at the brooklyn institute for social research teaching primarily in literature and philosophy so i want to start by adding my birthday congratulations to mean thinking about how artistic and political imagination have taken up his thought historically what we're doing with it now and what use if any the future might have for it how we hold open some kind of sense of aesthetic or political possibility and how we might need in fact to revise marx in order to do so so some questions before us are what do we mean when we invoke marxist aesthetics or poetics and what on earth do we want when we do so so this discussion is going to consider both what's alive and what is dead in marx particularly when it comes to the theory and practice of different kinds of art so visual media performance and poetry among them and one thing that thrills me so profoundly about the people we've gathered to talk through these questions is the range of perspective that they bring to this topic so all participants are scholars of one variety or another and they also bring something more of i have their deep engagements with poetry and performance and visual art and popular media  so they'll be introducing themselves a little bit more fully in a moment so i'll try to restrain my desire to heap more specific praise on their heads for now panelists have graciously agreed to open the conversation  by offerings some informal thoughts on particular objects and problems in marxist aesthetics in order to ground us in the moment so we'll start by going around and laying out some initial gambits before moving into more so from the point of view of the artist s producer i don't think there's a single marxist aesthetic there's no one solution to the formal and substantive problems marxism poses for artwork i find the legendary debates about all this interesting but forever inconclusive and what those debates reveal is more a series of intractable problems so the aesthetic is about perception the sensory world it's about the seeing hearing touching tasting feeling of the world it's about sensuous materialism as such the aesthetic touches on sensations that are particular we need not think of them as individual sensations they can be shared that can cross multiple bodies but the sensations out of which the aesthetic is built have qualities limits boundaries they imply a point of view a standpoint a situation so to me marxism is first and last the point of view of the working class we need to have an open mind about who or what that class years or might be or could class it's a subtle problem once we recognize that the working class is not knowable prior to its coming into an aesthetic form the being of the working class and its expression are connected so the first problem is and not particular and may lack any obvious sensory form the working class are caught up in act within and against relations of production and reproduction that are abstract and have no tangible qualities now those are two har problems on the other hand are many and varied none of the solutions ever quiet seems to solve all three problems and so one ends up with many and varied kinds of artwork and these are sometimes pitted against each other which often accomplished literary artist he came to the point of view for the labour point of view from without and wrote towards it through his ironic and sarcastic treatment of bourgeois writing while focused on the lineaments of abstraction he's constantly pausing to call forth the worker as a concrete character who suffers and struggles but one has to admit this a little bit of ventriloquism and the way he does it now there's no shortage of art workers who took over the role of internal critic and satirist bourgeois culture a role that still leaves plenty of room for different aesthetic strategies it's in one welles cinema for example and the technique is basically defined the particulars of bourgeois culture that reveal its absurdity and hypocrisy is a totality like when well makes like half a dozen movies about dinner parties basically yeah and also this is adorno's whole shtick to show equivalents exchange value undo itself now there's also no shortage of art workers who went the other way and who close to working class experience desires feelings and most particularly forms i'm thinking of woody guthrie's songs or the many fine underappreciated examples of  la here one might mention elfriede jelinek coruscating writings about everyday alienated everyday life working class life working class culture is as much a product of the culture industry as any other that these problems are closely related to the third what is the class location of the art worker anyway in marx's day they were renegades from which wildlife not least those who are excluded for other reasons from its world such as german speaking jews they're also those who defected from petit bourgeois culture that includes myself and again it's not uninteresting to look at how often exclusion voluntary or enforced on other grounds  from the possibilities of bourgeois culture generated marxist art workers there's some examples now once upon a time the magic solution to the problem of class for an art worker was to be a member secret member of fellow traveler of the communist party it's a largely suppressed aesthetic tradition now only those who publicly renounced the party are usually allowed back into the canon and here it's worth pausing to put adorno's critique of the culture industry and dialogue with the work of those who organized within the industry both over questions of labor but also over the content of what it produced hollywood made no marxist movies but it's striking how marxism became an element within solution also to the problem not just of connecting the particular of experience to the general of abstraction it was a way of keeping particular particulars together the party presented itself as the representation of all workers and of work as potentially a universal class with the decline of the party form the particulars detach from the abstract but also from each other and this has a good and a bad side keeping the particulars together with other particulars was an achievement but often it meant subordinating others to a kind of ideal type of worker and moreover the party's idea of the abstraction of kay of capital was far from universal it marxism and extended to other forms of oppression so that's sort of the good side but what we got in its place so what we got in its place on the plus side with these accounts of the particulars of experience connected to other abstraction and to be to be captured by kind of a certain liberal pluralist discourse in there in the process however it's not surprising that innovations in cultural form that connect the particular to the workers who committed to party work often ended up with a broad experience beyond their class which ironically enough became useful for a making art marco hyneman was a banker's daughter but you became the the coal industry and later wrote a terrific underappreciated novel about working class life in around the pits of wales called the adventurers and i'd like to compare that to and roberto who famously joined the party and then refused his assignment to go work with the gas workers cell because it's like why should i read statistics about gas work and it's like dude you just so didn't get this did you like that's sort of the point from that's how i see it anyway so that the class location of the artwork is a particularly intractable problem and one being in the orbit of the party masked for a while the class location of the art worker i think actually went through three stages first the de cla intellectual like marx himself second the era of the culture industry and the industrial organization of creative production but thirdly something like the stage were in now so the culture industry still exists in the united states the working conditions that communists and others fought for in those industries are very rapidly eroding so alongside the culture industries i think we now have what i call the vulture industries like the culture industries at least entertainers th industries oblige us to entertain each other as unpaid labor while they collect the rent right so you don't even get the free show anymore you have to like do all the work i think oh this there's the three so i didn't put the numbers of the slides down here so i'm getting a little lost i think the situation's international actually foresaw the negation of the culture industry and the production of free cultural information it's actually called it literary communism what they didn't f was the recuperation of that strategy through the commodification of the platforms of the information commons themselves which was actually just discussed in the last panel so it turns out marx's precarious life as a freelance writer now seems like an this under the guise of creativity and innovation state backed cinema funding all my marxist friends really like dismissed this movie like i kind of loved it and like burst into tears five times i took my son to see it to show him like this is your father's culture you know it's like i'm   and here you know the the good news is it's like thousands of people there is someone for you making work along these lines and so let me just end with a shout out to some personal favorites fred martin and boyer stewart home jordi rosenberg and much so i now want to turn it over to julie on a spar if that's all right with you um who will tell you a little bit more about her work