holy shit, I'm depressed whenever I picked this up. So, I don't know, maybe starts saying, this is how you should not be, but it's maybe how we tend to be if we don't know what's really going on. I don't know.

11:52 Mark: I don't get any sense in here of that. You're responsible for all this. You could just read this as a depressing text and everybody is being fickle. So I guess that's how I read. Like, this is this sort of subjectivism that I could see why somebody might find Ayn Rand appealing by comparison.

12:11 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

12:11 Stan: Even though I was thinking about that this morning.

12:13 Unknown speaker: Yes.

Yes.

12:14 Mark: Even though her criticisms of somebody like Kant are not fair, because, yes, you can still have science. There's still something that's beyond human whim. Sartre does really seem to think that we are responsible not just for what we do, the choices we make, that kind of freedom, but for our own attitudes toward things. And it's not that, again, that it's a matter of rational, deliberative choice, what our attitudes are toward these things. But it's a spontaneity. It's something that we do so that him seeing the beer look in this scummy way and feeling like he can't pick the piece of paper off the ground that he's just stopped from, he's doing that to himself.

An actual therapist would say, come on, there's more to it than that. There's things. There are reasons why he's doing this that he's not aware of, but he seems to trust, or at least in Existentialism of Humanism, seems to think that you're doing it. It's enough to know that you're responsible for it and you can kind of work through it.

13:04 Sean: I got a sense from existentialism, Humanism, that that's empowering. And I felt like that kind of freedom feels empowering to me. And then you read this book, and he's just, like, anguishing in it instead of feeling empowered.

13:16 Stan: Yeah.

13:16 Mark: I mean, does he realize, has the narrator read Existentialism is a Humanism?

13:20 Unknown speaker: I.

13:21 Mark: Probably not.

13:22 Sean: So he's probably like, this is like a tale of caution.

13:25 Stan: Then maybe this came before.

13:27 Sean: Right.

13:27 Stan: Existentialism is A humanism. And that was almost meant to be as kind of a rebuttal to all the critics who were saying how negative, right. This philosophical thought was and all the downsides of existentialism. And I don't know, maybe Sartre tried to make existentialism as a humanism too upbeat. You know, he was trying to be a little more defensive, I guess.

13:49 Mark: One question is, is this phenomenology? Sartre was certainly familiar with phenomenology, but what phenomenology is, it's kind of a systematic description of experience. And you might think that the best way to do that is through describing in a diary or a novel, rather than doing something pretending to do science that like, ooh, I'm entering the epoche and I'm. Whatever Husserl is doing. I don't know, I didn't get the sense, at least I didn't take it seriously as seriously in nausea, to think that I had to take note of what the steps say in his discovery that the world is just masses of existence. I just felt like it was artistic and semi random and I don't know that there was nothing like, this is the way that human being is. And if you do this, you can have a similar experience with the same details. That's what phenomenology would say.

14:41 Sean: I do remember when I was in my literature class that they said that the novel was powerful because it allows you to have vicarious experience. That was the term they used. And if this is phenomenology, maybe starts trying to give us use the novel. Because it's all about the experience that you have as a human, right?

14:59 Unknown speaker: Messed up people that hate their lives. Messed up people that hate their lives. Messed up people that hate their lives. Not fun to be around. Not fun to be around. Not fun to be around people that hate their lives. The fools will be around.

And now Heidger's the Question Concerning Technology, featuring Dylan Casey, Philip Czerny, Daniel Cole and Paul Harris.

Why don't you start us off with an opening question, Philip?

There's a sentence that I found that just screams atavistic naivete, right? Nostalgia, he says, today we are too easily inclined either to understand being responsible and being indebted moralistically as a lapse, or else to construe them in terms of affecting. In either case, as we bar from ourselves the way to the primal meaning of that which is later called causality, so long as this way is not opened up to us, we shall also fail to see what instrumentality, which is based on Causality properly is. And the word primal meaning is something that I circled, highlighted red. So did you guys find this just naively atavistic, or did you take something else out of this?

Perhaps, you know, we're reading this 50, 60 years on, and we think, oh, it's just naive. And it's this quest for a simpler time, you know, a nostalgia from when technology wasn't taking over everything. And I think that if we look at it in the context when he would write it, the thing that he is pining for, the thing he is looking for, is not that much further in the past as it is to us now. When he talked about cryptomology, he sort of go, it's an essay that could arguably have been written yesterday, but that was written in the 1950s. And if someone wrote it now, I might go, well, hang on a minute.

You're being overly nostalgic. We're well beyond that period. But I think for Heidegger, he was speaking more of a genuine concern about technology and thinking more about this idea that we need to be careful to not become so consumed in it and so overwhelmed by it that we can't reach back to a previous thing and we can't take a step out of it.

He says at the very beginning of the book that we shall be questioning concerning technology, and in so doing, we should like to prepare a free relationship to it. So part of his goal here is, while unearthing something about the nature of technology is also to establish a way of understanding it with respect to our lives, both as individuals and as a community. That phrase have a free relationship with it. That part, I think, resonates across, not just right now when we talk about, you know, is Google ruining our lives? But it resonates. That kind of question about whether we are the instruments of technology or whether technology is something used by us resonates for hundreds of years.

He lays the blame for the current nature of modern technology at the feet of modern mathematical physics and roughly, you know, Descartes and further, and maybe even quantum mechanics and mechanization. He doesn't seem to want to consider hatchets mechanical.

