Original transcript. Audio streaming on Spotify and created in conjunction with Christopher Nealon’s George Mason University Cultural Studies colloquium lecture on the “Afterlives of Anti-Communism.”
“Anti-humanist rhetoric is also highly mobile between left and right. The degree to which progressive environmentalist language remains attached to the idea that it’s our species, for instance, rather than our class relations, that is making Earth uninhabitable for us, that’s the degree to which that progressive language makes itself available for appropriation by right-wing eco-fascist projects, for instance.”
– Christopher Nealon
Podcast Transcript
Richard Todd Stafford: Hello and welcome to Second Nature, a podcast from George Mason University’s Cultural Studies Program. My name is Richard Todd Stafford, and I’ll be your host today. I’ll be sitting down and talking with Chris Nealon, who is the John Dewey Professor in the English Department at Johns Hopkins University and who lives here in Washington, DC. Dr. Nealon is the author of The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century as well as Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall. He’s the author of four books of poetry: The Joyous Age, Plummet, Heteronomy, and The Shore. I will be talking with Dr. Nealon about his current project, which he previewed at the Cultural Studies Colloquium in April. In this project, Dr. Nealon calls on us to return to debates about value theory and articulates a new and exciting vision for Marxist humanism. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Chris Nealon.
Christopher Nealon: Thanks, Todd. I’m really happy to be here.
Richard Todd Stafford: Could you briefly summarize your current project?
Christopher Nealon: Sure thing, Todd. My project focuses on Marx’s theory of how value is produced in capitalist societies, and how closer attention to it, returning to it, might give us a good vocabulary today for linking the many different ways people are devalued in those same societies. Value for Marx is a really technical term with very specific meanings, some of which I talked about in my virtual visit to Mason. My other key term, devaluation, is a broader term, a technical one I’m using in a broad way. But I’m trying to link those two things so that we could be clearer about how people with very different lives and locations and histories might nonetheless come to think of themselves as having important experiences in common as subjects of capitalist life.
Richard Todd Stafford: Great, thank you. In your talk, you linked this to the history of the material experience of anti-communism. Can you draw that connection a little bit for us? How does that understanding of value connect to the material experience of anti-communism?
Christopher Nealon: Yeah. Well, in brief, I think the anti-communist political strategies of the mid-twentieth century were part of a much longer history of tactics and strategies designed to make sure that nothing gets in the way of capitalist accumulation, and those things tend to be forms of violence. So, you know, when I talk about devaluation, I say it’s not a technical term. Maybe the closest kind of technical term for Marxists would be what they call primitive accumulation, which was a violent kind of dispossession of people, with the ultimate aim of training them from peasants to workers who had no other choice but to work for a wage and be underpaid. So there’s a kind of continuousness there between the violence of primitive accumulation and other kinds of violence later on in capitalist history that are designed to block off the possibility of anything else, especially the possibility of socialist or communist societies. And I think that Marx’s discussion of primitive accumulation, because it links back to his bigger discussion about value, is a good gateway for thinking about how other, more recent kinds of violence are also bound up with how value gets produced in capitalist societies.
Richard Todd Stafford: That’s very useful. I’m interested in the way that you’re mobilizing and responding to these traditions that grow out of Marx but also get taken up in a variety of different ways in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Marxism. Primitive accumulation you just spoke to, but you have also been taking up a very explicitly Marxist humanist angle to thinking back through Marxism, one that takes us back to the 1844 manuscripts, well before Capital in some ways. But it does seem that your project has different emphases than the way that Marxist humanism has been taken up in the past. Rather than foregrounding alienation and species-being and the like, it seems like you’re responding to that tradition. You’re extending it, but there are some differences, and I’m wondering if you might speak to those a little bit.
Christopher Nealon: Yeah, sure. It’s a pleasure to try to get clear about this. I think, as you say, earlier forms of twentieth-century Marxist humanism were grounded in readings of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, which he finished composing in 1844 and which therefore significantly predate the fully worked-out theory of value that gets published in Capital. Those manuscripts, though they were written earlier than Capital, were published much later, posthumously, in the 1930s, in German. And those manuscripts emphasize the things you just mentioned, like the idea of alienation, and they begin their critique of capitalism from what scholars would call a transhistorical place. That is, they start with meditations on the idea of some human nature that’s been with us since the earliest days of our life as a species, a human nature that has been perverted by capitalism. Those earlier manuscripts raise the question of whether we might have the potential to be more fully realized as individuals, as a society, and maybe even as a species, if capitalist social relations didn’t organize our lives in the way that they do. Later, in Capital itself, Marx sets aside those questions in order to study how capitalist value is created. To the extent that the work in Capital is historical, it’s an investigation of how something you could call capitalism emerges in order to ensure the continuing expansion of capital, and I’m interested in starting in that place, the historically specific place.
