Independent Publisher ✱ Minor Theoretical Literature ✱ Berlin/Nicosia
Transcription: Charles Mudede—Exocapitalism (2025) debrief
This interview between Charles Mudede and Palais Sinclaire took place on Friday 18th July 2025, at 9:00PM (Berlin)/ 12:00PM (Seattle), via Google Meets. It was recorded by Polymnia Tsinti on multiple cameras.
Palais Sinclaire:
Hey.
Charles Mudede:
Hello!
PS:
Can you hear me?
CM:
Yeah, I can hear you.
PS:
Wonderful. Let me just get set up. If you can't tell, you are projected on my front room wall.
CM:
Oh, shit.
PS:
Where are you?
CM:
I'm at the office in Seattle. At The Stranger. We have an office here, so I had a meeting actually with Blaise (Agüera y Arcas) –we're planning to do some science fiction together.
PS:
Oh, wow.
CM:
Yeah. This office is near where we were meeting, so I didn't go back home, and came to the office, instead.
PS:
Nice. So, how have you been?
CM:
I've been all right. It's been kind of a busy summer. I'm still dealing with a bunch of little stuff on the side, but for the most part, it's been okay.
PS:
That’s great, and that's got a lot to do with your book [People of the Universe], right?
CM:
Yeah, yeah.
PS:
So, Exocapitalism! I suppose I can show you because [Exocapitalism has] been delivered today, and if I was to turn the camera, you would see like a whole stack of boxes. And in the video of this, you'll see that next to us is just a wall of boxes, basically. I should get them out and show you. I’m just going off-screen for a second. Yeah, we have them here. Τhey're, I guess, reversed. Yeah, we just got them today. They just came.
CM:
Yeah, you guys are fast. So, we have the book here today. It's all done. Within a week! It’s amazing.
PS:
So, I guess I was just going to pick your mind on a couple of things, really, because... When it came to approaching you about writing either a foreword, or a review, or something, of this book, it was basically because I had some memory of, at some point, you mentioning that one of your favourite Baudrillard books, if not your favourite Baudrillard book, was Mirror of Production. Usually, I'm quite comfortable with Baudrillard’s work, with his ideas. I was the editor for a huge book by Achim Szepanski, where Baudrillard was the main theorist. And I found it okay. But Mirror of Production in particular is a book that I find very difficult. So, actually, when it came to asking the question of who do we know that we can rely on to kind of understand this kind of a book, it immediately popped to mind that, okay, if your favourite book is Mirror of Production, then you probably can handle Exocapitalism. So yeah, I wanted to start by asking, effectively, like— when I sent you the manuscript, I didn't tell you anything about it. I almost deliberately didn't mention anything because I just wanted you to get a first take for yourself and decide if it was something that you were interested in, or if you wanted to be associated with this project. So what was your first impression of Exocapitalism when I sent it to you?
CM:
Okay, first things first. When I first read it, I read half of it, and then I had to jump into another thing. I read half of it, and then I had to jump into another thing. And then I realised that I had to re-read what I had read, again, so that I got a sense of the steps, the way that the thinking was going. There's a lot that’s new, for me, at least there was a lot of new concepts. And they were building new concepts as they were going along. What I find... Okay. Let me get this right. What I find, often, is that when you read something like Empire, right by Hardt & Negri or something like that, it lacks a certain amount of boldness. And sometimes, we have to say things that may not be positive. But we just have to, you know, there is this idea when you’re reading and I was thinking about this with Hardt & Negri, and how they were sort of looking at some Spinozist joy, right? They were trying to transform labour into something that was like “the multitude” and all of this stuff. Right? But at the end of the day, it was like a Hollywood movie with a happy ending.
PS:
I see what you mean, yeah.