and also speak to her our topic thank you wonderful you don't even need bye thanks thanks for inviting me thanks for being here it's been it's actually been a great day i've really enjoyed it um that started last night a great day that started last night um so i feel like i want to confess that i feel a kind of fraudulent showing up here and most days i don't really feel like i deserve the insult of marxist and i'm in many ways late to mark so i went to graduate school  as cultural marxism was becoming sort of stayed or the convention and i still kind of have a little bit of resistance to those readings that were being done around the time like the moments where you would like talk about how language poetry disrupts capitalism because it's got a phras not in higher education which means not related to aesthetics or poetics though those are my two academic fields of study probably and then some whatnot in higher education i sat down and did that year long study of capital that a lot of people deal with to administrative staff members where i work which is at a college so we were in higher education but we were also a bit of an under commons on that moment our reading group met during their work hours which were kind of maybe min too and then in the years since then i kept studying marx through free school classes on things like marx in crisis that were happening so in contradiction well i feel like i'm maybe not a good marxist i might deserve the more specific insult of vulgar marxist i know you mentioned it last night and i start with this study because it's coming to marx through community and not through institution i think is one facet of the marks now that many people have have experienced like where i teach still doesn't teach courses on marxism which is kind of interesting also cuz it's a women's undergraduate college and i can't imagine a marxist course there's like whereas i could imagine at some other institutions which is potentially disturbing  marxist i can say that well marx has not been that useful for me and understanding poetics or aesthetics and has been nothing but useful for helping me to understand the peculiar role of literature in capitalism why does literature at moments appear to be a resistant form and at other moments why does it appear to be so stubbornly of and with the state marx when he attempted to understand how the creative arts fit into the mcm prime and early drafts of capital left room for something that we might call autonomy milton he claimed produce paradise lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk as the expression of his own nature literary production and marxist formulation here as at least somewhat extraneous to exchange even though as benedict anderson noticed the book is the first modern style mass produced industrial commodity even though as marx knows major milton later sold the product for five pounds and to that extent became a dealer and a commodity dave beech and art and value which has actually been really helpful for me to kind of trying to understand this is really insistent on maintaining this distinction in ways that i found helpful he writes that art's anomalous incomplete and paradoxical commodification and thus he continues means that while art is inescapably brought into capitalism it is also something and dependent from capitalism understanding this he adds is crucial to understanding the basis of art's political engagement with society to be something like adorno's claim that art is now no longer also a commodity but as a commodity through and through a claim that's prevalent and a lot of cultural marxism is a misunderstanding of the role of artistic production in capitalist economies aren't as exceptional to the commodity and capitalism in his understanding this exceptional half and half out relationship with kan revolution will be made and the name of bread of course but also in the name of fresh air and poetry which comes to the same thing and cabral to ride and natural liberation and culture that the study of the history of national liberation struggles shows that generally these struggles are preceded by an increase in expression of culture consolidated progressively into a successful or unsuccessful attempt to affirm the cultural personality of the dominant people as a means of negating their pressure culture and for african dawn and unnatural cultural and for audrey laura to claim that poetry forms the quality of the light within which we predict our hopes and dreams toward survival and change first made into language than into idea and then into more tangible action basically the idea that literature can be a part of resistance to capitalism to the nationalism that capitalism constantly instrumental eise's is an idea that presumes that literature as a saliva that the artist excretes as the silk with this extraneous to the market part of cultural production also makes literature vulnerable to other sorts of conscription in ways that are often overlooked when literature is pursued to be a commodity through and through or presume to be entirely a resistance project  spend much time on what it means that the silk of literature has an anomalous relationship to capitalism that makes it vulnerable to other forms of conscription marks instead drops those sentences about milton from capital they end up in the grundrisse a and after he talks about milton and the singer and the schoolmaster he reminds that the kinds of work which are only enjoyed as services and yet are capable of being exploited directly in the capitalist way even though they cannot be converted into product separable from the workers themselves and therefore existing outside them as independent commodities only constitute infinitesimal magnitudes in comparison with the mass of products under capitalist production he's right but nonetheless as someone who sometimes excretes literature even while literary production is not really a great place to understand how capitalism works understanding how this anomalous role impacts literary production feels somewhat crucial when i write something that i think of as literature even when i know i am unlikely to be ever be able to turn it into a commodity which is a common state as a poet  after i start to feel the saliva gather in my mouth i do for sure swing my head from side to side and a figure eight distributing the saliva that will become silk but the swinging of my head never feels the way i imagined the silkworm feels she does this the entire time i am very aware that after i use my spit to make a mile of silk to cocoon my body so i can be born someone will snatch me away and boil me alive before this happens so as to unwind my silk and combine it with the silk of many others to make a fine and beautiful jacket for themselves the autonomy of my saliva is conscripted in all sorts of ways eliot reminds and the social function of poetry that no art is more stubbornly national i'm not sure that poetry is exceptional in relation to other forms in genres but the intensifies in the post war period after one thousand nine hundred and forty five a great deal of literature is produced and distributed in and by state supported institutions and by state networks i mean both various governmental agencies and also in the united states a large extended network of liberal foundations and often work very closely with the government and have revolving staffs with them the cold war is cold because of the support and much of it develops in parallel with the soviet union state support can takes multiple economic but not capitalist forms sometimes the form is direct grants and prizes for writers sometimes the form is the development of cultural centers and other sorts of not for profits sometimes the form is student loans but the support of course is paralyzed by the repression of the and seventy the support is often seen as a sort of innocent support for the arts it's hard to critique the that you pet you give an artist some money and that you should complain about it to notice it is often perceived it as being ungrateful or resentful depending on whether one has been touched by it or not to insist that it shapes everything that is literature is potentially to be seen as paranoid and yet i think it was impossible to understand the contradictory role of literature in this moment without understanding the ways that literature is not a commodity let it be instrumentalized in various ways within capitalism if i had two more hours in this talk i would proceed to argue that this sort of instrumental instrumentalization of literature by the state is the reason we are in a moment where a large impact of these forces have had on literary production after mid century has been dramatic these forces more than the market shaped not just who produces literature but how they produce it what gets published who gets published who buys what gets published who reads it after they have bought it who gets it from the library who feels it tells their stories who feels it tells stories not about them but useful to them and who feels it is not worth doing or that is the thing that other sorts of people do which is that you were that when you said the unicorn of the working class writer in some way and sure literature is caught that literature is an exceptional commodity let's lords claims about the potential within literature to lead us to light half meaning this is a good thing and it is the same exceptionality that makes adorno's claim good that this is not a time for political works of art to make it a good time for