Postmodern Money Theory! (Part 3)

In the third installment of Superstructure’s “Postmodern Money Theory!” series, Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson wrap up their discussion of B.S. Johnson’s novella, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, which self-consciously weaves money and accounting into the very fabric of literary form. Rob and Scott tease out the text’s lingering potentials and blindspots in order to problematize dominant forms of political economic and aesthetic critique. (Click the following links for Part 1 and Part 2.)

To start, our co-hosts zero in on the book’s estrangement of taxation. Characterizing taxation as a zero-sum game that breeds extreme pettiness, resentment, and violence, the book critically distances itself from orthodox visions of money, while providing only faint hints of possible alternatives. Next, Rob and Scott read Christie Malry’s generative tensions alongside two misleading tendencies in critical theory, both of which are predicated on the false barter story of money’s origins. 

The first tendency links the end of gold standards to the rise of modernism and postmodernism, respectively. Advanced by the likes of Jean-Joseph Goux, Jean Baudrillard, and Fredric Jameson, this expressly lapsarian tendency frets an absolute volatilization of forms and values across political economy and aesthetics, rather than affirming a contestable and imaginative politics of public inscription unencumbered by legally sanctioned austerities and inequalities. 

The second tendency, meanwhile, casts the orthodox problem of dyadic exchange in terms of debt and credit. From Friedrich Nietzsche to David Graeber, this discourse reduces debt to narrow oppositions between domination and freedom, while foreclosing credit’s collective and always disputable caretaking capacities. Although both impulses inform Christy Malry’s construction, Rob and Scott underscore the ways that Johnson’s constant formal experimentation subtly reframes and exceeds these tendencies’ erroneous totalizing judgments.  

Finally, Rob and Scott uncover money’s repressed public foundations and alternatives in Christy Malry’s allegorical conclusion. Working to redeem Johnson’s unrealized longings for socialism, the co-hosts consider the text’s enigmatic appeals to credit overdrafts and debt write-offs in relation to its tragicomic play on Christ’s sacrificial death. 

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Internationalism in Name Only: The Left’s Realist Turn

By Jane Ball

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 touched a dormant but significant fault line on the left. On the one hand, much of the left was outraged by the invasion, believing it to be an illegal and genocidal land grab. On the other hand, a cadre of the left, especially in the US and the UK, took the opposing position. They blame the US for NATO’s eastward expansion for provoking Russia’s invasion to defend its “legitimate security interests.” This second group, given voice by Noam Chomsky and by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has consistently demanded Ukrainian capitulation to Putin’s demands. These voices combine an economistic definition of capitalism with the offensive realist IR theory (mainly John Mearsheimer‘s) of international relations as driven by the politics of power projection. Thus, they attribute Ukrainian unwillingness to capitulate to an American capitalist Realpolitik that perpetually threatens Russian security and not as an authentic defense of their nation. 

However, this argument suffers from a poverty of theory. It views the world as a mechanistic body driven solely by predetermined (capitalist) instincts and denies human agency to affect the world. It also suffers from acute ahistoricism. Mearsheimer’s formulation of an anarchic “security competition” is a tautology that self-consciously excludes factors that contradict his theories as outside the scope of international relations. He does not explain how this anarchy developed, what specific social property relations it expresses, or how those social relations evolved. Thus, while it is necessary to question NATO’s continued relevance in the 21st century, the critiques by Chomsky and the DSA rely on a theory of international relations that is divorced from the material realities of the actual historical process. A leftist IR theory must be firmly rooted in the specificities of history and must account for the development of the social relations buttressing the international order. If Western capitalism is to be blamed for the war, then capitalism should be defined. The theory must also understand the evolution of internationalism as a complex and sometimes contradictory ideology, which implies a complete understanding of its revolutionary origins. Finally, a left IR theory must consider how militant worker action impacts the creation of world systems and their tensions.

The Head and the Heart

The DSA position is that the US is uniformly responsible for capitalist expansion and exploitation. It is easy to dismiss this as typical left-reactionary anti-Americanism, but this proposition is critical to DSA’s analysis of capitalism. For example, its original NATO statement argues that provocation from NATO’s expansion is the sole reason for Russia’s militarization. The International Committee’s opening statement proceeds from the organization’s 2021 platform, which states “DSA operates in the heart of a global capitalist empire” and later says, “as socialists living in the heart of the American empire.” The conflation of the US with the totality of an empire of Capital suggests that they view the two as indistinguishable. It is not just a rhetorical posture; it is a philosophical disposition.

From a moral standpoint, the DSA statement is correct. As the sole remaining superpower, the US is responsible for many atrocities and horrors, disproportionately targeting people of color and developing nations. These horrors have been committed – sometimes justified – as necessary actions to spread democratic values, protect human rights, and above all, capitalist social relations. The DSA is right to call out these hypocrisies, and they stand on firm moral ground. However, as a critique of the current imperial order and an analysis of the specific social relations that comprise the existing order, they present a reductive and mechanistic theory of history that ultimately undermines their moral capital.

Consider DSA’s description of an individual’s relationship to the system of Capital. The system is a body, the US, the body’s heart. Humans living “within the heart” are individualistic cells encoded by DNA for specific functions. Cells have no agency – they can only do what they were programmed to do. A single cell cannot change the direction the body moves and does not exist apart from the body. The body is intrinsic to the cell’s identity and existence. Not only do people have agency that goes beyond the orchestrations of a univocal political “body”, but this agency is social and linked to other relations of affiliation and dependence. 

Likewise, analogizing the US as the “heart of empire” has problematic implications. The heart pumps blood, distributing blood and oxygen to the rest of the body. Without it, the body could not function. This reasonably analogizes the US’s function in the imperial system. As the prime hegemonic power, the US economy and military have an unprecedented ability to exert their influence directly and indirectly to maintain the imperial order. However, this is where the analogy breaks down. DSA presents the body—capitalism—as a totality, defined and driven entirely by a mechanistic heart. There is no agency here, let alone the heterogeneous institutions and stakeholders that actually make things move. The inevitable march of capitalism flattens everything. 

These notions of inevitability are at odds with the historical process. By imagining people as individualized cells within a mechanistic body, the DSA theory denies the working classes of the past the agency and the ability to effect positive change in the world that inspires them to organize today. It collapses the last five hundred years of human history into an inevitable, perpetual, and all-consuming system called “capitalism.” In doing so, the DSA theory merely inverts the Whig narrative of historical progress rather than changing them. It does not analyze the structure of the current imperial order, its origins, or what specific property relations they reflect. They see that the US pumps capitalism’s blood but ignores the mind controlling the body. The US acts in “service to Capital.” Still, DSA does not precisely define what capital is. Capital is everything and exists a priori and apart from the human experience. The US may be the “heart of empire,” but the heart does not direct the body’s actions. It does not create the logic through which the body engages with the world. By centering the mechanical heart and not the dynamic mind, DSA conflates the guarantor of the imperial order with the imperial order itself. This mistake renders their geopolitical posture incoherent; there’s no specificity to the social relations guiding the imperial international system. The United States’ actions are definitionally imperialistic, regardless of the actual social and political context. 

The Left’s Realist Turn

There is no better demonstration of this tautology than a portion of the left’s critique of NATO and response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. For instance, here is how Noam Chomsky summarizes the crisis: 

There are some simple facts that aren’t really controversial. There are two ways for a war to end: One way is for one side or the other to be basically destroyed. And the Russians are not going to be destroyed. So that means one way is for Ukraine to be destroyed. The other way is some negotiated settlement. If there’s a third way, no one’s ever figured it out. So what we should be doing is devoting all the things you mentioned, if properly shaped, but primarily moving towards a possible negotiated settlement that will save Ukrainians from further disaster. That should be the prime focus…We can, however, look at the United States, and we can see that our explicit policy — explicit — is rejection of any form of negotiations. The explicit policy goes way back, but it was given a definitive form in September 2021 in the September 1st joint policy statement that was then reiterated and expanded in the November 10th charter of agreement.

According to Chomsky, the outcome of the war is a foregone conclusion; Russia will inevitably “destroy” Ukraine, and the only way for Ukraine to avoid destruction is to negotiate with Russia, having accepted this inevitability from the start. Since this outcome is obvious, it is irrational for Ukrainian officials not to accept this reality. Therefore, the refusal to accept Russian demands must come from an external force – the U.S. Rather than Zelensky’s refusal to capitulate reflecting Ukrainian rejection of Russia’s terms, it is caused by the US not allowing him to negotiate. The US is forcing the Ukrainian military to continue to fight to weaken Russia, thus confirming that the US and NATO are actively antagonizing Russia via NATO expansion and justifying Putin’s “legitimate security concerns.” Even now, a year into the war, Chomsky downplays Putin’s responsibility for the war in favor of placing blame on the United States while continuing to hint at Ukraine’s inevitable destruction:

Let’s return to the current topic: how policy is being designed to bring about “much worse” by escalating the conflict. The official reason remains as before: to severely weaken Russia. The liberal commentariat, however, offers more humane reasons: We must ensure that Ukraine is in a stronger position for eventual negotiations. Or in a weaker position, an alternative that does not enter into consideration, though it is hardly unrealistic.

On the topic of NATO’s expansion, the Chomsky argument weds itself to the statements made by proponents of the offensive realist school of foreign policy – John Mearsheimer in particular. In a New Yorker interview in March 2022, Mearsheimer makes a similar version of this argument:

Nevertheless, what has happened with the passage of time is that we have moved forward to include Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. Of course, this includes more than just NATO expansion. NATO expansion is the heart of the strategy, but it includes EU expansion as well, and it includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat.   

Mearsheimer, like Chomsky, depicts the United States as the prime mover in the story of NATO’s expansion. NATO’s expansion is something the US did to push a “Western bulwark” further east, closer to Russia’s borders. In both accounts, the US is the only country with agency; everyone else is just along for the ride. Both deny Putin’s imperial desires and believe Russia is only reacting rationally to the security threat the US is perpetrating. However divergent their intellectual paths to this moment may have been, Chomsky and Mearsheimer are in complete alignment in arguing that the US has stretched the limits of unipolarity and is facing the natural, inevitable, almost mechanical reaction from its adversaries. This convergence is not new; for instance, Chomsky has long argued that NATO intervention in Kosovo was an imperial act of aggression by the US against Serbia. Nor is it just a rhetorical convenience; it betrays that both Chomsky and Mearsheimer share a highly deterministic view of capitalism and empire that, at its base, rejects the importance of diverse human agencies in the historical process. Nothing is contestable.

The left should be wary of aligning itself with offensive realists like Mearsheimer and, more recently, Henry Kissinger. In the first place, Mearsheimer’s worldview is highly simplistic and self-reinforcing. He defines his worldview on his website: “I believe that the great powers dominate the international system, and they constantly engage in security competition with each other, which sometimes leads to war.” This statement reveals that Mearsheimer believes that competition is every state’s historical default security posture and that international relations can only be defined as the sum of this competition, with the most powerful states monopolizing this competition. Only the Great Powers can express agency; minor nations are along for the ride, and the heterogeneous agencies of a state’s populace receive no consideration in his analysis. The reification of the nation-state and the naturalization of competition as a universal law of politics is antithetical to any leftist project that believes that collective action by the working classes can positively transform society. 

Second, leftists who would invoke realist foreign policy should know why Mearsheimer is so critical of the US’s focus on Russia. He is not advocating for dismantling American imperialism; he believes the US is distracted by a weakened Russia and is not doing enough to engage in Great Power politics with China, which he views as the true global rival. In his words: 

We do face a serious threat in the international system. We face a peer competitor. And that’s China. Our policy in Eastern Europe is undermining our ability to deal with the most dangerous threat that we face today.

Contrary to the left’s goal of preventing a new Cold War between the US and China, Mearsheimer is advocating for such a Cold War. 