I should say that there is a tradition of Frankfurt School critical theory, different also from mid-century Marxist humanism of the kind that you were mentioning, that also makes the distinction I just did between a Marx who earlier on starts with a transhistorical set of presuppositions and a later Marx who sets them aside. But for me, that Frankfurt School tradition takes that dichotomy, transhistorical versus historically situated, to be the main point. Whereas for me, the main point is that the more historically situated Marx does something. He’s the Marx who gives us a clear understanding of how capital actually functions, what it needs to function, what it needs outside itself to function and to expand. And one way that that expansion has worked, and this is returning to your earlier questions, is by engaging in a range of violent tactics to prevent anything else from happening. I mentioned mid-twentieth-century anti-communist projects of various kinds, often facilitated by the U.S. I should mention that the recent book by the journalist Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method, isolates Indonesia in particular as the great laboratory for that kind of violence. In the mid-1960s, more than a million members and alleged members of the Communist Party in Indonesia were murdered. So I think that the vocabulary I’m trying to set up, the humanism I’m trying to set up, keeps coming back to those forms of devaluation as opposed to the question of alienation per se. But that’s not because, as in the case of somebody like Althusser, I think questions of alienation and the question of who we could be as a species are unimportant, or even because I think Marx didn’t think those questions were important. I think he moved on to something that was a deeper explanation of what went wrong. Not that he stopped caring about the fact that something did.
Richard Todd Stafford: In bringing up Althusser, you set up a contrast that I think underlies what you’re up to. By making an argument for a new or revitalized Marxist humanism, you are responding to a set of anti-humanist critiques, with the Althusserian approach within Marxism probably being the most familiar. But I’m wondering how your intervention speaks to other scholarly anti-humanist tendencies that have either diverged from Marxism or that have completely distinct intellectual lineages. I’m thinking particularly of deconstruction, the recent ontological and biocentric turns, or maybe even Foucauldian approaches.
Christopher Nealon: Yeah, that’s a great question. It keeps me honest. It’s also true, though, that as I answer you, I think I’m going to sound a little doctrinaire in my reply. What I mean by that is that I think the intellectual tendencies that you just mentioned, though they are outside a specifically Marxist conversation, each have a very particular relationship to Marxism, and especially to Hegelian Marxism. I don’t think they quite escape that gravitational field. So, as Derrida early on in his career is working out the terms of what will eventually get famous by the name of deconstruction, for instance, he draws over and over again in that early work a picture of a Hegelianism that pretends to be open-ended and, quote-unquote, dialectical, but which always secretly assigns to itself the ability to predict the future or know the whole. This picture of Hegel with his thumb on the historical scales is actually as old as Schelling’s out-of-the-gate misreading of Hegel. But in the 1960s in France, that old misreading, refreshed, becomes a convenient way to critique the rigidity of the French Communist Party through a kind of metaphorical chain: the PCF equals Hegel equals something between Leninist vanguardism and Stalinist authoritarianism. For Derrida, the endless free play and truly unpredictable movement of language, especially in texts, especially in poetry, especially in Mallarmé, exposes the Hegelian dialectic as more rigid than open-ended. It’s an open question for me, even after Derrida writes Specters of Marx in the early ’90s, whether his more free-play-focused version of causality is meant as a friendly corrective to Marxism or is more important for its disregard of Marx’s actual work.
In the case of Foucault, of course, biopolitics and the theory of power are meant specifically, as Foucault tells us, as a corrective to Marx, although of a largely friendly kind. He has many interviews where he talks about this. There’s one where he says quite straightforwardly that his generation’s interest in Nietzsche and Bataille was not a way of distancing themselves from Marxism or communism; it was the only path toward what they expected from communism.
Then there’s the newer stuff, the ontological turns of our day, what you call biocentric turns. My sense in those cases is that what they share, across left and right political orientations, is strong Heideggerian undercurrents. That is to say, one aspect of their critique of the human is an argument that the so-called human arrogates to itself the capacity to know the world fully, to organize that knowledge with perfect clarity. And those vocabularies make a counterclaim that reality itself will always elude or mock this attempt at perfect organization and meaning-making. The various ontological turns, in other words, share a critique of epistemology as a philosophical starting point, and make arguments for attention to being, to ontology, as a corrective to what they take to be an overly narrow and, sometimes quite polemically, a kind of pinheaded focus on what can be known rationally. And this is, of course, how Heidegger sets up the argument of Being and Time at the beginning of that book. So, as with the other tendencies that you mention, Heidegger’s gambit is bound up with a critique of an idea of Hegel as the arrogant philosopher of absolute knowledge, so focused on arriving at the so-called end of history that he can’t see the daily mysteries of being right in front of his face. The fact that this is a wild misreading of Hegel is less important for our conversation.