I don't want to throw it out just on the basis of being nostalgic, because it also seems to me that that might be kind of relativist in a way, because there's no reason to assume a priori that one period of time wouldn't be a better way to live than another. So I'm not going to discount him just right away on that. On the other hand, like I was listening to another podcast with this guy, Tom Sheehan, and he was really saying, like, look, you know, the guy who wrote Being in Time and who came up with the concept of thrown ness should never have fallen prey to trying to universalize his own nostalgic black forest peasant origins the way he does in this essay.

And I can kind of see that. I mean, to make that the home base and judge everything against that style of living does seem a little bit biased in a way that you really wouldn't expect Heidegger to be. But on the other hand, I do think he has his finger on something that definitely has changed. Like, I was listening to another series of lectures by Hubert Dreyfus, and he was saying, like, look, you know, Heidegger, he has the phenomena, right? But he didn't really live long enough to see great examples of the phenomenon that he was trying to pinpoint come into fruition.

And things like the Rhine being challenged forth to produce electricity or the tourist industry and all of that, they were kind of getting there, but they weren't anything like what you have today with information theory and, you know, all of the universe as information processing, agribusiness, you know, genetic engineering.

Dylan, you raised two issues that I want to address. One has to do with the free relation to technology. The other issue that I wanted to talk about was distinction between modern technology and techne. Ancient technology, because he distinguishes between historical and chronological sequencing. And so in a weird way he's saying, like, the hatchet is no different from the computer. It's just there's something in our nature that. That technology has been latent.

Modern technologies are really something that was inherent since Plato's Eidos.

I think that you're hitting on this slippery nature in Heidegger, where he is both praising the development of technology and attributing it to the natural activity of human beings, and also decrying it, especially mechanistic technology, as getting us away, as that being a kind of danger. And my first thought would be to try to get to those two concerns that you brought up by just talking for a few minutes about what it's meant that technology is a kind of revealing. Which is at the beginning of the essay, he talks about the four causes and poiesis and the notion of revealing.

What has the essence of technology to do with revealing. And he goes on to talk about technology is a way of revealing. It is the realm of revealing, of truth. And so if we could try to articulate a little bit what he means by technology as being A kind of revealing. I think we'll get a ways to be able to answer those other two questions.

To me, that's something that's interpretive. It seems like he never expounds upon it in the text. So when he says revealing, I can only guess what he's referring to. The example he gives is the silver chalice.

Yeah. And in the Lovett translation, the first time he uses the word revealing, which is just before this section breaks, it refers to the German word das entbergen. And that was helpful to me because revealing is a funny English word in that it speaks to uncovering as opposed to pulling out of. Or there's this phrase harboring forth, which I'm like, okay, like how many verbs are you going to put together? So in the footnote it says bergen means to rescue, to recover, to secure, to harbor, to conceal. So that way of entbergen, which would mean to reveal, would bring forth those kinds of meanings. I guess we could just talk about the interpretation of it of Alethea. But I guess, specifically speaking about why technology is a mode of revealing something

I felt like I kind of made progress when I understood was the way he's trying to evoke this happening without portraying it in terms of humans causing something to happen. He's trying to take that human agency out of it and show it as a thing, an event, a revealing as an event where humans participate but don't necessarily. Cause, I guess, where being discloses itself. You know, as you'd say, we're not necessarily running around using our technology, being the sole arbiter of what happens and what doesn't, but it's more of being as a whole, you know, manifesting this occurrence or not. But we are the clearing in which it happens. And how that relates to technology, I still don't know if I could totally express.

Well, I wanted to go back to that German word, Bruggen. Yeah, Heidegger is Bavarian.

He's from somewhere south Germany, I believe, in the forest. And so, like a lot of his language involves like, forcing. So like the clearing revealing.

To me, that's the image I get. And also, like earlier, he talks about vague, like you're trying to build a way, questioning builds a way.

He uses this rhetoric that kind of refers to foresting.

He uses that in pretty much all his essays.

I think that this revealing is a phenomenological or aesthetic revealing or ontological revealing in the sense of when you're driving a car, you're not driving necessarily to get from point A to point B. But you're just staring in wonder at the fact that there is a machine taking you way faster than your feet could carry you. And I think Heidegger is always trying to instill wonder. So being like a steward of the earth and also inventing these new forms

that are just there to astound us

and to keep the question open about the nature of the physical world.

I guess when he brings in this idea of inflaming, which I struggled to get grasped on, the closest I came is that he's sort of saying, we coming back to what he says at the beginning about mankind's need to maintain a kind of spiritual control over technology. That actually in framing is when we see what a particular technological phenomenon produces. And therefore we can contextualize it and rationalize it. And I'm just thinking as well in terms of Heidegger's take on theology and on religion. This idea of going, actually, now what we're going to do, we're going to rationalize everything down by framing something that also kind of contains it.

So if I follow the thought a little bit, we have that technology is a kind of revealing, is a mode of revealing. He makes the distinction between ancient and modern technology in wanting to say that modern technology is also a kind of revealing. But it has a distinctive character to it. And that character has to do with being a setting upon and a challenging force. Which is where he brings up the idea of standing reserve. And the ultimate characteristic of that is in framing, which he lays completely at the foot of modern technology. So he says, and framing means the gathering together of that setting upon which sets upon man, challenges him forth to reveal the real in the mode of ordering, as standing reserve.

So if I try to parse that out, you know, this is a perfect example of the kind of sentences in Heidegger that just make me want to shoot myself. He is concerned with the activity of enframing. Because it has a reflective character back upon man himself. And so that man's activity of using technology and looking at the world as a standing reserve also reflects back on himself and prevents him from being in sense of revealing nature. So that in framing means that we restrict the coming forth, the bringing forthness of technology. We're not actually bringing forth our understanding or whatever it is we're doing.