CM:
You know what I mean? And a lot of Marxism suffers from this, right? They just will not confront the thing head on, and let the sparks fly, without trying to smother them, without kind of throw a blanket over the whole thing, without us not going right into it and saying, oh my gosh. This is the world I live in. When you're reading something like Negri with Empire, and then there's two subsequent works— and I’m just using them now because they're the easiest ones to plough into, because they offer the easiest platform or the easiest model, for readers to say like, well, look at what they attempt to be doing, in describing our moment, or at least in the turn of the 20th century. And saying that, you know, with the WTO riots that happened in Seattle, and in trying to frame it within this work, but it was to me, completely unrealistic. First I thought, yes, of course, because you learn as you go along. But as I got older, I started realising that this is just not a useful model. And also, I didn't really see the world I live in. One thing that Exocapitalism does, which I think is really important, and I think that a lot of writers and critics have to get to this point, is that we are not outside. The whole thing of the outside is a complete fantasy, right? I was literally born in capitalism. And I think we almost have to do this thing like they do in church, when you admit “I am a sinner”. Come on, stand up, tell us, what did you do? And you say “I’m a sinner”. I believe any approach to capitalism has to have this moment and to say to the congregation, “I didn't pay my bills” and all that stuff. And yeah, “I exploited my neighbour” —you know what I mean— there has to be this confessional moment. It’s also important [to say], what else do I bloody know but capitalism? Everybody is talking about the outside, where is this outside? Are you kidding? Even in Zimbabwe when I was growing up, I mean, I remember that ... As a kid I would look at things and say, “oh, wow, look at how ... all these trees, all this fruit, all these, you know, plants. Africa is so fervid, you know. So pregnant with life, and all these different animals, all these different kinds of plants. And then, I mean, it took me like a while to realise that they were all from other places. Right? Tomatoes didn’t come from Zimbabwe. Almonds didn't come from Zimbabwe. Avocados didn't come from Zimbabwe. Right? Going down the list, Oranges, all this stuff. And you realise you're looking at a capitalist geography all along, and you thought that you were somehow in Africa, “outside the world market”, and yet your own backyard exposes you as implicated. Well, I just love the courage to just come to terms that, yes we are here, and this is a part of our experience, not a part actually, as it may be the whole part of our experience. But let's be honest about it. If we're going to find any solutions, then we first have to admit that this is the state of things.
PS:
It's something that I was also referring to, as it's addressing the elephant in the room— big time. Occasionally people have had a bit of an adverse reaction to it, in particular I think there is one line which you even mentioned just now, where it says “the problem is us, right?” It's such a provocative, on the nose kind of statement, that is yeah, it's the elephant in the room. We've been kind of circling around, in theory, this idea that we kind of recognise that we're all a part of this [process]. The theory is there for us to acknowledge that we are taking part in this system in many ways. But there is like an almost an inability to “go through the looking glass”, or ...
CM:
To make the leap, actually, you're right, to look into the mirror, into the Mirror of Production like Baudrillard, right? And to accept that, you know, seriously, two things: One is ... when you look at the Mirror of Production, which is why I love it so much, and why it became an important text for me, was that for a long time there was this whole notion, even in the Frankfurt School as well—but the Frankfurt School did kind of break it down well... the Frankfurt School did get into this a little bit, but they didn't really explain what the key problem was. So the Frankfurt School sort of understood that, you know, when they're talking about Jewish bankers and all the stuff and then they would point to the real economy, in saying that they're just a class of people who are dealing in finance and all these things that are not real, and then you have all these other people, like the workers and so forth and so on, who make stuff, right, and who build stuff, and who actually are on the streets, selling things, making things— and that's the “real economy”. We have it here in the USA, right? We have what they call Main Street and then Wall Street. So the bankers are completely in the thinnest parts of the atmosphere and we are the ones who are grounded. There was a critique, by the Frankfurt School, of this structure, but they didn't really explain why there was this division. Right? Why was it possible to make people feel that when they went and bought a refrigerator or something like that, they did participate in the real economy and when they were buying stocks, they were participating in finance, and in the mirage, the hallucination, the dream, whatever. And they didn't really explain it. And so what I love so much about Baudrillard, is that he just said, “my gosh, the stuff that we make is as “fantastic” as the stocks”. Where you draw the line between the fantastic elements of capitalism— say in finance, or fictitious capital, and the products of production. You know, there's nothing more fantastic than the huge pickup trucks they have around the USA, right? What we see is that the whole thing is fictitious, there isn’t a place where you can hide, or that you can justify, in the system. This is what I love most about the Mirror of Production, with his criticism of Marx. [Marx] was trying to make a place you could go to, within capitalism, and