political works of art and i'm still going to hold on to that as a goal worth pursuing one beginning might be to reckon with his cotton as if nothing else it begins to explain why some literature is the enemy and some less so we are in a moment when rhetoric about how literature as some sort of resistance is at a fever pitch and much of it on the internet appears tellingly on the websites of various literary institutions that are funded by private liberal foundation s figuring out which is which as part of the work we all have before us right now it can be a fun party trick to imagine that literature could possibly what literature could possibly be after the revolutionary destruction of capitalist social relations even though chances are our hobbled by the present as anything else i hope you're at those parties too there's a small cannon of attempts to imagine this that i want to wrap with silk among the ones i like best or the manifesto of the paris commune federation day ar marie's who was a black panther for revolutionary culture despite the disparate historical moments that influenced them i'll imagine an art that is other than national i'll presume that art could be autonomous from the government and in resistance all also  might be failures the history that comes after these moments so justice thanks institute's and these panelists i'm here with thank you i thought i could maybe in the conversation section talked a little bit about some of my own performance work in the way shall we say marxist legacies have played out and a few of those projects but to start with i thought i would read a four pages from my newest book called black performance on the outskirts of the left in which i track in the s and sort of expanded s the way black political language of the time i was appearing in performances and circulating transnationally and part of that circulation importantly was sort of adaptation reworking or sometimes refusal of international leftist project and by the same token the ways for example the situationists might point to race riots in the states as a way to make a point there's a sort of borrowing that goes in both directions at the time and to sort of get out of a kind of romantic period izing i wrote an  wanted to think about the way these politics function in representation in that context and in something called the president so one section is about well you'll see what it's  about the question of time as history and as a measure of action was insistently posed by a months long reading of the three books of karl marx's capital in the center of the exhibition a reading the curator oakland w describes as a main component of his premise importantly the idea of reading capital aloud place performance squarely in the center of the biennial and the construction of the square arena stage facing the audience on three sides and many performances filling out discursive spaces around marxist analysis british artist jeremy deller offered a programme of historic labor ballads american musicians alicia hal moran and jason moran responded to black american work songs my artist father charles gaines presented a composition that translated political speech into musical notation and other performances and screenings enlivened the occasion marx's text loses fixity in in wazers context the exhibition catalogue offers while this suggests the internationalism of that influential writing attention to the histories of the places where these languages are spoken to diminishes a sense of uniformity in its reading in ways our enlisted the british film and video artist to direct the live reading julian's work has also circulated widely and has offered specific influence on black and queer art practice practices with pieces such as the one thousand nine hundred and eighty nine film looking for langston an ambivalent meditation on the legacy of l on hughes working with his partner marc nash julian staging of dusk capital oratorio heightened dialogic processes to readers alternated from either side of the stage the reader spoke english with cumbersome italian accents the reading was accompanied by a projection of marxist footnotes annotating the speech the oratorio offered a concrete engagement with politics while it's performed difficulties kept multiplicity alive the capitol oratorio followed up on julian's earlier piece capitol a two channel video presented in london in two thousand and thirteen and also on view and vin in which julian interviewed the scholar david harvey in a gallery space surrounded by an attentive audience intermittently video montages splash across the walls of the gallery offering bits of economic information scenes of commerce and trade and enactments of political crisis meanwhile julian asks harvey about capitols conditions julian mentions marx's idea that value as an expression of capital quote brings forth living offspring or at least at the least lays golden eggs and suggests the resemblance in that image to contemporary art objects bought for outrageous amounts by billionaire oleg art's ruling families and the like harvey returns attention to the idea of the fetish and reminds the audience that this produces jobs for no one but a few artists like julian a couple of lucid questioners wonder if capital is better suited to address large ontology x such as capital and art and less adept at analyzing the more detailed places of differentiation within those categories were much meaning can be found harvey turns attention to strata of analysis attributed to marx the universal which includes a relationship to nature the general or capital's rules dominate the particular were variables like wages rents and interest rates fluctuate and the singularity the place of consumption where we might recognize our own individual drives and quote human passion cultural theorist stuart hall who is also in the audience suggests that harvey's strata do not go far enough to uncover contemporary conditions and calls for a stronger revision revisionist approach might better account for something in marx's own writing that attends to the productive the masculine the factory while paying less attention to reproduction and consumption processes which have moved into the foreground present capitalist life though harvey disagrees how insists that capital does not depict current you can can experience which is ambiguous and that it lacks clear demarcations between classes with the diminishment of factory production the privileged proletariat class is no longer so continued to contiguous or complete jillian's video montages that appear within the video include a constructed cinematic scene of suited white collar workers battling riot p suggesting that perhaps hedge fund managers might form part of today's revolutionary class paulo cautions however that's simply expanding the idea of the proletariat to include different kinds of workers makes everyone proletariat's and is not at all a solution how points finally to the fact that capital does not account for gender or race affirming that further revision to marx's model is called for harvey characteristically sticks to his guns replying that you cannot use race or gender to theorize economic crisis quote you can only look at the way capital is racialized and genderized this back and forth set within a video that itself is an art commodity reveals some of the differences marx can bring us to crucially halls intervention restage is the kind of revisions adaptations and interpretations black political projects have brought two marxist analysis including those of the sixties that i have discussed in depth while this exchange shows how capital continues to productively shape political discourse attention to black performance and its relationship to leftist projects shows the nests necessity of revision when thinking about social differences on articulated in the figure of the european factory worker reflecting this tradition of revision hall an influential figure in the british new left called for openness where it comes to marx and this is a quote from hall this relative openness or relative indeterminacy is necessary to marxism itself as a theory what is quote scientific about the marxist theory of politics is that it seeks to understand the limits of political action given by the terrain on which it operates this terrain is defined not by forces we can predict with the certainty of natural science but by the existing balance of social forces the specific nature of the concrete conjecture conjuncture it is cyan tif ik because it understands itself as determinate and because it seeks to develop a practice which is theoretically informed but it is not scientific in the sense that political outcomes and the consequences of the conduct of political struggles are foreordained in the stars this reading identifying a useful science of economics that prognostication opens two important possibilities first an incorporation into marxist theory of the value of different social configurations than those detailed by marx himself second a resistance to the notion that marxism or all of politics for that matter have come to fail as made evident by the present lack of a world workers government that ought to have been an historical inevitability halls body of writing which pays attention to race and colonialism made an important contribution to this first result helping to retain marxist analysis as a critical tool for those marginalized more than just industrial class i said just now it just says by more than industrial class by bringing historical