Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
Gothic Capitalism and the Fate of Radical Art with Adam Turl
What happens when artistic rebellion becomes just another commodity? In this thought-provoking conversation, Adam Turl unpacks his book "Gothic Capitalism: Art Evicted from Heaven and Earth," taking us on a journey through the ruins of revolutionary movements and avant-garde dreams.
The discussion begins with an unexpected Soviet connection—Alexandra Kollontai's gothic novella that serves as a metaphor for revolutionary ideals crumbling under bureaucratization. This sets the stage for exploring what Turrell calls the "gothic dialectic" within capitalism: how class struggles win partial victories only to see them rolled back, creating spaces of loss and nostalgia that haunt our cultural landscape.
Turl brilliantly analyzes Boris Groys' concept of the "weak avant-garde"—how once-revolutionary artistic gestures that sought to democratize art have become institutionalized without the social transformation they once promised. The white cube gallery, intended to elevate art, now often serves as an unwitting accomplice to gentrification. When art galleries moved into Boyle Heights, the conceptual art that once seemed democratizing became, in practice, a force of displacement.
The conversation takes fascinating turns through digital space, AI-generated art, and the false promises of Silicon Valley utopianism. Turl argues that just as cities once offered liberatory potential before becoming commodified "hellscapes," the internet has followed a similar trajectory of enclosure. Meanwhile, AI art burns massive resources to create derivative works—a bizarre form of wasteful consumption that prioritizes replacing human creativity over efficiency.
Throughout, Turl emphasizes that art's meaning emerges not just from the object itself but from its "social performance" in the world. He calls for reconnecting artistic practices to community organizing and mutual aid—not to make all art explicitly political, but to restore meaning in an increasingly alienated world. As both technological and ecological crises deepen, can we create spaces where art serves community rather than capital? Join us for this urgent conversation about finding beauty and solidarity amid the ruins.
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Hello and welcome to VarmVlog. Today I'm with Adam Turrell. He's a returning guest. You can find him talking about his Born Again Labor Museum on an episode about two, two and a half years ago. At this point, as we're all getting older, that doesn't seem that long ago to me, but it probably is for some of you.
C. Derick Varn:You also work with the Locus Review and you do Locus Radio, and we are here today talking about your book Gothic Capitalism Art Evicted from Heaven and Earth, by Revol Press Disclaimer. So people know I have a relationship to Revol Press. I also am under contract with RL Smith to write a book on barbarians, because Revo is, as I like to say, it's, the optimistic left publisher. It seems like all of us have basically been writing books about how everything sucks, but your work on art actually hits a bunch of different concerns we have here at the show and people should definitely check it out. But we're going to be talking about it today and I was surprised when I read your book that it started with Koh-Lantai. I was not expecting a book that was invoking the Gothic to spend so much time in the Soviet Union. So why was Koh-Lantai such a starting point for you here? Why was Koh-Lantai such a starting point for you here?
Adam Turl:Well, I think, while I was quoting an article, or paraphrasing and quoting an article by a name and about a novella that Alexander Koh-Lantai wrote during the early years of the Russian Revolution, that sort of created a gothic novella, but with Bolshevism and czarism in the place of modernity in the medieval world, like in the classical gothic novel right.
Adam Turl:Frequently in certain tropes, a woman is taken back to a patriarchal mansion, usually an aristocratic mansion. That represents both something that is longed for but also scary from the past, and it percolates all up into modern culture, all the way to like Hitchcock's Rebecca, the movie where there's something you know it's a beautiful, where there's something you know it's a beautiful mansion but there's something scary about it.
Adam Turl:In Kolentai's novella a communist organizer, a woman, goes to stay with her lover in the provinces, who's moved into an old mansion and is starting to have all these bourgeois trappings or tastes.
Adam Turl:You can start to see the bureaucratization of the Soviet Union and a lot of the language she uses in the book. The author of the article I'm going to write parallels the language she used when she was a spokesperson for the workers' opposition, which was one of the first oppositions to the degeneration of the Russian Revolution very early on. So I thought the Soviet Union partly figures, along with many other things, because it is this gothic ruin that really represents politically, socially, like the ideals, a lot of the ideals of modernity, the animated emancipatory struggles, right. So I transition in the book from Holentai and then I start talking about the sort of ruins of the liberation movements from the 60s and 70s and the radical new left that formed out of the student movement and the black liberation movement and the attempts to create some kind of socialist usually socialist alternative and how those also crashed on the rocks of neoliberalism and so on.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, I mean, one of the things that your book reminded me of is how, for us and you're a little bit older than me, but we're both over 40. You laugh, it's like I'm well over 40. But for most of us we've mostly seen these movements recuperated, recapitulated, burnt out, neoliberalized, turned into shallow slogans and advertising, and that's been the story of my interaction with it my entire life. You're old enough that you may have remembered when that wasn't the case, but for me, being born in 1980, that's pretty much what I've known and it leads to a cynicism that's hard to overcome. The book here spoke to that. I found there was some interesting subversions of that in there, but I do think the high points are really interesting.
C. Derick Varn:You talk about the women's liberation movement. Their high points probably 1971. And then it's downhill from there. Are, you know? And there's this, this thing you point out where, like Susan Flutie and early Naomi Wolf and I know Naomi Wolf has completely different valiance now that she's been a conspiracy theorist for 20 years but tried to pivot to something else, but they basically put a girl boss on offer. You know whether they realized it or not and how ultimately recuperable that was. You talk about that with the Black Nationalist Movement too. And then you bring in Gothic Marxism, which was an interesting move, because I haven't really thought about Gothic Marxism for like 12 years and I was really interested in. You know Chanaemeyavel trying to talk about the aesthetics of that, but why did you see that as developing out of these ashes of these movements?
Adam Turl:Well, I'm not necessarily sure it develops out of the ashes, or it might be a parallel, related track, because I think the Gothic there's, like many, there's several things that lead to and I'm not saying capitalism has become like we should all call it gothic capitalism, like I'm not trying to name a phase of capitalism or anything but I think there's this gothic dialectic within capitalism, and I think the two main things that cause it are the fact there's constant class struggle and other struggles born of exploitation and oppression, and those can win partial victories under capitalism.
Adam Turl:but as long as capitalism remains those victories can be rolled back. So we carve out autonomous space, we carve out um room to feel like we're human, we create third spaces, uh, like independent record stores or bookshops or coffee shops. They're not really liberated spaces, but they're places that aren't just about money, and those get rolled back, and so there's this tragic loss that happens in this turn of time. And then there's also the fact capitalism is based on novelty, innovation, the constant destruction of capital creation and destruction of capital. So people become anachronistic. You know, you learn how to do a trade.
Adam Turl:It might be something that you have dignity in that you can make a living at for you and your family. You have a whole community and culture based on your trade, and that gets destroyed through innovation and things like that.
C. Derick Varn:So I think there.
Adam Turl:It isn't just that it comes out of the ruins of social movements, but I think that's one of the the ways it happens. Um and this is related to not everything in capitalism, everything is ultimately about exchange value of, and a utilitarian attitude towards people and the achieving of exchange value, and so other values are deemed alien to capital. And this is similar to what happened with romanticism in art and philosophy and culture at the beginning of capitalism's industrial revolution, where a layer of artists and intellectuals who measured things by qualitative values bristled at the turn towards the quantitative, the turn towards the mercantile. I think that that's being recreated for people who are deemed anachronistic by capital.