We're not pulling out in that poetic way of bringing forth something that is true to itself, for lack of a better phrase. I don't know that Heidegger would phrase it that way exactly. But we are in framing it. And in Fact, in the end, we end up glossing everything as different kinds of standing reserve, so that there's no possibility of bringing forth, because everything has now been flattened and there's no distinctions to be made between one being and another. And then we're no longer able to bring forth that thing and that entity and learn about the world and engage in the world.

And importantly, that reflects back on ourselves that we cannot have an authentic relationship with ourselves, because at the end of the day, we enframe ourselves.

And now follow me even farther back from Dylan's December recording there to my November recording on Zizek.

27:32 Mark: This is on Zizek's the Year of Dreaming Dangerously. This is Mark Linsenmeier from Madison. Why don't we just go from left to right?

27:40 Unknown speaker: This is Karee Robertson from Oakland, California.

This is Matt Cole from Northern Ireland.

This is Philip Tierney from Dallas, Texas.

This is Steve Robinson from Chicago, Illinois.

27:48 Mark: Stuff jumped out that was interesting to me. He's giving social commentary and using Lacanian terms to do so, talking about capitalism as the real, the ultimate motivator of what's going on. But that is not the specific visible actor in any of the conflicts that we look at. It's always, you know, specific groups versus other specific groups. But really, it's capitalism. The real is that's the underlying force that's going on here. So I got that much. This is commentary on the news generally. And I can do that in gross ways, but not in a way that I feel like, yeah, I'm using this Marxist language and infrastructure to talk about these things in a precise way that this analytic jargon adds something that makes it sound less bullshitty.

28:31 Unknown speaker: He's almost psychoanalyzing the reality. Right. What's going on in reality. It's kind of an interesting and eclectic mix of subjects. Right. He has a subject on the television show the Wire, as well as his take on Occupy Wall Street. I guess that is kind of a postmodern way to review sort of an archaeology of various pop culture phenomenon in order to explicate more difficult concepts.

28:57 Mark: Was the point. The point to explicate the concepts, or is he using the concepts to explicate the phenomena?

29:03 Unknown speaker: Right.

Yeah, sometimes it's kind of hazy which way he's going with it, similar to how, like a psychoanalyst would look at the symbols or maybe dream signals to attempt to determine someone's psychological state. He's using the culture, which is a product of our view, but he's reversing it and saying, no, this is the image that's being put onto us to kind of cultivate our understanding.

I understand the Lacanian real, but I'm not sure I completely understand what Zhex means in terms of framing capital, where he says the real is the inexorable, abstract, spectral logic of capital that determines what goes on in the social reality. That seems to me to contradict what Lacan talks about in the real. And then earlier he said something along the lines of the real is that which eludes the grass. That's more what I think of. I wanted to see if we could get a clear understanding of what he means by the real and why he's framing capitalism in terms of the real.

I'm pretty certain that the real that Zizek is referencing is not what's being presented by the players at hand. At least I think that we can say that the real is not what the media is putting out to us from either side. The real exists separate of that, prior to that.

30:19 Mark: So what Lacan, if I remember correctly, meant by the real island, that which resists symbolization or ideation, representation.

30:27 Unknown speaker: Right.

30:28 Mark: I'm confusing a little bit at the difference between the symbolic and the imaginary that. So my view of myself has a component of the imaginary. I've got this sort of view of myself. It's not necessarily verbal, but then there's the symbolic, which is what I can actually of that capture. But then there's something that's always going to be left out of the symbolic or out of either any kind of

30:51 Unknown speaker: representation that's the real.

Doesn't he say, like it's like the principle of distortion in addition to its distorting effects? I felt like that was a very eloquent way of putting what he was discussing. I'm not sure I totally understand it.

31:04 Mark: That's something that I certainly don't feel in any state to judge the efficacy of this whole transposition. That seems like the big introductory thing in this book and why it's cool to read this after doing Lacan is this transposition of the psychological talk into the social. But I'm not sure that Lacan himself would read this, and I'm not really sure.

31:23 Unknown speaker: Well, Zizek most certainly takes his liberties in translating sociological norms into political norms in terms of using the same language to describe, let's say, the ideology of capitalism versus actually happening real market capitalism,

31:39 Mark: which doesn't actually seem unusual. You know, Freud, in going to civilization is discontents talks in the same way. He's not talking about individual psychology, he's talking about group psychology. We in the Jung episode, if you listen to that, he does the same kind of thing, that he analyzes whole societies and their blindnesses to certain things in much the same way that you can analyze individuals. So I guess this is something that is not radical that Zizek is proposing.

32:02 Unknown speaker: This is something that was in the

32:03 Mark: psychoanalytic project from the start of talking about societies in something like this. It's just I hadn't seen a Lacanian version of that exactly before.

32:11 Unknown speaker: Zizek is drawing attention sometimes to where Lacan has said something like that. There is definitely a critique of capitalism involved in Lacan, so far as I can see.

I also. I'm not sure if I'm fully convinced by. I think there's limits to psychoanalysis, obviously. But one of the things that I find interesting about psychoanalysis, what I find compelling about it is its explanatory power. And sometimes it seems to like. It's like, oh yeah, this does seem to work. Like when he starts talking about how class struggle, where there's a third other that they tend to throw the. Like he brings up the Jew, how in order to sustain itself, it needs to find another to blame, and so it'll blame some kind of outsider.