Finally, neorealism self-consciously lacks historical explanations for international relations and state behavior variations. The theory declares a universal and transhistorical motivation for state behavior – specifically “security competition” – and only concerns itself with factors affirming the view. Aspects that contradict the theory are externalized; these are forces outside the narrowly delineated sphere of international relations beyond the scope of consideration. Mearsheimer presents another mechanistic world where complex social relations are relegated to a series of If/Then loops with narrowly defined parameters. Outcomes are predetermined, and reactions are instinctual and predictable. 

Ignoring the social complexity of history’s unfolding, Mearsheimer reduces inter-state politics to competition for security dominated by the most powerful states. Each state, like each individual “under capitalism,” has objective “interests” that are defined a priori: a zero-sum game of security flatly mediated by the invisible hand of power. Chomsky’s theory of international relations is nearly identical to Mearsheimer’s, with the difference that Chomsky incorporates a vulgar Marxist specter of Capital to position the US as the invisible hand moving all international relations. It assumes that if a Russia-Ukraine war were against the US’s interests, the US would prevent or stop it. Therefore, the conflict continues because the US wants it to continue. The US is one “actor”; the heart beats, the body responds. 

Internationalism in Name Only

DSA claims its anti-NATO position is principled internationalism. However, carefully reading their statements undercuts both claims of internationalism and the arguments made to justify the DSA stance. In the preamble of the June 11th, 2021, “No to NATO” statement, DSA calls for an immediate and unilateral withdrawal from the alliance. Regardless of NATO’s continued relevance in the 21st century, such a unilateral move by the US would be viewed – rightly – as an act of betrayal by our allies and would seriously hinder possibilities for future international cooperation. Further, immediate withdrawal would create a defense vacuum, as the defense umbrella European countries have planned their entire economies around for decades will suddenly evaporate. The vacuum would cause a rapid intensification of defense spending, well beyond the 2% of GDP requirement, leading to increased instability domestically and internationally. Domestically, intensifying defense spending would divert essential resources from the civilian sectors. Internationally, unilateral withdrawal makes the concept of “common defense” across Europe moot. The sudden vacuum of the American defense umbrella would spur a flurry of regional defense pacts among factions with diverging – and sometimes competing – security interests. Instability on both fronts is likely to be exacerbated by the fact that many of the NATO countries are also part of the Eurozone, whose monetary policy is effectively controlled by the German central bank. Far from undoing American imperialism, a unilateral withdrawal of the US from NATO is a continuation of Bush-era foreign policy and displays utter contempt for international institutions. 

Additionally, the language of the first bullet point in the “No to NATO” statement is inherently nationalist, not internationalist. The bullet point reads: 

Article 5 of the founding document that binds NATO members stipulates that “an attack on one is an attack on all.” A hypothetical attack on small Baltic nations that border Russia, although all the way across the Atlantic from the US, would force Americans to fight on European soil.

This statement is explicitly isolationist, arguing that the Baltics are too distant and insignificant for Americans’ concern. The phrasing of “European soil” also naturalizes the arbitrarily delineated borders of the nation-state.

Likewise, the fifth bullet point in the No to NATO statement is ostensibly a critique of the hypocrisies of liberal internationalist humanitarianism. However, in practice, it does more to cast doubt on the legitimacy of humanitarian concerns rather than the methods used to affect humanitarianism. The statement doesn’t argue for a better way to address humanitarian concerns; it dismisses any humanitarian justification as a pretext used to manufacture consent. Strikingly, though, the most potent example of the US using humanitarianism as a pretext for naked American aggression – Iraq – receives the least attention. Most of the critique is directed at the NATO intervention in Serbia, where the humanitarian situation was unambiguous. This position is consistent with Noam Chomsky’s overt denial of Serbian ethnic cleansing and genocide of Bosniaks and Kosovars as part of his criticism of the intervention., The Chomsky-DSA foreign policy may be anti-imperialist, but it is not internationalist. An approach that calls for the unilateral withdrawal of the US from its defense commitments combines all the arrogance of Bush unilateralism with all the fatalistic bleakness of Kissingerism. The denial of the genocides that precipitated NATO’s interventions in the Balkans and, more recently, the dismissal of Ukrainian sovereignty perpetuates fascist propaganda propagated throughout Europe and Russia. The defense vacuum created by the abrupt withdrawal advocated for by DSA would further destabilize Europe during its second refugee crisis in a decade. The lack of an American presence will drive European military spending, not decrease it. DSA’s No to NATO statement demonstrates this fact. 

On the one hand, to support its claims that NATO encourages European militarization, the statement points to an increase in France’s defense spending in 2018. On the other hand, it notes that the US and France’s chief executives have recently questioned the relevancy of NATO, with Trump nearly withdrawing the US from the alliance. The specter of a NATO without the US increased French military spending. Realizing such a withdrawal will encourage more militarization across the entire continent. With decades of austerity policies and multiple refugee crises, widespread militarization increases the threat of reactionary and fascist movements. The Chomsky/DSA position is reactionary anti-imperialism and is a dead end as a leftist vision of international relations. 

What Must Be Done

DSA’s adoption of neorealism comes at the most inopportune time. Now is a time for questioning the continued relevance and future of NATO. If the left is to have a voice in this conversation, it must be able to speak coherently with other political factions in this country. A left critique of the current state of IR cannot resort to polemics and sloganeering. It is not enough to say, “the US acts in service of capital.” This statement has no explanatory value. A critique of American foreign policy cannot assume that historical “forces” – capitalism, imperialism, or liberalism – are self-motivating, nor can it be guided by purely economistic theories of history that adopt conservative premises and assumptions of international relations. 

Missing from both left and right neorealism is any social content. Both ascribe the movement of history to large and impersonal forces impervious to human input, a riderless locomotive charging through a desolate landscape. “The US is the heart of the imperial project and acts in service to capital.” This is a description, not an explanation. It treats imperialism and capitalism as interchangeable words rather than distinct phenomena that interact with each other. For example, while NATO’s intervention in Kosovo certainly qualifies as an imperial projection of power, it’s unclear how such an intervention served the interests of capital. These words need grounding to a materiality that clearly defines them as social relations and is tied to the specificities of history. Capitalism isn’t a thing. It is the name used for a set of social relations defined by market dependency to meet basic needs. These social relations are not a transhistorical force; they developed in a particular place under specific circumstances. Moreover, the constitutive relations of “capitalism” are not constant over time. They are contestable across and within classes and often adapted ad hoc to crises and changing circumstances.  

Likewise, there must be an explanation of the origins of the imperial state system, from the seniority rankings of European monarchs below the Papacy to its evolution into today’s liberal internationalist rules-based system. Much of the imperial system’s history predates the global dominance of capitalist relations; the political and social character of early modern imperial disputes must be understood on their terms, not as subordinate parts of capitalism. Imperial competition in the 17th and 18th centuries was motivated by dynastic rivalries and the secularization of the Reformation into disputes over political rights and legal jurisdiction. It was not until after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 that capitalist relations became integral to imperial power competition. What precipitated these reconfigurations, what social tensions did they mediate, and how did states respond? 

Additionally, we must make distinctions among different iterations of the imperial system and the purpose of each. Differences must be enumerated. For example, the Congress of Berlin system is qualitatively different from the post-war liberal internationalist system. The Congress of Berlin self-consciously triggered an imperial competition for resources as the European powers rushed to industrialize to catch up to Britain. On the other hand, the post-war liberal international system saw itself as the ultimate triumph of the ideals of the French Revolution; the Declaration of the Rights of Man heavily influenced the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the very least, a Left IR theory should use these principles as our comparison point; how has the US, the other western powers, and the international institutions they created undermined these goals? It should then attempt to answer how to articulate better and realize the UDHR’s principles. We should not, as realists do, reject their importance as superfluous or merely as a cynical excuse. 

Finally, a Left IR theory must recognize heterogeneous working-class agencies and their ability to affect the trajectory of history, including in international relations, for both better and worse. Mass movements over the past two centuries have profoundly impacted the foreign policies of imperial nations. For instance, during the negotiations for the Treaty of Paris in 1814, the British government considered recognizing Haiti as a French possession to increase the legitimacy of the newly restored Bourbon monarchy. However, the British public, building off over two decades of grassroots agitation against the slave trade, vocally rejected this concession. A massive protest campaign organized by the African Institute sent 800 petitions with 750,000 signatures to Parliament. The outrage forced the British government to back away from the proposal and ultimately to insist the Congress of Vienna include an international repudiation of the slave trade. Returning Haiti to France was essential to the British government’s geopolitical interests- it would have provided the Bourbon monarchy financial self-sufficiency while still leaving them beholden to British sea power to protect French trade, neutralizing them as a threat on the continent. Public agitation intervened to change the treaty’s terms decisively, forced the British government into an anti-slavery position, and committed the resources of the British Navy to enforce the ban on the slave trade. 

However, just as these mass movements forced human rights concessions from the ruling class, they have also been co-opted by the ruling class to further the imperial mission. As anti-slavery sentiment grew in mainstream society in the middle of the 19th century, it coalesced in the “Free Soil, free Labour” ideology. Historian Eric Foner argues that the Republican Party formed as a coalition among certain aspects of the Capital class, artisans, professionals, and radical worker elements espousing this ideology to counter the political influence of the Slave Power. By the end of the century, the abolition of slavery was a primary justification for colonial intervention in Africa; Germany, France, the UK, and King Leopold of Belgium used the suppression of the slave trade to justify carving Africa amongst themselves at the Berlin Conference in 1884-1885. On the one hand, this represented the ultimate success of abolition over the planter classes. On the other hand, it represented the ultimate betrayal of the radical ideals of the abolitionist movement. 

Similarly, the international institutions and world order created by the United States and the Soviet Union represented the ultimate success of many revolutionary ideals espoused since the English Civil War. In his 1941 State of the Union address, FDR outlined four universal freedoms that became the justification for the Allied war effort: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Roosevelt later expanded on these four freedoms in his 1944 State of the Union speech when he argued for a Second Bill of Rights that guaranteed economic and social rights such as guaranteed employment, a basic income, decent housing, adequate healthcare, and education. In many ways, the Second Bill of Rights echoes some of the most radical revolutionary demands from the 1800s; the Soviet Constitution of 1936 likewise contains similar provisions. The four freedoms became the basis of the Allied war goals and formed the ideological underpinning for the United Nations. Though there were deep ideological divides between the Allies, each manifested a society shaped by similar revolutionary ideals. The post-war international institutions were designed to extend these ideals worldwide. 

Despite these lofty goals, and although much of the world’s population did see a significant overall increase in living standards, the reality of the post-war consensus was a betrayal of many revolutionary ideals. The post-war “peace” was predicated on preventing another land war in Europe and domestic politics hostile to labor militancy in Europe and the US. The transition from coal to oil as the primary energy source after WWII allowed for the extension of middle-class prosperity to more people spatially dispersed across a wider area. Replacing coal with oil also altered the social relations of energy production and consumption. Coal mining was labor intensive, required high concentrations of largely autonomous workers to extract and transport to sites of consumption, and was done by workers within Europe and the United States. By comparison, oil requires far less labor to extract and transport, and reserves were primarily in formerly colonized countries. This change in production requirements and locations further cemented the control of capitalists over energy planning, undercutting worker movements in industrialized nations by shifting the nature of work while reinforcing the economic power of former colonial states in the newly independent states of the Middle East and North Africa. With coal, labor could exert significant control over energy production and, thus, the entire economy, whereas, with oil, workers were too few and spatially dispersed to exercise political power similarly. The change in geographic location outsourced the violence and instability necessary to maintain worker discipline from urban centers in both the NATO and Warsaw Pact countries to newly independent nations in the MENA. The post-war attempt at securing political, economic, and social rights for the middle classes of the industrialized nations came at the cost of undermining those same rights for people living in oil-rich countries. 