C. Derick Varn:So I think those two things feed each other.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, I had recently just done an interview with W Tom Pepper, who is a Marxist and a critique of a critic of Western Buddhism for its romanticism, and he points out similarly that romanticism is in a way a capitalist ideology, even though it's a response to a contradiction in capitalism and a favoring of a kind of personal transcendent as a way to cope with it. Why, you know, one of the things I find interesting about that and you pointed out in your book, you know I also just know this from the history of of artistic movements is gothic literature is a response to romanticism itself. I mean, it's kind of a dark romanticism but literally it's in the name, like, why was it called gothic? Because the goths are the people who come after the romantics, aka the roman empire. Um, and what do you? What do you think about the like? What does it say? That the romantic move seems not really completely believable for most people in capitalism.
Adam Turl:Now, Well, I mean, I think part of the thing that causes romanticism is capitalism. On the one hand has this celebration of the individual but also a debasement of the individual right.
Adam Turl:So I think it's entirely right the romantic is a product of capitalism, but also that it comes right up against the reality of how capitalism functions. And this is particularly important in the arts, because for 200-some years the dominant bourgeois ideology around art was art for art's sake. It's important because it's art bourgeois ideology around art was art for art's sake. It's important because it's art and the capitalists could read into the artists themselves a sort of metaphor for themselves. They're an individual genius who makes stuff. They're like me. I'm a self-made man and I, um, I think the we might have a connection issue there, um. So now the romantic.
Adam Turl:I think part of the problem, one of the things that some of the traditions that are historically called romantic and things that float, float out of it later like surrealism and situationism and things like that is helping us imagine against this sort of vulgar realism that you know I would connect to what Mark Fisher describes as capitalist realism, because people need some sort of mythology or story, a metanarrative, to animate their activity beyond just vulgar self-interest. Right Now, obviously, Marxism ties to the self-interest of the working class, the long-term self-interest of the working class in particular in uniting across oppressions and so on, but there has to be a story. People aren't willing to necessarily sacrifice their lives, their time, their effort for something that isn't bigger than themselves. They want to be part of something, I think, bigger than themselves. That's one of the things art can help us do, because I think there has to be some kind of romantic belief or use of mythology, by the way, we expose the enemy mythology.
C. Derick Varn:Okay, one of the things that leads me to I think it's the second chapter of the book when you talk about weak avant guards. That's a concept from boy, from Boris Grosz, a kind of one of the more interesting art theorists working. I think he's still alive. I'm pretty sure he's still alive, working. I think he's still alive. I'm pretty sure he's still alive. What do you make of Gros's analysis of the weak avant-garde and how is it related to this Gothic slash Romantic paradox?
Adam Turl:Well, I think Gros identifies it largely in existential terms.
Adam Turl:He acknowledges there's a social reality around the art world that the art world has changed. We went from having this period of innovative artistic movements that were innovative conceptually, formally and so on, and many of the gestures that were produced in those avant-garde were democratizing. We need to break down the barrier between art and life. We need to make art more accessible. You have artists like Joseph Beuys who say everyone is an artist, the gesture of putting ready-mades in art, anything can be an art object, and so on. And a lot of those artists tied some of those gestures to the idea that there would be some sort of transformation of society, some of those gestures to the idea that there would be some sort of transformation of society. Some of them were socialists, not many of them weren't, but they thought there'd be some kind of transformation and we ended up having that transformation. So we ended up with this art institutionalized avant-garde where technically anything can be art and anybody can be an artist.
Adam Turl:But there's no sense of how that works. There's no agreed upon debate. A bourgeoisie has jettisoned its idea of art for art's sake. It sort of continues zombie-like, without a raison d'etre, without a reason for being. For Gros, that's largely an existential, temporal thing. In the absence of that innovation, artists are trying to create images that step outside of time.
Adam Turl:And I think there's some truth to that, but I also by like not being strong images or having strong politics. But I think it's really about also the ideology of capitalism, particularly neoliberal capitalism, capitalist realism and the economy of the art world, because at the end of the day, most of the people who buy art are at least middle class and the top of the art market is thoroughly bourgeois, it's thoroughly capitalist, and that has an impact on what gets discussed even in the nonprofit sections of the art world.
C. Derick Varn:And the nonprofit sections of the art world are also tied to finance capital and gentrification, particularly in the United States since the nonprofit art funding was throttled in the 90s and will probably be even more so now, because what's left is under the chopping block under trump 2.0 well, I mean this brings me to like danny besner's uh critique, that we are now in a a time period where art is back to a totally elite activity for most people, at least in the commercial world.
C. Derick Varn:And that does seem to complicate things when it comes to this art, for this weak avant-garde imagery, because one of the things that I've noticed about it and you didn't write about this so much in your book, but I want your take on this is that, ironically, the more you push these kinds of egalitarian forms of art, the more outside commercial social capital signifiers have to be involved for anyone to take it seriously. So even outsider art gets its impromptu because somebody's buying and selling it for millions of dollars. That's also based partly on who's got access to it, who's doing the selling and how are they doing it. It makes it weirdly an even more elite activity because it's not like a craft you can learn and fake your way into in the same way that it was before. What's your response to that as part of the change in the general political economy of art?
Adam Turl:Yeah, I can hear you.
C. Derick Varn:Do you want me to go ahead and talk, or is it working? Yeah, go ahead and talk. Yeah, we're working sorry.
Adam Turl:Um, so yeah, the a lot of what goes into the, the contemporary art space, relies on the space itself to elevate it and say this is important. Um, and when people were doing these conceptual gestures historically, like when marcel duchamp puts a urinal into the armory show in new york, it's like one of the first times that's happened. It's an argument. It has a clear conceptual meaning and provocation. Um, that doing that kind of thing now doesn't have but one of the things that's happening in these white cube spaces, particularly the white cube gallery spaces. It separates the art object and elevates it.
Adam Turl:It underlines its auric value in the Benjaminian sense, and that's something that people using the white cube space can manipulate but oftentimes isn't thought about consciously.
Adam Turl:One of the things I like about the artist ilya kabakov is how he consciously manipulated the oracity of the the white cube to tell stories about, quote-unquote, regular people in fantastic situations. Now, one of the ways that some of these like gestures that seem like that were historically Democratic gestures and they play out in this rarefied space is almost like a cruel joke. So in Boyle Heights in Los Angeles a few years ago, as the neighborhood was gentrifying, a whole bunch of art galleries moved into the neighborhood. People were protesting these art galleries and, of course, working class people in these neighborhoods would make fun of this like unskilled artwork. You know that was being displayed, this conceptual artwork that didn't seem to have any cachet to the people in the neighborhood, to the people in the neighborhood, and the meaning of these art objects, whatever was intended, was becoming the gentrification of Boyle Heights and I think that that had a big impact and one of the reasons why I argue we have to think about the social performances of the art.
Adam Turl:We think about the art objects we make, obviously, or the gestures, or the films or whatever, but we need to think about their social performance in the world. And I go back to benjamin's idea of cult value um, the sort of performance of the medieval icon, or the processional in the church, or, uh, the book of hours, um, how you would look at a prayer book of hours at regular times for solace or whatever and think about how that relates to our cultural gestures and objects today, and if we are left-wing artists who believe in emancipation.
Adam Turl:we need to think about the social performance that surrounds our artwork and that's one of the things. So one of the things I argue in the book is, you know, it's not that I'm against showing things in white cubes all the time, or whatever, whatever or think you should never go to an art museum, uh, or anything like that.