The return of the evil ethnic thing.

Well, yeah, he does try to approach how, in an attempt to save itself, capital has created a subsection of fascist nationalist, ultra right wing sects in politics that represent a dangerous side of what can happen if there is no resolution to the general conflict between capital and its counterpart.

Well, it's interesting to me how capital operates on its own logic that can be psychoanalyzed.

So I thought of some analogies, like censorship. I remember having this discussion with my sister about if we simply just didn't treat cuss words as bad words, then we would get rid of them because they just mean nothing. But I remember she said that maybe there's some use to sustaining bad words as bad as taboo. So it's like the desire of the censor is also desired to sustain bad words as bad words. I thought that was a good analogy for thinking about how binaries operate, because when they're two opposites, then they depend on the other. Like the upper class depends on the lower class in order to be the upper class.

He brings up this point about Foucault, who has the same sort of idea about the creation of the repressed urges is sort of generated by the system itself and then repressed. It's a systemic function, basically.

Yeah.

I think the point about Foucault is Pretty relevant. I mean, this idea that the subjective processes. It's a bit like what Iek is saying about the real being, the thing that conditions and also covers over that conditioning at the same time. And that process of subjectivation of power systems for Foucault is very similar to that in that you have to live through that process, but by living through that process, you also catch yourself in these systems. That's unavoidable.

Right. What his proposal of the structure of capitalism is is kind of a refinement of what Marx originally discussed, which is the creation of the mind through the economic structure. And so I think that presents real problems for a person who, like Zizek, is as a communist or has a utopian vision for what society could be. If the entire system creates the persons that are in the society, it creates legitimate problems for how you go about advancing change. And the times in the book where he recommends what one might do are very fascinating because they're sometimes not what you might expect.

For example, at one point, doesn't he kind of. I don't know if he's being entirely serious, but he suggests that opposition to taxation would be one of the ways in which one could push back against the existing neoliberal system. Right. I think in order to sort of deal with that fact, you have to be provocative and sort of attempt to kind of inject yourself into that cultural stream in sort of unique ways, which I think is. He's both explaining things and also attempting to kind of right on the edge of the cultural real. That's imprecise use of that word.

But because I don't think that's right,

there is a precise use of that word. I wouldn't worry about it too much. Yeah, I think he's definitely offering potential solutions that are, even within the context of Marxism, they're outside the normal. I mean, I think he sees that there are big limitations to the original structure of Marxist thought because it's. It is so caught up in that kind of deterministic outlook that things have to follow that pattern that Marx sets out. But what he does really well, I think, is recognizes that things have moved on. We're not in the middle of the 19th century anymore, and the way that capitalism works has evolved and developed.

So you have to look at certain things that might not have been as obvious 150 years ago. I suppose the issue of managerialism and technocracy and those kinds of problems that are developing now are things that wouldn't have been an issue for Marx because they just weren't an issue for anybody concerned with the way that capitalism works in the middle of the 19th century. You have to shift with that. And what that means is directing your kind of solutions, those more modern problems as well.

I agree with Zizek, most of his critiques, but then when it comes to

his solutions, they seem a bit nebulous, I guess, deliberately so. The whole idea that we need to think, not act. And to me, not acting is impossible. Living is acting. So in what way does he mean not act?

Thinking is acting.

Yeah, I mean, he says we need to stop fighting small battles against inertia.

I think what people need to realize about Zizek is that he is 99% of his goal is to get you to just think differently, just to stop thinking in your typical frame of thought. So he'll say something that is extremely provocative, very nonchalantly, clearly, because he doesn't believe it. But it'll cause you to think in such a way that you might come up with something different than what's being peddled around. And I can get behind that endeavor to some degree. So Hud has no problems with saying, why don't we go back to Stalin? Because what that'll do is that that'll cause you to think about what Stalin's downfalls were, so that you don't go through the same lines of logic, which. Okay, I can get that. As long as it does not become the majority. Now, if everyone starts doing that, you're just trolling.

I'll tell you, when we started this, it was really a challenge, a big learning curve for getting something, something that looked the way you wanted it to look. And I'll tell you, it would have been really nice to have a all in one stop, very well designed, clean platform to be working on. And when I look through this Squarespace stuff, I'm really impressed with how design oriented and forward modern looking web design it is.

With Squarespace you've got a lot of really great templates that you can use right from the start. You don't need to know how to code Everything is drag and drop and you can just rearrange the elements on a page once you've picked your theme. And let me ask you a question. When we have a problem with our website, who do you call?

I sit down at the computer myself.

There you go.

I have no one to call.

It would be nice if like Squarespace, you had an amazing support team working 24 7.

Yes, it'd be even better if it was really reasonably priced.

It starts at just $8 a month and that includes a free domain name. If you sign up for a year, it automatically is going to look great on tablets, phones, web browsers of all stripes, operating systems. Doesn't matter. And it's got already e commerce built in. So if you decide you want to use it to sell products, you've got that available to you right from the get go.

You also get hooked up with the social accounts, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, that kind of thing.

40:41 Mark: Before we go on to the next Not School segment, wanted to briefly introduce you to pronounce your last name for me, Hillary Sidlowski. Sidlowski, who has led our Not School introductory readings and philosophy group for the greater part of a year. So the intro group here is a little different than the other groups. Not School is very free form, so anybody can propose a group.

