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A
Go beyond the verses and achieve a deeper understanding of Scripture with the Rebind Study Bible App. An audio experience of the Bible interwoven with expert commentary. The Rebind Study Bible App reads Scripture to you, enriching your comprehension with insights from the world renowned New International Commentary on the Old and the New Testament in an accessible podcast episode format.
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B
Be not therefore anxious for the morrow. Matthew chapter 6 each day will have.
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C
Its troubles, but by God's grace they can be survived.
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A
Use the Rebind Study Bible App's chat function to ask questions and get answers in real time. That's thought provoking discussion and analysis rooted in decades of research and wisdom from more than 40 scholars at your fingertips. The Rebind Study Bible App is a new way to experience the Bible with enhanced depth at your own pace in the moments you have. Search the Apple App Store for Rebind Study Bible or go to Rebind App for a free seven day trial.
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D
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A
Extra.
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A
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C
Prices and participation may vary.
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D
Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California and for delivery.
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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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E
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm the advancer. Listen carefully. The audience is your instrument. Play it. In order to practically understand how we are generally instrumentalized, Prepare the audience with concepts, questions and movements as a way to explore the dissonance that exists between the individual narcissism that capitalism promotes and our social capacity. Between how we conceive ourselves as free individuals with agency and the way that we are socially determined by capitalist relations, technology and ideology. Reflect on the I we relation while defining social dissonance. Help the collective subject to emerge. The text I just read is the interaction to the score to Social Dissonance, a performance staged by the artist, musician and theorist matin at document 14 in 2017. At the event, audiences were subjected to a series of seemingly arbitrary actions by for performance for many participants this experience was unsettling or destabilising. In the course of the hour long event, audiences were forced to repeatedly rearrange the social relations between themselves and the.
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B
Rest of the group.
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E
For some, this came at the cost of having to become publicly vulnerable. For others, this experience was so uncomfortable that they may have preferred to opt out. This long term experiment by Matten is part of his application of the principles of noise performance to social relationship. Noisework is often assumed to be autonomous and unencumbered by social conventions. In Social Dissonance, the book which bears the same title as the Performance, Matin develops an in depth theory of alienation in the Marxist philosophical tradition. He proposes that the condition of social dissonance, one which unsettles social and material relations to the point where they are impossible to ignore, is the only way.
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B
To deal with alienation.
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E
Rather than return to some pre alienated state, as is the aim of much Marxist fault, Matin wants to confront the mechanism of alienation outright. I planned to record a perfectly streamlined interview with Matten. His book would have lent itself to this perfectly. The majority of the 200 or so pages contains perfectly well written theory and built on well situated history of Marx's thought. But perhaps because I wanted to talk about my experience of the performance, the interview got a little derailed in a manner that would have normally required me to edit some of the sequence. In the spirit of social dissonance, however, I decided not to do this. What you hear now is my conversation with Matern as it happened, including some mildly awkward pauses and side notes. It may not make sense throughout and it might not be the most enlightening interview that you ever hear either. I will ask, however, that you follow one of the rules of social dissonance that I remember from the performance Documenta. If you decide to stop listening in the middle of the episode, please pause and explain to everyone out loud why it is that you want to leave.
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B
Martin, welcome to the show.
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C
Thank you so much for having me.
- [04:55]
B
Martin, I'm super excited to talk to you. I've kind of been waiting for this conversation for five years, but I didn't necessarily know that I was. So in the previous edition, the last edition of documenta, in 2017, you staged a performance called Social Dissonance, which is also the title of the book we're going to discuss now, and Social Dissonance. I remember being quite shaken by. I experienced it twice. Once I walked out of it in Athens. Because your performance, maybe you were in the audience. I don't know whether maybe you were in the room. Your performance made us wait for no reason for an incredibly long time. And I got a little bit impatient. But somehow when I got to encounter the same experience in the same same performance in Castle, which is where Documenta the exhibition takes place normally, I somehow gave into it and I spent a wonderful hour, or maybe more locked in a room with about 20 other people, most of them on that occasion, museum curators and art world people. And I was being completely bewildered by a series of exercises by a performers. I remember that we started off by trying to organize ourselves along a wall, not from tallest to shortest to shortest to tallest, but rather from least powerful to most powerful, or maybe least confident to most confident. Now there's a recording of this. Maybe we'll get to this. But I thought this was a fantastic thing. I didn't quite understand it at the time. And through sheer luck I managed to come across the title of your book. Now, this is a very long introduction. I'm going to already have to edit it because I'm getting overexcited. What was it that I experienced, Matin? And who are you? What was your role in this performance experience for me?