find safety. In the worker, in the factory, sweating. Muscles being exerted, biological process. It’s real what they're doing there. But it's phoney. It's useless. I think he called it the ectoplasm, right? I think he called it the ectoplasm, right? The products of the worker are ectoplasm, so... The products of the worker are ectoplasm, they’re just monsters, they're just crazy. And so once you see, once you break down that wall where you cross into the mirror of production, then you see that the whole thing is quite fantastic. There isn't a place where we're not dreaming, in some form or another, and social democracy falls apart I mean, this is where I step completely away from Marx, and in a way I’m with Baudrillard, who is correct to have averted his attention to the product, the way that they're made and the way that they signify, to the product, the way that they're made and the way that they signify, he is completely correct in that because we never really leave the realm of the fictitious. Like, there is no such thing as non-fictitious capital, so we have to dismiss that and get rid of that. It’s worthless. And then the other thing is, once you accept this, and Exocapitalism does want to accept this, then I think some progress can be made. Right? Something that... It's like, okay— it's not like this Matrix thing, where you wake up like Neo and you have to eat some gruel. Do you know what I mean? They're making this a real place, where you eat steak in the in the simulation, and you eat porridge in the real. [This structure] is everywhere, [we have to] throw it overboard. But once you do that, we say that we are actually ... I’m mostly made of artificial nitrogen and I’m dependent upon the pharmaceutical corporations, and all of these things. Once you accept it, once you see it, our “cyborgness”, and all of these aspects, then I think we can finally make some progress, Here it is,
and this is my second point:
A lot of people forget that A lot of people forget that just because we are capitalist subjects through and through, and so, as the book would say, lifting us is as natural as anything could be, considering our conditions. And if you look at like, Christian Locke's idea of the capitalist schema, right, that our minds are actually structured in this way, if we could get a grip of that ... There’s a guy, I'm always impressed by Carnot, Sadi Carnot, who wrote his little book on thermodynamics and heat, and is of great importance to me, because he looked at a machine, a steam machine back in 1820s, he looked at a machine that was meant to pump water out of mines because coal mining was becoming as they consumed more and more coal, so they needed machines to go to places that were becoming more difficult to access coal. So he looked at the steam engine, which is pretty much a Scottish invention. And he looked at it closely enough, And he finally discovers the laws of thermodynamics. Right. And then suddenly Clausius is coming in having read Carnot, and he ends with the line, I mean, he’s very technical, but then he comes in and he says, maybe our universe is structured this way. Right? And so he's looking at the cosmos from a steam engine. If you go into Lord Kelvin, and they actually bring it out, like the universe work this way, and, you know, you could have problems with it, but I'm like, isn't it odd? So here we have this machine, and suddenly we are really looking, in a whole new way, at our world, or the structure of the universe, which I think is super impressive, right? We can’t dismiss the second law of thermodynamics, or the first, but you know, all that stuff, but it came from a bloody steam engine, of all things. And so what I'm trying to say is like, when you do enter and you accept that this is the kind of subject you are, let's then stop and look at the things that are around us, and see what we can see through them. To me the first step is just to accept that there isn't, as far as I know, anybody who's ever lived “outside” of the capitalist market. I don't know anyone. I've never met anyone ... I've never seen them walk or talk. I’m not going to act like, you know, yeah. So that's what I did. So I accept it. I mean, I think a book of this kind brings us to that point.
PS:
Let's talk a bit about labour, in the sense of... what would you say to someone who is, you know—I think that there's a certain anxiety around the conversation about... what does it mean for labour to be detaching from capital? What would you say to someone as a kind of introduction to this issue of capital lifting away from labour? to this issue of capital lifting away from labour?
CM:
It's important. I think that's almost one of the most important contributions in the book, to be quite honest with you. There's been this idea, and I was drawn to it by a writer called Moishe Postone, who is not an elegant writer, but ... I’m sorry! he didn't have as much imagination as the authors of Exocapitalism do. It’s fun to read, by the way, a very important thing to me, that people sort of ignore, but aesthetics are still important. One has to read with some joy, even if it's not what they want to hear.
PS:
Yeah, I think it's an important way of delivering the bad news.
CM:
That's right. But, Moishe Postone is confronted with two things in 1993. First of all, the rise of post-structuralism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. He tried to remake Marxism and, he’s not a very popular person for taking this position, but I found him the most important thinker of that period, if not even still today. And I know he is borrowing a lot of stuff from different sources, but the basic thing that he did was to break with Lukács completely, right? Where Lukács tries to make labour like the subject of history. So basically Lukács takes Hegel’s, you know, spirit or Geist, which moves through history towards its fulfillment— its Amazon fulfilment. The word fulfilment has been appropriated, you can't say it without thinking of those huge, robotic...