material attention to blackness julian has argued that halt uttered in quote the end of the innocent essential black subject and the freeing up of positions from which black artists and filmmakers can speak the second matter the retention of marxist analysis in the twentieth first century and its adaptability is the proposition of the oratorio at the center of a world art exhibition that necessarily featured several golden eggs some news reports and online comments suggested there was a contradiction to the reading of capital in the b while outside enormous yachts lined the waterfront and further that the oratorio would have been better eliminated than the yachts this response said perversely yachts are material marxism is a fantasy like the sixties like performance for that matter i attended a party on a yacht while in venice i judged the yacht to be quite expensive i was the guest of an artist friend who told me it was a birthday party for a young museum worker that worker was the daughter of contemporary art collectors whose family fortune i later discovered derived from the dealing of weapons their big collection includes the work of several artists seen in the biennial including isaac julien's class extremities frame contemporary art so i want to offer at this moment more than a kind of coherent position paper a set of notes and queries on marxist poetics in the moment  and i want to start with a gloss one that that can gesture towards earlier i thought really beautifully in his work and the gloss is on this term aesthetics which comes from the greek ice lisa's meaning to sense or perceive and so etymologically speaking has always been bound up with ideas about materiality and how it comes to us t a science of reason goodness justice equality ethics and natural law would be incomplete or so the thinking went without a complimentary science of the senses so to sum up how to reconcile the precepts that describe cognition volition desire action and will with those that account for the realm of the sensuous the realm of the chanc determinants of human being and behavior as reason however and this is a big caveat the only tools that these thinkers offered for understanding the sensuous were in effect the rational methodologies that came out of the same socio economic matrix that was elaborating simultaneously the suspect logics of capitalism classical liberalism patriarchy and race so this is not to say that theories of the aesthetic might not be mobilized outside of and against oppressive structures but in as much as the aesthetic is a kind of ideology it inscribes in itself and has from it's very beginning the contradictions of a set of cultures that could make passionate arguments in favor of ideals of pure reason and human freedom and at the same time failed to constitute as free persons the victims of the transatlantic slave trade which of course w century and here i want to pause for a moment to go back to a film that that ken mentioned the young carl marx which we did a free screening of earlier this week and at that screening  reminded us that it's also the th anniversary of frederick douglass and he proposed a really amazing counterfactual scenario and said you know what if this film had been in fact a meeting between karl marx and frederick douglas ideology is another one marx makes an impassioned assessment of private property as and here in quoting the material perceptible expression of estranged human life and i want to dwell on that for a moment he goes on to argue that the tendency to treat others as property or as disposable instruments for fulfilling various desires and these can be for labor wealth sex social capital and the like comes out of the same logic of capital that encourages us to see the world in terms of what we can possess and for marx this impulse to mastery is a kind of deep wound to the senses among other things so he describes smelling tasting feeling thinking observing experiencing wanting acting loving in short all the organs of his individual being like those organs which are directly social in their form are the appropriation of human reality their orientation to the object is the manifestation of the human reality it is human activity and human suffering for suffering humanely considered is a kind of self enjoyment of man private property has made us so stupid and one sided that an object is only ours when we have it when it exists for us as capital or when it is directly possessed eaten drunk warned inhabited et in short when it is used by us although private property itself again conceives all these direct realizations of possession only as means of life and the life which they serve as beings is the life of private property labor and conversion into capital in the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses the sense of having the human being had to be reduced to this absolute property in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world so marx's predecessors contin hegel thought of sight and hearing as our theoretical senses closer to reason and more removed from bodily interest than smell taste and touch and therefore constitutive of the rational enlightened european subjects capacity for aesthetic experience remarks meanwhile  also again working from that eurocentric perspective the materialist philosophy pushes against many of the idealist architectures in count and hegel seeing hearing smelling and tasting exist alongside one another at least in this particular moment in marx rather than in graded tears what's more marx extends the realm of the senses to encompass the faculties of feeling thinking observing experiencing wanting acting and loving it is quite interesting so the dilemma in marx's view is that a capitalist society conditions us to link all physical and mental senses without exception to the interests of what we can possess and consume so that all sensory experience whether of mind or body is reduced to its use value so well kant and hegel again to differing degrees argue for the disinterested autonomy of aesthetic experience to go to a concept that has already proven i think of much interest to our conversation lists its separation from ordinary ways of perceiving and economies of state exchange value marx's exploration of sense experience as a social interface with the world  suspicion on the idea that any area of human perception can ever truly be free under pressure of capitalism it follows by extension that art anaesthetics poetry and poetics my brief here today which are discourses of these adulterated senses may be really dubious places to invest your hopes of a utopian community of taste so i want to move from that kind of exegetical mode into a sword of hypothesis a hypothesis about one way in which marxist aesthetics is alive right now i'll be it in a way that maybe has nothing to do with marx's original intent i want to suggest that one strand of marxist poetics worth following is the one that understands sensory experience as materially contingent and works to show inform content or both the character of that contingency and its implications this kind of art and literature if indeed these are categories in which we still want to invest and as several of our panelists have already noted there may be reasons to hold those categories in deep suspicions these kinds of art and literature might look like many things not all of them explicit propositions about political economy although maybe maybe some are that for example poetry that prioritizes the relationship between shifting historical materiality z and sensory experience a kind of marxist ice thesis might as june jordan's letter to the local police does offer an extended metaphor in which that tired old poetic rose roses appear everywhere in our in our english language poetics becomes a vibrant stand in for the unruly beauty of black life and objectification i have encountered a regular profusion of certain unidentified roses she writes growing to no discernible purpose and according to no perceptible control then again i csis in this sense might look like and here i'll direct you to the second poem on your handout and boyars preoccupation with what it's like to inhabit in an ongoing present all these  verbs in a poem called the place where in the end we find our happiness which situates both the promise and the failure of revolution in the small on historic acts of sensory experience i'll quote in a minute what i want to say though is that what is so suggestive about this poem to me is that it doesn't say that sensory experience is necessary the place where we will find any kind of revolutionary possibility and it doesn't necessarily foreclose that either so boyer writes how totally under theorized is breathing nobody is in school with their bodies anymore meanwhile and here i'll direct you both to the image that we are projecting on the screen and also to the third palm on your handout fred mountains gramsci monument which is to my mind a profound critique of the swiss artist he's artwork of the same name also ways the relationship between theory and sensuous presence turning from theoretical propositions like and here i'm quoting again if the  project from outside then the projects been a project forever to address a you saturated in sensuous language and experience by the end of the poem and here again another quote my cabin and flesh be burning in the hold i love the way you smell your cry enjoys me let me taste the way you think hirsch horns gramsci monument and some new yorkers will already know this was an art installation