One year into the conflict and contrary to Chomsky’s prediction, Russia has not destroyed Ukraine. While it is undoubtedly true that NATO’s military and financial support has been invaluable to the Ukrainian war effort, the failure of the Russian invasion is a testament to the Ukrainian people’s will to maintain their independence from Moscow. Despite ongoing resistance from Ukrainians, the Chomsky Left continues to view the war through a lens of brute economistic offensive realism. They rely on vague assertions that NATO’s goal is to destroy Russia and “expand capital.” However, their arguments lack specificity and are unmoored from the historical process. They adopt a mechanistic view of history that assumes that capitalism is natural and inevitable. They claim the mantle of internationalism while utilizing isolationist rhetoric to advocate for unilateral treaty withdrawals. Further, by aligning with offensive realists, they dismiss the possibility of cooperative institutions at the international level, rejecting the left’s first attempt at ending imperialism during the first world war. Finally, by characterizing capitalism as a totality, they deny working class agencies in affecting history, including international affairs. 

If the Left is to articulate a coherent anti-imperialism for the 21st century, it cannot adopt conservative theories about the construction of the international system. The historical specificities around the development of capitalist social relations and the imperial order must ground our critiques. Likewise, it cannot hold itself hostage to the ideological battles of the Cold War nor be guided by a rote opposition to anything the United States supports. The Chomsky-DSA reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine failed on all accounts. As a result, they’ve squandered an opportunity to offer a coherent alternative to the current international order that deals with the challenges of the 21st century – particularly climate change and the rise of authoritarianism both at home and abroad. By joining with neorealists such as Mearsheimer, they eschew a material analysis of the imperial system for one that treats the system as constant and inevitable – a mechanistic progression of history – rather than constitutively polyvalent and contested. More than strange bedfellows, such a marriage is a death knell for international solidarity in the 21st century.

Money on the Left

Bank of the People: History for Money’s Future

By Dan Rohde

Who would’ve guessed that the sudden failure of a state-chartered, regional bank would’ve inspired fundamental reckonings with the nature of money and banking? Yet, this is exactly what we see today. The failure of Silicon Valley Bank (“SVB”) and its $200 billion of mostly-uninsured deposits has spurred renewed debates about not only whether and when banks should be allowed to fail, but what role they play, or ought to play, in modern society.

The ongoing SVB episode has laid bare two fundamentally opposed views of banks. First, there are those who regard banks primarily as private businesses. This orthodox camp largely (though not entirely) opposes the present rescue efforts, insisting that the market be allowed to discipline banking enterprises. Poorly run banks, they argue, should generally be allowed to fail, unless their size and systemic importance dictate otherwise. This business approach to banking lies behind the current design of deposit insurance, which only insures deposits up to $250,000 per account on the presumption that only small account holders should be protected; holders of larger accounts are presumed capable of monitoring their bank and moving money to a safer institution if necessary. The market should thereby privilege safer banking institutions. Such thinking similarly underpins much of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which attempts to isolate banks that are “too big to fail,” while leaving smaller institutions more to the discipline of so-called “market forces.”

But, as the events of this weekend underline, this is an increasingly strained perspective. SVB’s largest depositors plainly did not adequately supervise its practices, and this is not particularly surprising. And, in spite of being a regional, state-chartered bank not identified as systemically important under Dodd-Frank, within 72 hours of the panic beginning, Treasury, the Fed and the FDIC, through some creative and surprising legislative maneuvering, pooled their resources to engineer a rescue of all SVB’s deposits – both insured and uninsured.

Such apparent failures and exceptions from the orthodox perspective are much less surprising to those who understand banks to be public institutions. As laid out in a recent editorial by Morgan Ricks and Lev Menand calling to remove the cap on deposit insurance altogether, this position holds that banks are best understood as privately-owned entities charged with a fundamental public function: issuing the vast majority of the deposits we use as money. Eliciting language from Saule Omarova and Robert Hockett, they describe a bank charter as “an outsourcing arrangement, a franchise, to issue money on behalf of the government.” Eliminating the cap on deposit insurance “would underscore the fact that banks exist to serve the public interest, not to privatize gains and socialize losses.”

To gain greater perspective on the present debate, it’s useful to consider the historical foundations of modern banking – both in the US and elsewhere. My forthcoming paper in the Osgoode Hall Law Journal offers one example. There, I explore the introduction of banks into Canada – a period when, even if privately owned, banks were openly and explicitly conceived as public institutions. (Accordingly, they also marked a central site of political contestation.) Elite monetary engineering on behalf of one partisan camp was met with opposition from another, followed by direct, democratic contestation. Returning to this past can help us in at least two ways. First, it helps clarify the role that banks were meant to serve and still serve today in our monetary system, foregrounding the actions of the state in creating and backing them. Second, narratives like this can help us conceptually to imagine and work toward creating a more democratic monetary architecture, both today and in the future. 

The Chaos of Canadian Colonial Money

Money in colonial British North America was a mess. And the colonies were in a tight spot trying to fix it. The law generally forbid colonies from issuing their own money, either through establishing their own mints or issuing bills of credit. Further, as of the 1820s, the British government required that all colonial accounts be denominated in sterling. All the while, continuous growth and a trade balance favoring England constantly tapped the money supply, leading to near constant calls for more liquidity.

The colonies responded to this with legislative ingenuity. With jurisdiction over their own revenue and courts, they would declare coinage of various nations “current” within their borders, meaning that such designated coins would both satisfy debts to the colony and count as legal tender. They would then “rate” those varieties of coin under their own unit of account – granting each a domestic value that differed from (and typically exceeded) either its face value or what value it would acquire in foreign markets. While the official unit of account was English, many goods were priced in dollars, and most actual coins in people’s pockets were Spanish. This process, known as “overrating” coinage, fomented a currency mélange throughout the colonies that immensely complicated even basic everyday transactions.

Still, the colonies enjoyed a brief reprieve from this complexity during the war of 1812. To fund that conflict, the British forces issued legal-tender “Army Bills” directly to soldiers and suppliers.

These bills not only serviced the war effort but also were widely adopted and appreciated by the settler population at large. Typically denominated in both dollars and pounds, they greatly simplified everyday exchange, offering settlers a paper currency that was, more or less, worth the value listed on its face. Significantly, the bills were issued in good supply, reaching a peak of £1.5 million in 1814. The result granted the colonies a level of liquidity they would not know again until for decades. Exposed to their first paper money in good supply, the colonists thus experienced previously unparalleled liquidity through public money–even if a money, of course, issued for military conflict.

Enter the Banks 

In spite of such achievements, the British fully redeemed the Army Bills after the war. Retiring the bills led to a deep and profound monetary contraction. And it was this specific moment that directly inspired the chartering of Canada’s earliest banks. First was the Bank of Montreal in 1817, followed by the Bank of Quebec in 1818, the Bank of Upper Canada at Kingston in 1819, the Bank of New Brunswick in 1820, and, as will be discussed below, the Bank of Upper Canada founded in the town of York (later incorporated as Toronto) in 1821.

The first Canadian banks were universally run by wealthy, politically connected and conservative individuals, often with direct ties to England. And they were chartered to offer a public service. They could store varieties of legal tender coinage and issue notes that, like the Army Bills, listed their value on their face. While not legal tender, these banknotes could thereby replace legal tender coin for much everyday exchange. Banks could additionally issue more notes than the amount of coin they kept in reserve, thereby directly increasing the money supply for the still liquidity-starved colonies. Thus while certainly commercial enterprises driven by private profits and interests, the early Canadian banks (as with many chartered corporations at that time) were not merely commercial institutions, but expressly political ones. They were individually chartered and empowered by statute, run by politically-connected colonial elites, and specifically charged with a public service in simplifying and augmenting the money supply.

Crucially, such elite banks “of issue, discount and deposit” were not primarily held out as savings institutions or mere intermediaries, but money issuers. Generally, they built their reserve of specie by selling shares rather than attracting depositors, and their primary purpose was to clean up the colonial money supply and expand monetary circulation. Banknotes almost immediately became the predominant currency for everyday use in the colonies.

Where government had receded, government-supported for-profit enterprises were called in. But private bank money came with very new terms. Whereas Army Bills offered payment to individuals, banknotes were issued through loans, meaning that they came at a cost and with a commitment. To many, this new money felt less a monetary expansion, than a shift of obligations – away from the state and towards these new, undemocratic corporations.

The Bank and the Government

In Toronto and much of Upper Canada, nearly all banknotes were issued by one especially partisan institution, the Bank of Upper Canada. The first chartered bank in the Canadian colonies, the Bank of Upper Canada was founded by Anglican archdeacon John Strachan and his followers in the “Family Compact” – a close-knit conservative political faction that wielded an outsized influence in the colony. Indeed, the bank inscribed its ruling position directly on its notes. The notes proudly announced that the bank was “chartered by parliament.” They bore images of St. George and Britannia, unabashedly mimicking iconography from the Bank of England.

While it never took on exactly the role that ‘The Old Lady’ played in England, the Bank of Upper Canada was explicitly established to represent elite interests and, for a considerable period, it was the only bank chartered in the region. During that period, anyone who needed money would have to either borrow from that bank (in which case they owed it a debt) or work for someone who had previously borrowed from that institution. In either case, money was issued in Upper Canada with lines of obligation running directly to a single, unapologetically anti-egalitarian institution.

This bank’s anti-egalitarian activities were particularly egregious to Upper Canada’s “Reformers”  – a political movement directly opposed to the Family Compact that advocated to make the colonial government more responsive to the electorate. To Reformers, banking institutions like the Bank of Upper Canada benefitted from public legitimacy and support, but lacked democratic accountability. If banks were in a fundamental sense government agents, then their control was a political cause. The interest on their loans, furthermore, was akin to taxation, only not paid into public coffers. With this, banking reform became a central plank in the Reform movement.

The Reformers began by attempting to make the Bank of Upper Canada more accountable, and then by proposing alternate public monetary bodies. Failing in this, a group of Reformers then established their own (unchartered) institution in 1835 named the “Bank of the People.” As with the Bank of Upper Canada, the Bank of the People was erected overtly as a political institution. Its board was made up exclusively of established Reformers, and the bank issued money largely to communities excluded by the Bank of Upper Canada. (Indeed, one of its first loans was to future leader of the Upper Canada Rebellion, William Lyon Mackenzie, to establish his newspaper, the Constitution.) In house, too, the bank joined the politics of credit issuance to the politics of publicity by hosting a newsroom on its premises featuring “the leading liberal Journals.”

Bank of the People notes differed starkly from the Bank of Upper Canada’s, reflecting the different political community to which the bank spoke and the alternative values it sought to express. In the place of British monarchial imagery, its notes feature bustling cityscapes and ports, alongside generic symbols of industry, such as Vulcan and Demeter.

Despite its judicious management, the Bank of the People did not last long. We know it was well run, because it managed to be both profitable and to be the only bank in British North America to not suspend payments during the banking panic of 1837. Still, the Bank lost many of its supporters after the failed Upper Canada Rebellion, and competition with the Bank of Upper Canada led its founders to sell to the Bank of Montreal in 1840.

From the Bank of the People to Banks Today

Obviously, the Bank of the People was established in a very different era from the present moment. There were few banks then, and they carried their association with government on the face of their notes. But much is also the same, as the discourse around SVB’s collapse makes evident. Privately-owned, for-profit banks are still tasked with issuing the vast majority of our money, and this remains, in many regards, a very public mandate.

