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

23 - Superstructure Cancels the Pope

Maxximilian Seijo (@MaxSeijo) speaks with Natan Last (@natanlast) about his recent essay for the Superstructure vertical, "A Graceful Kind of Non-Absence."

Read it here: https://moneyontheleft.org/2021/04/07/a-graceful-kind-of-non-absence/

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

Superstructure Vertical: Natan Last

In this episode; Scott Ferguson and Maxximilian Seijo discuss the politics and aesthetics of Marvel’s WandaVision (2021), which was released via the Disney Plus streaming service earlier this year. Picking up questions about blockbuster form and apophatic analysis they’ve pondered in previous episodes, Scott and Maxx affirm the show’s exceptional foray into past sitcom aesthetics and other similarly abstract forms in light of the present neoliberal paradigm crisis. They tease out WandaVision’s critical engagement with the white heteronormative patriarchy that sitcoms have complicatedly mediated. And they critique the program’s ultimate capitulation to conventional blockbuster aesthetics, which substitute a finite and fatalistic physics for what is in truth a capacious and transformable process of monetary mediation.

Modern Movie Theory (MMT): WandaVision

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

For access to the full 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)

The Neoliberal Blockbuster: Jaws (Preview)

Andrés Bernal joins Scott Ferguson and Maxximilian Seijo to discuss the historical and political implications of the latest Marvel streaming series, The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. Together, they tease out unstable contradictions between the show’s desires for racial and geopolitical reparation and justice, on one hand, and its punishingly zero-sum Malthusian drama, on the other. The result is a fascinating and, at moments, surprising Marvel offering, which struggles to keep up with the contemporary crises of American imperialism and white patriarchy. 

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

Modern Movie Theory (MMT): The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

¡Llegó el primer episodio de Superstructure en Español!  

Andrés Bernal (@andresintheory) y Natalie Smith (@orangeasm)  conversan sobre la relevancia de la Teoría Monetaria Moderna para Latinoamérica con dos expertos económicos de la región, Jesus Resendiz (@Tlacuachito) y Daniel Rojas (@DanielRMed).

 Analizamos las protestas recientes en Colombia, con sus formaciones reaccionarias y las posibilidades para la izquierda, incluyendo la candidatura de Gustavo Petro, una carta abierta de economistas Colombianos heterodoxos criticando una tendencia común a la izquierda de entender los impuestos como la fuente del gasto público, y una propuesta para una ley de garantía de trabajo. Después, vamos a México para conversar sobre los supuestos ortodoxos de austeridad asumidos sin crítica por el gobierno de la izquierda de AMLO. 

**

It's the first Superstructure episode in Spanish! Andres Bernal and Natalie Smith discuss the relevance of MMT for Latin America with two Latin American economic experts, Jesus Resendiz and Daniel Rojas. We discuss the recent protests in Colombia, reactionary formations there and prospects for the left, including  the candidacy of Gustavo Petro, a recent open letter from Colombian heterodox economists criticizing left tilt towards understanding taxes as funding the government, and a job guarantee proposal. Then we move to Mexico and discuss the orthodox austerity assumptions uncritically taken on by the purportedly left government of AMLO. 

Look out for the English and Spanish transcripts in the coming weeks!


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

Superestructura: Versión Sureña

Simulation and Simulacra, by Jean Baudrillard (Page 1)

In Processions, host Maxximilian Seijo reads and reflects on one page of a given text, five days a week. Taking a tour through a vast array of thinkers, concepts and methods, one snapshot at a time, Maxx explores the redemptive capacity of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective’s method of analogical critique. 

After the first five episodes, Processions will be released as a Patreon delayed exclusive. Episodes will be available for public listening seven days later.

Subscribe to our Patreon for more: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

Processions: 1 - Postmodern Angst

Rebecca L. Spang, Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Page 6)

In Processions, host Maxximilian Seijo reads and reflects on one page of a given text, five days a week. Taking a tour through a vast array of thinkers, concepts and methods, one snapshot at a time, Maxx explores the redemptive capacity of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective’s method of analogical critique. 