in tribute to the italian marxist philosopher antonio gramsci marx himself and a number of civil rights activists and philosophers in this monument existed in the shadow of the forest houses projects in the insufficiencies of a poetics of external witness the work however well intentioned of a swiss artist transplanted to the bronx when set alongside mountains organic poetics of feeling and we might think of the title of his tw fourteen collection of poetry the field trio the importance of feeling in mountains work more general generally both poetry and theory or come to think of it gramsci's own insistence that the working class needed to produce its own organic intellectuals in order for revolutionary possibility to persist and yet for moton even a turn to the potential of the sensuous won't save us poetry will not save us they might leave us though perhaps if we're lucky with a new imaginative project maybe even a project we can choose but hardly with the culmination of that project hardly with its completion and it's on change and are changed yes genres of eyes thesis and aesthetic practice alter dissolve and are reborn sometimes even dialectically as material conditions shift but this doesn't mean that anything we now poetic is neatly or completely convertible to politics or practice so the slightly counterintuitive question i want to ask is whether this inefficiency is in the end cause for an extremely unnerving kind of optimism because it means things will be different in ways we can't predict but also that that difference might involve space for excess for a kind of necessary luxury for abundance the froth above there life the hope of all things in the realm of the senses that cannot be reduced to use value and this question comes to me in tandem with another intimately related to our brief  today a line of inquiry that i think has been of import throughout the days of this symposium but which also is one that i was thinking about the other night at the the showing of raoul packs film but i repeated here newborn so what is it to interpret marks for the demands of the moment and what is it to change him thank you so i want to open up the the larger conversation by weaving together a few of the the shared concerns that the panelists have brought to the fore for us  malik juliana and can all gestured at this really really difficult long standing and i think to borrow again a word from can an intractable problem of autonomy sort of the the semi autonomy of the ar how that feeds into various networks of production and circulation when it comes to who gets to produce arts what that art says and who that art is for so i'm wondering if we can talk a little bit more about this i yeah as as with all of these terms i feel ambivalence and that's a part of the condition of the autonomous or what did you say  earlier the extraneous no stu exchange or the kind of exceptional half in half out condition right there's a place of ambivalence there and we keep returning to who is a colleague of mine i urge anyone who still wants a costly two degree come to performance studies at nyu it's a really good department and on one hand there's this you know long tradition of of the new book is consent not to be a singular being right and this of course comes from a place of prohibition where there is no black subject that is allowed to be recognized until perhaps on the side of criminality or in some kind of negative relationship to citizenship or what other whatever form of individual subject hood you're trying to construct and so there's actually maybe the what did you say the froth on the of working in performance in a practice of working in performance in museums right i come from a kind of performance art tradition that's a kind of poor production for some all audiences that then get sort of swept into these institutions and as a kind of like access of surplus right and it's ambivalent for everybody right the board doesn't really want us there but some impulses in the institution do want us there for example in in the one time for an exhibition at the whitney we did a adaptation of rex play the mother and we you know for kind of you know fancy art exhibition we converted a gallery into a performance space and made a kind of three person version of brax play which is an adaptation of a gorky novel which is you know straight up propaganda it's not like one of the subtle kind of epic theater pieces it's you know it's really going forward it's about the mother of a worker becoming a revolutionary right and we would act it out and we had these sort of dialogic moments in the piece and found that while the conditions we were describing of how do you hide your printing press when the cops come like the kind of scenarios that we were working through word were you know different mm hmm not exactly describing current conditions the kind of power relationships still felt exactly the same and the diagnosis performance collective that is read in so many different ways by so many of the different people who pass through a space like that and but nor do we do a brack splay because we're going to convince the whitney to lead the revolution right there's there are a lot of sort of different levels of of engagement that are a part of being in that position that sort of half in and and half out of the institution and so when it you know it's hard for me to arrive at a kind of satisfying answer to a question about ambivalence because it simple in itself but i think both in terms of black study and in contemporary  production on these along these lines there are sort of ways to think about forms of being in forms of action that art about a kind of singular subject that can tie back into that flaws i mean the utility of arts usually very indirect and maybe that's a good thing the autonomy of art was maybe an institutionally useful ideology at a certain time but but and and the ending of the modern maybe the ending of that black art movement intended it i get it now it never ends the way you intended it so i static strategies are always tactics that are designed to work in particular contexts someone would would kind of need different  tactics at the time of the collapse of the autonomy if into a generalized commodification of information like i think that's the thing to think it became part of that and i kind of precursor to it so what does it mean to to think it in that space and they kind of actually rethink some of this the received ideas about our history that or aesthetic history that actually might not quite match with the present not canonic even though it's the only one about my hometown it's one of only three about the steel industry ever written there so you know that actually might be more useful tradition to look at in some  some may be smaller questions just about media and and genres so i have to say i share do be honest suspicion of kind of casting all of literature as resistance right or casting all modes of art and what we file under that under that head as potential sites of revolution they're not i think and it's hard to think of them all together in that way so i'm also wondering if we can think maybe about  of a couple of these different types of media i mean do we see sort of reasons to think about hopeful possibilities in different types of things that we file under ar making right now and different types of poetic moves or different types of performance moves or literary moves or moves even into realms of intersections among arts and technology so just curious about doesn't media make a difference well and like i'm from media studies so i actually think all of our literary history is just a subset of the study of media much to the horror of my literary studies colleagues who think the reverse they think you know media is just a subset of literature it's like you know you can kind of reverse that whole picture so maybe those works that seem of enduring interest to me are ones that were actually  to like figure out something you could do with the meteor of a certain time and they sort of become you know sort of absorbed into established notions of literature art later  i mean a lot of what dada was doing had to do with cheap printing and the fact that from switzerland you could send stuff by mail for free to all of the countries who are fighting the war because for nationalistic reasons though  supporting this free postal thing so it's like oh you just like worked and it worked an angle there and got this this thing to circulate later it becomes visual art or literature and you notice you have to like hack it in half to to sort of and that's the art part of there but at the time it's one thing and it's like working at a space of possibility that was like incredibly narrow so to me that's sort of a thing and then how would you not like repeat any of that but right so here these people who you know found a tactic for working in a moment it's gone and where none of those conditions are the same and it's like that's the thing to do again how do you just sort of  potential that you have here to be a publisher or to do performance within the space of possibility that you have and i you know because i know both of you are working artists in different ways i'm wondering if maybe it can reflect a little bit i think there was such an amazingly powerful moment particularly  of these questions of production for you or how do you think about writing a polymer or ever mounting a performance when it comes to the question of how it is how it is political how it is engaged with these things