41:02 Unknown speaker: They just need to get at least

41:04 Mark: two other people supposedly to accompany them. And it could be just participation on a forum. It could be a recording like some

41:11 Unknown speaker: of the ones we've made, what you're

41:12 Mark: hearing on this highlights episode. But the intro group is a special one because Hillary is tasked with being a little more hands on than in other groups. So it's a little easier for people who might be intimidated with just jumping into reading a text largely by themselves and perhaps having to lead a discussion tell us more about what that experience has been like.

41:32 Unknown speaker: I think it's a little bit less labor intensive than being a TA because it's not part of a course curriculum. So people who are involved in the discussions want to be involved in those discussions. Really what I'm doing is guiding a discussion more than teaching something. Although if I do notice, you know, that we're drifting off course, I'll go through and start pulling out the high points that we want to talk about. But very often the participants are going to do that themselves while I am there as a ta, if they do need help, it's pretty rare that they do need more than a nudge.

42:03 Mark: So this is mostly form activity. But you also meet a couple times

42:07 Unknown speaker: a month through Skype, right?

42:08 Mark: In a non recorded low pressure setting.

42:11 Unknown speaker: I do shoot to have a Skype session. It kind of gives people a chance to have more of a freeform discussion. A lot of the times when you put text up, you're following a thread. It's gonna be rare that you get those fun moments or those little interesting side notes that you run into when you're doing a more casual conversation where you're face to face, so to speak.

42:30 Mark: So what's the pace of the discussion on forums? How much? If somebody was wanting to sign up for this, what kind of time commitment

42:37 Unknown speaker: are they looking at?

The way that I've been doing it is to try and keep that time commitment to a minimum. You know, since it's a forum, people who are involved have jobs and that's sort of a commitment for their time already. And I think that what they want to be doing is really getting at the meat and potatoes of the philosophy that they're studying. So what I tend to make an effort to do is either pick a reading that is very, I don't want to say easy, but very reader friendly, or I will through a reading and pull out what seems to be the important sections, the sections where the philosopher really gets into the details of what their philosophy is, rather than a lot of the times they'll do defenses of the philosophy, which is, you know, important, especially contextual to the other philosophies that they might be referencing or they might be opposing.

But I really think that what people are interested in here is what is this person actually positing? And that's what I try to focus on. Chapter one and chapter three instead of we're reading this entire book, you can read the book, chapter one and chapter three we're going to be discussing.

43:39 Mark: So let's go through some of the

43:40 Unknown speaker: topics that you've covered.

43:41 Mark: What have been some of the highlights,

43:42 Unknown speaker: what works particularly well.

The things that seem to get people fired up are things that they connect with emotionally. Nietzsche was a very big one, which is not shocking. Nietzsche is an incredibly emotional philosopher. He also happens to be one of those philosophers that is easy to digest. He writes a lot, very small paragraphs or very small sections that you can then mull over and talk about the other ones that People really got into were the Tao Te Ching. We did Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and we actually had a big response because people hated it. They talked about it a lot. So it actually worked in a very weird sort of way.

44:18 Mark: Yeah, that's one of those devious books that it looks like it's very straightforwardly written. The sentences seem to make sense, you

44:23 Unknown speaker: know, until you get far enough into it that there's symbolic logic and things like that.

44:26 Mark: But it's deceptive to try to figure out, as people who listen to our episodes on that book know, to figure out actually what's going on.

44:36 Unknown speaker: I think there's two different things going on in there. You have one, which is the symbolic logic, which became a very large part of the logos in philosophy. People are still trying to use that today. But then there was also a point behind that, and that's really what I tried to. To pull out, was that whole deal where at the end of the treatise, he gets into where you have this ladder that you've climbed and then you throw away. And the fact that it has a limit that he hits gives you an understanding of the point that he's trying to get at. And that's the part that I really think that people were able to connect with. And that's. That is the type of thing that I try to focus on in the group.

45:10 Mark: So it wasn't just read the whole book. It was. Make sure to read this last.

45:13 Unknown speaker: I mean, it's really like the last 10 pages that most of that stuff is packed into, right?

Oh, yeah. I mean, I really think I focused honestly on the first five or so and the last 10, because the symbolic logic wasn't focused. That's that very heavy philosophy, and that's not for an intro group. But there was a very simple. Well, a very straightforward sort of philosophical point in there, and that's what I wanted to draw out.

All right, Any other highlighted readings we should talk about for a minute?

Common Sense by Thomas Paine. Got a really good response.

Oh, yeah? Okay. Is that one you recommend for us

45:43 Mark: to cover formally in the podcast?

45:46 Unknown speaker: I don't know. I feel like the podcasts are much more formal philosophy. The thing that I drew from Thomas Paine was more of a study of rhetoric, getting back to what gets people involved in philosophy and what gets people involved in the intro forum. It was a very emotional piece, basically an inflammatory piece. Its whole purpose to incite revolution, which worked. So it was a very interesting discussion, but I think that that sort of less logos, more rhetoric Approach is something that I've tried to take into the intro to philosophy groups, because that is the beginning point where you start to form your understanding of philosophy, at least in my opinion.

46:23 Mark: A lot of the not school groups

46:25 Unknown speaker: have been very successful.

46:26 Mark: The most long standing one is the fiction group, and now a new one on theater is coming forward.

46:31 Unknown speaker: You had asked me about potentially covering in the intro group the Name of the Rose, the novel by Umberto Eco, which, other than it being probably way

46:39 Mark: too long for people to read in a month, I think is a great

46:43 Unknown speaker: idea in terms of there's always so

46:44 Mark: much people have to clue in on.