Banks today are critical public infrastructure, which stand upon a massive edifice of government infrastructure and support. Because we use bank credits as money, when they fail, the consequences can lead to massive economic fallout with a very real, human cost. They also act as a primary vector through which government intervenes in a crisis. (This includes even our recent global health crisis that did not originate in the financial sector.) No wonder they are among the quickest institutions to receive government support when under threat. No wonder also that, in the wake of SVB’s collapse, explicit government support has been offered not only to “too big to fail” banks, but to smaller banks as well – an experience Canada also went through in 1985.

The monetary system that the Bank of the People actively contested is now the norm, but, all the while, its public nature has become less visible to us. Revisiting such democratizing efforts reminds us of the indelibly public role that banks play, and that they were intended to play, since their very introduction into North America. The Reformers movement equally reminds us that monetary systems that appear resistant to change, may yet be subject to contestation. Faced with the legal inability to make the existing monetary order more accountable, the Reformers turned to establishing their own institution. While short-lived and little-known today, the Bank’s example and influence lived on through its participants to influence Canada’s future monetary order. Similarly, today, current public banking efforts (in, for example, California, New York, Massachusetts, & Pennsylvania) remind us that, regardless of how hard it might be to see at times, there is always the possibility of alternatives to elite, private, and for-profit means of issuing money. Times like this, looking to the past may help us to more clearly see our present, and to imagine our future.

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Postmodern Money Theory! (Part 2)

In Part 2 of Superstructure’s “Postmodern Money Theory!” series, Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson explore B.S. Johnson’s postmodern novella, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973), which self-consciously weaves money and accounting into the very fabric of literary form. Regarded as brokering a broader transition between modernism and postmodernism, Johnson paradoxically conceded that “to tell stories is to tell lies,” while remaining committed to the revelatory “truthfulness” of literary form. In Christy Malry’s Own Double-Entry, Johnson tells the metafictional story of a disaffected young man, Christie Malry. Throughout the book, Malry applies the principles of double-entry bookkeeping in response to injustices in his life, “crediting” himself against society in an increasingly violent manner for perceived “debits.” 

Our co-hosts trace Christy Malry’s multifaceted approach to accounting, which cuts across questions of money, narrativity, enumeration, and reckoning in economic, ethical, historical, and even biblical senses. Affirming the text’s defamiliarizing insights, Rob and Scott unpack how Johnson’s satirical and estranging use of language unsettles dominant visions of money as a merely finite and located particular. At the same time, however, they also weigh the book’s problems and limits, flagging Johnson’s unquestioned white masculine framing of accounting, for example, despite his socialistic aspirations and attentiveness to form’s social restrictions. Stay tuned for the third installment of “Postmodern Monetary Theory!,” in which Rob and Scott further plumb Christy Malry’s Own Double-Entry for its postmodern lessons about the aesthetics and politics of credit and debt.

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Mikhail Bakhtin Pt. 1 – Carnival Laughter & Grotesque Realism

Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) inaugurates the first of a lecture series on the work and ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin. Drawing parallels with right wing attacks on contemporary drag performance and ballroom traditions, Will discusses Bakhtin’s analysis of the Medieval carnival humor, its manifestation in Renaissance literature, and its unique aesthetics of what he terms “grotesque realism.” Quotations are drawn from the Introduction and first chapter of Bakhtin’s text, Rabelais and His World (1965), with additional references made to Siegfried Kracauer’s 1927 essay “The Mass Ornament” and Marx’s Capital. 


Music: “Lilac” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.

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Postmodern Money Theory! (Part 1)

Launching a new Superstructure series, Rob Hawkes joins Scott Ferguson to explore the ins and outs of “postmodernism.” Postmodernism is a heterogenous and disputed regime of aesthetics and theory that arose in the second half of the 20th century. Dated to midcentury, but promulgated as a discourse from the 1970’s to 1990’s,  postmodernism is known primarily for its preoccupations with multiplicity, difference, surface, language, image, constructedness, reflexivity, and the integration of art and everyday life. Decades past its heyday, postmodernism today frequently serves as a pejorative for reactionary critics of social and ecological justice and aesthetic diversity. In their conversation, Rob and Scott critique noxious voices both outside and inside of today’s Modern Monetary Theory movement, who similarly wield postmodernism as epithet to discredit and police money’s contestable public capacities to provide for all. Our co-hosts dismantle such false zero-sum invectives by weighing the historical nuances and semantic surfeits of terms including modernity, modernism, postmodernity and postmodernism. As a result, this episode prepares the groundwork for a forthcoming engagement with B.S. Johnson’s postmodern novella, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973), which self-consciously weaves money and accounting into the very fabric of literary form. Check out the second installment of this series here.


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Superstructure 34 – Italy and International Fascism

Co-hosts Naty T Smith (@orangeasm), Will Beaman (@agoingaccount), and Charlotte Tavan (@moltopopulare) discuss the rise to power of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni near the 100th anniversary of Mussolini’s March on Rome to frame the international moment and the ascendance of red-brown tendencies, the urgencies of anti- fascism, and the shape of contemporary reaction. Through the example of Meloni’s election, they explore how monetary austerity, anti migrant tactics, fascist nostalgia, and other ideologies of replacement, are at stake in this global conjuncture.

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Political Economy of ‘The Rehearsal’ (New Transcript!)

Cohosts Charlotte Tavan (@moltopopulare) and Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) discuss the reflexive and imaginative political economy of Nathan Fielder’s HBO series, The Rehearsal. The show points towards an apophatic ethics of social provisioning, presenting an ambiguous portrait of care, production, and human agency. This portrait remains irreducibly and collective, in excess of the powers and intentions that constitute social belonging.

Transcript: Mike Lewis

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Transcript

Will Beaman  00:00

Hey everyone, this is Will Beaman from Superstructure podcast and Money On The Left Editorial Collective. And I have with me my Money On The Left collaborator Charlotte Tavan.

Charlotte Tavan  00:24

Hi! Hi Will, good morning.

Will Beaman  00:27

Good morning. Yeah, it is. That’s very nice of you. Because it is morning for me, and I think it’s almost midnight for you.

Charlotte Tavan  00:37

Yeah, but I had a nice nap. So I’m letting you have priority because I feel worse for you.

Will Beaman  00:43

There’s like a sliver of the day that we’re both awake. And yet somehow we do find a lot of time to talk.

Charlotte Tavan  00:52

Yeah, we’ve attempted this recording a lot of times.

Will Beaman  00:58

So for listeners who are wondering why this is going so well, that’s actually no accident because we have rehearsed this exact Zoom call 13 times.

Charlotte Tavan  01:14

In different rooms of the house…

Will Beaman  01:17

With actors playing both of us. And the reason for this joke is that we’re talking about The Rehearsal.

Charlotte Tavan  01:30

Yeah. Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal.

Will Beaman  01:33

It’s a fascinating show, and several people have reached out to us since the show started, being like, “I hope that you’re going to do something about this, because this is like the most Money On The Left show ever.”

Charlotte Tavan  01:49

Oh, I didn’t know that. That’s so cool. That makes sense.

Will Beaman  01:51

Yeah. I exaggerated a little bit. I’ve had it twice. Two people have reached out. Okay.

Charlotte Tavan  01:58

That’s awesome.

Will Beaman  01:59

Yeah. And that’s half of the people that I know really. So.

Charlotte Tavan  02:03

Yeah.

Will Beaman  02:05

Yeah. And everyone else on Twitter is just a part of my rehearsal, like an unwilling member.

Charlotte Tavan  02:13

Yeah.

Will Beaman  02:15

But anyway…

Charlotte Tavan  02:16

You’re just things to me. You’re just little things in the computer.

Will Beaman  02:21

Yeah, exactly.

Charlotte Tavan  02:23

Part of my master plan.

Will Beaman  02:24

You’re all extras in my show. So let’s back up and talk about what this show is. I guess. Yeah. Like to contextualize it. Start with maybe like, who is Nathan Fielder? And what is Nathan For You? Which is the show that kind of comes before this? Because I think that in a lot of ways, The Rehearsal is commenting on Nathan For You. And I’ve seen a bunch of Nathan For You. But I think that you’re the resident Nathan Fielder scholar here.

Charlotte Tavan  03:06

Thank you.

Will Beaman  03:08

And I say that because I hope that he hears this and reaches out to you.

Charlotte Tavan  03:15

That would shake me to my core.

Will Beaman  03:22

I wasn’t sure if when Nathan reached out to me…

Charlotte Tavan  03:29

Yeah, exactly. I do love Nathan Fielder, though.

Will Beaman  03:35

Yeah, so who is Nathan Fielder?

Charlotte Tavan  03:37

So I actually had practice explaining this to somebody at a pub last night. So I think it’s gonna go well. So he’s a comedian from Toronto, Canada, who…I think he started off doing a lot of — he’s one of those people who, if you look on his YouTube channel, he’s kind of just kept everything up there for the past 15 years. And you can see that he’s been actually quite prolific and hard working for a long time. But he has this drive to make content constantly. Although he did have a bit of a break. But yeah, so his first show that he kind of hit it big with was called Nathan For You, which was a comedy program that was essentially a reality TV show format in which he gives advice to failing businesses, in and around LA, on how to succeed. As this character is him but like an exaggerated version of his own certain characteristics. He has an awkwardness and, you know, people are always wondering, like, “is he acting?” but yeah, it’s like a version of him. And he gives these businesses ridiculous advice, playing this straight man the whole time, and they think it’s a real reality TV show. They go along with it, and they end up doing and saying stupid things. And it’s really, really, really funny. But yeah, that show went for about four seasons and got bigger and bigger, and the budget just kept on getting bigger and bigger. And he just kept on attempting more and more ridiculous stunts, including commenting on the media itself and experimenting in ways that he could manipulate the media for business. Stuff like that.

Will Beaman  05:36

Yeah, so he’s very, I guess we could say, reflexive and perhaps neurotic about the medium itself, that he is kind of acting within.  And I think that there’s a parallel that we could draw here between something that happened earlier in the 20th century, with reference to, I mean, really, with a lot of experimental genres of film. But I think that what this borrows from, particularly, in the kind of category of experimentation is a documentary form that was responding to the kind of mainstream documentary forms of its day, which is Cinéma vérité. French for “cinema truth.” Basically, the idea of Cinéma vérité was the fact that a documentary was being created and wasn’t hidden from the characters or from the audience. Everything was above board and self aware. And, in a way, all of the paradoxical questions of that self awareness were like very heavy themes in it. So these questions that Nathan will bring up about “what is a reality show?”, basically are, I think, going to interact with the reality show form in a similar way. And a lot of the signatures of the reality show form, in particular the confessionals, actually do come from this longer history of vérité documentaries where people will stare directly into the camera, and the camera is supposed to be us. And that kind of implicates or raises the question of, how do we relate to the characters? Right, and how do we relate to this show as a production?

Charlotte Tavan  05:51

Yeah. Yeah. And Nathan is super aware of this, about how the medium forms the themes and experience of the viewer and how we see everything. It’s not just the content he’s creating, but how he’s just super, super aware of that and reflexive about that. And he’s always talking about it…Nathan For You is supposed to be like a sillier show than The Rehearsal, which we’ll go on to discuss, but yeah he’s super in tune with that, I feel.

Will Beaman  08:35

Yeah, absolutely. And so like you said, Nathan For You gets more self-reflective and more meta commentary on its own forms. The problems and paradoxes and questions of what it means to be making a show like that, because I think a lot of people responded by saying that the show is exploitative or…

Charlotte Tavan  09:05

Mean.

Will Beaman  09:05

Yeah, that it’s mean.

Charlotte Tavan  09:08

Which it kind of is. I love it but, yeah.

Will Beaman  09:09

Yeah, I mean, there is some of that for sure. And I think that one of his responses in Nathan For You that then also gets picked up in The Rehearsal and kind of different ways: in Nathan For You, he plays a very cringy version of himself where I think he’s at least implicating himself in whatever kind of embarrassment there is. But it’s an open question of does that cancel out the kind of dickish-ness of the form, right? And I think that, yeah, that kind of increasing self-reflexiveness, it sort of hits its peak at this episode, the last episode of Nathan For You: Finding Frances, which you’ve seen a bunch of times. So, maybe we can…how does that go and how does it end? Because I think that that actually provides some continuity, then, for where The Rehearsal picks up.