Adam Turl:I really love going to the stainless art museum. My partner and I'll go whenever we can and just sit in the room with the max beckman and pay things, because we love max beckman so much. Um, however, the main uh organic connections with working-class communities and the struggle against exploitation um and oppression, and why one of the reasons we wrote our space regularly has, for example, uh meetings of the local dsa chapter um we've organized meetings around abortion rights here, solidarity uh with the stop cop city protesters and things like that. And, of course, the content of the work is also important. The form of the work is all and all that stuff, and I give two examples in particular, positive examples in my opinion of the performance of modern artworks, and I talk about Diego Rivera's man at the Crossroads, the mural that was destroyed by a Nelson Rockefeller in New York City, and how it took on additional meaning because of its interaction with the world. The painting itself shows a worker with machinery and social and cultural images all around them, and it's about the choice the worker has to make between socialism or barbarism. Right, it's a didactic mural from the 1930s. That painting was destroyed by Rockefeller and then it was recreated in Mexico City, if I remember right.
Adam Turl:And then I give the example of Picasso's Guernica, which has some references to Spanish mythology and history but, aside from its title, isn't really explicitly about the Nazis bombing, for the Spanish fascists, the village of Guernica.
Adam Turl:But the title and the sort of feeling of the painting, combined with the fact it was toured to raise money for the Spanish Republic, has imbued that painting with more of that political meaning. So the performance of the artwork in the world becomes part of its meaning. And this is more true now than it was then, true now than it was then when modern art was going through its innovative process. You know you're creating a whole new visual language. You're rebelling against the old, stultifying ways of doing things. Maybe it doesn't matter that the art gallery is in the fancy part of Paris and everybody who came to your show was rich or whatever. That's not the most important thing about I don't know this particular painting by Picasso or whatever. That's not the most important thing about this particular painting by Picasso or whatever but it becomes really important to the meaning of the artwork now.
C. Derick Varn:This brings me to something that you pointed out, that I actually need to go and read your source for this.
C. Derick Varn:Lucy Lippard's work about dematerialization in art I have not read, but she brings up a point that you do a lot with that dematerialization is initially related to a critique of capital, because the material commodity you sell, it and particularly I think about, like what is it?
C. Derick Varn:The art in the age of mechanical reproduction by benjamin are, um, some of the stuff from the culture, energy by adorno, and when you think about, like fluxes or dada or letterism or situationism, they all are very immediate, experiential things.
C. Derick Varn:But one of the things that you actually point out and Lifford points out too, so I guess I should really attribute it to her, but you do a lot with it is that this actually is based off of one a false gnosis that you do a lot with it is that this actually, um, it's based off of one, a false gnosis that you, that all commodities need to be physically material to be sold, so the idea that you could sell authenticity just didn't occur to Benjamin and two, um, that this also means that, um, that this also means that there's a devaluing of work because of the, the, the kind of like the way automation makes production cheaper and thus reduces the labor and dematerialization actually does a similar thing makes production cheaper, more immediate. So outside of the exploitation of immediate authenticity, it's real easy to just consider it not valuable at all. Am I reading your reframing of Lippert's argument correctly?
Adam Turl:I think so. I would encourage everybody to read Lippert's argument correctly. I think so. I would encourage everybody to read Lucy Lippert's history of conceptual art. She was there. She's really insightful and it's a great book. I would also encourage people to read about conceptual art elsewhere, because conceptual art in the United States was very focused on sort of definition and sign and reference and so on, whereas it was focused more on narrative in other countries.
Adam Turl:But I think that artists, frequently, who are influenced by radical ideas, create, sometimes against the wishes of capitalism, and I think that's why it sort of took on this oppositional, oppositional hue at times. Um so, uh, you know, data creating like you know Dada creating, like you know, culture jamming, which they did. The Berlin Dada put out a call saying that there was a Soviet, a Dada Soviet, formed in a Berlin suburb, and the police showed up and the press showed up, and so on.
Adam Turl:This is something Benjamin talks about in several cases, about artists sort of predicting large cultural um shifts.
Adam Turl:But I think that your discussion of automation is right, because when you look at the history of automation, um, the idea exists before the actual process. Right, the idea is something that's celebrated by the bourgeoisie, in a certain layer of the managerial classes, before it's actually possible to automate factories. It's the same thing happening now with generative ai. To a large extent is the ideology of generative ai is far out, as far out surpasses the actual ability of generative ai to do anything useful, even from a capitalist perspective, because the ideology is the replacement of workers. With automation, the replacement of workers, the capitalist will be alone, or what Barbrook and Cameron in the California ideology called an ideal of cyborg masters and robot slaves. Of course, what happens to the actual workers in that scenario if they were successful? Well, you know exterminism, you know lack of social programs and things like that. I think that, again, this is another reason why connecting our art community to mutualism, solidarity, social struggles, and I'm not necessarily saying all art has to be didactic or anything like that Can ameliorate this sense of loss.
Adam Turl:You know can help sew together mutualism. Community and solidarity Play a role in it, not the determinant role, but a role, and that will be good for art itself.
C. Derick Varn:Because I think art is sort of lost at sea.
Adam Turl:You know, a lot of what museums did in the 2010s was just compete for Instagram likes. You know it used to be. Museums were supposed to be the repository of like this is really important stuff of human life and performance and being or whatever, and art for art's sake and civilization and all this stuff. And then they were faced with maybe we're actually redundant and what we have to do is be in a roadside attraction and get a whole bunch of people to come and take selfies with whatever Instagram trap we set up at the Museum of Modern Art or whatever. So I think, in trying to recuperate arts, meaning is connected to trying to recuperate meaning for people in general.
Adam Turl:The last thing I'll say is I think that Benjamin's idea of, like the auric and the manically produced image, losing aura. Um, it's really important, but it's an ongoing process. It's like a lot of things that, like Marx described, it's not like primitive accumulation of capital, isn't just something that happens at the beginning of capitalism. It keeps happening, right. So, through privatization, colonization, the destruction of capital through war, the things he talks about in primitive accumulation, colonization, the enclosures and slavery, this stuff keeps happening. It's the same with aura and the auralist image. So, because aura is the sort of like meaning we prescribe to, the unique thing isn't just about distance in both time and space, right? So a mechanically reproduced image and I talk about this in the book that is old recuperates auric value, right? So you take a picture of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and if you've ever been there, there's like 100 tourists at once taking a picture of the Mona Lisa.
Adam Turl:It's really absurd and that obviously has no specific value, but if your grandmother dies and you find a Polaroid she took in the 70s with the Mona Lisa or whatever, that has a work value.
Adam Turl:It's a lost human performance and I think that a lot of people when they read Benjamin project the mechanically reproduced image is better, it's political, or we have to avoid the mechanically reproduced image and just retreat to the oracity of the unique art object. Or one is fascist and the other is communist, both can be each, Each can be both. It's this ongoing process and authenticity is a real thing, but it's very hard to describe and it's very hard to reduce to a superficialness.
C. Derick Varn:Reduced to a superficialness, right, you know one point that you make that may be related in a way that I didn't actually ever put together, as you were talking about honoring Lafebvre's abstract space in relation to cities and that the alienation of cities. Actually, in some ways I hate to use the word prefigures, but I actually do think it might be the only word I have for this uh, prefigures what we've seen with the, with the internet, where we've actually seen I don't want to make it sound like the old internet of the 1990s and aughts was decommodified. It wasn't. But the internet as we understand it, particularly World Wide Web, was only possible because someone made a choice of decommodification in the early 90s, and that was an active choice. And what we have seen over the past, let's say since the end of the, the Bush administration and it's been very slow and not obvious, but um, well, actually I don't think it's actually been that slow, but it has been not that obvious um, these tech overlords and the government actually colluding to enclose um cyberspace commercially, um, in a way that has made it hard for me to explain why anyone ever thought that the internet was a liberatory space at all. And and that's interesting because I think the same thing about cities actually, because, you know, um, uh, it's hard to imagine trying to convince people that cities are a liberatory space because of the way that they use social production and it's like a proof of social production, the socialization of labor and life, and blah, blah, blah, um, but they become kind of commodified hellscapes. It also seems very true that that's what we're seeing in the internet and that has had a.