PS:
That would be the conclusion that [history] deserves.
CM:
Yes, that’s correct, and I believe that is actually what Postone correctly determined. So Lukács said let's get rid of the Geist, and all that metaphysics and let's put labour, let’s put the worker, as the subject of history. And you know, it does feel a bit Hegelian, because Hegel said something like the worker is going to be there at the end of history, or something like that. And Lukács sort of does this, that's basically the Frankfurt School, they're locked in, and the only thing that's Marxist about them, to be honest, is their early commitment to Lukács. What Postone, who is Canadian, Moishe Postone, who died about ten years ago, but he said that this was garbage, right? That's not what it is. The subject of capitalism is capital. What are you talking about? That's what he said. And Hegel was just confused because he thought he was talking about something metaphysical. But you know, as the subject of a capitalist economy, he confused Geist with capital. So that's what Moishe Postone was [saying], which was absolutely a horrible thing to say particularly for traditional Marxists, who place so much hope on the apotheosis of labour transcending, and taking over, and finally we are supposed to be outside of capitalism. And he just said that was nonsense, and he is correct, and I agree with him— which was a big relief for me because I knew that I needed to get rid of that, that notion. The other person, and I sort of mentioned this, is the Kozo school out of Japan, they are really interesting, the Kozo Marxists out of Japan were also just dismissed. The Kozo school were looking at Ricardo and Malthus, and and then there’s ... even to some extent there’s Adam Smith, where they were sort of looking at this idea that an economy is composed of three characters. All of whom have, or, deserve a portion of the output, or of the wealth. They, in some way, have a claim on the wealth. And so you have Renters, you have Entrepreneurs who need a profit and then you have labourers, who need a wage. And the Kozo school thought this was another fantasy, right? That we should just disregard, or flush down the toilet because they were thinking that the wage is not really yours anyway, that we shouldn’t include the wage. It's a joke. Let’s get rid of it, and just be honest. The only players here are those claiming rent and those who are claiming profit. If we can do that, then we would have a better understanding of the system and what it's doing. When you bring in workers, you're going to be disappointed, because you end up with this idea that somehow wages will fix everything, and we found out that it doesn't fix everything. So you start saying you need greater distribution among labour, but you’re not even looking at the system. You’re not even looking at the way it’s structured. That is why I'm not so much into the Open Marxist school. I think that their rejection of structuralism is too strong. I'm still a structuralist, but I think that structure evolves. It's not settled, that's all. But I think that you can take a picture of capital, which is what I think Exocapitalism does, you can take a photograph of it at a specific time, and see its structure— but that doesn't mean it stays there. If we get sequence of DNA correct, we'll solve all these problems, yada, yada, yada. Right? Remember that there was a rush at this time to get the human genome literally photographed. And we thought that once we get that picture, all of our problems, all the diseases will be solved— it was just a picture, and we saw the structure, but it was the structure at a particular time, but it wasn't the whole thing. But yeah, the structure appeared to us, and it was useful to have a picture of the structure. And I think that when we are looking at Exocapitalism, we are looking at the way it’s structured right now. Which is why I’m so impressed that the book is out so fast, because, yeah, it could change [any second].
PS:
Oh, you know, actually, this was one of the things, because I think that [the authors] understood that it was very immanent, it was very relevant to right now, and that things might change very quickly. And actually, I think at the peak of the Trump tariff moment, there were even some small discussions about [whether] something had already changed, and it might even be putting time pressure on Exocapitalism, because, you know, there was this idea that Trump had somehow reasserted the power of the state to control [capital]. But in the end, I think that that's not really what happened and they asserted something for a moment, but I don't think it’s possible to really say that they've fully reasserted the power of the State. So I think the moment passed. But yes, it's a very prescient book. It's very relevant to right now. But also, I think that as I was reading it, I realised that maybe to associate the word accelerationism with this book was actually a misunderstanding, because as I was reading it, I didn't find myself feeling as though it was an accelerationist text. And then I think towards the end of the editorial process, it became clear that the authors also didn't see it as an accelerationist text.