46:47 Unknown speaker: It's not just a bunch of stale

46:49 Mark: prose that they're either stumped by or trying to penetrate. The language that something in a novelistic form, something with rhetoric to it, something that is poetic in some sense, gives you some. If you want to say it's an emotional starting point. At worst, it makes the situation satisfying, even if not philosophically enlightening, if that makes sense.

47:09 Unknown speaker: I think exploring the human element, I think that that's important. I think that might get lost. I had actually spoken Word covering John Stuart Mill on Liberty, and he does an excellent job connecting to the human elements. And I had. Actually, one of the things I'd mentioned was that he tends to reference concepts and then debunk this notion that there's a word attached to them. And I think that a lot of philosophy focuses on structure, which is good, and it's important because that structure is something that a society works through, and that's how it grows. It's like the trellis that a flower grows on. But the point that he gets into is that human element. And as you said, I think that that's the starting point for it. That's where we connect in. And from there you grow out from that and you do eventually create your own structure.

Yeah. So that was February's activity.

47:56 Mark: Jay Jeffers, another one of the academically experienced not school participants, was leading for that month. So you're going to be taking it back in March?

48:04 Unknown speaker: Well, I did want to get into Name of the Rose by Humberto.

48:07 Mark: Okay.

48:07 Unknown speaker: You know, we were bouncing that back and forth, and I don't think that we did come to a conclusion on that. The thing that I like about it, you did mention that it was too long to read in one go, and that might be true, but you can kind of get away with this cheat sheet sort of thing by watching the movie, which would make it a little bit more accessible. I've been really interested in semiotics lately.

48:30 Mark: Yeah, Echo's a great way into that,

48:31 Unknown speaker: rather than looking up Saussure or something.

Yeah. As far as what I'm going to pull into an intro class, I do try to keep it accessible. Barito Eco is a guy who's much quoted. He's somebody that you can kind of branch out into a little bit. We like to pull in alternate reading materials, alternate video materials into the class sometimes, and that'll be a nice add on, I think. You know, we can reference the movie, reference the book, we can reference some of the his quotes to help understand what's going on there. But I really like to focus on semiotics and that is how I tend to pull the next reading is to follow a path like that. We're like, okay, we're going to look at semiotics and from semiotics, what came from that, and so on.

Great.

So while it is freeform and you can join at any time, the class will actually tend to have a rhyme and reason.

49:18 Mark: Well, thank you so much for giving us a little glimpse into what's going on there. Folks listening. It's definitely not too late to sign

49:23 Unknown speaker: up for March, so jump on in. In addition to this group doing Umberto Eco, the philosophy and theater group is going to do Richard Schechner's Dionysus in 69. Philip Czerny, who you already heard on the Heidegger recording, there, will be running on another one on Heidegger on his essay the Origin of the Work of Art. I'll be leading a group on Henri Bergeson's short essay Introduction to Metaphysics, which will also be the topic for Pel episode 92. I also see a proposal on the Citizens Forum by PEL blogger Michael Burgess to lead another group on Slava Zizek. If you'd like that to happen, you can go there to let him know you're on board. Some of the other ongoing groups, such as the Philosophical Fiction Group, will also definitely be continuing. There may well still be time for

50:02 Mark: groups like that for you to join in and vote about what text to tackle next.

50:05 Unknown speaker: Not hearing any options that appeal to you. Go propose something yourself. It's easy, doesn't involve a hefty dime commitment, and doesn't mean you're committing to creating a recording like the ones you hear here.

So long.

Thank you,

Jesus. What's that sound? Oh, I know. It's the clip from the Philosophy of Theater group on the play Equus by Peter Schaeffer. Equus is a fictional account of A real life incident in which a young man blinded six horses with a hoof pick. The group leader is Daniel Cole. The first one you hear talking about the play is Philip Czerny. Other participants were Theo Monk, Jesse R. And Carlos Franke. In this segment you'll hear them talking about the Apollonian versus the Dionysian, as these terms are used in Nietzsche's the Birth of Tragedy. The Apollonian is about reason and order, while the Dionysian is about ecstasy, intoxication, chaos.

Alright, looks like we got everybody, I think.

Wait, who's everybody? I forgot everybody's name.

Well, it's Daniel. I'm here.

Well, I'm Theo.

Is that Carlos? Yes, I think we got Jesse too.

Right, yeah, I'm here.

Does anybody want to get started with maybe just kind of a loose summary or brief thoughts or anything like that?

This whole time reading this play, I was trying to think of what angle to approach the play from because there's of course the psychological dimension and you can talk about just the storyline. You can also talk about how the play is structured. And did anybody here actually watch a performance of the play? I was looking for one and I could not find any. But I was very curious. Based on descriptions and what I saw on Google images, it looked like a really interesting stage set and everything.

Yeah, I couldn't find one either. But I did watch the movie with Richard Burton. I did too, which was pretty interesting. But I'm glad I didn't decide to just cheat with that. Only because when I started reading the play, the stage directions made it clear that that was gonna be a pretty different experience.

Yeah, like in the beginning he starts talking about the horses should not look like the actors own heads are seen beneath them. No attempt should be made to conceal them. Any literalism which could suggest the cozy familiarity of a domestic animal or worse, a pantomime horse should be avoided. I love that Peter Schaefer's voice coming in out there. But when I saw pictures of these like skeletal frames that are somewhat futuristic of horses, I was thinking this is very different. It reminds me a bit of a Greek chorus. Although, you know, the great chorus, they wear masks, but they're kind of props.