C. Derick Varn:I mean, I think AI is like AI generated art, you know, burning up massive amounts of water and resources to make pure poor studio Ghibli things that even the fucking president uses to, to, to mock, deporting immigrants or whatever, um, and literally melting like million dollar cores of server forms. To do that in some ways is a bizarre form of this logic, and I say it's bizarre because it's almost, you know, to bring in something from batai. It's almost a potlatch. It is so incredibly wasteful of a way to do this, like when I tell people the energy cost of generating ai art is like way higher than if you just had human artists do it.
C. Derick Varn:I don't think they get that because people are still sold in some ways that efficiency and resources is part of the capitalist logic, but actually in AI it actually is a place where that breaks down both in terms of art and in terms of employment, because right now it is more costly to use AI to do a lot of things than it is to use people. Yet people are wanting to try to use AI to do it off of the promise that eventually it will replace the need for workers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I disagree with Jody Dean that we're already. We're already in techno, neo-feudalism or whatever, but I do sort of think she might have a point if this continues development that we're on. So how does that relate to art?
Adam Turl:I think that I think that some, some, both capitalists, liberal capitalists and socialists, sometimes overemphasize the extent to which things are rational. Right? So when people started putting computers in American office buildings, right, it was over a decade before there was any productivity increase at all in most offices. Right, it was over a decade before there was any productivity increase at all in most offices. Right, it was on faith in a capitalist dream. Right, that businesses switched everything to computers. Faith and fear. Faith in the idea, the ideal of automating labor, and fear that they might lose out to another firm that did it before them. Right, so you have over 10 years of spending billions of dollars on computers before anybody sees any productivity increases in the business world. I mean, I'm just talking about the offices, not the factories or or anything else. So I mean, in terms of the part of what I'm arguing, is that we have to break down the barrier between the art world and the rest of the world.
Adam Turl:Um, because I think that what's happened in the art world is a combination of celebrating the rarefied space, the rarefied in real life analog experience for people within that rarefied space, and then combined with a lot of techno-utopianism as well, and of course this was easier in the 90s because there was a sense of anarchic freedom in the early internet. Was a sense of anarchic freedom in the early internet? Um, it was an intent. It was created by the military and by academia in large part. Um, it was predecessors, arpanet and so on um to be a networked, almost rhizomatic thing that would survive a nuclear war or, and in the early days there was a lot of free self-expression. And with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Godfathers and all this stuff, you can see why people could just celebrate this seeming random fragment of it. The problem was, of course, there was some narrative. It wasn't the bottom line even for a quarterly of their own system. I think one of the things that's changed now, is they?
Adam Turl:don't believe in the utopianism of their own system anymore.
Adam Turl:Which is why they're looking to create their own private Elysiums we're talking about Peter Thiel and floating network or whatever or escape to Mars, which is nonsense, or massifying a bunker in New Zealand and things like that. Because I think that the intersection of the Anthropocene and the fact that they don't necessarily need our labor is part of the logic of what's happening right now and again. One of the roles art can play and to what I said, this is in the art world versus, you know, the rest of actuality is to cut against this sort of apologetics for Armageddon that we see constantly in media these days. Like you know, it's almost been a ritual for 30 years to watch New York and Los Angeles get destroyed at the movies a couple times a year. You know, some of our most popular media is about the end of the world and it used to be that those things were prophetic warnings, like when George Romero accidentally invented the modern zombie genre with Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the.
Adam Turl:Dead he considered these things warnings, like he was a mad prophet in the desert warning against the end of the world, but now it's just entertainment.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, I mean, that's another area that I find fascinating because, like a lot of early apocalyptic cinema or the grim cinema that we might call it, proto-capitalist realism of the 1970s is is kind of a imminent critique of capital from its own artistic conscience. And by the time you get to the last 20 years, I think even after mark fisher wrote his book um, there is almost none of that eminent critique there. It's just, you know, it's almost like Tina, but instead of for capitalism it's for the apocalypse, and it's just like okay, and I find that interesting. I also find it interesting just in terms of ideology. You know your book doesn't talk a ton about this, although you do hint at it.
C. Derick Varn:And this is, you know, these tech overlords moving from the optimistic techno-utopianism where maybe, like, capitalists and communists can all get along now because we have the freedom of the Internet, blah, blah, blah, because we have the freedom of the internet, blah, blah, blah, to basically neo-reaction, you know, which is like let's have feudalism but capitalism together at last.
C. Derick Varn:And you know, we'll find weird Austrian economists like Hans Hermann Hoppe to justify that, and then we'll, you know, get into this idea of like maybe we need to transcend humanity altogether, a la the alleged I'm going to put my alleged there appropriately meth-fueled dreams of Nick Land in Shanghai when he broke with his prior left-wing self Although to be honest between you and me, I'm not sure Nick Land was ever all that left-wing reading his uh work on batai.
C. Derick Varn:But there is this kind of like grim meat hook future that these people are also selling themselves now, um, weirdly, while they're also super dependent on massive social reproduction schemes. I mean, even though they don't really need our labor, they do need our government tax money or their stuff is not viable. Which is the great irony of this round of libertarian tech development is it has always been utterly entwined with the government, has always been utterly entwined with the government. Like you know, obama screwing NASA and giving SpaceX contracts is actually like the beginning of a lot of this, and it also makes it hard to even though now Elon Musk and Peter Thiel clearly have a partisan resonance people forget how much of a role that regular old liberals played in empowering these people and making them super rich, and so you know your book to me points out all these ironies, but how they're manifested in the way we approach art.
C. Derick Varn:And one of the things that actually got me really thinking about it you know you were talking about the auric elements of things is Friends, which I would have considered a totally throwaway TV show that I would never have to think about again now has an auric component because it seems to speak to a lot of young people about a time that was slightly less commodified than now, which is odd as hell for people you know of either one of our ages, because I can remember the nineties. It felt super commodified, but uh, oh yeah.
Adam Turl:Well, I mean the rent wasn't nearly as bad, but I mean, that was what everybody said how the fuck do they have that apartment? You know, like with those shit jobs, um and uh, anyway, but uh, the false is. I mean, I bring it up in relationship to that weird liberal apocalyptic film leave the world behind that was produced by barack obama such a bizarre movie. I don't have you seen it no, I haven't, I was on netflix and it's kind of like.
Adam Turl:It's sort of like a. It's like the civilization falls apart but you should be nice to your neighbor. But that's also understandable if you, if, if you screw over people, if you have have to. It's a weird sort of. It's a weird, weird movie, and I don't mean that in a good way, necessarily. It's a liberal apocalyptic film is the only way I can describe it. But the teenage daughter really wants to watch the Friends series finale because she's been streaming it and she finds a doomsday bunker when everything else has gone to hell. Really wants to watch the Friends Series finale because she's been Streaming it and she finds a doomsday bunker when everything else has gone to hell, and finds a DVD Of the last season of Friends or a DVD box set of the last, whatever it is, and watches the last episode While explosions are going off In New York City across Across the river.