- [06:51]
C
Well, yeah, hopefully you were experiencing social dissonance, which is the title of the book, the name of the score, and a concept which tries to describe the discrepancy that exists between certain values that are promoted in Western democracies that have to do with equality, democracy and individual freedom. So these are the values that, you know, most of us in Western liberal societies promote. But in our everyday life, we reproduce a system based on inequality, oppression and exploitation. So this inevitably generates massive cognitive dissonance between what we think and what we do. And I think that's a kind of latent thing that we all have, and that through this experimental situation, I call it a concert. The idea was to make this social dissonance resonate, to collectivize it, to do something with it, to put it out there in order to play with it. So this core, which the four interpreters were trying to follow, but which the also audience had access to, it was made in order for this to happen, to this social dissonance to be played with so we can try to engage with what it might seem very abstract kind of concept, but then practically, did you experience this social dissonance? Did you get a feeling of like.
- [08:47]
B
Oh, I'm not entirely sure. I'm not entirely sure that I did in a way that would be kind of ideal. And I'm going to own up to something straight away. I think I've already, in asking you this very complicated, long question. I've already overcompensated for something I expected might happen even in our conversation. So social dissonance, in my words. We'll get to think about it a little bit more in a second. Is this condition in which one is a little bit disorientated by one's surroundings and by social relationships that are playing themselves out. And I have a memory of positioning myself in your concert, in the performance, as someone who was overtly confident and having read the book and having read the script a couple of days ago for the performance, I realized that you have ways of dealing with people like me by now. And maybe you didn't do that. Maybe you didn't have them at hand in the very early iterations of the performance. So maybe. Maybe I need to shut up is what I'm going to suggest, and let you perform some social dissonance on me by going back to the beginning. Tell me who you are. Tell me how we've got here. What. What is your practice? How is it that your practice, which I understand, deals with noise and music, how that has let you led you to this position of playing humans as instruments?
- [10:15]
C
Well, yeah, I'm an improviser, and I also deal with noise. And in the course of my many years engaging with this context, I started to understand that there was something taken for granted in this context, and this was individual freedom. And I think that this individual freedom is highly problematic, is actually not possible to fully realize. It's a very minuscule kind of possibilities. You know, it offers a very reduced possibilities of what freedom might be. So then the question was, okay, what do we consider to be an individual? And that's what it took me to the concept of alienation. Alienation as understood as a kind of forms of mediation and separation. And the history of the concept has many. It's very charged. But what I started to understand is that this individual is mediated by, you know, different forms of alienation. From language to technology to, you know, capitalist relations. There's, like, different, you know, forms of mediation that actually undermine that idea of the individual and its potential for freedom. So then I started to basically deal with this lack of freedom as material to be dealt with, to be improvised. So then maybe the emphasis shifted from the kind of sonic material to a more direct relation to other people and to engage with other people and to play with interactive forms of engagement. And that's how, you know, I guess maybe with the help of conceptual art and, you know, different Forms of theoretical frameworks and trying to be experimental and.
- [12:49]
F
Be with others in ways that is not very clearly defined. And then you try to engage and break some forms of consensus or, you know, engage in different ways, and then something opens up.
- [13:06]
C
And from opening things up, then it takes you to the next step. Yeah.