After the first five episodes, Processions will be released as a Patreon delayed exclusive. Episodes will be available for public listening seven days later.

Subscribe to our Patreon for more: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

Processions: 4 - Performing Money

Stuart Hall, Essential Essays (Vol. 2): Identity and Diaspora, "Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities" (Page 67)

In Processions, host Maxximilian Seijo reads and reflects on one page of a given text, five days a week. Taking a tour through a vast array of thinkers, concepts and methods, one snapshot at a time, Maxx explores the redemptive capacity of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective’s method of analogical critique. 

After the first five episodes, Processions will be released as a Patreon delayed exclusive. Episodes will be available for public listening seven days later.

Subscribe to our Patreon for more: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

Processions: 5 - Hall of Mirrors

Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America  (Page 8-9)

In Processions, host Maxximilian Seijo reads and reflects on one page of a given text, five days a week. Taking a tour through a vast array of thinkers, concepts and methods, one snapshot at a time, Maxx explores the redemptive capacity of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective’s method of analogical critique. 

After the first five episodes, Processions will be released as a Patreon delayed exclusive. Episodes will be available for public listening seven days later.

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

Music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

Processions: 7 - Infinity Sign

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

Dasha Files (Case #7: Hegel Edition)

Siegfried Kracauer, History, the Last Things Before the Last (page 42-43)

In Processions, host Maxximilian Seijo reads and reflects on one page of a given text, five days a week. Taking a tour through a vast array of thinkers, concepts and methods, one snapshot at a time, Maxx explores the redemptive capacity of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective’s method of analogical critique. 

After the first five episodes, Processions will be released as a Patreon delayed exclusive. Episodes will be available for public listening seven days later.

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

Music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

Processions: 11 - Framing Historiography

Hosts Natalie Smith and Maxximilian Seijo dive into the world of personality types as exemplified by the likes of astrology, MBTI and Enneagram. Complicating John Ganz’s recent dismissal of personal types as univocal, alienating and repressive, Naty and Maxx queer such typologies, drawing attention to their playful, generative and relational meanings. Sprinkled with references to Adorno, Deleuze, Leibniz, and Hegel, the episode treats astrology, MBTI and Enneagram as analogical practices and asks how such practices can inform a non-zero-sum left politics of money. 

Link to Ganz's essay: https://johnganz.substack.com/p/thats-not-a-personality-sweetie

25 - The Official MMT Personality Test

Maxximilian Seijo, Andrés Bernal and Scott Ferguson plunge into the latest Disney Plus streaming series, Loki (2021) as part of their ongoing examination of Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). For all its deliciously queer aesthetic & political potentials, they argue, Loki represents another MCU tragedy about the promise & perpetual failure of social contract theory, and fascism’s seductive exploitation of that failure. In doing so, they critique how the show’s neoliberal and tacitly Deleuzean conception of time as “univocal difference” problematically pits care against heterogeneity in a zero-sum trade-off between fascism and democracy. At the same time, they suggest that Loki’s polyvalent and often-campy aesthetics nevertheless express new longings for alternative modes of questioning and organizing the world.

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

Modern Movie Theory (MMT): Loki

Ian (@ian_as_portrait) joins Natalie Smith to discuss the hyper-normative left rhetoric of philosophy instructor and frequent Jacobin contributor Ben Burgis. Emblematic of a certain deadpan logical sobriety seen in certain left circles, Burgis’s debate style downplays heterogeneity, pleasure, and generativity in an effort to convert libertarians and rightwingers to an incrementalist tax-to-spend vision of democratic socialism. Calling out the austerian and deeply fatalist assumptions of Burgis’s reactionary approach, Ian and Naty instead affirm the potentials of an inclusive, heterogenous, and emotionally wide-ranging left discourse.

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

Left Conversion Therapy w/ Ian from Twitter

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

For access to the full 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

The Neoliberal Blockbuster: Robocop (Preview)

Subscribe to our Patreon to support our work: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Liz Files (Case #1): Birdicide

This Money on the Left/Superstructure episode is the tenth premium release from Scott Ferguson's "Neoliberal Blockbuster" course for Patreon subscribers.