Charlotte Tavan  10:03

So, “Finding Frances” was like a feature length special that was the final episode of Nathan For You in which one of the actors from–and this is really interesting, because it’s not a new guy–he takes one of the actors that he took the piss out of, in an earlier episode, who played like a Bill Gates impersonator that was meant to drum up popularity for a business. And he was really, really funny. So basically, Nathan got him back on the show, and apparently the premise is that he and Bill were recording, like DVD commentary, and then Bill Heath, the subject of “Finding Frances” has started talking about his high school sweetheart, who he has always been in love with and has never, ever forgotten about and swore that she’d loved him till she like till her grave, I think was the line. So Nathan is like, you know, maybe I should like, give a little back. How about like, I take this, like, nice old man Bill and I use all of the money and resources that I have at my disposal, which he specifically says, to help him find his high school sweetheart. Like, what better use of my money and time. And so they kind of go on this journey together, “Finding Frances”, his high school sweetheart, and in typical Nathan Fielder fashion, he complicates everything. And there’s just layers upon layers of tricks and lies. And he has to pretend that they’re filming a sequel to the film “Mud” in a high school to get access to their archives. Yeah, he makes Bill Heath pretend he’s from the town of Dumas, and puts on a fake high school reunion and stuff like that. As the show goes on, Nathan starts to realize that he’s being lied to, do you know what I mean?

Will Beaman  12:48

Mhm.

Charlotte Tavan  12:49

It’s almost like he, being continually accused of manipulation and lying and exploitation, but then it starts to become apparent that Bill Heath is not being completely honest with him. And Nathan doesn’t have full control over where this project is going. And there are points where he’s just like, “I literally don’t know what I’m doing here. We’ve just been filming random things for a week. Like zoos and trees and stuff.”

Will Beaman  13:21

Yeah, and this is so interesting because I feel like one of these complications here is that Bill has his own life and his own agenda. And yet at the same time, he is and everybody is being enlisted into this TV show. Right? For Nathan. And there’s a kind of an interesting, I guess what you could call, there’s a kind of meta continuity here, across all of these kinds of different worlds, that people have that sort of deviate and then come back to each other, right? Where even thinking about who Bill is and what he discovers that his wife, he finds out, has been married. Or not his wife, sorry, his…

Charlotte Tavan  14:26

His fantasy wife. He did want to propose to her, they do rehearse that.

Will Beaman  14:31

Yeah. And so this fantasy is part of Bill’s interior world, but it can actually be blown up to huge significance in this medium. But, yeah, he finds that his fantasy wife, high school sweetheart, has been married, has had a bunch of kids, has kind of been out living her own life, and then the whole time she’s also been a character in his story. Right? And he’s a character in Nathan’s story. But I think, as we’re getting at with Nathan not having full control over this, it’s not just like a Russian nesting doll with Nathan’s story at the peak of it.

Charlotte Tavan  15:23

Yeah.

Will Beaman  15:24

Where, ultimately, there’s one master director. I think that part of how this is working in conjunction with that vérité style of implicating yourself in the world, is that the director of Nathan For You, and these kinds of problems and paradoxes of control and controlling people and exploiting people, aren’t inherently one directional. Right? They go across all of these different directions.

Charlotte Tavan  16:02

And like Bill Heath is an actor. I think that’s significant as well.

Will Beaman  16:06

Yeah, totally. So with this continuity across–and The Rehearsal will call these, basically, rehearsals. Right? But we could say in the case of Nathan For You, these continuities and discontinuities across episodes as to who is a character and who is not. You have these characters who come back. There’s a sense with Nathan situating himself, and all of these characters in our world, where he’s a documentary or a TV show maker, right. It’s sort of like, what is continuing if it’s not an episode, per se, but it is nevertheless something that is very social, right? And he continues to be caught up in these people’s lives, even when he’s not working.

Charlotte Tavan  17:12

Yeah, like Macy is a good example of that in that show, as well, in “Finding Frances.” Initially, he hires an escort to help Bill rehearse for meeting his fantasy high school sweetheart, but Nathan just ends up like, that becomes a relationship and dynamic in and of itself. It also has that like, she’s working, she’s an escort, he’s paying in cash, but at the same time, she’s part of the story on the show, but then she has her own other dynamics going on. And then like, why is this even part of the show? Like, yeah, it’s interesting.

Will Beaman  17:58

It’s really interesting. And I think that that is, one of the most, that part especially feels a lot like The Rehearsal. And so, maybe then jumping from Nathan For You to The Rehearsal. I think like Nathan For You, The Rehearsal, he sort of is starting from the same character, right? Where he is somebody who has a budget and a TV show to help people with real life problems. But instead of struggling businesses, the scope is just kind of life in general. Which is quite interesting. So I mean, how would you contrast Nathan For You with The Rehearsal? Or maybe how does The Rehearsal go further?

Charlotte Tavan  18:58

Well, I mean, the character Nathan is changed in The Rehearsal. I feel like that starts happening in “Finding Frances”: he kind of presents himself as like, Okay, now this is me being earnest. Like he’s still the same Nathan, but he’s being earnest and being more vulnerable, I guess.

Will Beaman  19:21

Yeah. There’s such an earnestness about it. And part of it, I think, is that there’s a kind of behind the scenes deconstruction of how the show is even being made in the first place where it almost at times feels like a documentary about its own making. A little bit where he’s like, you see him with all these computer monitors watching things that have been recorded or watching things that are being acted out at the same time. Part of the nature of this is that his character is a little bit more voyeuristic than, at least at first, there’s a separation between him and his clients, I guess where his clients are all preparing for difficult conversations or difficult life events. And the premise, basically, is that he, with his unlimited HBO budget, will create down to the detail, like absolute models and replicas of that situation and stage endless, what he calls rehearsals for that moment, with an actor playing whoever the characters need to talk to. And all along the way, he sort of is like the voice in the characters’ ears a little bit during the rehearsals. He’s not supposed to be part of The Rehearsal in the way that a director is not supposed to be part of a film, necessarily, but then of course, what we’re watching, he is a part of.

Charlotte Tavan  21:16

Yeah, he’s like a part of it. But again, he’s constantly reflexive about how he is part of it.

Will Beaman  21:24

Right

Charlotte Tavan  21:24

And constantly fucking up and then like saying, “Oh, I fucked up.” Which is something he kind of started doing in Nathan For You, as well. The example I always think about is the dumb Starbucks episode where he tries to help a failing coffee shop by saying, “let’s just imitate Starbucks.” And then he just ends up running a fake Starbucks for no reason. And then at the end, he’s kind of like, “Oh, I just realized that I got a bit caught up in myself here.” And like, “I’m sorry, bye.”

Will Beaman  22:05

Yeah, and that’s spoiler alert, I guess, for anybody who’s listening. Sorry, this came a little bit late into the episode, but, there will be spoilers. Because that sort of is the arc of The Rehearsal, in a way, where all of these rehearsals kind of continue and they compound on each other. And at one point, I think it’s episode three, they start to overlap with each other where he has multiple rehearsals going on at once. One of them is for this woman, Angela, whose original purpose was she wanted to see what it’s like to be a mother, and so they planned for over the course of several months to simulate a fake house and do child rearing. At first with an actor, but then the actor leaves. And then it ends. So Nathan steps in to play the father role, as well as the director role.

Charlotte Tavan  23:25

Although, was that guy an actor?

Will Beaman  23:30

Are any of them actors?

Charlotte Tavan  23:32

Yeah we don’t know. But he was enlisted via a dating app.

Will Beaman  23:37

No, you’re right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, totally. These are linguistic ambiguities, I say, covering my ass.

Charlotte Tavan  23:48

Yeah. They’re all actors.

Will Beaman  23:52

Because yeah, in the context of the show, they’re all actors. But then also, part of what’s going on here is that there’s some way where this kind of social anxiety and nervousness about your performance doesn’t have a starting and stopping point that’s clear, right? Like where Nathan will sometimes be director or sometimes an actor in the, like, relative to the show and the scene that he’s performing, he’ll insert himself in the scene sometimes as an actor, but regardless, his acting never stops. And it becomes very interesting when there’s multiple rehearsals, and he’s acting in one of them, because that sort of begins to resemble a work life balance, where he has his day job, which is this rehearsal that he’s not acting in, and then his home life. What’s the difference between being at home and being at work? While at home, it’s your own rehearsal versus when you’re at work it’s someone else’s rehearsal. Right? It’s this idea, and I think we’ll get into this: it sort of is playing with the boundaries between work and leisure in a way that I think is familiarizing these as being as hard and set as we think of them being. Anyway, we’ll get into that, because I think that acting is like a very interesting figure for this. But first, I guess, I want to take a step back and just talk about what’s been written about The Rehearsal so far. Because in preparing for this episode, obviously, one of the places to start besides watching the show is sampling all of the articles that have been written about it. And there have been a whole bunch, and I think we only really want to talk about a few, but I think that these are emblematic of the range that we saw. Yeah. So do you want to start with the first one?

Charlotte Tavan  26:21

Okay, so this is kind of on the super, super critical, shitty end of the…

Will Beaman  26:32

Yeah, this guy hates the show.

Charlotte Tavan  26:34

This guy really hates the show, and we’re not entirely sure that he watched the whole show, either.

Will Beaman  26:40

It definitely seems at points like, the first few episodes were viewed, and then there’s a kind of a hand wavy thing at the end that’s like, and for the rest of the show. And it’s after Episode Two, and it’s one sentence at the end.

Charlotte Tavan  26:57

Totally. So the title is, Richard Brody: “The Cruel and Arrogant Gaze of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal,” which I think you know, that gives you an idea of like…

Will Beaman  27:12

The entire thesis…

Charlotte Tavan  27:16

And that’s like, basically what it says. “As a filmmaker, Fielder displays interest, not in any physical process unfolding over time…

Will Beaman  27:25

Which is exactly what TV is supposed to be about: capturing a physical process unfolding in time. That’s actually like a funny…that sounds like a very experimental documentary form.

Charlotte Tavan  27:41

Yeah, I know. Just real time, like a CCTV camera.

Will Beaman  27:47

Like city symphonies or something. Yeah.

Charlotte Tavan  27:50

But yeah…

Will Beaman  27:51

You wrote in parentheses “what does this mean?”

Charlotte Tavan  27:56

That was my main comment. Yeah, “he revels in his own thoughts as he tailors the conditions of his subjects’ lives to fit his storytelling.” Which again, did you watch the show? Like, that’s just the opposite of what is happening in the show, I feel. Can I read another?

Will Beaman  28:17

Yeah, please, let’s jump around and get a real sampling.

Charlotte Tavan  28:25

This is my favorite bit. So this guy seems to have like, a.) an idea that this TV show is supposed to be a documentary. Like an actual very serious inquiry. Which it is, but like…

Will Beaman  28:45

It definitely can be read as a documentary, but I think he means it in like, he’s looking at like…

Charlotte Tavan  28:52

David Attenborough, right?

Will Beaman  28:52

Like, the most expository mode of documentary.

Charlotte Tavan  28:56

Yeah.

Will Beaman  28:56

And then being like, “this show is messing up at being a documentary.”

Charlotte Tavan  29:03

Yeah, exactly. My really specific and strange idea of what a documentary should be and how I want to be made to think about things. This is an example of that, “Angela presents herself as a devout Christian. She displays an obsession with the dangers of satanic cults and gives voice to some remarkable conspiracy theories regarding the power of the devil in daily life. Yet his gimlet-eyed dubiousness about these ideas remains retentive and incurious, without any probing of causes and sources, and without the scathing political satire of Borat and subsequent movie films.”