- [13:16]
B
Okay. In an attempt to keep. Keep some control over a conversation, which I'm going to. No, actually scrap this. I think it might be useful for those of our listeners who haven't quite. Sorry, start again. I think it would be quite useful to maybe trace the steps from the tradition of noise and noise performance and its relationship to concepts such as freedom to take us a few steps towards the realm of contemporary art. And I don't want us to necessarily get completely bogged down into contemporary art because that's a field that has whole range of problems. But I think what you're trying to do in social dissonance, the performance and the theorization of it that the book deals with, in the most part, you move from a set of tools and a set of kind of liberating conceptions that the performance of noise traditionally is understood at. But you acknowledge, you observe that actually that's also something that we can no longer really rely on for a number of reasons. One's the fact that performance and noise, performance and its kind of freedoms have been appropriated now already into modes of productions. You bring up examples like John Cage's 433, the famous piece of non music that he produced, in which it is now after which is now no longer possible to consider sound not as socially constructed. So maybe we can take a few steps from noise into the realm of the conceptual in which noise itself is no longer adequate.
- [15:00]
C
Well, yeah, Once again, by taking noise, you know, like from the 70s or 80s and the form of transgressions and the things that they were replying to, I think they kind of propose a very vitalist approach to performance and like, you know, like extreme forms of self expression that maybe at that time were breaking taboos or breaking boundaries. And then, you know, they were also offering different frequencies and engages with material which were perhaps disorientating for the listeners. But all these became tropes, very recognizable tropes, where then it no longer kind of challenged or disturbed the listener or the public. But it was expected, it was actually anticipated, it was treated as, you know, good quality sounds. You know, so there's a kind of process of formalization or of becoming palatable material and palatable sonic material. And I guess for me it was that you know, I guess the disturbant elements of it, which somehow I always thought they were reflections of the disturbance in society that interested me. But then what I came to realize is that you don't need to go to music to go to that, you know, to find those disturbances. You can find them in our own everyday life, you know. And that's where I went from an understanding of noise in this extreme sonic realm into trying to understand the noise in this psychological sense. And that's where the social dissonance comes. So there is already, you know, we embodied, you know, that disturbance from a promise of this system, give us, you know, this possibility of freedom, whatever that might be. And, you know, that. Or more specifically, individual freedom and that, you know, impossibility to do fully realized. So this generates a form of mental noise, which I think, yeah, it became my material. It became my material in order to explore, to undermine some of those assumptions which, you know, noise historically has. Propose or, you know, or. Yeah, these expressions of transgression, you know, so them is like, okay, when those expressions of transgressions are just a masquerade for actually, you know, forms of extreme individualism which are the ones promoted by this system, then what do you do? And then you start to kind of see things in reverse or, you know, you see certain inversions, you know, what you consider to be these acts of freedom then actually might be also read as actually very conservative, you know, promoting certain conservative agendas. And like. So I hope this helped a bit to understand that my transition from one scene to this other.
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B
I might make that the first question. I might move it to the. To the beginning, because I think it's a good. Will be a good way to introduce the listeners to.
- [19:02]
C
Yeah, to.
- [19:03]
B
To. To where we are. Okay. Maybe. Maybe we can. We can think a little bit about the meat of. Of the concert and rather than to. To rely so much on. On my experience of it, which was just one out of, I think, 167 performances. Or in fact, maybe. Maybe many, many more. Because. Because the way they. Without wishing to maybe describe too much of this for listeners, instead, maybe what I offer is I'll put a link in the show notes to the video recording or that performance I was in. Just.
- [19:42]
C
And which one were you pretty much at the top of? The confident people or the powerful people?
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B
I think, yeah, it was me and another museum director. I made myself more powerful than her, more confident than her.
- [19:54]
C
So you were at the top of this?
- [19:55]
B
Of course. Of course I was, Martin. Of course. I'm going to let Listeners, if they so desire, look at, watch the video. Just to assure kind of complete humiliation of me as a subject in this, if it didn't happen in the performance, that I can be broken right now. But what I want to say is that. Would you propose for your performance, as you mentioned before, you propose a whole range of devices by which various social relationships can be undermined and destabilized in sometimes subtle, but sometimes quite overbearing ways. Instructions, making people wait. And these are kind of things that contemporary art has experimented with as much as noise has experimented with its sonic relationships. And just. I'm going to read one of them, one of your possible devices, instructions, just so the listeners get some of the absurdity of it. Squirrel. When you don't know what to do, pretend to be a squirrel. That's going to be my motto. But this is maybe one of the kind of slightly sillier ones of quite a serious score. So I have a couple of questions that come out of this. One is the role of repetition. I've never really hung out with noise people that much in my life, but I know that it's a repetitive activity to a certain extent. It's a practice that one has to maintain and keep on developing in a way that requires certain kind of aesthetic attunement in social. The concept social dissonance in Documenta also took place over 160 odd days, which meant that you could refine it or you could refine it as a performance, as opposed to you couldn't refine your material, you couldn't refine your instruments, because the people, the audiences, the participants were different every single time. So in the two things, the repetition and the kind of aesthetic tropes that you already alluded to, how do they relate to one another? What does the form of performance of a concert allow for the development of the project. And maybe underneath it there's a question, who is this being produced for? Who ends up gaining whatever knowledge and emancipatory potential is alluded to here? Is it the performance? Is it the audiences? Is it you?