For access to the rest of the course, 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)

The Neoliberal Blockbuster: Toy Story Part 1 (Full Episode)

Cohosts Natalie Smith and Will Beaman discuss mutual aid, highlighting the potentials of its often neglected monetary and linguistic dimensions. 

Reading against Dean Spade’s interpretation of mutual aid as fully internal or external to money and the state, Natalie and Will recast mutual aid practices as active and vital forms of contestation over the “monetary naming” of other fiscal authorities that naturalize austerity and unemployment. Viewing mutual aid this way, they argue, opens up possibilities for its expansion through monetary creation.

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

26 - Mutual Aid By Any Other Name

Co-hosts Will Beaman, Natalie Smith, and Maxximilian Seijo discuss recent critiques of the Sunrise Movement by influential members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) on social media and in the pages of Jacobin Magazine. Problematizing the DSAers destructive zero-sum rhetoric regarding the allegedly correct “theory of change,” the gang suggests an alternative mode for organizational provisioning, rooted in neither the sovereignty of a dues-paying membership structure nor the sovereignty of “outside” donors. It is impossible to take part in an interdependent social organization that knows no externality because everyone is responsible to everyone else, whether inside or outside a particular organization. Misunderstanding inter-organizational dependence, the Superstructure co-hosts argue, has led these writers to accuse Sunrise of “social disembeddedness,” a reactionary charge with little basis in reality. In contrast, the Superstructure team proffers a self-consciously generative and analogical model of social coordination that opens organizational activity to diversity and difference.

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

27 - Sunrise or DSA?

In this special episode, hosts Natalie Smith and @moltopopulare take on the austere sexual politics promulgated by cultural critic and commentator Elizabeth or “Liz” Bruenig. Mirroring the tacit zero-sum logics built into her spouse Matt Bruenig’s analyses of political economy, Liz regularly weaponizes social conservatism and conformity in cruel efforts to shore up a problematic vision of a proper social democratic populace. Natalie and Charlotte lay bare the sadistic violation of sexual freedom and identity that forms the core of Liz's project by examining a wide range of articles on topics such as queer celibacy, the politics of pornography, and 50 Shades of Gray.
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

Comforted & Chastened : A Liz Bruenig Special

CW: trauma, abuse

Will Beaman draws on personal experiences to reflect on how the problematic reduction of “deradicalization” to dialogues between fascists and anti-fascists resembles other forms of emotional and relational abuse. When the imperatives of “coalition-building” require victims of right wing violence to double down on dialogues with hostile interlocutors, the supposedly public realm of ideas resembles an abusive household, in which leaving is not an option. After a cold open from Briahna Joy Gray’s recent interview with Talia Lavin on the “Bad Faith” podcast, Will suggests that distinctly non-carceral and non-“paid for” modes of institutional mediation are necessary for deradicalization to be something more than the emotional blackmail of victims via toxic social norms.

The Last House on the Left

This Money on the Left/Superstructure episode is the eleventh premium release from Scott Ferguson's "Neoliberal Blockbuster" course for Patreon subscribers.  Typically reserved for Patreon subscribers, this special two-part episode about Toy Story is available to the general public in full. 

For access to the rest of the course, 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)

The Neoliberal Blockbuster: Toy Story Part 2 (Full Episode)