Will Beaman  29:49

I’ll admit this is no Borat.

Charlotte Tavan  29:55

It’s definitely no Borat 2.

Will Beaman  30:03

Jesus Christ. Yeah, I mean, I don’t know, he’s seething. Like he hates it so much.

Charlotte Tavan  30:10

Really angry.

Will Beaman  30:11

Gimlet-eyed dubiousness. Well, I just looked up what gimlet means, and it’s an eye with a piercing stare. So that sounded less like, I don’t know…

Charlotte Tavan  30:26

Gimlet sounds like a goblin. Like a little Goblin.

Will Beaman  30:31

His beady little eyes.

Charlotte Tavan  30:36

But it’s still, yeah, it’s not very nice anyway.

Will Beaman  30:41

Yeah. And, you know, we should say that, I think, at a very superficial level, he’s drawing on a theme in film studies which is the potential violence and sadism of the camera. And not just of the camera, but of the voice of the film. And this is a problem that cinéma vérité documentaries are very concerned with. You can contrast it at the extreme end with like a Ken Burns documentary where you have this kind of voice of God narration that it’s very clear what the preferred reading of the film is. And really, I think that there’s a way to talk about cinema history in general that is sort of wrestling with, you know, not to be precious or exaggerate about it, but like, the trauma of being hit over the head again, and again, with like a very codified way of making films where it’s supposed to be very, very clear and unambiguous what you’re supposed to think. So in the documentary form, that’s, you know, Ken Burns “In the Civil War…” But also, you can think back to classical Hollywood, right? Where what kind of forms is the kind of best practices in Hollywood that are then enforced by codes and regulations, and the kind of monopolistic structure of the industry that kind of gets broken in the 60s when people have handheld cameras, and they can kind of go off on their own and do, well, cinéma vérité documentaries, among other things. But all of these conventions were about, they would say, hand holding and making it legible and accessible to the audience, right? Audiences aren’t supposed to be confused by what they’re watching. It’s supposed to be very clear who’s a good guy, who’s a bad guy. The voice of the film is very unambiguous.

Charlotte Tavan  33:11

By leaving it ambiguous, you open it up to the devil or something.

Will Beaman  33:16

Well, right. And it’s so funny that you say that, because this really becomes kind of codified and kind of stuck this way during the Prohibition era. So there really is a moralistic and like Christian language around. Yeah, like, especially thinking of these city centers where, what are these lower and middle class people watching? There’s an anxiety that they’re going to be corrupted or something like that.

Charlotte Tavan  33:51

We were talking about criticisms of Euphoria before as being like that.

Will Beaman  34:00

Yeah.

Charlotte Tavan  34:03

“Gimlet-eyed dubiousness.”

Will Beaman  34:08

That gimlet-eyed bitch! But, yeah, right. There was a New Yorker review. It’s always The New Yorker. This is also The New Yorker that we’re reading from. I don’t think it was…this one is Richard Brody. But I think the last one was Naomi Fry who also has a Nathan For You review that we’re not going to read because this one is just kind of more cartoonish-ly mean. But, yeah. I mean, she takes issue with Euphoria being like, “I can’t tell what the motivations of these characters are, so they messed up. So I hate that.” There is kind of that impulse here a little bit like, “I don’t know, he’s just letting things unfold rather than telling you.”

Charlotte Tavan  35:11

Yeah, but then he also complains that he’s telling you what to think via the voiceover

Will Beaman  35:16

Yeah that in doing so, it is the ultimate in exploitation.

Charlotte Tavan  35:23

Yeah. Yeah. Just like taking issue with him not like trying to explore Angela’s Christian fundamentalist beliefs in a serious way. And that is just so funny.

Will Beaman  35:39

Yeah, I mean, it really does become such a theme. And actually, like, I think that she has one of the best lines in the series, which you see this at the beginning of one of the days in the house, where she’s praying, and she says something like, “God, you are guiding this rehearsal. It’s not Nathan. It’s not any of us, it’s you.”

Charlotte Tavan  36:13

“And let Nathan know that no matter what happens, it’s you in the end that’s guiding this,” and like, yeah.

Will Beaman  36:19

Yeah. And, obviously, I’m sure she means this in the kind of Christian fundamentalist way. But I do think that there’s kind of a, I think, from the point of view of Nathan, including it in the show, there is like a mystical borderline theological argument that is being made here about no rehearsal, or no action or no camera can fully dictate everything in the world.

Charlotte Tavan  36:59

Yeah.

Will Beaman  37:00

Or you could think of this with, I mean, this language of Nathan’s cruel and arrogant gaze. The spectatorial gaze is like superficially drawing on this idea of the cinematic male gaze.

Charlotte Tavan  37:18

As opposed to Borat.

Will Beaman  37:22

Yeah, Borat, which is the people’s gaze. Oh, my God, actually Borat as like shitty faux populism in contrast to this is really funny to think about. That he would say that Borat is, it’s being directly subversive in some way where this is like, “what is Nathan doing?”  “It’s not even clear who he hates.” That’s the main question. Yeah so this history of thinking about and criticizing the dominant preferred reading in a film, and how different elements of film form conspire to foist that on you, the viewer, is like a long running theme in film theory. In a past episode, even, we’ve talked about an article about the cinematic male gaze by Laura Mulvey, and this gets picked up by bell hooks. Sort of the argument, also, is that this is reinforcing a kind of spectatorial gaze that’s biased in the favor of the cinematic gaze, which is a patriarchal gaze, right? So the spectatorial position is male coded. And in a certain way, it’s meant to shore up an anxious masculinity, that in order to feel the full degrees of its freedom and independence and ability to do whatever it wants, needs to make a show of manipulating and punishing and objectifying whatever’s on screen. And certainly, I would say that that’s being taken up as an anxiety in the show. But I do think that this article is drawing on it very superficially. It seemed very much in danger of saying the essence of a camera and the essence of a gaze, is this, like, phallic penetration or something. And I don’t think that that’s, you know, I mean, both Mulvey and especially bell hooks, also write about counter gazes, and other viewing positions. And these can be articulated as being like a counter phallic gaze, or something, and there definitely is…I feel like that’s a very RadFem reading of it. But there also is just a kind of a re-situating the gaze in a world of gazes, right? And these don’t have to, you know, maybe there’s a different relationship to viewing than mastery in the first place.

Charlotte Tavan  37:47

Yeah, yeah. It’s one of those shows where once you finish the whole thing, and then you realize that you didn’t even have mastery over how you were even spectating it in the first place, I feel. I rewatched it, and there were moments in it that I feel like have to be intentional, or regardless, there were moments in it where I was, like, having seen the last episode, now rewatching this I have so many different feelings about it. I mean, you kind of get that with a lot of that kind of media, but like, yeah. Spoiler alert, the final episode about this kid who didn’t have a dad or a father figure in his life ends up like forming a real bond with him and doesn’t really seem to actually understand the concept of acting or realness, or fakeness. And gets upset and feels abandoned. And Nathan kind of has to reject this child, in a way, or in the way that the child wants, and they’re just like…

Will Beaman  41:33

Right, yeah, that’s really well put.

Charlotte Tavan  41:35

When you really watch it after having seen what it’s like, you watch scenes and you see that child before he becomes more of a serious subject in the final episode. Because this child is one of the child actors that is hired to play Angela’s son.

Will Beaman  41:55

Yeah, there’s like a rotating cast of 12 child actors throughout this whole arc.

Charlotte Tavan  42:00

There are like hundreds. Well, there’s like dozens. There’s babies to teenagers to adults.

Will Beaman  42:13

There’s a funny parallel there with the dumb Starbucks episode where the premise of the dumb Starbucks episode of Nathan For You that you know, “we couldn’t copy Starbucks, unless this was categorized as a parody. So technically, this is a museum.” And I feel like there’s a similar, playful, like, Huh, that’s a legal problem that’s getting in the way of life. And in this case, it’s literally child labor laws. Allowing a child actor to perform in four hour increments, which means that for every single day, he has to have like six kid actors.

Charlotte Tavan  43:01

Yeah, he’s got like, a fake baby, like a robot baby that goes from a certain time that babies can’t work past that he controls the robot baby. And then he hires a guy to sit up all night and press a button to make the baby cry that would mirror the crying of a real baby, I think, that they’re also observing. It’s crazy. It’s so good. But yeah.

Will Beaman  43:29

Yeah, and this is a different temporality and like a different rhythm, but it almost does kind of remind me of, I mean, Nathan, literally is an employer, or at least he’s questioning whether he’s an employer, right? He’s like, what does it mean to be an employer in the same way? Like, what does it mean to be a director? What does it mean to be an actor? But employers, if you zoom out, maybe not, maybe they don’t switch actors or, you know, switch employees, like three times a day. But, you know, obviously, people move around from job to job. And institutions nevertheless continue to continue to last, right? So, if you were to look at any other business, which I think is a central theme here, is the production of a TV show is kind of analogized to all forms of production, and kind of all societal forms. And so, in the context of something that’s not a TV show, we kind of expect that all institutions are run in an ongoing way by a whole host of people who come and go. This is another example of, like, it’s sped up and that makes it funny. But there are a lot of these kinds of uncanny semblances that I think are really interesting. Yeah. It’s like the fake bar that he builds in the first episode, he actually just opens and runs as a bar in the end.  Yeah.

Charlotte Tavan  44:24

In a building and then creates a little tunnel and puts signage out, and the public just walk in and start drinking in this bar that is just running now like.

Will Beaman  45:27

Yeah, so I think we wanted to take kind of a Goldilocks approach here where, you know, this article  was too mean. And we’ll get to the one that was just right. Not really just right. But like, to the edge of, then, where I think we want to step in.

Charlotte Tavan  45:45

Pretty good.

Will Beaman  45:46

Step in pretty good, yeah. To use another HBO phrase. I’m sorry to the listeners for us. Yeah. So this next article, this was in Vulture, and it’s titled, “Nathan Fielder’s Dazzling, Horrifying Trial Run of Reality” is by Kathryn VanArendonk. So this review, unlike the last one, at least sees that something self reflective is going on here that’s not just a kind of enlisting other people in his own kind of cruel gaze, or whatever. But still, this is like a pretty negative review where she writes “By episode four, when Fielder turns the whole thing into an unending spiral of self consciousness,  The Rehearsal starts to look like a stunning display of narcissism more than anything else. It is solipsism disguised as its opposite. How could that not be repellent?” And then later, she says, “but there is at least one level on which The Rehearsal is unquestionably commenting on something beyond the strange recesses of Fielder’s mind. Everything Fielder does is an unadorned version of how all reality TV works. We’re uncomfortable because we can see the mechanics of it, but nothing is actually different. People consent to play along with the production, often built as a social experiment for their possible game. Participants of Love is Blind, don’t know how they’ll be edited. Real Housewives give their consent, but how much power do they have to say no once their lives are warped by the franchise? People on The Circle sign up knowing they’ll be manipulated. Does that make the manipulation okay?” And I think that this is already miles ahead of the last article in a lot of ways. Because I do think that this resemblance is really important. And she’s definitely picking up on something in the show.

Charlotte Tavan  48:11

And yeah, and that was even the same in Nathan For You, he’s trying to expose the real mechanics behind television all the time. That’s part of what’s so fun about it to watch, as well.

Will Beaman  48:27

Yeah, and I think that your description of the “Finding Frances” episode, I think, gets this across really well that these problems of power and control over how this will go and consent and like all of these things, they don’t just start and stop in a very clean way with the director. Right? Because in that show, Nathan realizes that he’s being lied to.

Charlotte Tavan  49:06

Totally, Yeah.