yeah when you were talking about genres just trying to partially i was thinking about when you're talking about performance as being somewhat outs like it mean clearly it begins is this a moment when it's not producing a product the painting that can be sold and then it ends up coming into the academy in this kind of like different way and i don't know enough about what happened right now if there's like an remains an independent tradition or like one that you would like locate that's not  located and some sort of institutionalization or not but i was thinking also about and then you were talking about the novel and a social realist novel and i was thinking about the middle brown novel and they're kind of like this kind of international novel that's coming out of the united states and some for because of the various publishing histories and i was just kind of i think my only thought was is that all of these genres have these very specific histories within them and they're all kind of different they tell these different stories but they're all trying to figure out how to intersect with things and they have these moments where they keep trying to have these moments of resistance that kind of like are constantly kind of recuperated into it and i mean i don't know what would happen if we were more attentive to not allowing that recuperation or if we could be even and i just like an open question yeah yeah i'm also just every question i'm thinking through like a series of different disciplinary spaces institutional not institutional are we talking about politics are we talking about being together are we talking about fine art you know and so the answers for me maybe because i've been in this maze of dealing with these the spaces between these disciplinary distinctions for so long but what a few things that i find to be wells of some kind of resource particularly working in a kind of genius artists sphere any kind of cooperative work or and of course collaboration can go either way right you can collaborate with a fascist regime you can collaborate with right so i'm not trying to imagine like collaboration as this pure form but it's never been the read but at the same time there's a kind  of you know there's like an old you know augusto boal thing like theatres not the revolution it's rehearsal for the revolution right and there's a lot of romance and that too but there's something about actually working together as someone who works in a three person group for example making these performances there's something about working together to solve problems that immediately are is a social phenomenon and you know inherently political from the first instance and then if those priorities get carried through to the place of production or visibility then maybe something about that is communicated i'm not sure about media i feel like every student that comes in with a proposal for a thesis or dissertation i'm like but what about what does the internet do to that you know like everything is about this kind of new incredible mode of distribution that's not about kind of specific disciplinary channels and and sometimes it seems like the you know everything that appears is good everything that's good will appear or is like a really kind of risky outcome of our expanded media terrain so i i feel like the jury's out about specific forms media disciplines but there are ways of working within them and between them that i think still can connect us to the project of being people with people  and that in itself seems like a way of kind of holding open the door to possibility or imagination a little bit is the the kind of evolution of genres or what we consider art or even the category of art itself  with what kinds of collectives we can form to gesture at a point that that you were making earlier and it actually reminds me of something that i think on what's noting on almost every every panel we had some kind of gesture to literature art and so aniruddha for instance on the on the first panel but also you know what struck me was was that almost every panel had a reference to science fiction of some kind and to name one of my favorite vulgar genres so we had i think incredible painful knowledge that things could have been imagined differently and not that that that genre among all the rest is particularly predictive it's not but it does sort of hold open the idea that that we might still like those leftist science fiction writers in particular and but the other place that's really interested in science fiction or dystopic science fiction which a lot of that is even on the left is the alright who kind of has been doing a lot of writing in recent years of these dystopic kind of race that's the kind of struggle in in like every genre accepts the bourgeois literary novel alright it's just always meh it's like always in the middle it's just always like some white couple in connecticut getting divorced i mean this is the same literature you know like i don't see it's a choice like the each have their affordances and possibilities and i read all of it i love it all genre i mean genre can do some quick work though right like the displacing the kind of feeling of reality from that kind of novel you're describing even though it is the kind of form with the kind of protagonist and a kind of world and a kind of you know generic rules right when you get past that then a certain kind of work a kind of distance opens up a certain kind of attention to the ways of like not just the writing itself but it sets up all sorts of expectations of how to read and you know john  and my work we've used genre very forever as a way to kind of set up political scenarios that feel too real and displace them somewhere else so that a kind of distance can appear we have a western that we're remounting for a the the skirball is doing a marks birthday festival and the fall and is like marks festival in october i there's a person ethan philbrick western set in california there's like this moment in california history where it's a semi autonomous republic and it was spain then mexico then the us doesn't come in yet and the western is called non western and the problem is that while classes you know the way that value is extracted extracted by those in power is is the condition you know there's no there's not even any kind  of complete sovereignty there's no one speaks the same language people from all over the world there's a church authority there's you know indigenous you know there's everything in this one space so the kind of distances between locations of the real become like open places to perform all sorts of different possibilities and genre does that and a lot of genres make that possible you know i think people like especially in a kind of afro futurist popular dialog people look to butler and you know in butler every time like you have to relinquish humanity probably ma with an alien species that you find repellent and then at that point maybe there's some hope my boyfriend is a super like sci fi comic like fan guy with a podcast at everything and he's been  noting in his conversations how both in the kind of queer space following munoz and others and in the kind of like what honda there's this resurgent interest in utopia keep popping up like i'm gonna have to run through the woods with my child my god and you see that on tv and you see that in the blockbuster movie that just came out where half of the world dies at the end  genres set us up for that but at the same time i i think then large or more normative view is like we're ready to let humanity go and so i'm still a little bit interested in these utopian models even ones as dark as butler's which say we'll have to make some extraordinary change because this is all falling apart but then a future is possible when moon and a uber capitalist sexist decadent culture on the planet and they have this kind of conflict and i was like so which society seems better and they had no like i read it and i'm like oh yeah there was capitalist society or that sexist and decadent and horrible is the bad one right and they're like i don't know in this conversation that just happened was the idea that for me you know genre is i think you you wisely say about these cues that we offer to the reader but it offers off you know the reader resistance right so you mentioned  reader and that also is another way of thinking autonomy right not necessarily as independence quite independence but just the texts give you in some way some set of rules that you have to derive for actually interpreting or understanding or or use birmingham school as opposed to frankfurt school cultural marxism like that's the foundation of it and it's you can sum it up in a phrase which is the people make meaning but not with the media of their choosing so that there's a margin of autonomy in the interpretive practice and an agency around that but not with media if you're choosing you don't have control over that and but then the bit people leave off is getting control over that would be the next stage  so what would the socialization of the production of meaning actually look like in meme then becomes the question so i wish the the rights fantasy about cultural mark was true and that we were destroying the world not actually and i gotta tell you being one has not helped me in the academy academy at all it does not get you jobs i don't recommend it i've been blackballed more than once but we  june i was so surprised it's like oh it's like good to know that the universe can still surprise us once in a while i so