CM:
Nor did I! In fact I state that quite clearly. I think that this is not an accelerationist text, and I was looking for accelerationism, but the reason is that accelerationism is still tainted with the idea that you're trying to get to the outside. Right. You're trying to break from this ... you’re trying to [imply] there is an outside, and there is a kind of rush to it. And so that's not what [Marek & Roberto] are doing. You know, they're not trying to grind down [or] they're not trying to say that, no. You can accelerate, you can accelerate processes in capitalism, without the consequence of its demise to a certain extent. To me, that wasn’t the game in town. That wasn't what they were trying to propose. And I think it's important that everybody has to let go of the climax. And we have to kind of... give up on that.
PS:
Like a Finale?
CM:
Yes, and I'm thinking that, politically, this might be the most radical thing we can do, [and Exocapitalism] does avoid that, which is why it's so important. If anything else, it teaches us that we can be critical without having a finale, without having a climax. An exit, a final exit, right? No, and in that case, how do we think in a condition like this, that seems much more interesting,
PS:
Have you seen Snowpiercer?
CM:
Oh, I love Snowpiercer.
PS:
Yeah. It makes me think of that. They can't expect some sort of finale, they have no idea and they just have to kind of manage the situation that’s going on. And all of this came to mind, as relevant to what you're saying, if you remember [the show].
CM:
Yeah. Good question. But there is Snowpiercer the cartoon...
PS:
Okay. Yeah, here we go—I mean the Netflix Series.
CM:
The television series?
PS:
Yeah.
CM:
Okay, good. Because there's also the movie by Bong (Joon Ho). the Korean director. But he didn’t face this problem, because he could just end the film But he didn’t face this problem, because he could just end the film at the point that the revolution is achieved. The TV show had to do another season, and the next season would have to do with them dealing with managing people after the revolution.
PS:
I suppose I was thinking more in the sense of that they have to keep the engine going all the time, otherwise their power will go down, so they can never [stop]. They have to essentially figure out how to slow it all down, somehow, and slowly, slowly, think about landing this kind of ship [which has] gone way off course.
CM:
The thing is that Hollywood has a problem, which is that it can't make a great movie from the perspective of the stormtroopers.
PS:
True!
CM:
This is where they've been stuck. And they try, but they can't do it— nobody will watch it. So they're stuck with this format for the structure, which is basically the structure, if you look, and here I think was the brilliance of Soderbergh's film Che. Because he goes and looks at the Cuban revolution, but here's a guy who is doing Ocean’s Eleven on the side, as his main income, while he makes this film about Che and the revolution in Cuba, and they're identical! Because they're about a heist, right? That is ultimately what Hollywood knows, that everybody wants a heist, right? And a revolution is, in the capitalist form, correctly, a heist. We've got to go, we’ve gotta get the best [team], there has to be a guy to crack the safe, the get-away driver, and there is all these guerilla tactics. So we—and I think that there's an important truth to this —why are we always stuck in the heist? You know what I mean? Why do they always sell us a heist of one form or another, right? Even Star Wars is a heist film, you know, Snowpiercer is a heist film. What you're trying to do is, you try to crack the code of the rich and the powerful. But once you open the safe, nobody knows what to do. What do you do once you’re inside, right? So nobody ever really thought about what happens when this heist is successful.
PS:
It reminds me of something Žižek said, and I think it's a very famous joke, about V for Vendetta, about what would actually happen on the day after the revolution? What if the film was to continue for another five minutes? The director would be kind of stuck.
CM:
Yes, because you never reach that outside. I think that is what’s important, you never really left the system. This is why social democracy collapsed. This is why I have no patience with social democracy, socialism, and all these other things. It just feels that you end up exactly where a lot of these television programs are stuck. It's not only some accident that they are so similar. If you look at Mr. Robot— watch Mr. Robot, the TV series— the best thing about it is, of course, he's going to crash banking system or whatever, with these computers and all this stuff. crash banking system or whatever, with these computers and all this stuff. But once he does that, we have two seasons of Lord knows what. The second season is completely bizarre. The second season is about him in a state of madness—the whole season. Seriously. That's probably the best that they could come up with.