In this episode, co-hosts Natalie Smith and Maxximilian Seijo argue that the pandemic not only killed neoliberalism as a tacit ideological formation; it also revealed how neoliberal truisms have never captured the actual causal mechanisms and potentials that defined the past 50 years. Fleshing out these claims, Naty and Maxx journey through the work of rockstar economic historian Adam Tooze, focusing in particular on his widely-hailed recent book, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy (2021). Naty and Maxx affirm Tooze’s characteristically thorough demonstration of the myriad ways that the world-wide response to the pandemic, however inadequate, dismantled the pillars of neoliberal governance. Yet they also critique the elitist complicity of Tooze’s methodological commitment to historical immanence and inevitability, tracing such impulses to back to John Maynard Keynes’ fatal dismissal of Abba Lerner’s proposal to do away with balanced budgets and revenue-constraints. For the Superstructure crew, by contrast, proceeding “in medias res,” as Tooze puts it, requires an abolitionist attunement to genuine conditions of injustice and possibility, from #Defund and ongoing labor strikes to contests over #MintTheCoin and the Green New Deal. During the conversation, wisecracks and burns abound, per usual. This one, too, is packed with citations, including loving shoutouts to David Stein, Jakob Feinig, Mariame Kaba, Dan Berger, Emily Hobson, Alex Yablon, Nathan Tankus, and Rohan Grey.

Link to our Patreon: 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

Superstructure 28: We Have Never Been Neoliberal, What Now?

A guided meditation you can do with your Tungsten Cube.

Becoming Cube (Guided Meditation)

Cohosts Will Beaman and Maxximilian Seijo uncover the cultural and aesthetic foundations of popular histories of inflation. They discuss the 1930’s Weimar hyperinflation, 1970s American “stagflation”, and more.

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

8 - Aesthetics of Inflation

Cohosts Will Beaman, Natalie Smith and Maxximilian Seijo discuss Maxx's recent article in the Journal of Environmental Media, titled “Governing media information through a Green New Deal: History, theory, practice."

Featuring a special report by Australian Twitter Correspondent @moltopopulare from inside the Superstructure, and a surprise call-in from friend of the show, Liz Bruenig.

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

Link to Maxx's paper below:
https://www.academia.edu/43950105/Governing_media_information_through_a_Green_New_Deal_History_theory_practice

15 - Tragedy of the Commons

Cohosts Will Beaman, Natalie Smith, and Maxximilian Seijo reflect on the importance of Modern Monetary Theory for the Left.

16 - Why MMT?

In this episode, Maxximilian Seijo (@maxseijo), Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) & Natalie Smith (@orangeasm) are joined by Matt Christman (@cushbomb) from Chapo Trap House to discuss their critique of his zero-sum methodology.

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

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

18 - Superstructure Works (with Matt Christman)

Kicking off a Money on the Left / Superstructure Patreon fund drive, Scott Ferguson joins Maxximilian Seijo to discuss MMT, eco-fascism and Avengers: Infinity War. This premium episode offers listeners a sneak peek at Ferguson’s Hollywood Blockbuster course, which will be rolled out for subscribers in the coming months.

While we appreciate support for our premium content on Patreon from those who can afford it, this is not a hard paywall! If you are unable to pay, reach out to the Money on the Left/Superstructure team for free access to our premium content. 

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

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

Modern Movie Theory (MMT): Avengers: Infinity War

In this episode, Natalie Smith & Maxximilian Seijo host Daniel Bessner (@dbessner) to debate the pertinence of contemporary leftist efforts to analogize Trumpian neoliberalism to 1930s fascism. The conversation also takes up matters of left strategy & media, including the role of theoretical provocation and the politics of online culture.

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.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

20 - the Fascist Analogy (with Daniel Bessner)

In this episode, cohosts Natalie Smith, Will Beaman & Maxximilian Seijo reflect on some ill-fated responses to the right-wing insurrection at the Capitol, utilize feminist psychoanalysis to articulate a film theory of the state, and meditate on the mental health side of an MMT-informed left-wing praxis. 

Link to our Patreon: https://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

21 - Film Theory of the State

Scott Ferguson joins Maxximilian Seijo to discuss method and the dangers of overly positive or negative orientations to the historical world. First, they critique Liam Kofi Bright’s problematic revival of logical positivism, which submits left praxis to reductive and exclusionary market models. Next, they affirm the negative approaches to aesthetic criticism found in the works of Siegfried Kracauer, the Frankfurt School, and Fredric Jameson. Finally, they celebrate the often-overlooked “double movement” of positive & negative impulses that animate Karl Marx’s writings, only on analogical rather than dialectical terms.

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

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