- [22:28]
C
Because of the scale of it is so big or there is. There was so much time. 180 hours, I think it contains. It depends of how much you focus on specific. Either a specific session or your personal experience. Or you can take all this material and depending on the engagement and the interest, you might have. Well, there is certainly a lot of rich material there to engage with. So the repetition, well, simply has to do with. I guess I was trying to take the most out of the conditions that I was given, but understanding that this performance is quite intense. So, okay, one hour every day seems to be kind of fine. And then. It's funny that, you know, whether it's a repetition or a continuation, you know, because we never actually. Every day was different, you know. Every day, you know, it was like a threat, you know, so it was like a kind of continuous threat of things for the people who were following it, you know, so there is repetition in the framework, but not in the way that we dealt with it. Because when we started, when the interpreters started, you know, to play, the audience as an instrument was definitely new to them. And like, you know, if you start to play without any knowledge of an instrument, imagine the guitar or something, you just do it quite roughly. Like really, you know. And that's what we were doing at the beginning with the audience. It was pretty rough, you know, we didn't know how to engage in, you know, we had to learn. We had to learn how to go about it. And with time, you understood. We understood that the most important thing was to just have minimal proposals or structures or instructions. So things get going, you know, and then once things going, then is the audience playing themselves, then also playing the interpreters, you know, things just kind of roll. But it took a while to. So it was definitely a learning process, but I guess it was that kind of repetitive structure that allow that learning process to improve. And in terms of form, what do you mean? Like, you know, like. What's the second point that you want to.
- [25:06]
E
I think the question of aesthetics comes.
- [25:08]
B
In quite, quite strongly, and it's something that you address in the book. And actually the presentation of your work within Documenta, which is, you know, until this recent edition, this year, was a place in which one could go and see what is happening in the world's aesthetics. You know, we have this. It's definitely a place where the art world comes and thinks it knows what things look like. But you've also been critical of aesthetic tropes, of course, and noise production and its tradition. So I'm interested in how one undoes these things in a performance environment.
- [25:44]
C
I don't know if it's. And I guess I remember like a noise musician saying that I just want to take the listening to the woods. And then I was thinking, well, actually, everyday reality is much more strange than the woods. And whatever, there is something very, very strange. So it's almost an inverse relation in which, by using the skews of aesthetics, you have experimental framework, temporal framework, where you can engage with People that you might not know and talk or deal with your own self conception and in relationship to others. So it's almost like engaging in a kind of very prefabricated setup, engaging with you as material, basically, not only you, but a kind of collective self reflection on how we relate to each other or who we think we are. And that is done. Understanding that there is also a process of aestheticization. Even though this might not be usually considered as music or not many people consider it a music. But there are sounds, there is forms of maybe at the moment they are not aesthetically totally validated or performatively. So it's. I guess what I take from noise is to look or to break the hierarchies of aesthetic value. So actually to say it doesn't matter whether this is formally interesting or not, this noise contains something rich. And I'm gonna commit to that richness. And this is kind of the social noise that I'm trying to explore. But that doesn't mean that I'm able to decipher this noise. Maybe this has to do with, okay, the scale. Some people might get something. Some people got frustrated, some people actually got many different reactions. But there is also this whole archival material that is actually made to be processed and that will take years. And I would love to have a group of people coming from different disciplines in which we try to digest or try to make sense of what it was. Because at the very least it was a portrait of a specific time, the height of globalization, pre pandemic. So it's an amazing portrait that I think it could give us quite a lot of clues of maybe psychological unconscious of how behave the way we behave. But it will need some kind of dealing with it slowly and with time. So I think at the moment it's resting in this in between area where not many people is interested in this material. Maybe with the book some interest arises and I guess I slowly wait for the right situation to come to actually digest all this material, which then it will make maybe the project more complete.