Well, and the question you have to ask is: are we writing because—no, I want everyone to look at this, is it that we're limited in our imagination? Are we just, in that sense, stuck in capitalist realism? And that our imagination can't escape? Or if we abandon that, they’re saying that we're somehow ignorant or deluded too deluded to finalise, or to complete, or to make the transition to a post-capitalist society. This is where I want everybody to turn back, and literally, look back at the mirror again and say what the fuck is going on here? Right? Which is if can look at it and then you can say, oh my gosh ... And I think my answer to it, and I do have an answer, and people have always asked me, “well, what is the answer, Charles, if you're saying that we're in this in this kind of system,”... But I think I could say that it's a cultural form. You have to keep this in mind. We are dreaming in a specific way. That's all we're doing. And so when we go into a transition, or when we are looking for other modalities, we should admit that we're dreaming, and therefore whatever other thing comes up, it has to be a form of dreaming. And nothing more, right? You have to accept it. We're not saying that we're getting rid of dreaming. Like we won’t do the Matrix thing where you wake up and eat porridge, but we will admit that we were dreaming before, and so whatever we do afterwards, it has to be a form of dreaming, right? That is the most political thing I can say. Right? And if you tell me that, in social democracy or socialism, the workers are suddenly in power the workers are suddenly in power and the real economy, Main Street, is in power, as if value has not left, you know what I mean? Value is a form of imagination. So we have to accept that we don't ever leave the Matrix. Maybe the question is how do you change the Matrix? How do you change dreaming? How do we dream in another way? Well, we should never say that we're not dreaming. We will always dream. And I agree with this, to the extent that there's a whole theory about “dream-time”, which a lot of Western anthropologists have deciphered or have attempted to do so, around the Aboriginal people of Australia. around the Aboriginal people of Australia. But I've always wanted to say that, no, you have to start with the idea that we are in “dream-time”. We are in, and there is no other way to solve this problem, We are in, and there is no other way to solve this problem, but to find another level of dreaming. Be that upward or downward.
PS:
I hadn't thought about it in that sense, I suppose it's definitely a time of like ... I can't stop overthinking and my mind can’t stop trying to produce images of what might happen, or of what's to come, let's say ... I can't exactly get my head around the whole idea of labour detaching from capital, because effectively, what is left of our reality when that happens? what is left of our reality when that happens? I mean, it's not a sense of getting to the outside, as it’s about the idea of this (capitalist) system just lifting off away from us. And actually, it reminds me of something that you had said, I think in another talk, where you were talking about [the idea that] we're waiting for a second punishment. We were sort of ejected from Eden, punished for eating the fruit of knowledge, and then, yeah, we've sort of slowly been outsourcing our toil to the machines. And at the point where it seems as though we're almost, or some people are almost, “out of it”, the whole system just kind of departs, and it's as if there's a second intervention, almost like it's the second punishment, a kick back to the beginning.
CM:
Yeah, we are, and I think that there a great deal of anxiety about the second expulsion, that is everywhere. And you had to figure out, particularly when you when you're looking at America right now and what we're going through, it is this attempt to avoid a second expulsion. I mean they're getting rid of immigrants, and all that sort of stuff. But you get this sense that we went too far, and you know what I mean, things got too good, and God is angry, and we need to atone for this before we are expelled for a second time. I think it's quite feverish, amongst MAGA and people like that. Even Evangelicals when they're talking about the war in Gaza, you get the sense that we’re just driven by this— not towards apocalypse, but almost towards a ...
PS:
A collapse maybe?
CM:
Yeah, a collapse, and also it’s this kind of thing that we’re saying “We didn't eat the fruit! Dear God, we didn't eat the fruit!” We did our best but we don't have the knowledge because we just don't have it. I think that's one of the reasons why the US is attacking science at Sloan. We have scientists fleeing, and they’re going after PBS. So there is this notion that there will be no knowledge at all. And it's kind of bizarre to see this reaction, Nobody's taking that seriously enough, that the second expulsion was real, and that we're in the midst of a reaction.
PS:
We're in the midst of, like, a rapture. We are watching technology ascend to where, you know ... The robots have “taken our salvation”, because they did the toiling.
CM:
They did the toil, and yes, that's why we see [robots] as evil, that’s completely the source of our anxiety about robots that’s completely the source of our anxiety about robots actually, it's quite true.
PS:
They're the second born child, and they're going to get the throne, and we're the first born watching this happen.
CM:
We're in an artificial Eden, that is what it is. We're in an AI Eden. But the thing is that, again, and this is always difficult for people to see— one of my favourite comments by Baudrillard, just to sort of go back to him, is when he is talking about Disneyland. I think in the [Simulacra and] Simulation, in that book, he mentions that Disneyland exists ...