Adam Turl:And I think that there is an oracity that happens to these old cultural products as things continue to get worse. I mean, we talked before about like being an activist or being an organizer or being political and seeing the sort of trajectory of things going in a particular way and there's been some victories along the way. Like I, I was friends with a lot of people who worked on anti-death penalty work in illinois and we abolished the death penalty in illinois and got death row cleared out under republican governor. Um, a lot of the people on death row have been tortured by police commander john burge. Um, I've been involved in like gay liberation struggles that have won. You know won things like equal marriage rights.
Adam Turl:A lot of the left-wing critique is, uh, that there was a narrow focusing of the mainstream gay rights organizations on equal marriage rights but actually the equal marriage type right stuff exploded. Most of the mainstream organizations didn't even want to touch that with a tent football. They had to be dragged, kicking and screaming to do that. Or the Sensenbrenner anti-immigrant legislation that got put forward at the odds was defeated by mass immigrant rights marches around the country. But those are the exceptions. Exceptions.
Adam Turl:The trajectory of most things has been going downhill so it's understandable that young people are going to be nostalgic for artifacts from a past that in many ways was better for, at least economically better for for working um, working class people in some ways not perfect, not great, but clearly better in some way. Or a fiction that's better in some ways. Not perfect, not great, but clearly better in some way. Or a fiction that's better in some way, although, god, I wouldn't want to live in a friend's universe, even with that apartment or whatever.
Adam Turl:I think one of the things we want to do as people who make art and culture and talk about it is when we're looking at the past, the signs bequeathed to us from the past, to construct those in a way that allows for what maybe you could call critical nostalgia. That, for example, one of the things Mark Fisher talks about is the mass belief that a different kind of society was possible. That was prevalent amongst millions of people in the 1970s, is largely gone and trying to recapture some of the sense of that. What was lost? How could we regain it? That would be useful.
C. Derick Varn:I feel like um and I'm not saying that like I'm judging people for being nostalgic for things that are banal or whatever.
Adam Turl:I still have fond feelings for GeoCities pages or whatever, in the early anarchic days of the internet.
C. Derick Varn:Me too. I have nostalgia for zine culture, which is petite, bourgeois as fuck, but I really do miss it.
Adam Turl:I mean, it could be petite, bourgeois as fuck, but I really do miss it like I mean it could be, but there's also a lot of like. I mean my, I, the guy I bought pot from, who was a dishwasher, that was a job we made zines together when we were like young, you know, like you know, we get together, make zines and, uh, you know, get high.
C. Derick Varn:And you know he was a dishwasher I was a dishwasher too at the time, actually, so it wasn't super petty bourgeois, you know like a lot of people were, but there's a lot of working class people too well, I mean, I don't even mean that as a critique, even like, like, I think that was an interesting time period where petty bourgeois interest and like working class interest could seemingly overlap in a way that it's also hard to imagine now, like, but it's our well, I shouldn't say hard to imagine. A lot of people do imagine it. That's what right-wing populism really is is the collapsing of petite bourgeois talking points and working class talking points, although ultimately it's for the ground-hot bourgeoisie, not the little ones, to think about those kinds of responses. And I do think socialism is more agnostic on that than we probably are comfortable with, because there are these socialist efficiency people who really do think that a socialist world is just like the capitalist world, but nicer, and you get free college or something. I mean.
C. Derick Varn:One of the things that occurs to me, I think, when you talk about the difference between the seventies and, let's say, the odd teens, right when you know, we saw this re-explosion of leftism and I got excited about it. You probably got excited about it, like, but even at the time it did feel like the what they were demanding, which is like social goods at a basic level, like you know, 25 an hour, which is the equivalent of the minimum wage from 1960. What was it like? A like a few cents, um uh, what was? What was the other thing? Um uh, free call medicare for all, free college. And you're like, these are just basic social goods that you're asking for, which, I admit, we desperately need, like, so I'm not mad that you're asking that would be a better world. But it it is. In a way, it felt like a reawakening of the left. But when you actually like, really think about it, it's like but we're not demanding that much this time, not really, we didn't even get that.
Adam Turl:But we're not demanding much, but it also was like. This is like one of the tragedies of the United States, right? Demanding universal health care is not much of a demand in the grand scheme of things of capitalism. Almost every other capitalist country provides some kind of universal health care. Even a lot of very poor capitalist countries provide some kind of universal health care For all sorts of obvious reasons, reasons.
Adam Turl:But in the context of the United States, creating an actual single-payer healthcare system would probably be one of the largest redistributions of private wealth since the end of the Civil War, that's the crazy thing that's why American liberal, the radical center, the McCrones of America right can't accept this modest reform? Because it would alienate such a large swath of the bourgeoisie that has stock in health care companies, insurance companies and so on.
Adam Turl:So it's, one of the tragedies of America right the United States is. This minor demand becomes unconscionably impossible, and I think this is related to, for example, my parents.
C. Derick Varn:My mom was a teacher.
Adam Turl:We've historically, on the left, had criticisms of public education, how it stultifies imagination, how there's not enough resources put in, how there's not enough emphasis on critical thinking, how class sizes need to be smaller and so on.
Adam Turl:But then we've been fighting a rear guard battle against standardized testing and all this nonsense for decades. And now we have to fight for the very existence of public education against the far right lunatics that are running around Washington DC and the administration right now. So we're not able to articulate what we actually think should happen in education because we have to fight for the very existence of a thing that we feel is fundamentally flawed and problematic. And this keeps happening in the United States. And the liberals are often content just to point out the absurdism of the far right enemy without looking into the underlying problem of what they're doing. And I think this explains some of the dark enlightenment stuff a little bit, because neoliberalism tied the enlightenment, rationality, progress and the idea of progress to a mainstream capitalist sense of the economic system that you can only tinker with things politically, you couldn't change things fundamentally. And so when someone says the Enlightenment has failed, whether it's a postmodernist in 1995 or one of these techno-fash, elitist, techno-fash people the dark magotypes as opposed to the regular magotypes that can resonate?
Adam Turl:with people because it did what was called that did fail for people. Right, it did fail for millions of people. It reminds me of like when the CDC was telling people you only need to be six foot apart when you're teaching during the pandemic. Actually it was about 12 feet, but they didn't think people would do it, so they just said let's cut it down to six. So they did lie and the right says the CDC is lying. You know, we don't need masks at all, all it's. You know. Whatever. You know the right to the CC line of articulation. We had a little bit of that with Bernie, but of course Bernie ended up being Bernie, as we knew he would be, and didn't have stomach to tell the Democrats. So that mainstream articulation of a lot of politics was very brief, yeah, I mean. I mean we could talk more about what happened in the odds. Yeah, of course, but I think that's when we need more artists doing it. The main thing that will solve it is mass movements, but you know.
C. Derick Varn:Well, I mean mass movements. I agree, and I think mass working class movements are needed. My big challenge right now is trying to get people to understand that I don't think we know what a mass working class movement today is exactly going to look like, because so many of the things we took advantage of in the 19th and early 20th century either aren't viable or they don't really exist. In the same way and I'm not talking about political parties or socialism, I mean like um, when I was trying to tell people that like hey, starbucks workers, starbucks workers, unionizing is great and we support it, but it's not the same thing, as you know, industrial unionization in the 30s, because you're dealing with much smaller groups of people with way more variety in contracts. And also, if you stop production at that end, does it really stop that much if you're just doing it in your city? And that's a far different thing. And the other thing that I tell people is like, look, even if the factories come back and, by the way, even before Trump going back to Obama, they've been coming back they just don't employ that many people.