questions from from the audience what are your thoughts earlier today a member of the audience mentioned that there is the politics of remembering and forgetting and so especially in the context of thinking about  recall him having said that he thought that jazz was an even greater or i've been writing because it's improvisational and so especially in the context of how and why black performance ended up and continues to end up on the outskirts of the left i'm very interested in your thoughts about improvisation and in this context i'm also thinking about how great black artists like richard wright for example went into the communist party and then said i have to get out of the communist party i'm gonna going to continue to make my art in the way that i need to make my art i'm also thinking about how even though i mature to certain thinkers in the frankfurt school like habra must have just stressing it is to me that order adorno had an incredibly snobbish attitude towards jazz and i'm wondering if that's yeah thank you i think that might be a tendency i i mean that's the culture industry thing right i mean because it's like pop right guy think jazz and that also is kind of just like the popular form of beyond kind of  avant garde of black improvisation that he's reacting to but of course black life is full of improvisation and you know right you know and people move in and out of all sorts of spaces right and the whole kind of thing the thing that i trace has to do with both the state the rights movements in the states radical movements in the states the transnational pan africanist movement the establishment of new states and west africa and elsewhere and my cases go from west africa to western europe to north america and people are moving you know people just on the move there is like no clear uniformity around how to put marxism through the early th century you know he's kind of a elitist guy you know he's like has a good education and maybe has some kind of aesthetic difficulties but he's the reason he gives and a lot of those articles is because the white working class will never help us you know like we we can't count on them and of course by the end when he's kicked out of the country and retires and gone after going to china and you know he says alright fine i'll be a communist  so you know it's just not a stable terrain so it makes sense that people move in and out i think interestingly you're reminding me of the first section and fred mountains and the break which is about improvisation and there's a passage that's often cited where he takes from capital the question what if the commodity could speak and marx comes up with a kind of poetic answer to what the commodity would say if it had a voice and moton says well of course at this time there are plenty of commodities who are capable of using their voice and that's forgotten in that passage and he relates it then to a scene in frederick douglass's autobiography of hearing his aunt hester giving this excruciating scream right and that maybe is that is otto has to scream a place of butuan individuality i think not you eggs so the other part of that question is i think that expressiveness has a different role in black political projects where there is no sort of stable subject from which to perform in the first place but i got to give a shout out to eric hobsbawm who was you know one of the great jazz critics in england who was you know loyal marxist and communists in fact a dead end until the day he died and and his  you know what is working class black woman's subjectivity about and finding a place you could find it recorded that's outside of writing because it's in the lyrics you know and we have recordings of the lyrics and some of the songs and so forth so it's so the relationship between so transnational party culture and jazz is actually complicated and nuanced and sometimes supportive and sometimes not and had a tendency to like traditional jazz more than modern is another thing and and the judgments usually been against them on that but it's actually something to be said for the valuing of traditional forms as well perhaps maybe two or four in party culture through to get you know what actually happened between those two versions both of which are obviously interested in that perception of jazz to has this cold war history again right the soviet union was social realist and you know these other experimental forms were bushwell individualist and that got the us played into that too and it used jazz you know extensively and it's kind of cultural diplomacy and soft diplomacy propaganda  networks at the time in response to the soviet union and so we kind of those histories kind of tape go down and we kind of we'd have to untangle those two to begin to understand like the position of those in some way many of them but terrible maybe it can be reborn eating is exactly the same thing in some other place so there's a kind of desire for the thing to actually exist and for it to have a kind of charismatic figure and because the cubans chose not to have that be in the global south there were other models besides those as well like those just the ones that seem to circulate in the west as a way of sort of reviving that hope that something could actually already be existing but for those of us who never really thought this was much of a fantasy it's more of an historical  isn't there like a game show where you can call like a lifeline if i could call my boyfriend he can explain it right now really well but i think there's something to the fact that he's from krypton he's from another planet and he comes to save the world but because these  because these corporations now produce multiple messages that are equally consumable there is a soviet superman who didn't land in the midwest he landed in soviet union and in that comic book he's like there's pictures of him up on the wall with lenin and everybody else production led to what i would see is that kind of an attempt to constitute the proletariat in a literary sense so this idea of searching for the working class artists but also searching for working class themes and the difficulty of this in the politics of this and the fact that class in general could lead to this abandonment of the proletariat as like a political category i don't know what do you guys think about going in a slightly different direction from from that how to frame this so there was a lot of criticism of twenties roughly through the s of black artists and intellectuals going into the communist party being an actual betrayal the black liberation movement and it being a site of removing some of the best and brightest from the actual organic struggles of the community into kind of privileged spaces of white and that you know some of their arguments best articulated not directly about them but but by malcolm a kind of against this this trend to a certain extent is that you know these folks are making you  you up and giving you an audience and giving you legitimacy within the kind of the white world to articulate views and points of reference that kind of codified their notions of resistance and perpetuate certain their own notions of what african people or what black people could do or should do and so i want to just bring that into the the space because it was not always at least in the s and s it was not always articulated as counter marxism but counter and engagement of a certain type of politics found most most explicitly within the communist party itself right and that some of those artists and intellectuals were accused at basis being opportunist for going at those spaces as opposed to utilizing spaces within the black community are creating their own spaces which i think is part of from a direct somewhat disconnected from a direct link so i just want to bring that in to kind of challenge some of where and how these ideas actually enter into our movements in our spaces and that they are different there historically have been different transmissions belts other than these parties themselves okay can i just mention something quickly i think it may be relates to your comment as well about how do we redefine the proletariat or abandon that as organiz organized instruction right i mean in that section there's this conversation about is race its own structure or is race a category of class right and there's this article new york times a couple weeks ago about how  african american men who are born wealthy in the united states are more likely to die poor right so how can you how can you not see and in our in the united states but also in various like colonial situations right like it's so much more complicated than class organizes all structures of difference there are these various competing colluding contradictory of power that have to be thought about wholly and so that's and that's part of the kind of interim movement debates that you're describing should we go work with the communists or should we do our own thing but it's also a problem of using class as lenz to understand something  like police violence right yes there is a strong economic component to that a wealthy person may also be shot right and it just means we have to think about a lot of things at once don't feel compelled to think of whether the word surplus come from and whether the word labour come from very melodious words and this kind of makes me think that when we think about aesthetic categories they are much more situated there must  like this these things are going to be very culturally specific and the more distant from