Richard Todd Stafford: That’s very helpful, and I think especially at the end of what you were just saying, the answer to the next question started to peek out. But I’m going to ask you to elaborate a little more on what the political stakes are of the critique of anti-humanism that you’re offering, and then also what the political stakes are of the project that you are advancing positively.
Christopher Nealon: First of all, I want to thank you for thinking of this project as having political stakes, since I understand that, as an academic literary critic in the United States, the political significance of the work I do is minimal, to say the least. But as for stakes, I do like the idea that I could help clear ground for a way of political thinking that sees the limits and the possibilities of solidarity today in a clearer light. I think it would be the clearer light of the way capitalist classes work in concert to maximize value production, not least by pitting fractions of all other classes against each other. I think of this as a different version of intersectional thinking, one that strives to produce conceptually clear, historically concrete descriptions of the unity and difference of all the different kinds of people who’ve come to imagine each other as in separate political categories, or even as antagonists. So that’s how I see the political stakes.
Richard Todd Stafford: Great, thank you. I’d like us to pivot to talk about the literary itself. You signaled that there’s not an expectation of there being political stakes within the literary discipline a lot of the time, but I think it’s very clear that your work is politically engaged. One of the ways that you’ve articulated that in your published work is by arguing that the violence and disruption wrought by capitalism is actually a central theme in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century poetry, both in the poetry aligned with the left and, surprisingly, in the poetry that we think of as being by right-wing figures, and this, you argue, has actually generated our current understanding of what poetry is and does. Likewise, you’ve argued that the anti-humanist style, or the anti-humanist tone, has deep roots in aesthetic and literary practices. So I’m wondering if you might talk about what the characteristic stances or styles of literary and aesthetic anti-humanism are, from your standpoint, and how they are connected with this process of grappling with capitalism.
Christopher Nealon: Yeah, it’s such a thoughtful and attentive question, and it’ll take me a bit to try to do it justice. I sometimes like to say that part of my argument is that anti-humanism is a tone as much as a set of propositions. You know, I grew up in the ’70s, or I guess it was the early ’80s by then, watching the TV serialization of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on PBS. And when Carl Sagan says to you, when you’re thirteen years old or whatever it is, that we are tiny in the face of the immensity of the universe, it’s a really uplifting and beautiful thing. But when anti-humanist discourse snarls at us that we are tiny and insignificant in the face of the vastness of the universe, the tone implies much, much else. So the propositional content is the same, but the tone makes all the difference.
As for touchstones or roots, I would say that, as I’ve studied it, the key anti-humanist trope or touchstone for me ends up being the idea that there is an impassable gap between humanity and God, or, in a secular version of it, that humanity is at the bottom of an impassable gap between itself and the vastness of the universe. In the reading I’ve done, I’ve found that this tends to lead to critiques of epistemological arrogance instead of critiques of capital. And when I say “instead of,” it’s because I think anti-humanist discourse is a kind of critique of secularization, even when it’s not fully aware of it. That’s what it comes from and what it borrows from. The versions that think of themselves as secular nonetheless want to encourage sublime emotions in us, emotions that have long histories of religious use: shame at our tininess, humility, awestruck terror, all kinds of things that have associations with the sublime but have concrete uses in various forms of religious life. In the history of Western religion, Catholic anti-humanism is a great example here. Catholic anti-humanism tends to critique the arrogance of human overreach in the face of an infinite and unknowable God. Secular anti-humanism critiques the arrogance of our thinking we already know everything we need to know, or sometimes critiques the idea that we could know the things we want to, that we could know the universe in its entirety. Anti-humanist discourse, secular and religious alike, on the left and on the right alike, tends to say to humans, “You need to learn your place.”