C. Derick Varn:Dark factories are a thing now. You need three people to go in there and make sure the servers work and a few people to service the robots, but a factory that would probably have employed 2,000 people today. I think the estimate in the United States it would employ 15 of that. So, like I don't know, 150 people. Um, feel nil's done a lot of work on this. It's also affected, uh, developmentalism and, like africa, because you don't get the employment gains anymore when you bring a big factory, and even if you're in, like Botswana. So you know, I do think and this is why I still care about art actually is because I do think we need a way to reproduce these movements that are not based on those assumptions of the early 20th century, because they simply don't exist for us, at least not in that way.
Adam Turl:Right, I mean there still are a lot of manufacturing workers, about 10 of the workforce in the us um, but that's nothing compared to what it was the high point of 35 40, where you're talking about large, vertically integrated factories with large union presence that had been built over decades by radicals and were able to. There's obviously a whole bunch of history. A lot of those factories, even the ones that do, still have a number of workers have been moved to the south of the US, to non-union states, states with more history of racism.
Adam Turl:There's a fragmentation. There's still hundreds of thousands of manufacturing workers in Los Angeles, but they don't live in the city center. They live on the periphery of the city, so you can be a working class service worker in I don't know Echo Park or whatever the fuck, and you could never see a factory worker ever, you know, even though there's hundreds of thousands of factory workers in the Los Angeles area Right.
Adam Turl:So everything has been restructured. It's been restructured both because of the economy of capital and the ideology of capital and I love the essay by Barbara and Cameron on the California ideology because I think it's so, so prescient and good. And they're writing in the 90s about the Silicon Valley ideology and they're cutting against a lot of utopianism at the time. And they sort of tie a lot of the utopian rhetoric around Silicon Valley to sort of the separation of the Bay Area counterculture from its connections to the new left of the 1960s counterculture from its connections to the new
Adam Turl:left of the 1960s. So you still have this messianic utopianism, but without the egalitarian left critique of capitalism, and they describe this as an ideal of cyborg masters again and robot slaves. And then they compare this to Thomas Jefferson's invention of the dumbwaiter, so that he can be served dinner by his slaves without having to see them Right Right and point out the practical ways this happens. For example, the earliest computer hardware factories were in the United States. They were quickly offshored after a series of strikes. But it also happens in the structure and thinking through the software itself and the technology itself, the way everything's constructed. So almost all the higher paid coding jobs were in the Silicon Valley area and all the other jobs were offshore if possible. But of course now we have AI and one of the things motivating AI is to replace the higher paid coding jobs. Right, because you still have to pay somebody who went to mit or ucla two hundred thousand dollars a year to to make walls for the expansion of world of warcraft or whatever.
Adam Turl:Um, anyway, I think that. I think that part of the answer there's political questions, strategic questions and structural questions. For example, like one of the difficulties I think comrades and working people have had in the starbucks stuff is the starbucks is just trying to run down the clock on actually signing contracts. So there's a question about are the unions, are the union leadership I'm not talking about the workers in each store willing to help the workers in each store fight the kind of fight, you need to get a contract.
Adam Turl:Are we willing to do the kind of things as a movement to organize where the factories have been moved to within the United States and globally, but also create an ethos and a pathos and a culture in which solidarity, mutual support, is the default? Because I feel in the absence of that, people are sort of signing on to cruelty. I think a lot of what's happening is especially for middle class people and some working are signing on to cruelty in the absence of support and solidarity. If you can't, if there's not a way out, you can sort of sign on and be part of the problem.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, if. If you can't, if there's no answer to the problem, at least you can fuck over the people who are the same as you are slightly lower than you, do you just like? I mean, I hate to say that it's that banal because it's not in all cases, but it does seem like that is, and I don't, and people think I'm talking just about the right here. I'm actually not. The viable left of American politics is basically revenge fantasies against Donald Trump. So it's. It also is not really an alternative notion.
C. Derick Varn:I think we've actually seen that in the way that the resistance has like re. The resistance in quotation marks has has a re kind of build itself now between, like AOC and Bernie Sanders, which I have plenty of critiques of, but it is an interesting sign that they're attracting that many people to it. I don't know that we're going to take advantage of it, but you know. And then the kind of other thing that you see is the resistance would like fuck a shit ton of neoconservatives like picking up seemingly left-wing talking points to bring back their, their us empire, like, and you know, for all my critique of the late aughts left, and I have a ton, um, uh, are the late teens left the left of the first trump administration and and what we saw happen there, uh, this, this new resistance, doesn't have the same left valiance at all. It really does seem like, um, like a resistance in the old sense of the word, like we're just trying to resist being totally plowed into the floor. Now we're're not even making new demands.
Adam Turl:I think so out of. You get a radicalization out of a series of things and the odds and the financial crisis, you have Occupy, and Occupy is very much in the old idiom of a lot of the sort of automatically anarchistic kind of protests that we had in the 90s in particular.
Adam Turl:But then you know it gets smashed up by the democrats. So it raises the question of the state and usually when people the question of the state gets raised, people go to electoralism. And then bernie happened and trump happened and so on. At the same time you have the parallel sign around black lives matter, so that complicates it and makes things a little bit different. And then, of course, we've seen some of the failures of electoralism.
Adam Turl:But I know a lot of people on the left that are doing patient-based building and community work around unions, tenants, organizing Palestine, solidarity and stuff like that. That isn't necessarily going to get on the news all the time. I think people have realized you actually have to do. A layer of people have realized you actually have to do organizing over a long period of time to have results, which is a good thing. I think people have realized that, as long as we connect that up to contesting on the larger questions, I think on the what was it that you brought up something about? Well, the Sanders and AOC rallies. I have lots of criticisms, like you, of Sanders and AOC and I saw a lot of my comrades, just repeating our criticisms of those.
Adam Turl:And I tried to suggest that what we should be doing, you know, is getting the rest of our local comrades together and if AOC and Sanders come to town or nearby, we should go there and try to meet people and organize them.
Adam Turl:And part of that can be saying, and because we can't, partly because we can't trust them to take things to their logical conclusion, because we've seen Bernie always capitulates to the Democrats and I can expect the OCD so good, like everything. A lot of what was said was great. I disagree with you, whatever. But we need to organize ourselves, we need to do it ourselves and I, you know I got a lot of. I got some people liked that. I suggested that, but everybody in my chapter at DSA liked that. I suggested that, but everybody in my chapter at DSA liked that. I said that, but they didn't come anywhere near us. But some of the people I knew in other places, well, they didn't like it because it meant they'd have to do something.
Adam Turl:I'm not saying everybody has to do everything, but that's the active, revolutionary thing to do is go there and not to denounce, necessarily although I have problem with people protesting, bernie, on Palestine or or AOC but like go there and organize the people who showed up to do something better over time, you know.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, this was my thought. It's the same thing with the artwork.
Adam Turl:I think a lot. Yeah, I think it's a similar thing with the artwork a lot. You come an artist, you want people to look at your artwork. You know you dream about being like successful, like your favorite artists or whatever, even if you don't think you're going to be that. So you want people to like your artwork, you want to make it, you want it to be in the gallery, you want it to, you know, uh, be a thing. You know, um, but people get so oriented at the top of all that um that they don't think about. Historically, people made art for the people around them, like for almost all of our history. People didn't make art with the idea that it would go to a city a thousand miles away and you would sell it for a hundred thousand dollars or whatever, or the equivalent of that people made art for the people in their community, in their town, for their church, for you know they played songs for people in their hunter gatherer band.