PS:
To reaffirm the reality principle.
CM:
Yes, Right. So that it makes it look like [Disneyland] is the fantasy, and we are in reality.
PS:
But actually America is the hyperreal.
CM:
Yeah, and this is an important point to say to people— I’ve always loved it— right? Because an Eden, which is Paradise, can only be ... There is this notion that ... it is somewhere that has a boundary. What were you going to say?
PS:
Just that even the [very] idea of recreating Eden is a direct act of simulation, that's the only way it's possible. Maybe you're right, that we have to have new dreams, because as long as we're trying to get back to Eden, then we're always just going to be chasing after a simulation.
CM:
But the thing is that he is correct, Baudrillard is correct, and that’s why I love him so much, because he says “no, we are in Disneyland.” “no, we are in Disneyland.” There is no boundary between us and Disneyland, its only function is to make it feel that way, that there's a boundary, right? This is why sometimes the whole notion of labour can be as real as a theme park, which I think is the real genius— I always tell people that the real genius of a film by Mambéty called Hyenas. The real genius is his examination of neoliberalism as a form of neocolonialism. But he's so correct. He's so correct, [...] but he’s also thinking about The Visit, which is a play by a Swiss German director, mid-century, Friedrich Dürrenmatt. The important point is that [Mambéty] remade [The Visit] as an African film, what happens is, everybody is supposed to be living in some kind of reality where they're poor and, you know, no one has money there, and nobody is working there, and then there’s a woman, who claims to make money from prostitution, and shows up in town and she says that I have more money than the world bank, which is funny, and I will give it to the village, to all you poor people, and I will give it to the village, to all you poor people, if you kill the guy who broke my heart as a young woman and the villagers say “Hell no, we don’t want to do that, that's not a part of our culture.” He didn't commit a real crime, breaking your heart is not a real crime.” But then she says, okay, and she goes and camps outside the village, and then everybody in the village, what they do is, they start to borrow money. So they start to borrow money for fancy cigarettes and all this stuff. So they just get looped right into it... What is so correct is that... they were never outside. He's right about that. We are never outside. The poverty was not outside; the cigarettes were always there. Right? The whisky was always there. What happens at that final moment in the film is that a theme park arrives in the village and it's perfect. A whole theme park, and they all go on the rollercoaster. Right? And it's hard to tell people, in our day and age, that the theme park is really everywhere. The theme park can be capitalist, it can be communist, it can be all these other things, it's a theme park, right? It could be religious, right? So we are actually looking at this whole notion ... When you look at what they're doing somewhere like Dubai, or something like that— this is supposed to be Islam, (haha), as a theme park, right? You go to Israel, this is supposed to be Judaism, but this is a theme park (haha). The whole thing is a theme park, wherever you go, and we're just going to act as if we're not building theme parks all over the world. The Christians are doing it in the South. Everybody's building some kind of theme park, right? Even here, in Seattle, where there was very large gay community, what we end up with is Gay Parade, and we're looking at theme parks again.
PS:
Baudrillard, I think in his last book, and I don't [exactly] remember what was the case with this last book, whether it was finished or whether it was put together posthumously, but it was specifically about carnival, I think Carnival and cannibalism. Something like that. So I think that by the end of his career, he was really leaning into this idea of... you're saying theme park, but he might say Carnival.
CM:
Yes, was he meaning it in the Bakhtian sense? You know, Bakhtin was a big deal like.. about 30 years ago, Mikhail Bakhtin. He's a Russian theorist out of the 1920s, He's a Russian theorist out of the 1920s, He's a Russian theorist out of the 1920s, the golden period, or the period of the Russian Formalists, right? What Bakhtin said, and it's still important today ... So [what he said] and there's a lot of films structured this way. What [he said] is that the carnival would turn society upside down, right? The structure of society, where the king becomes a fool and the fool becomes a king, right? And then you go into the carnival, and you participate in this reverie, right? And then, but then it comes to an end, and all the order is restored.
PS:
Yeah. You know what I mean? Everything turns back to normal. There's a reset and it’s over, right? And once you keep track of all the films that use this structure ... My favourite example or the one I can draw on right now, is After Hours by Martin Scorsese. Right? So you have the situation where you enter the night, and everything's turned upside down. Nobody knows their social position. And, and then there's this kind of uncertainty— it's the same thing. So the moment the sun rises, everybody is back in office, everybody is back in their seats. Yeah.