- [29:32]
A
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- [30:34]
B
Hi, I'm here to pick up my son, Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school?
- [30:40]
C
Streaming only on Peacock.
- [30:44]
B
I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection.
- [30:47]
C
You don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned.
- [30:51]
B
What are you gonna do? I will do whatever it takes to.
- [30:54]
C
Get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All her fault. A new series, streaming now only on Peacock.
- [31:05]
B
That's an interesting timeline you've just proposed here, Martin. We've had five years. This is the time. Document us. As you were saying this, I've just realized that it's quite possible that many of our listeners have still no idea what we're talking about, what this performance, concert looked like. And I think at the risk of having fallen into a trap that you didn't even need to set for me, I think we should continue this interview with this kind of socially dissonant way. I think I'm going to. Having just said a moment ago that I'm going to edit something, cut it, move it. I think I'm going to even leave that in. And I'm going to not edit this conversation. I'm going to let us go and I'm going to ask our listeners. Listeners to stick with it in the same way that you were asking your participants, audiences to stick with your concert without necessarily telling them what they were in for. But I am going to.
- [32:04]
C
Sorry to interrupt you, but that's because I'm also trying to make sense out of it. You know, it's a very. And you know, it's slippery. It's very slippery. It's constantly falling. Like sometimes you think you have a bit of a very awareness of what this is about. And then it's just like Slipping through. You know, what the fuck is. What is this about? You know, what's.
- [32:26]
B
This is brilliant. But Matin, look, I don't want to. Just for those of our listeners who really need to be held by the hand and reassured. I'm holding in my hand a book that's over 200 pages. And most of the 200 pages are quite well written. Dense theory with footnotes. And we are going to talk about this in a moment. But all of it seems to relate in a way that I think is quite rare in a writing by an artist. When it connects to a project, it all connects to this experience that for me, happened to come five years before I was aware of the book's existence. Now to start asking you some technical or theoretical questions. We talked a moment ago about the role of the audience as an instrument. And I was thinking about this kind of knowledge system. Like, I did ask you about this as well a moment ago, like, who learns? Who benefits from this project? But actually, I think this is a very utilitarian kind of naive question. To a certain extent. This is a question that the unreformed me, the predeciminant me, would have been asking at the. At the experience itself. But you talk about this kind of social richness and the potential of these relationships in which one doesn't necessarily know whether one has kind of this dissonance imposed on them or whether one is actually embodying it. And this is a long, really long way to start asking you about the various meanings of alienation that the. The book in its theoretical part deals with. Maybe just. Let's maybe start on this kind of very superficial understanding of alienated labor from Marx, which I think most people will be aware of. And then let's start building this to understand how you use that concept to analyze or maybe build these relationships in space.