And I think that on the right, the critique of secularization swaps in for the critique of capital, not because of some innate attraction to piety or some innate piousness of the right, but because secularization stories have concrete roots in actual histories of property relations. I’m persuaded by the work of the German philosopher and historian of philosophy Hans Blumenberg, in particular, that secularization narratives are bound up with a specific property history in which emergent secular states expropriated church land for their own purposes. Now, this gets twistier than we could probably talk about together on your podcast. But I’ll just say that alarm bells went off for me the first time I came across Blumenberg’s argument. I was reading him in tandem with a really great book called The Reactionary Mind by the political theorist Corey Robin, and Robin makes this argument that conservative political rhetoric since the nineteenth century has built its public language by poaching from democratic idioms of grievance and abuse. Robin doesn’t mention the specifics of property dispossession that Blumenberg does. Blumenberg is talking about a much earlier period, but in a way, Robin is way more concrete. And that rang bells for me, because I think left-wing anti-humanisms are critiques of arrogance, like I was talking about before, but they also focus more on the redistribution of the products of capital than on critiques of capital’s production of value in the first place. Humanism is often faulted for sounding pretty but serving power.
But anti-humanist rhetoric is also highly mobile between left and right. The degree to which progressive environmentalist language remains attached to the idea that it’s our species, for instance, rather than our class relations, that is making Earth uninhabitable for us, that’s the degree to which that progressive language makes itself available for appropriation by right-wing eco-fascist projects, for instance. So, like I said, a little bit of a long answer, but that’s what I was thinking about in response to your query.
Richard Todd Stafford: That’s very thoughtful, and I’m wondering if you might elaborate on that last point. What I’m hearing you suggest is that the Anthropocene approach is actually in some way in this lineage of problematic anti-humanisms, and that this is part of what makes it available to be taken up by the right. Is that correct?
Christopher Nealon: Yeah, I think so. I want to be thoughtful about how I describe that dynamic or that susceptibility. But people more expert than I am, and more versed than I am in the history of the environmental movement in the United States, for instance, have written pretty extensively about how the origins of things like the Sierra Club, and certain moments in the birth of more radical environmental activism, like the work of Earth First!, are bound up with degrees of neo-Malthusian ideas about population reduction, for instance, that tilt pretty hard to the right. I’m not saying that contemporary environmentalism on the left is still tainted by that, but inasmuch as it is willing to use the language of the species, what humanity is doing rather than what our class relations are doing, I think it remains susceptible to appropriation by increasingly articulate and forceful right-wing ecological projects.
Richard Todd Stafford: Let’s turn now from the critique back to the positive project, and let’s keep our focus on aesthetics and the literary. You’re particularly interested in literary rhetorics of militancy that refuse both the declensionist narratives of much of high modernism and the intellectual abysses much loved by the poststructuralists. As a poet and a critic, I think you might have a unique vantage on this, and I’m interested in how you would characterize the most promising aesthetic interventions and practices of this type.
Christopher Nealon: Yeah, that’s a nice way to maybe round out our conversation. I remember when I was in my MFA program, it was before the days of easily accessible audio files, but I was given a chance to hear a lecture of William Carlos Williams’s and could hear for the first time his live voice saying things that were of great interest to me. And though the degree of my overlap with somebody like Williams is maybe less than it once was when I was a kid, I can still hear his voice saying, “If it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem.” And I think it’s still true for me that my taste in poetry has always run toward poems that show off or expand what can be done with everyday language, including everyday language used by poets that has evolved in the wake of modernist difficulty and all kinds of complex cultural and historical developments that make everyday language deeply complex. I don’t think the things I like best are formally or innately suited to revolutionary politics in some direct way. I think the long history of the avant-garde and its politics has taught us all that no one politics goes with any one set of strategies or techniques in art production. There are too many moving parts in literary history and literary production and literary reception for that to be true.
What I’m finding, as I reflect on it, you know, at midlife, is that a metric for the usefulness of poetry or art to the possibility of revolutionary politics is not quite a metric at all, but something like a question I find myself asking, sometimes answering as I ask it. The question is: Does this give me courage? We’re all just so, you know, tired and scared, until we’re not. And the art that gives would-be revolutionaries courage at some key moment may not in itself be revolutionary in orientation.
So instead of a schematic, I could give you a kind of snapshot of spring 2022. There are three things on my mind, three aesthetic experiences that have moved or delighted me most just recently. It’s always a matter of a snapshot of a season for me. One of them is a poem by the queer, Berlin-based Brazilian poet Rafael Mantovani, which has recently been translated from the Portuguese by Chris Daniels, and this little poem is called
and no
and no, the devil doesn't want to make a pact with you
he said he's not interested in your soul
he said it's too common a model, he's already got quite a few like it
and he uses them for scratch paper
he said: a whole lot of chumps try
to sell me their soul after it's already been corrupted on its own
he's not impressed with your proposal
he says he's laughing at your little letter down there with beelzebub and the other guys
and he's going to tell god you made the offer.