western culture they're going to be the more different they will be so if you have anything any thoughts about how would we weave these kinds of theatre the great works of european bulls were production because they're complex they're important they're they're good for workers to look at and he wasn't talking about things specific to russia he was thinking about you know sort of a common western cultural heritage that was going to be universal so i'm also wondering what to make of make of that in this in this context i i think all of those are really provocative and exciting comments on how we might think the aesthetic and whether there is in fact a kind of relic of a universalizing project that we can make good on in our own struggles resistance certainly i think there's so much to be learned from d centering the the eurocentric perspective of what aesthetics is as a discourse certainly that that term wouldn't even a pie in a lot of contacts there's a lot to be learned from doing that i think also that you know i i might have had a line to this effect earlier but that we do not yet have and we have never had the kind of perfect conversion or even weaving in of aesthetic experience into a kind of politics or into a kind of project of resistance and it's been tried a lot of different times so you know go back to soviet realism and i'm kind of with with ken here and that there's ab that's actually a much more interesting tradition than i think people give it credit for being and there is much in that program and itself to be learned from but i think to that one thing that we might want to give up is the the seeking of perfect conversion and that might be the the first step in actually diversifying the the grounds for a really material materially grounded education in the senses which i think is is part of what an aesthetic project can and offer more probably conceived but yeah the the degree to which that actually translates into a specific program of resistance i think is still dark to us in many respects so i hesitate to be prescriptive about it i mean there's a version of telling the story leaving the orbit of the party to do another project that's made against it and i was habits of thought from a marxist training and created a different relationship between the particular and the abstracts that's from that training even though it's made against that training in some regards so i think it's time to sort of like like move on from forty eight was party led and the the first problem was how do you all go out on strike on the same day with people who don't use the calendar and the innovation was books of raffle tickets so tear a ticket off every day when you're out then we're all out  like a way of coordinating action in time with people who didn't think about time and turn some counter at a time but well that's what makes a strike effective so in terms of culture and art it also strikes me as having an interesting dimension so yeah i i'm just sort of like pushing back on the war version of the story because it's over to try to find another way that one can think about there being a memory of cultural resources here from which we get up things we don't even know are there because we were made to forget about them hi you've prescribed socialist realism as a something to cultivate on the other hand there's a prescription sometimes there's a prescription about things that are not socialist realism i'm surprised that kafka was forbidden in the german democratic republic and you can cite other writers as well so how do how do we not proscribe we press cry but we don't now you miss hear me i'm not prescribing anything i know that i miss hearing you completely there i know but but when people have power they start saying well you can't do this you can't do that that's what i'm saying when when people actually get to the power when they're not there and it's fine you can do whatever you want to so it's a novel about women it's actually a feminist novel but within the space of the conventions of socialist realism so like sometimes you find things there and it's like ah that's actually kind of interesting and it's doing work that it's sort of existed back to the betrayal of the black liberation movement so something i've been interested in could your reverse question like is does like cooperation jackson have like a cultural component or interest in cultural production is that an important cultural production that isn't based in kind of a state arts grant or an institution in terms of the mfa so i mean what what's in place now is a i wouldn't call it a co op at this point but there is a a collective of artists myself somewhat included amongst them called revolutionary residents  actually means right is culture cooking yes or no you know is culture child care yes or no you know my answer is yes to  both but then like how does that play into the programmatic work of the coops that actually exist in those that are coming into formation and then there's a big debate around you know how do we support revolutionary residence becoming a co op in such a way that the cultural workers can actually make a living doing it right doing what they love doing that activity and there is no easy answer particularly within our context particularly within the confines of the market and particularly trying to do things that are not necessarily commodified is the first response to to putting things out but i can tell you well so that's there's there's active debate and what we're doing now so just yesterday we had our own th anniversary slash cinco de mayo event where there was there was a summer spring i mean the spring summer and fall this is the kind of a regular activity we try to do like every saturday and before that's like in the afternoon and then and then the work we have what we call kazi mob which is like a volunteer where we try to get all the members and people in the community to come and do some volunteer labor in exchange for like time banking and then there's like a cookout which is part of what we think is a culture which is basically free food for anybody in the community whether they work or not and then there's kind of like this cultural exchange over eating food so that's all part of we see is kind of development of culture but our aspiration is to develop our own media center first and foremost and that goes back in part to what we what we were talking about somewhat yesterday about or i think was this morning i'm getting it mixed up you may have been disappointing which is about how do we actually share our vision politics in a way that is attractive to other folks in the community and to use that to try to point towards a new future in a new direction and art being in our view i think in a broad sense very essential to doing that in a way in which me articulating a speech or a political program cannot and will not necessarily capture the hearts and minds of of folks in the community it's kind of i think our general view right so it's very central to us and some i think it was you the  main our main inspiration for this politically is emilich our cabral you know and that i think the out of the tradition i come with the the come out of that particular articulation of his particular articulation of culture i think has been at the foundation of a lot of our organizing work even though it's not explicitly stated in that way it's it's much more or at least the attempt and aim is that to always be integrated question of forms genres social realism or not it's instructive to look at those cases historically and see to what extent they've supported movements andor states i think the lesson of new york today is any form genre or style may be can be deployed to support the status quo in one way or another and you know i think like i've always been interested in american realist painting that continued after abstraction it had already ascended and taken over there's a kind of like counterculture there sometimes it's conservative sometimes it's actually leftist but there's an interesting culture there but i was thinking about that one and we were looking at china's model dramas and my undergrad class this week a different kind of you know like adaptations of beijing operas of inner about revolutionary party politics right it's not exactly realism it's something else intention behind them and they are mutable right so a part of i think getting right with what they're mutability and the fact that they can be deployed to different ends is also coming to terms with the idea is that the social forms that we need an artist no exception  might look very different in the future they might look nothing like it like the the genres and the moves and the modes and the forms that we have available to us in the moment right now and getting very right with that i think is part of a socialist  what doesn't and i'm i have not yet found the answer or like i mean i don't think it's as simple as the funding apparatus although i think that's part of it too can't be ignored certainly through the particulars and then some relation as an art worker to some notion over people like to me those are the only three specifications and that has created such a wide and interesting variety  possible aesthetics that you could spend a lifetime just tracking them down remembering them passing them on and recreating them as because the struggle goes on right and among the proliferation of forums there are ways to say goodbyes so i think maybe thank you rebecca do bring up the panel to a close on that note thank you so much