- [34:32]
C
Yeah. So alienated labor is a concept by Marx that proposes, especially in the 1844 manuscripts and starts to suggest how the worker is alienated in different forms in the labor process. So it's alienated from its own catun's vessel or species being, you know, which is what is supposed to be, you know, like the capacity for sociability of the human, which is a problematic terminology specific. But it's also alienated from nature in this process, is also alienated from the fellow workers. Yeah. So there is, like, these different forms of. And from himself. You know, it also alienates, you know, from his own possible, you know, productivity. Because the product that he produces is not for their own purposes. So that's a kind of earliest stage of the concept of the way the concept of alienation, Marx used it. Then later on he started to develop other categories. He started to understand that while early on he was discussing the way that the human was separated from the labor process and the system. When he started to do an analysis of capital and look and develop these categories such as value and then the wage relationship, then it is like the concept of the human loses importance. And then you were mentioning before the talk about Marx Sterner and I think the whole concept of alienation was very important for Hegel. But then also for the left Hegelians. That was a group after the month of Hegel that they were very much discussing. What does this alienation mean? Because for Hegel it is a necessary part of self consciousness, you know, this separation, you know that you need that level of separation for the dialectical process to kick in. So it kind of makes the spirit guys, you know, to move forward, you needed this. But that is a kind of form of alienation in thought or in self consciousness. And you know, far back brings us to the question of religion and the way that we. We separate ourselves in this process of alienation by projecting human qualities into God. And then others criticize Faurbach by thinking, so then Harald, he did have this concept of the Gatunsbes. And this essence of human was separated by this belief in God. And then Max Stiner comes, very influenced by Hegelian and says, okay, your idea of the human is an abstraction which is separated from the particularities of the I. You know, like the I is, you know, the Einsiger, the Diego or you know, the unique one, you know, it's like that's so particular that it's not separation, that that's not, you know, like that's, you know, that's not alienated, you know. So it's like there was all these many discussions and actually Marx read Max Steiner book and said, no, no, your idea of the ego, the unique one, you know, the Einsige, that's an abstraction, you know, that's a historical, you know. You know, so that's when he started to leave behind his concept of the human. And then like trying to focus more on, okay, we are engaging in our own self reproduction, in the capitalist form of relations. And through that certain categories, concepts and ideas start to emerge. And these abstractions are produced by us in our own engagement with this system. So I think since alienation is a result of modernity and it definitely implies that we don't know what we are. It is like a way of having to deal with, you know, it's up for grabs to know what we are. There is no essence, there is no way back to some, you know, harmonious relation to nature. There is, you know, like, it's totally up to us to define what we are. And inevitably this is a full encounter with alienation. If you leave behind some religious worldviews that make a place for you, a placeholder for you to, then you have to deal with alienation. And I think Marx has one of the most sophisticated understandings of how alienation works in the capitalist mode of production. So, yeah, that I hope explains.
- [40:16]
B
No, that's clear. And just to give credit to the book, all these ideas that you just gave us a kind of a run through beautifully and in a lot of detail developed in the book. And I think one of your main contentions is that the contemporary debates on demeaning and the construction of alienations are actually at a bit of a stalemate. And that some of the problems of the left seem to stem from the fact that this particular debate has run into a couple of dead ends. And maybe that has even created some space for people like Stirner to come back on the horizon and to propose quite alluring alternatives for some right wing positions, like the aspects of libertarianism that reinforce some of the more damaging aspects of the alienated neoliberal subject that actually take it to an extreme. So the way I understand your theoretical project and I connect it, I think quite instinctively, having experienced the performance, having read the book, is that you try to construct an alternative understanding of alienation and you insist that this understanding needs to be performed, needs to be lived, because it's not possible to avoid alienation. As you were saying, we can't go back to some kind of unencumbered natural relationship to the world that doesn't really exist, at least not under our conditions. So what are the conditions under which we can think about alienation again? I mean, we don't necessarily have to think about the term alienation, but we have to. You've proposed putting us through a set of experiences that somehow make the possibility of understanding the alienating mechanisms. Well, in fact, I'll let you use whichever terms you need because there's quite a few, quite a few terms you propose in the book. Estrangement, reification, some of which come from you, some of which come from other thinkers. How do we develop this in practice?