Adam Turl:You know they were. They were like Levin. I always like this joke about preachers and manure. I don't know who said it, but they said that preachers were like manure spread out. They were good for the community, but in a big pile they smelled like shit.
C. Derick Varn:I think it's a similar thing for art and leftists.
Adam Turl:We're supposed to be like Le. You know, we're supposed to be the bread, not be the bread.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, I mean.
C. Derick Varn:I do think that no, no, no, no, that was just a lag. The thing that really sits with me when I think about this is I mean, there's a couple of challenges to it. Something you bring up is actually an argument of Mark Fisher's deliberately melted the the interior and outer um notions of self in favor actually of the outer, not because he thought that was good, but because he thought it was a critique what was actually happening. Ballard's own politics are weird. Like he's basically a kind of conservative critic of capitalism. Um, uh, it's even hard for me to say that he's conservative, but I do think that that's that's there and that in some ways, that lack of interiority actually, I do think, um, to tie it back to what we're talking about makes people impatient. Um, you know, and look, there's a lot of reasons to be impatient. I used to be, like I live in a place that used to have snow in the winter and now for five years we've had only rain. Um, like you know, there is a time stamp on some of this stuff, but, yeah, the way people have handled that impatience is basically, you know, kind of the the paradox we're talking about with the people critiquing Bernie.
C. Derick Varn:I agree with a lot of the people critiquing Bernie, but my question is like it's not a bad thing that people are moving to something. Why aren't you trying to take advantage of that Right, as opposed to just complaining about Bernie and AOC's politics? Because, frankly, you know, I've never trusted AOC as far as I could throw her, and I kind of think Murray Bookchin called Bernie out correctly in 1984, so like but I have to admit that the Bernie movement of 2016 really did mean something, and it happening to people who weren't part of that now also could mean something. But what are we doing with that is a different question, because, um, uh, you know, as I tell people like Trump and their GOP right now is incredibly unpopular, but it hasn't returned the popularity of the Democrats at all. This is actually a very interesting time period and you would think that would be a good for people like you and I, because it's like well, no, unlike any of these fuckers, we could offer something better, right, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening right now.
Adam Turl:Well, there's like practical political. I know like my chapter of DSA is pushing towards you know it's going to be supporting resolutions trying to push DSA to create its own party and so on. I don't know, it probably will win. But I think that's the imagination we need to have and the practical direction we need to go in terms of electoral politics, of how bad the Democrats are and it's slower than using the Democratic Party ballot line, but the Democratic Party ballot line keeps sabotaging us right, absolutely and I think this is the same thing.
Adam Turl:It's it's slower to say we should organize that factory. So I'm going to spend the next five years of my life trying to organize a factory that takes and trying to organize a factory that seems like a lot to people in temporary capitalism in the first place. That's what people had to do, to do those things.
C. Derick Varn:Right, I mean well and yeah.
Adam Turl:I don't know what to do about the contradiction in time, having forest fires here possibly. That was impossible basically throughout my childhood, because it's a swamp. It's where the Ohioio and mississippi rivers meet.
C. Derick Varn:There should there there should not be the possibility of fire.
Adam Turl:It is wet, always wet, even when it's cold, even when it's hot, it's always wet. But just talking about the possibility of fire, we've had, you know, the alert days and so on. That shouldn't be possible. So I get the urgency. That shouldn't be possible. So I get the urgency, but most of what's fast is controlled by capital and doesn't create the connection and mutuality and the imagination. We need to move in a different direction. I think most of what's fast is mediated by capital and we need to create our own spaces and networks and ideas and communities together. And I don't perhaps it's too late, but I'd rather go out that way than making transparent gestures. Yeah, making transparent gestures.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, I think that's as strong enough point to end on as any, but I I wanted to before we go off. It reemphasizes there is a role in art here, because art is part of social reproduction. And I also will say, of course, not all art is explicitly didactic. I people have complained about my poem seeming to have no marxist content and I'm like, well, that's not entirely true. But even if it's there, I can't tell you where. Um uh, but it is also like what that's for. It is also slow, like I've taken lately.
C. Derick Varn:You know I've been doing internet stuff for now 15 years and I've just taken lately that what I do on the internet is only to inspire people to do stuff in person. It is not in and of itself political. It is just like a passive form of edutainment that if you want to do something political, it's there, available, available for you. But just consuming it on youtube even though I my youtube's demonetized and doesn't have a lot of commercials on it, still gonna have some. Um, tying people to youtube is not the same as you actually going out and doing something with it or even doing art in the local community, like um here in Salt Lake.
C. Derick Varn:I got with a union group and we had like a sing-along for May Day. It was real fun. I was a little bummed that like there's not really any union songs post-1960, which actually does say a lot, but it was still fun to do and I do think about that because I'm like this actually means a lot, whereas what you and I are think about that because I'm like this actually means a lot, whereas what you and I are doing right now. Somebody can take what we're saying or pick up your book or whatever and do something with it, but we're to a very diffuse audience. Like you know, probably between the podcast and the YouTube, 7,000 people are going to hear this in the year, but they're spread out over the entire fucking planet. So what are they going to do with that? It's not really the same thing. And one of the challenges I did get from your book was thinking about the importance of art in political spaces in person, as opposed to media prod products that are just consumed or not.
Adam Turl:And that's yeah, you know I have nothing against using youtube, the internet. I'm not saying people should uh, uh, you know, burn their computer like it's a draft card or a bra or something. Uh, I do think the in real life stuff is important, but what I'm hoping is that we can get to the point where we're using this global media and inspires other people to, like you were saying, do the organizing politics in real life. The art in real life, the big questions are important and they're not just political. I'm still upset about the fact I'm gonna die someday. I don't like that at all and you know, like, if that's not nothing, it's political in this society, but it's not just political, right? So all that stuff matters, um, but I think it takes on a meaning in poetry and a political significance in real life. That's different. I think what we can hope for in terms of the media stuff is that it's like the first.
Adam Turl:Velvet Underground album.
C. Derick Varn:Only 5,000 people buy it but they all start a band.
Adam Turl:You know, that's kind of like what we should hope for. The drive to create content for the sake of it. I think is very much a performance of capitalism, like, if you want to do it and you're making a living at it, a performance of capitalism. If you want to do it and you're making a living at it and you're saying what you want to say, that's all great. But there is always this pressure to produce content. And I always think of Marx on accumulation. Instead of accumulation, it's content. That's Moses and the prophets.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, yeah, I mean, I feel it, I post videos. I posted a video. I should post a video on it, even though I have nothing I want to say yeah.
C. Derick Varn:Well, I think about that all the time, like, uh, uh, wes started making shorts and I there's some observations about that, I'll save Um, when I started posting the instagram and I'm like, I'm like, oh god, I gotta remember to like post another thing to instagram. And it's just like, oh, just just consumes your life and I don't know that it necessarily spreads your product all that much in in this case, or at least not the people who would understand it. Um, and so I think about that a lot, whereas you know what I do out here. I mean, you know I'm in a very conservative part of the United States, but the labor stuff does not get the same hostility from rank and file normie conservatives. It does from leadership. They hate us, right, and I want to make that very clear. Um, it's not, you know, and yes, there's some bootlickers who will repeat what the leaders say, but, by and large, when I say I'm in a teacher's union or whatever, um, a lot of the people who are even fairly conservative do not react to me hostily in that capacity, the way they would act to me if I said I was a marxist.