CM:
And so what you've had is a kind of release, but you haven't had social change. And this is a critique from Bakhtin about this, about the carnival, and it’s interesting to me because you look at that, and if you look at it closely enough, why can't we say that the Cuban Revolution was a carnival (haha) ? Which is now going into reset. Maybe the carnival lasted way too long, right, and is now in a position of returning back to, you know, particularly in the global economy. It’s where we are getting this reset, right? That if you go to Vietnam, right now, which is a rising star of a capitalist accumulation, You could actually see that the revolution was also kind of a Carnival, right? Where the fool became king. But now we're finding out that, you know, that we were going back, everybody is going back to work. Everybody's going back to the ... Yeah, you guys had a long break. Well done. First of all, I don't know exactly, I don't want to make the assumption that Baudrillard’s idea of Carnival is related to that, but I absolutely understand what you mean, because, when we are talking about electronic music culture, there's often this idea of “the big night out” theory, where, effectively, what may have once been a kind of radical or political form of music culture, like rave culture and club culture, at some point, it kind of becomes this Bakthian reset, where you go for your big night out on your Saturday, so that means that you're kind of at home on Sunday, and then suddenly you're back to work and you're satisfied for the week. So electronic music is incorporated into capital in that way. But in another sense, my interpretation of Baudrillard’s carnival idea is ... Another thing that comes up sometimes in “rave culture theory”, in particular, if you read someone like Jeremy Gilbert, who wrote some book, in 1999, Discographies: Dance, Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound. He's sort of talking about how, another way that capitalism, let's say, territorialized or assimilated the practices of rave culture is like maybe at some point they were talking about the division between leisure and work, and that was an important capitalist principle, to have work time, and leisure time, and rave culture kind of spun that model by having a fusion of play and work at the same time, because you would volunteer for the festival and that would get you free access and free drinks, and so you'd be able to kind of work and play at the same time. And it was a kind of shake up of capitalist principles. But at some point that becomes the de facto principle of capitalism as we know it, where now we are sort of stuck in a situation where we are always at work, because we are always on email, we're always working multiple jobs. So like, in a sense, everything became like rave culture. Everything became this blend of work and pleasure.
CM:
Ah, yes. And that’s where the Carnival is.
PS:
Everything is the rave now ...
CM:
That’s actually more interesting as an assessment–
PS:
... and it comes with this max-serotonin or dopamine culture of like, everything all the time, constantly, attention economy, you know, this kind of social media culture and so on. It's all very ecstatic all the time.
CM:
Yeah. Oh my gosh.
PS:
I don’t know if I had any kind of closing comments so I suppose it's as simple as asking if there was anything else in particular about the book that you would like to mention, or anything like that.
CM:
One thing that I do love is ... and I know it comes as a shock, that I'm a structuralist, but I want everybody to see that, as you pointed out why this book had to be made so quickly, the systems are evolving as fast as as we can, and this acceleration, which is interesting to me and this is why I use structuralism, is that I believe in this idea called configuration space. I use structuralism, is that I believe in this idea called configuration space. And I keep bringing it back up and up again. And I say that, you know, what's happening within the space is constantly changing, and sometimes in novel ways. And we don't know where it's going to go. We don't know what is going to happen in a few months, particularly with the decimation of several institutions in the USA, of several standard government institutions, and an increased executive power and now that we're facing something that I did not see coming but we're now facing the US having two armies, who basically, after the budget was passed, etc ... I thought I’d mentioned this because, it was so important that we are looking at an army that is directly under the executive power, and an army that's under the Pentagon. And weirdly enough, right now, the budget for the one under the executive power is larger than the one under the Pentagon. What is the result of this? And so, as I would say, everybody should read this book as fast as they can.
PS:
Thank you very much, from everyone involved in Exocapitalism, for your contribution. It was really a dream come true. I mean, Marek, especially, said that you were a kind of personal hero to him. So for you to read the book, and engage with it, and understand it it was a really affirming, positive experience. Thank you.
CM:
Thank you. And I hope to connect with him, in the near future, but we'll see.
PS:
We'll figure something out.
CM:
Okay, you take care!
PS:
Yep. Bye!