Will Beaman  49:08

And he feels manipulated in some way. But I don’t think that the point is to just flatten and level it and say that, “Well, we’re all manipulating each other. So everyone’s a sinner,” you know, our infinite Liz Brunig rejoinder.

Charlotte Tavan  49:27

No, and Nathan never says that either. He doesn’t really pose himself as a victim either in these sins. Not that I really like that language. But yeah, he’s just saying this is happening. And he’s always making a point of showing people calling him a liar. And you know how he responds to that.

Will Beaman  49:53

Yeah, he’s fixated on how inescapable that danger feels.

Charlotte Tavan  49:58

Yeah.

Will Beaman  49:58

I think. And that is sort of the structure of the show, a little bit, is trying out every possible variation or way that something could go and then realizing that even then, you really don’t know.

Charlotte Tavan  50:17

I find that sentence like…”Real Housewives give their consent, but how much power do they have to say no once their lives are warped by the franchise?” It’s like, I see what they’re saying, and some reality TV shows are quite harmful to people. But what does that mean? Like no one has the power to say no when their lives are warped by anything in that way.

Will Beaman  50:44

Right. Exactly. Exactly. And that is sort of, I think, why this goes beyond just reality TV. And I think that he’s showing us not only how all reality TV works, but also I think how all institutions and life work.

Charlotte Tavan  51:09

Yeah. He’s literally going like, Oh my God, did I permanently emotionally damage a child?

Will Beaman  51:20

Yeah. Which then is him basically being a parent? Right?

Charlotte Tavan  51:26

Yeah, exactly.

Will Beaman  51:27

Concerned about whether or not, you know, did I just mess up?

Charlotte Tavan  51:33

I think that’s what the Real Housewives thing reminds me of. That’s like, as a parent, I’d find sentences like that chillin like shit happens, basically.

Will Beaman  51:48

Yeah, and I mean, God knows, it’s easy for parents to wring their hands about, you know, did I make the right choice? And life choices, if you’re a parent, become charged with people depending on you directly. But I think that there’s a way where that is being sort of extended, in all these kinds of heterogeneous ways to not just being a parent, but being a friend. Being an employee. Being like, both in and out of what we normally think of as this kind of hard distinction between work and leisure, where you are either on your own time, so it’s self care, right, and everything originates from you. Or, you’re alienated from that, and instead, you exist solely for your boss, instead. And I don’t think that in this show…I think that that’s being complicated, rather than refuted fully, right. Because, in a certain way, there’s nothing but anxiety about these power disparities, so it’s sort of the opposite of saying that they don’t matter. It’s like, actually, it’s the only thing that matters, it’s all we can think about. But it goes so much in that direction, that this awareness of power disparities and responsibility for how you will warp other people’s lives or impact other people, continues well beyond any one rehearsal, right? Even when you’re alone, and you’re reflecting, there’s a way where that reflection is a social reflection, right? You’re reflecting on how you are in your life with other people, right? I don’t think that we have a form of going through life that’s not minimally self aware, and self reflexive.

Charlotte Tavan  54:17

Which is acting, as well. I feel like.

Will Beaman  54:22

Yeah, totally.

Charlotte Tavan  54:25

Socially aware of what you’re doing, and in relation to the context and scenario, like that’s everything that we do, really.

Will Beaman  54:36

Yeah, totally. Yeah. And so like, is acting just anxiety? Or at least it’s an anxious action. Right? We can…like it’s interesting even though these words are so kind of similar, but one is more open ended and the other is more narrow.

Charlotte Tavan  54:57

Yeah, it’s just like having concern.

Will Beaman  54:59

Yeah, yeah, having concern, and there’s a sense of like, obviously, we resent having concerns that were not given to us in a fair way. You know, I used to have a job that I hated. I resented being concerned about all the stupid shit that I had to be concerned about throughout the day. But that’s different, I think, from resenting the fact of having to be concerned with things in the first place. But I do think that, certainly within like, a lot of leftist political traditions, you know, we’re Money On The Left, so we think about these kinds of things there. There certainly is a tradition of seeing that dependence and that concern as if it comes before individual consent in some way, then that means it’s reducible to violence. And that means that it’s bad, right? Or at least the benchmark, the ideal situation, is no one has to be concerned about anyone else unless they decide, oh, it would be fun to care about others. Whereas, I think that what you’re articulating about acting here, as this kind of ongoing reflection of yourself in the world, precedes caring about any particular thing, right? It precedes any one rehearsal.

Charlotte Tavan  56:44

I just like the quote in this article, which is like, “The Rehearsal starts to look like a stunning display of narcissism more than anything else. It is solipsism disguised as its opposite.” Like, I just think that that’s so the wrong way around.

Will Beaman  57:02

Yeah.

Charlotte Tavan  57:03

Like, it’s completely the flip of that. It’s like a reflection disguised as narcissistic solipsism. Do you know what I mean? For comedic effect, occasionally, because it is also, you know, designed to make you laugh and be self-deprecating.

Will Beaman  57:23

Yeah, it’s not just that this is the inside of Nathan’s mind. It also, by analogy, is the inside of a lot of people’s minds, or at least these are kind of the problems.

Charlotte Tavan  57:35

Alright, so, the next article, and this is the not-just-right, but like pretty good.

Will Beaman  57:43

Yeah. Right. Which is as good as we can get from rehearsing.

Charlotte Tavan  57:47

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And this is by Alissa Wilkinson, and it’s called “What Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal Says About Us.” And so this article, kind of drawing on the work of Jewish philosopher called Martin Buber who worked with these concepts called “I-it” and “I-Thou”. Basically getting to the heart of subjectivities, how we experience the world versus like our relationship with things in the world. What can the media do with that? She’s kind of making the argument. Do you want to explain the concepts of I-it and I-Thou?

Will Beaman  58:32

Yeah, well, we can read the paragraph. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Charlotte Tavan  58:41

Yeah, thank you.

Will Beaman  58:43

Okay, now we’re recording. Yeah, so Alissa Wilkinson writes, “Buber — a not-so-incidentally Jewish philosopher” just as Nathan is also a Jewish philosopher, on our reading, too. “is probably best known for his work I and Thou, which has exerted tremendous influence on 20th-century thinkers and which marries existentialism and theology. I have to oversimplify to a fault here, but in essence, Buber says human experience is embodied in two pairs of words: “I-it” and “I-Thou.” These distinguish between the way we experience the world and the way we enter into relationships in it. (In his framework, this all eventually points toward God.)” Which is, I think, also hinted at in this show.

Charlotte Tavan  59:36

Yeah, this is something I’m only thinking about now that we’re recording this, but yeah, the show is very theological.

Will Beaman  59:44

Yeah. And it’s theological in a way that’s very, like multiple religions. I think that he’s, and not in a way that is like flattening, that is like so materializing theology that the questions don’t even matter and it’s all just like a completely horizontal plane of like cultures or something. Because I think that he’s also teasing out how these different, you could say, religious voices are kind of, you know, that are in dialogue and like a fraught dialogue are kind of approaching similar questions. But yeah, so she writes, “A layer of human existence takes place in what he terms “I-it,” which is how I experience everything that I can observe and describe and put into a category in the world: the aforementioned tree, the aforementioned barista, and quite possibly people in my life as well. They are objects that I experience as a means to my own end. I look at it. I project onto it my feelings, my assumptions, the things I am sure I know about them. I am, literally, objectifying them.” In some ways, I think, this is just the same argument as that first article, right? The I-it thing, which is “The Cruel and Arrogant Gaze of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal.” Where just the act of putting a camera on something is this kind of looking, and…

Charlotte Tavan  1:01:31

Pure exploitation and…

Will Beaman  1:01:34

Yeah, objectification. But she seems to kind of distinguish between that and another way of relating which, according to this philosopher is I-thou, and she seems to associate that with in person relationships that have the complexity of intimacy, and all of these things that a camera can’t possibly capture. So she writes, “Then there is the “I-Thou” layer, which is when I have a relationship with not an object, but another subject — an entity that isn’t there to fulfill my objectives and goals, but into whom I am asked to invest myself. This requires intimacy, mutuality, openness, and, yes, empathy. To put it in Jamison’s terms, it is where the border between you and I may be crossed, where we can no longer project onto one another because our relationship is dynamic, allowing for each of us to defy categorization and be who we are. You are whatever category you identify with, but that is not all you are.” And, I mean, on on the one hand, this sounds a lot better, and I think what we want to say, but it strikes me as a bit odd that, as we’ll see, she kind of goes through and basically identifies the show as just showing a bunch of I-it relationships that fail to meet that kind of higher level of I-thou. And I guess it’s odd to me, because it’s not like when you’re hanging out with somebody in person, you have that kind of full mastery or identification with them as a subject, either, right?

Charlotte Tavan  1:03:29

No, or even the people that you know the best, people project onto you and yeah.

Will Beaman  1:03:36

So I think what we want to get at here, and I think our reading of the show, is that that kind of projection, on the one hand, is unavoidable. But on the other hand, it doesn’t necessarily lead to this kind of stupid objectification. And you would think that she was getting here because at the end, she says, “you are whatever category you identify with, but that is not all you are.” Right? That there can be multiple layers of projected meanings and categories and things like that. But I think that she’s thinking in terms of some kind of absolute immediate subjectivity. That is not abstract because it’s a little bit like it’s an agreement between two parties. You know, that’s like, doesn’t involve a camera or like a third party infrastructure or anything like that. Doesn’t involve a pre existing system of categories and languages and stuff. It’s just two people who see and understand each other kind of perfectly. And it’s just odd to me, because I don’t think that that really…

Charlotte Tavan  1:04:59

Oh, yeah. I’ve got so many relationships like that. I’m next level, we don’t even talk anymore. We just like to look into each other’s eyes.

Will Beaman  1:05:13

Yeah, well to avoid that, we close our eyes and just touch our brains. It’s a little bit like AirDrop, except it’s purely from the base biological.

Charlotte Tavan  1:05:32

Yeah.

Will Beaman  1:05:33

Yeah. So to substantiate that characterization of the rest of the article, she writes about Nathan’s attempts to try to understand people’s emotions and what makes them tick, she writes, “But all he manages to do is look at them as fitting into categories that he can relate to through another category. Director and actor. Co-parent and co-parent. Teacher and student. Daddy and Adam. Mommy and Remy.” And it’s especially odd to me that mommy and Remy is the last one because I know a lot of parent-child relationships in person that are Mommy and Remy.

Charlotte Tavan  1:06:18

Yeah, the thing is everyone’s like, “Oh, he tries to do this, but he fails.” But I think the point is that to achieve I-thou and stuff, all it is, is trying. Do you know what I mean?

Will Beaman  1:06:33

Yes, exactly.

Charlotte Tavan  1:06:34

All it is, is like what we’ve discussed about what is the definition of acting: it’s just being conscious about and having concern for another person’s subjectivities. Do you know what I mean? It’s not something you achieve. It’s not something that you can achieve. It’s just something that you try to achieve because that is how we make human social connections?

Will Beaman  1:07:01

Yeah, it’s something you take responsibility for trying to do, right, which is what I version is not doing, right. That’s not taking responsibility for trying, that’s just kind of the illusion of complete mastery. Right, which then needs to be violently shored up through the male gaze and blah, blah, blah. And so getting to the end of the article, then she writes: “I hate to say the thesis of The Rehearsal is to escape screens and touch grass a little more, but I don’t think it’s not. Nathan looks at us in the poster, but he isn’t looking at us; he’s looking at a camera. And we’re looking at a picture on a screen. He can’t see us; we can’t see him. It’s when the I-it transmutes to I-Thou that real emotions start to flow. “Could it be,” he says aloud in the finale, “that the path to forgiveness lies in someone else’s eyes?” And it just is odd. Again, it’s odd, because I feel like she clearly is getting an I-Thou identification out of the show. This is absolutely like she’s speaking to what his kind of complicated intentions might be, but then also beyond what the intentions are, whether or not they’re failing or succeeding, right, which is exactly what I-It doesn’t do. Right. It’s that, like you said, trying, right, that kind of contemplation.