I just really love the rueful and very queer self-deprecation here, the comedy of it, and how the deflation of the speaker’s self-importance, the speaker who thought he had a soul worth selling, is matched by the almost comic-book-like humanization of the devil and God. So that’s been a recent favorite of mine. And Mantovani’s body of work is really terrific and just now coming into English.
You know, I’m a great lover of popular musical forms, and just in the last month or so I’ve been coming back to this great verse, just four lines, from country singer Miranda Lambert’s song “Y’all Means All.” It’s a song she wrote with Luke Dick and Shane McAnally, and it uses a simple ABAB rhyme scheme to express solidarity with trans and non-binary folk in a way that makes that act of solidarity seem like the easiest and most natural thing in the world. And Todd, I’ve thought hard this morning about whether I should play an audio file or sing these four lines. There’s no good solution. I’m going to spare you that second option. I’m just going to read, slightly rhythmically, these wonderful four lines that rhyme ABAB. The song goes:
You can be born in Tyler, Texas,
raised with a Bible belt.
If you're torn between the Ys and Xs,
you ain't gotta play with the hand you're dealt
There’s a lot, maybe more than a podcast’s worth, we could say about the use of rhyme there as a kind of pun on chromosomes. But what I love about it is that it takes country music’s long history of taking complicated and existential experiences and making them vernacular in a flash, and the fact that it’s doing that with complex sexual politics these days, even in just four lines, makes me feel hopeful and happy.
There’s just one last example I’ll mention, and it’s something that came through Washington recently. It’s an hour-long dance piece by the Black queer choreographer Kyle Abraham, a piece called An Untitled Love, which is set to a series of tracks by D’Angelo, and it takes place in and around a night-long party, so it’s a semi-narrative dance piece. I love a lot of things about Abraham’s choreography, but one of my favorite things is his genius for establishing continuities between everyday vernacular forms of bodily movement and highly trained forms of dance movement. In An Untitled Love, that takes the form of treating the way people carry their bodies at a party as already choreography, already dance, so that the dancer’s movement from holding an imaginary cigarette or doubling over laughing at a joke is just a heartbeat away from a pirouette or a highly athletic leap. It just takes your breath away. So that’s a long, long way of saying I’m really glad you asked that last question, because those three pieces of art, or art experiences, together give a decent picture of what I think of as my humanism: a sense of joy and possibility in vernaculars, how they’re never just the everyday, never just vernacular, how they exceed themselves by being themselves.
Richard Todd Stafford: On that note, I want to thank you for bringing both the joy and the possibility of your current project to us on our podcast. Thank you so much.
Christopher Nealon: Thank you, Todd. It was a total pleasure. And honestly, since this is both a project that’s been brewing in its various aspects for a long time and now a thing that’s finally achieving critical momentum for me, it was a treat and a kind of gift to me to be able to think about this style of talking about it. So you’ve really done me a favor. I appreciate it.
Richard Todd Stafford: I’m really glad to have had the chance to talk with you, Chris Nealon, here on the Cultural Studies Podcast.
Bibliography
Selected Works by Christopher Nealon
Nealon, Christopher. Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall. Duke University Press, 2001.
———. Heteronomy. Edge Books, 2014.
———. Infinity for Marxists: Essays on Poetry and Capital. Brill, 2023.
———. The Joyous Age. Black Square Editions, 2004.
———. The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century. Harvard University Press, 2011.
———. Plummet. Edge Books, 2009.
———. The Shore. Wave Books, 2020.
———. The Victorious Ones. Commune Editions, 2015.
Lye, Colleen, and Christopher Nealon, eds. After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Works Mentioned
Abraham, Kyle, choreographer. An Untitled Love. Music by D’Angelo. Performed by A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, 2021.
Bevins, Vincent. The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World. PublicAffairs, 2020.
Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. MIT Press, 1983.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Hosted by Carl Sagan. Written by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter. Aired September 28–December 21, 1980, on PBS.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Routledge, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori. Translated by R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito. Semiotext(e), 1991.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Harper & Row, 1962.
Lambert, Miranda. “Y’all Means All.” Written by Miranda Lambert, Luke Dick, and Shane McAnally. Vanner Records / RCA Nashville, 2021.
Mantovani, Rafael. você esqueceu uma coisa aqui. Macondo, 2019. English translation by Chris Daniels, violaceous euphoRia, 2021.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1976.
———. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Edited by Dirk J. Struik. Translated by Martin Milligan. International Publishers, 1964.
Robin, Corey. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Oxford University Press, 2011.