- [42:26]
C
Well, I mean, the easiest way that I will put it is to try to engage in aesthetics has historically And I think it still has a lot of potential to offer forms of estrangement, like experimental laboratory types of situations where, you know, in everyday life we need to perform a kind of confident eye, you know, and as you said, you do it very well, you know, like. But there's many people that, you know, we don't, you know, some days better than others. But, like, it's a very difficult task. However, we need to show ourselves, you know, we need to pretend that we know how to perform this super eye. But so I think what aesthetics allow is a small room to relax or to, you know, put that super eye, you know, that kind of tank build, kind of enclosed thing that you have to build in, you know, in this reality. You can, like, put it out there and maybe open it a bit and to deal with it in playful ways, you know, so. So you can share, you know, some of the aspects that constitutes this conceptual, psychological tank that we have built, you know, and by constantly trying to be playful with this tank and to dismantling or seeing how problematic it is or seeing its breaking points, that I think opens a can of worm, you know, a can of worms, in the sense that then we see that actually that super I is actually a much more porous, unstable, fragile thing that is constantly at the verge of collapsing and sometimes very often also collapsing because we cannot hold it. It's just an impossibility. So what I propose is playful forms of estrangement in order to deal with this structural alienation. So, you know, not that we eat it by ourselves, like, thinking, oh, I feel so, you know, like, oh, what's wrong with me? You know, what? How can. Why cannot cope? Why cannot do this? You know, why feel so, you know, lack of confidence? Why things are so heavy? Why do I pretend to be so cool when I'm not feeling cool? Why, you know, all this kind of negative feelings that we often just personalize it and think that is our own problem, you know, it's. Well, it's. Actually, there are structural reasons for this to happen. And maybe if we collectivize this uneasiness or this not well being this, you know, then there will be maybe the possibility of saying, like, well, this is not good. This is not good. We need to develop something better. We need to do something about it, you know, and that might be like, you know, if you're thinking just by yourself that it feels like, what am I going to do? You know, like what? You know. But if there are many people who think like, okay, you know, if it is less intimidated the intimidating process, you know, it is like, well, is it? I don't know if it happened to you, but it certainly happened to me actually in Sweden that, you know, I thought like, oh, there's a problem with me, there's something wrong with me. You know, I'm not able to, you know, engage in this society in a proper way. You know, it's like, it must be me, it must be me, it must be me. By today, I don't think it's me, you know, it was not, you know, after five years of living there, Sweden.
- [46:47]
B
Does this to you. I know, yeah.
- [46:49]
C
So it's like, no, it's not me. It's not, you know, then you talk to other people and it's like, it's not me. You know, there is something, you know, not quite well and that in fact, I lived in Sweden for five years and Sweden is one of the most individualist countries in the world, if not the most, even though it has that social democratic past. But maybe this also comes from my engagement in living in Sweden. Not that kind of strong forms of individualism that, you know, at the end of the day they might make you feel alienated, you know.
- [47:21]
B
Yeah. You describe this moment of what in the book you called catastrophic reaction. This is the moment where this inability to connect to the I is such that the individual can no longer cope. And of course the concert, the whole theorization and this force estrangement that you propose is a method of collectively revealing this. But I do also want to give some credit to the second half of the book, the second half of the theoretical part of the book in which you move a little bit away from the Marxist framework which offers this structural explanation for alienation. And I think your argument for. I follow that argument quite closely and I think I'm in agreement with you that subsequent guises of capitalism, and particularly our kind of late stage neoliberalisms on its last legs definitely does still manage to perform alienation par excellence. Even in situations like your concerts, which is destabilizing to people, it is very difficult to achieve the kind of breakthrough realization. The. That catastrophic reaction even there is very, very well. We are very, very, very well safely mediated away from it. But a second part of the book, what you do is you look at a more kind of psychological realm. I'm desperately trying to look at my notes and find a phrase that a reviewer of your book used. But you talk about you list in a way that almost amused me before I understood the severity of it all. You list all sorts of acronyms for psychological pathologizations of the self. You know, I've just looking at some of them. I have dbtr, dpdr, the Personalization Derealization Disorder, and a couple of pages on. And I'm afraid I haven't highlighted them to be able to. To really. I know I have. We have things like Eusomesia, we have Agnesia, we have Fagoli delusions, Capricorn Syndrome, which is the correct name or rather the scientific name for imposter syndrome. So you take us through this whole catalog of acronyms and slightly technical names for things that we all experience on a daily basis, and you propose, and I think this is uncontroversial, you propose that the biological organism has to defend itself from having to deal with all the possible stimuli and information that we are bombarded with on a daily basis. And this is also something that contributes to alienation. So I want you to develop a little bit the space in which we don't have to go all the way to Marx and his structural explanation to understand that alienation is a real thing from which we might want to. Might want to break out.