C. Derick Varn:Uh, which you know is, is a different thing, even though it is also very clear, and particularly here in utah, where they're trying to make collective bargaining illegal for, for, um, all public workers except for, like, some people under federal jurisdiction, um, it's it's also very clear that, like, even though we're fairly popular amongst conservative rank and file, in some ways the leadership here wants to destroy us, and I'm always like that's one wedge that we really do have, um, and you don't have to tail conservative cultural points. You don't have to pull an Angela Nagle in 2019 to do that, like, because people can see that what you're doing would actually benefit them, as opposed to, like, some abstract moral point that they're not going to benefit from one way or the other, even if they agree with you. And I do really think about that. The more I get on the ground, um, and do stuff around here, I work with a group called out which is, uh, organized Utah, um and uh, and that's where I spend my time these days, um, and you know we work a lot with the DSA and a lot of the other various socialist groups, but we work also with, like, very conservative teamsters and stuff like that. What we don't do is endorse politicians or canvas for or anything like that, and I would tell people that that's the approach.
C. Derick Varn:But a lot of people right now, uh, it feels very unsexy to some people in some ways. You know cause? It is not going to repitulate a lot of the. You know the dramatic moments of the for the resistance to Trump one or anything like that, Um, but then again you get the feeling that a lot of people are embarrassed by that. I don't want them to go away now, so I don't know what people want.
Adam Turl:So I think a lot of the, a lot of the resistance trademark To Trump won was Sabotaged by liberalism, but that's probably a whole other discussion. You know that we get. Especially once they got obsessed with Russia, you know because, like, who needs the working class or popular politics when you can blame everything on Russian bots?
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, Russian bots. And those Russian bots are also somehow communist.
Adam Turl:Right, even though Russia is not.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, even though Russia is a pretty right wing regime at this point.
Adam Turl:So you, know, anyway, but I remember after NAFTA was passed and I was talking I was really odd, but I was talking to a working class guy in one of the small towns down here and he said something kind of racist about mexico. Evidently I looked at him in a particular way because he's like then he says to me wait.
Adam Turl:How do they feel about nafta in mexico? Because it hadn't occurred to them that they might not want it right. So I'm? I'm like I don't know everything, but I've read a couple of books and everything I've read.
Adam Turl:Working class people in Mexico do not like it and it's thrown off, like you know I didn't know the numbers yet, but it's cut off the expansion of communal lands for indigenous people. It's not good for people in Mexico, just like it's not good for people here. The only people it's not good for people in mexico, just like it's not good for people here, the only people it's good for are these rich people and this guy who had said something kind of racist a minute ago. He's like, yeah, that sounds right. You know, like that would have been wrong not to argue with him about the racism, but one of the ways to get him not to be racist was to point out that how he's fucking himself in terms of his understanding about class Right, and this is why I think these are important. You just like, you know, like it's not one or the other.
Adam Turl:it's both feeding each other. But if you don't have the class stuff because class is what sews together everything else into one thing- Otherwise you're just floating around and everybody's oppressed. But class sews together. How it all works together.
C. Derick Varn:You're right, everybody's oppressed and by oppression we're not quite sure what we mean by that and who everybody is.
C. Derick Varn:We can even somehow talk about the poor billionaire executives in some ways having trauma from their childhoods or whatever, and it's not particularly useful. I mean, it's too vague and I think that you know, I do think the part of this about art that I think people under rely on, because I will say I think sometimes I know I sound harsh on young people, particularly very young people. I'm a teacher and a lot of times what I'm doing is describing and people think that I'm blaming because what I'm describing sounds so dire. But I actually don't think it's the students fault. But I do think we live in a particularly artless moment, like across the board, and it is very interesting thinking about how and I don't think this was actually thought out in any room I don't think there's a cabal of capitalists figuring out we're going to introduce standardized testing and we're going to get rid of arts in school, so then people are going to hate learning, then we're going to drag in AI. I don't think that's what happened. Effectively, that still happens.
Adam Turl:So you know, a lot of people don't see the go again let's see if they've spent decades, decades minimizing the subjective value of individual working class people. So it makes sense that the cultural superstructure on top of that right would minimize the subject, the value of subjective expression.
C. Derick Varn:I don't think it's a conscious decision exactly.
Adam Turl:It might be for some of them, and we know that some of the attacks on higher education were as was at Reagan's point. To you it was like we don't want an educated proletariat or whatever. So there was some consciousness there, but I think the overall trajectory, if you're going to minimize the value of people's subjectivity, their individual humanity as well as their collective humanity, I'm not saying that's what it's meaning, but almost all art literature, poetry, music, sculpture these are records of human performance.
C. Derick Varn:And if you're saying human beings aren't important, that's not important either, right? I mean, um, we live in a very anti-human moment, um, and it's uh, it's an interesting uh paradox, um, but I, I think, uh, what I'm going to challenge people to do on this one is go out and do both some art and actually organize with real people in a real meat space. It uh, it's challenging. The unions are frustrating. Union leadership is infuriating often I don't want to romanticize that sometimes I think the jacobin people are a little bit too glib about that how hard that actually is to deal with. Um, uh, but uh, it's worth doing because it's. I think it's a lot better than being an alienated person staring at your phone feeling helpless and like, if they take your tiktok away, you have no means of self-expression anymore. Because, I mean, you don't control tiktok algorithm anyway, friend. Um, uh, where can people find your work, adam? I mean you don't control TikTok algorithm anyway, friend.
Adam Turl:Where can people find your work, adam? You can find the artwork, my partner's artwork at truelstudioart or bornagainlabororg I think it's org, it might be com, I don't remember. You can also find the book I wrote shamelessly at RevolvePresscom, or you can find it on Amazon or Barnes Noble. It's in some bookstores, but anyway.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, revolve's a new press. They've released what? Three, four books now, with two more coming. What was I right mine? And the funny story is I actually wrote half of my cast. I mean it's a good press, it's great.
Adam Turl:They got another book coming out right now or in the next month and yeah.
C. Derick Varn:I think and others.
Adam Turl:Yeah, but so far I've liked everything that's come out. You know I thought it was. I didn't agree with everything in every single book. Yeah.
C. Derick Varn:Their hit rate for me is a lot higher than most left presses, but they also don't publish that much yet, um, which I'm actually kind of glad of. Uh, but people should check it out. Check out your book. I really liked your book. Um it, I was going to say it. It feels like it picked up from where uh red wedge magazine left off, uh, which was a magazine that I read kind of habitually, like you know, eight years ago. So, yeah, I was a big fan of Red Wedge. They weren't always a big fan of me, but I was a big fan of Red Wedge, so it's nice did we ever criticize you?
Adam Turl:did we ever criticize you?
C. Derick Varn:Did we ever criticize you at Red Wedge? One of the editors at Red Wedge personally disliked me and I was associated with Angela Nagel because of my work at Zero Books, even though I was an internal critic of Angela. But they didn't know that.
Adam Turl:Like so.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, that wasn't public until like 2021. So you know, but it's all water under the bridge now. I don't. I only believe in holding grudges to traitors, and no one at Redwood is a traitor.
Adam Turl:So Redwood was something great for. For the last it was, it was a really great website for the the for for, especially like 2014, 2020, did a lot of cool stuff.
C. Derick Varn:So yeah, a lot of my more favorite magazines are gone. Now I mean like a viewpoint's also gone. I loved it too, so but anyway, we don't want to get too nostalgic on magazines. People should check out your book. I really liked it. I learned a ton. I do feel like you pick up some some some art criticism threads from like Mark Fisher and stuff and push it in new directions, and that's high praise for me. Thank you so much, adam.
Adam Turl:Thanks, thanks.