He kind of dehumanizes them. And that's why I really was curious to see how they were performed. Since it says any literalism, especially like the flapping of hooves and stuff. I was really curious about his vision and how this would be visualized because I had a difficult time visualizing it. Well, I think a lot of that was lost in the movie, when the more literal adaption that the movie did, the way that the play was structured, it was so almost dreamlike, whereas the movie was much more straightforward. Obvious memory, obvious horror story, etc.

Yeah. Real horse.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah. And also the bridges. I don't know if that's a technical term. I know in film they call, like, sound bridges. When you cross over to a. You put sound from another scene into it, blurs into one scene. Anyways, that's what the term I'm gonna use. There's this ambiguity from reading the text where, like, he'll be going back to his memory. What's his name, the main kid?

Alan.

Yeah, Alan. He's recounting his memory to the therapist. Yes, he's recounting his memory and then he acts it out as he's recounting it. So these characters come in. There's a simultaneity of different times or different settings, all taking place in this circular stage.

Since we're right at the start of doing this, it might be helpful if we framed the workers as asking a question and trying to figure out what their question would be.

Well, do you have any burning questions?

Maybe something like, what kind of relation do we want between the Apollonian and the Dionysian? Because I keep thinking of rebirth, of tragedy as I read this.

Yeah.

Alan has these really attractive qualities to him, but it's clearly unhealthy. And at the same time, Dysart has these unattractive qualities to him. He's a much more functional human being. And so it's like the player's challenging you to find some synthesis.

Yeah. Especially in diceaur's sympathy for Alan, where it crosses over into envy. That's a very interesting dynamic to add to the Dionysian in the Apollonian.

Yeah.

One of the questions that pops up in my mind, which is related to this, is also what it means to take away one's worship, which you can talk about it in the terms of the Dionysian. The collusion of sexual, aesthetic and spiritual in terms of worship and how that relates to the Dionysian rapture is something that I think is really interesting.

The Apollonian almost is, in a way, on trial with Dysart throughout the play. The Dionysian definitely seemed to me to come off as the celebrated part of that dichotomy, I guess, in the play. Even though it was definitely destructive, it was destroying Alan's life and it destroyed six horses. But at the same time, the Apollonian was just pretty much disparaged throughout In a way that's kind of, maybe with just the plays I read, I don't know. But that seems kind of typical for a lot of theater and a lot of playwrights going all the way back to Greek tragedy, you know, and the Festival of Dionysus and everything.

Just the ordered world, the clinical, dispassionate approach to life that Dysart was kind of the emblem of, really came out just not looking good at all. But it's interesting because it wasn't dispensed with entirely. You did still get the sense that Alan is in pain, that Hester kept bringing that up and that counts for something. But it wasn't ever clear to me to what extent, because Dysart, he's flailing all the time, agonizing over getting rid of Alan's pain, because that's a part of his individuality and his passion. But at the same time, it's clearly pain.

So he recognizes and concedes to Hester's urging to address that. But that was kind of a question of the play to me. Was, is there any balance between those two things? Is there any just totally giving yourself over to that pain or totally losing your individuality by having that kind of surgically cut out through modern psychiatry?

Yeah. And also the notion of what it means to push one up to the threshold of human experience, where that border between rapture and where. Where does that border? When does this become destructive? When does the rapturous love of life become a destructive force? Where you gouge out the eyes of a horse, you know?

Alright, the next one by the philosophy and theater group is on Cormac McCarthy's The Sunset Limited, a novel in dramatic form, 2006. The recording was from this January and features a subset of the participants you just heard, in this case, Daniel, Philip and Carlos.

Well, what did you guys think about this play or novel and dramatic form?

You want to go first, Carlos?

Well, yeah, now that you mentioned the subtitle, I wasn't entirely sure if it

57:31 Mark: was meant as a play at all.

57:33 Unknown speaker: It feels like a Socratic dialogue, like a failed one with no reductio absurdum.

Right.

It was interesting reading that. This is quite a contrast from the last one we read, where the last one definitely fits the conventions, where they have a cast. This one's stripped down to black and white. They don't even have names.

It seems like you could read this as a novel and it doesn't necessarily need to be adapted into a play the same way. Socratic dialogue. I mean, there's A performative element to discourse. But to watch that on stage versus reading it, it doesn't make much difference. However, I should say that I watched the HBO movie and it was interesting to see how Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson interpreted the characters.

They were much different from how I imagined them. I imagined the white guy to be much more mousy, fidgety and timid.

58:21 Stan: So I didn't watch the movie.

58:23 Unknown speaker: Can you tell me about it?

Sure, yeah. Well, the movie was my first encounter with this. And I have to say I'm actually a pretty big fan of the movie. And I've now seen it quite a few times, partially because it kind of took me a while to get a handle on this play. I find it to be a really deceptive kind of work because there's a whole dimension to the language that didn't open up for me until the third or fourth time I saw it or heard it or read it. Because there's a straightforward way that you can watch the movie and just be very engaged in the dialogue between the two of them and especially seeing it performed.

Samuel Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones are very good actors and a put a lot of character into this work that really. I don't know if it's really there in the actual words. They really brought it into a performance in a way that, like Philip was saying, I think it's very much a text that can be read without really losing much with not seeing it staged. On the other hand, I've done this work in three different formats now.

And I think the one I liked

the best was an audio without visual reading. It was good, and seeing it was good, too. But for some reason, like hearing it, it worked best for me. And it may also have been that particular performance with those two actors.

I can see that.

I can see how the visuals can get a little distracting. And especially if Daniel. You're saying that something about the particulars of the wording is what strikes you, then sometimes the acting, the gestures and the nonverbal communication can get in the way, can distract you from the words themselves.