- [50:34]
C
Yeah, well, that's a kind of. Yeah, that's what I call alienation from below, which generates phantom subjectivity. And this is another expression for what social dissonance is collapsing the self and the individual with subjectivity, believing that we as individuals are already a subject, but also the self with the individual. You know, so to kind of naturalize selfhood as if it was contained within the bodies that we have, this is a form of social distance, which is a kind of symptom of a form of alienation, but that it tries to actually contain it. So, you know, so basically what the help of Thomas Metzinger, this philosopher of mine, who has looked at several of, you know, many of these pathologies that you mentioned, like, for example, the Cotard syndrome, when somebody thinks he's dying. So this is occurring because the illusion that produces selfhood, or let's say what he considers to be selfhood through the theory model of subjectivity, what he calls the self model, Theory of subjectivity is an illusion that our brain produces in order to reduce the neurocomputational cost of our brains. And this illusion sometimes is not working. Sometimes it can be faulty. It can be through an accident, then your brain stops producing that illusion. So that's what happens, for example, with this Cotard syndrome, which is when somebody thinks that is dead or that is dying or that is rotting. So there, that illusion of the self is not Being able to be produced, there is nothing there to be. So this totally counters that perspective in which the individual and self is already one that is attached only to your body. And I think forms of virtual reality and avatars are really pushing this. And we will see this will become obvious through technology very soon. And with Metaverse, that separation from our body, that's I think in process of happening. But we have come from a time in which that close relation between selfhood and the body that has, you know, we have lived with it and you know, through that liberal and especially neoliberal thought in which it makes you believe that you're already a subject with capacity for acting, for self determining, you know, or, you know, for freedom. However, then this, in your everyday life, you know, you're not free from buying. You need to pay when you buy things, when you want things. So it's a very twisted, distorted conception of freedom. So this is the kind of template that we have built in which the values that we think are good, democracy, equality, all these values, individual freedom, we think they're good. They are based on extremely, let's say fallacies. They're just like based on things that are not materially, at the material level real. They are ideological constructions. And we've seen more and more this mismatch. And it's not surprising that there is so much mental health problems rising because that kind of ideal of the individual is almost. But it's crumbling, but it's not able to hold itself. Or then what you said you had these responses with dead of the welfare state, you have these responses in which you are in the jungle and then it's up to you what you do. So then there is all these libertarian kind of positions rising and like saying like no, no, I can do, you know, like I'm gonna just. With money, you know, it gives you certain amount of agency. I'm just gonna go for it and the rest, you know. But you know, with climate change and many things that you know that it's not gonna. Well, it might last for you for a bit and it might make you happy for a bit, but like, you know, this is, in the long run, I don't know if it's a good solution. But yeah, so that's what I'm trying to undermine some of those assumptions that holds the idea of subjectivity that we hold in liberal societies.
- [56:08]
B
Okay, So I think this is quite a clear formulation of something that I'm beginning to see and in both the left and the right wing politics, beginning to actually find consensus on is that the neoliberal subject is now become an impossibility. And one can analyze this and diagnosis from many positions. And you're not the first thinker on the left that I've spoken to recently who actually sees that certain liberal values, defined by the kind of performance of politics that we see in the news cycle every day, are actually deeply problematic for our continuation as societies, if not even as a species. I kind of hate to do this, but let's do this. So let's round up maybe by trying to do two things. One is to think about the. The possible vision of what happens after we've gained the consciousness that you are talking about. You're still a Marxist to a certain extent. You do try to destroy false consciousness and maybe replace it with something else. I don't necessarily see that your project requires us to kind of completely understand where you are, but you want to find ways of externalizing alienation in one way or another. And then if we could make it somehow jolly at the end, because, you know, everybody loves a happy ending, maybe we could find a way to play in a clip of music as we had discussed before we started recording. So, P.S. please, your vision of the future and some music to play us out. Martin, if we could.
- [57:54]
F
I think we can do both at the same time. I'll try to see the potential of a future where we feel that things are possible. What can be done? After we become conscious of our social dissonance, we will begin to understand.
- [58:36]
C
That.
- [58:37]
F
We are not so alone in our feelings of despair, in our resentment with the world. We could build a revolutionary community.
- [59:11]
C
That.
- [59:12]
F
Get holds of those people who keep things the way they are.
- [59:22]
B
Well, thank you. That was worth waiting five years for.
- [59:37]
E
Social Dissonance by Matin is published by Urbanomic. I'm Pierre Wolenser and the author is Marshall Poem. Thanks for listening and join us next time.
- [59:52]
B
Sam.