Right?

Yeah.

Samuel Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones were almost too good actors to do it because there was a whole dimension to it that I didn't really get until I heard it in another format.

McCarthy. One thing that I do find interesting about him is the way that he

conveys these profundities or thoughts through very simple vernacular wording. And then it takes you a while to think about how these things drive at something very deep. But they're just said in very simple ways.

Yeah.

Just starting out in the beginning of the play, I think the first thing that you're struck with is the way the characters are given to you just as black and white, even though white is kind of referred to as the Professor. Pretty much throughout the rest of the work in the script, you're seeing black and white just. There are several things that. That evoked for me. We were talking about McCarthy's writing.

I think that's one thing that he

is really good at, and it always impresses me about him, is the way that he's able to tie so many different things into one little piece of expression, so many different themes or meanings or allusions into just one little line or things like that. That was kind of what I meant about it being complicated earlier because there were so many different lines and little passages in this play that when I went back several times, I started to notice how they connected up with things that had been said before. And they kind of had more connotations the deeper I got into it.

And then I realized that, like, the language that Black uses especially a lot of the time, since he's mostly the one talking throughout most of the play, is actually very careful. And there's a lot of words that are used that are given certain meanings or that they have situations that come up in which they're used in the play that have connotations for later situations in which they're used. Again, things like when he's talking about the difference between doubting or questioning. And then later on, like, the professor will say something, and then he'll say, well, I doubt that.

But then you have carried over that baggage from when he later made that distinction between doubting and questioning, which is that the doubter is someone who pretty much wants to be told that there's no such thing. And the questioner is someone who wants the truth. And then later in the play, the professor says something, and he says, I doubt that.

And.

And it's after he's already made this distinction. And it leaves you with the impression that that is a kind of maybe a subconscious thing on his part where he's saying, I don't want to know. You know, I don't want to go any further down that road. And to me, that was kind of the whole play is a language battleground. It's two people trying to pull the other into their particular narrative.

Lastly, we're going to hear the introductory part of the the Marxism groups discussion from November 2013, featuring Andy Langley and

Glenn Stratton, all Right, I'm Glenn. And I'm Andy and Andy's going to give us an outline.

Okay, so we're talking about the Communist Manifesto and the Principles of communism. So the Communist Manifesto is written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848 and it's commissioned by the Communist League, which is a group that Marx and Engels helped set up to further the sort of revolutionary cause of their particular brand of socialism. And the Principles of Communism is written also around the same time. And it's a sort of snappy 25 point sort of a Q and A of what communism is from Engels point of view. So the Manifesto is four chapters that packs most of Marx's theoretical work into a pamphlet sized book that you could distribute and get an understanding of what Marx is all about and Marx's view on economy, politics, and it still be understandable, It'd still be readable, yeah.

The Manifesto, not only is it a distillation of the basic Marxist program, but as a pamphlet it's got a lot of rhetorical flourish and it's a must read for pretty much anybody who's interested in life, I'd say. I mean, you're not an interesting person if you haven't read it or don't

want to read it.

It's just a great work of literature on top of the political agenda that is backing it up. It's just a great read. It's written beautifully, it moves along quickly. There are very few patches where you're just confused. It's as good a distillation as you're gonna get for these ideas that on the one hand aren't the most complicated things in the universe. But if you're not used to thinking about society in terms of class or thinking about economics, then it might throw you if it's your first time reading it. But it's easy enough to read and it's fun.

Basically we're just encouraging you that if you're listening to this, it's short and there's a decent amount of not straight repetition, but the same ideas do get hit upon in slightly different ways two or three times. And the last section is a very concise note about communism's relation to the other existing party. It's historical information about the time when he was writing it. The philosophy is in the first two chapters, mostly where he's laying out the. I don't think he actually uses the phrase historical materialism, does he?

In here?

No, no, he doesn't.

Yeah.

That just tells you that it's basically A thing that you can hand out to people. Any schmuck who can read can read it. And it's not gonna beat him over the head with all sorts of highfalutin ideas.

It is very strict. Right.

So if this is your first time coming to the ideas of Marxism, it's not Hegel.

Right.

Some crazy ranting, just complicated mess. It's a paradigm of concision and clarity. And I don't know if rigor would be the right word because obviously it is a pamphlet.

It's rebel rousing as well, at the same time.

Yeah, exactly.

It's supposed to get you fired up.

Right. If you're sort of on board with these ideas, it's hard not to get fired up about it. I mean, it has that ability to energize you. That's how much of a good read it is.

So some sort of historical background.

Yeah.

This is written at a time when. And I mean socialism, Communism that get confused as words. Socialism is already an existing force before this is written. Has its roots in all kinds of different political theories that are floating around England and France beforehand. So Marx is trying to distinguish what his particular version of socialism is compared to other types of socialism of the day. And he has done a huge amount of theoretical and economic work to create an entire system. That's why it's referred to as Marxism. In the first two chapters. He's going to give a background as to why and how capitalism has risen, what the forces are that have created the social relations of the day, what the two big classes are. And then the rest of it is how communism as a party.

Yeah.

Communist parties deal with the class structure and with the political infrastructure of the day.

Yeah.

And then there's also. Which is basically just a lot of bitching about all these other socialists. Why they're not really socialists.

Yeah, no, there's a lot of. They do have a bit of that kind of Chopra, Harry and Nietzschean talent for just shitting on people that disagree with them.

And good night,

Sam. Messed up people that hate their lives Messed up people that hate their lives Messed up people that hate their lives Are fun to be.