Charlotte Tavan  1:08:44

And that’s all he does in the show. That’s like, the entire point of the show. It’s like, he’s constantly changing his mind, changing categorizations, learning new things about himself that he impacts, you know, learning new things by himself that he realizes are changing. Like the way he does his projects.

Will Beaman  1:09:06

Yeah, and she’s right how she focuses on it being very negative, right? Like, he is showing, in a way, a process of failure in the sense of ruling out, you know, “well, that didn’t work. I’m gonna try this. Oh, but then I thought of this other thing that created a problem. So we had to hire another actor.” And this kind of increasingly complicated provisioning structure that has to keep being elaborated. But I think one of our central theses about the show is that maybe we can move now from the reviews to really get into, is that that negative approach isn’t just like a nihilistic like everything is meaningless kind of thing. Because, I mean, just, I feel like this can even, in some sense, just be empirical. Right? Like a lot of people derived a lot of meaning from this. Right? Like, it’s not really like a process of failure. Or if it is, it’s that failure fails. Right?

Charlotte Tavan  1:10:25

Yeah.

Will Beaman  1:10:27

People talk about language failing. But the thing is it also fails to fail completely. Right? Like there always is still an effort there that’s part of the world, right? And is additive in some way.

Charlotte Tavan  1:10:45

Yeah. And even if he fails an original goal, he creates a new goal. So it’s like…

Will Beaman  1:10:49

Yeah, right. Which in a certain way, I think is this kind of complicated relationship to infrastructures and rehearsals and this ambiguous question of who are the rehearsals for, right? Because we have, on the one hand, a replica of a restaurant or something where he will replay the same night over and over and over again, towards the specific end. But what does the restaurant do? Right, a restaurant opens at the same time every day, has the same peak hours, and kind of rehearses the same night over and over again. But it’s not towards a specific end. Or you could say it mediates a lot of people bringing their own specific ends into it. Which is this kind of idea of infrastructure without a kind of a positive object necessarily, that it exists solely for. Sometimes care is just an open ended question of infrastructure.

Charlotte Tavan  1:12:01

Yeah. And then it fills itself in a way like people came into the bar.

Will Beaman  1:12:08

Right, exactly. And they all came from different places, right. And they’re coming and going to do different things. And, yeah, and all of that.

Charlotte Tavan  1:12:18

If you build them, they will come.

Will Beaman  1:12:20

I mean, it is sort of, like…

Charlotte Tavan  1:12:22

That’s not great business advice, but like, you know…

Will Beaman  1:12:25

Well, he doesn’t make a lot of Craigslist ads, doesn’t he? Isn’t that sort of what the show is doing? Yeah, and the show itself is an invitation for us, I think, to watch it a certain way. We can watch it in the I-it way and be like, “oh, this is just pure sadism watching people be objectified by a camera” and “this is just like watching Jackass” or something, but we also are invited to take the show seriously, at the same time, right? Like, if you build something ambiguous with a lot of different layers of meaning, people will kind of play around in that.

Charlotte Tavan  1:13:19

Oh, yeah, and I’ve definitely seen some responses on Twitter that I feel are enjoying it on a different level. I’m not saying it’s lower, I’m just saying it’s different.

Will Beaman  1:13:32

“Oh, look at that one. She’s so stupid. Oh, wow look at that. She’s doesn’t even know she’s on a TV show.” That’s my gawking onlooker voice. But yeah, so maybe to frame the kind of different themes that we want to get into. I think I really want to just spell out this negative approach of ruling out a bunch of things without positing a specific point. Right, which I think is where that article kind of falls short, in my opinion. Because there’s not a specific thing that the rehearsals are for, or there’s not a specific read on a character or there’s not like a specific object, that must mean that the rehearsals are showing that no matter how much you try, it’s meaningless.

Charlotte Tavan  1:14:45

Yeah, like he didn’t go in with some idea of what TV should be or what relationships should be. He just went with it and decided to find out. Which is not nihilistic. It’s like exploratory.

Will Beaman  1:15:08

Right, that’s such a good word. Yeah. And so tying this to an earlier Money On The Left content, especially from our collaborator, Scott Ferguson, has talked a lot about the negative or apophatic mode. Apophatic being kind of a theological corollary of negative as he’s using it. But so basically, this idea of a negative or apophatic mode of criticism is, you know, this gets contrasted with basically a positive or theological kind of corollary of this is cataphatic tradition, which is about basically stating positive truths. Right. So the show is about this. Whereas the negative method is more just about showing what it’s not over and over again, and sort of, in philosophy, I mean, the kind of very classic example of somebody who performs a negative methodology would be Socrates, right? Who likes to have these long conversations with people where he pretends that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about and he just asks them questions that show that they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Charlotte Tavan  1:16:29

Like Nathan

Will Beaman  1:16:30

Literally like Nathan.

Charlotte Tavan  1:16:31

Like he literally does that in his early shows. Do you know what I mean?

Will Beaman  1:16:35

Totally.

Charlotte Tavan  1:16:35

He’s just like, “oh, so like, you drink your grandson’s piss? Okay.”

Will Beaman  1:16:41

Yeah, that’s so funny. Because probably there was like a half hour of build up to where that would make sense in the show to like, ask somebody.

Charlotte Tavan  1:16:52

Yeah.

Will Beaman  1:16:56

But like, that’s what Socrates does, though. Like, 30 minutes into a dialogue, people are like, “I guess fish do live in the water.” And it’s like, “but do not ducks also live in water?” Whatever. But yeah, so like one reading of what Socrates is doing, which some of his contemporaries found really annoying, and they actually put him to death because he was so annoying. So there’s something to this probably. But he gets parodied by Aristophanes in this dialogue, The Clouds, as like, basically just this nihilistic troll who is just asking a bunch of dumb questions and coming up with increasingly stupid answers for no reason other than just basically because he’s a grifter. That actually is what the argument against him is that he’s corrupting the young men of Athens. Right?

Charlotte Tavan  1:18:04

He’s a huckster!

Will Beaman  1:18:04

Yeah, he has followers that he’s fooling with his non-positive dialogues.

Charlotte Tavan  1:18:05

He’s like a 4chan Moderator.

Will Beaman  1:18:05

Jesus Christ. But yeah, whereas I think the idea for us, and certainly, without getting into Socrates, because that really was just like a throwaway example, but there’s a lot of different traditions that read different things into him. But for us, I think we want to say that, okay, yes, there’s not some kind of positive truth that the dialogues are leading to, but there is a sort of truth that he’s kind of playing out by showing that it can’t be named directly, right? Or maybe, if you can point to it, it can only be by analogy. And I think that one of the things that we want to say, which is going to come out in a lot of the different themes that we talk about in this show is that Nathan’s constant undermining his own premises, and adding things, and stuff like that, is building towards and especially as we get to Episode Six, it really does build towards some really deep truths. I’m thinking of this conversation that he has with this child’s mother because the child actor was in the show, and he worries that the child was taking the show too seriously, and he’s asking the mom “but how do you know that the kid will be okay?” And she kind of gives us sort of a negative or like, not positive answer. Right? Which is just a kind of a “I just know,” and it’s sort of like “I have to know,” right? Because that’s what being a parent is.

Charlotte Tavan  1:20:15

I just find anyone who feels that show is nihilistic, I just find it hard to believe that they watched the final episode to be honest. It really becomes so earnest and he does state some positives, like, because he does, he says, “forgiveness is in the eyes of somebody else.”

Will Beaman  1:20:33

Yeah.

Charlotte Tavan  1:20:33

Like, he is trying to find meaning. That’s like, really obvious to me. I don’t know.

Will Beaman  1:20:39

Yeah. And interestingly, “forgiveness is in the eyes of somebody else” is like him saying, “I don’t know what forgiveness is.”

Charlotte Tavan  1:20:47

Exactly, yeah. It’s in the eyes of everyone.

Will Beaman  1:20:51

Like, he’s positing something that’s not positive. Right? It’s a risk, right? It’s like a risk that you have to take, because, ultimately, it’s not fully in your hands, right? Whether you’ll be forgiven, whether the kid will turn out okay, whether the rehearsal will go well.

Charlotte Tavan  1:21:12

Whether the claw takes your pants off and exposes you to a bunch of children…

Will Beaman  1:21:17

While a police officer stands by ready to arrest you, making you officially a child molester. But yeah, let’s talk about that kind of arc, maybe? Yeah. So the first thing that I think I wanted to talk about is this distinction between work and leisure that is kind of blurred in the show. And in The Rehearsal, it’s kind of interesting, also, going back to this idea of acting as being a sort of, like, middle position between working and not working. Right? You see in the show that Nathan’s internal monologue and his, I guess, external acting continues across all these different settings, and across all these different roles. So it’ll be, “cut. the scene is over.” And then we follow Nathan into the editing room, where he walks into a room that’s full of a bunch of people, and he’s all anxious, and he’s trying to manage a social situation, right?

Charlotte Tavan  1:22:33

He’s got that laptop in the sling thing that everyone seems to be kind of just like…in a lot of the articles I’ve seen, they’ve used the image of him standing in a busy room full of people with the laptop strapped to his chest thing, you know what I mean? Like, so they’re trying to like, I think visually, they’re making the argument like he’s the puppet master kind of guy. That’s something they’ve really focused on rather than like the other people. Do you know what I mean?

Will Beaman  1:23:12

Yeah, totally.

Charlotte Tavan  1:23:15

They’re ignoring the agent…all of the articles just are ignoring them, he’s trying to draw attention to the infrastructure of the show and the production and stuff. And I feel like a lot of the reviews just kind of ignore that. And they’re thinking about TV the wrong way. I don’t know.

Will Beaman  1:23:30

Yeah, well, and walking around like a group of people with a laptop strapped to your chest, it is a little bit like a parody exaggeration of how we use our phones a little bit too. Right? Where it sort of is this halfway position between, it’s not quite a phone, because it’s bigger than that. And we’re associating it with him working. And it also is a little bit like what’s he working on? He’s working on these like neurotic flowcharts that he’s scrolling through during the conversation and stuff like that. But, yeah, so I don’t know, I think it’s on the one hand, it’s taking the phone more seriously, as an…

Charlotte Tavan  1:24:17

Yeah, thinking about that, like, if that was just him with a phone it would look completely different. Different vibe.

Will Beaman  1:24:21

Right. Yeah. Which I think in a certain way, this is getting us a little bit at like, you could look at this a different way and see, like a very common critique of neoliberalism, right, which is that you’re always on. You’re always having to, you know, monitor social media, monitor your LinkedIn, gather credentials, and use apps 24/7. And so you’re kind of being controlled that way. And in a way that’s true. Obviously, like there is something to that. But I also think that this is an extension of his kind of neurotic process of self reflection, which is a social process, right? There’s no just full interiority in this show. Interiority is always, how should I act? Right? Or how did that go? It’s not even grounded in anything particular, it just is kind of engaged in the world.

Charlotte Tavan  1:25:28

This bit of the article that’s like “Nathan (if not Fielder himself) spends almost all of The Rehearsal flopping around trying to feel and experience the world in a real way.” That’s like, what all of us are doing.

Will Beaman  1:25:40

Yeah, right.

Charlotte Tavan  1:25:41

Like that’s literally the best you can do.

Will Beaman  1:25:46

Yeah, in a certain way, right. Like he is showing a kind of feeling of falseness, or an authenticity that we can all relate to.

Charlotte Tavan  1:26:00

Yeah, it doesn’t feel like we’re not experiencing the world in the right way. Like, with enough joy or emotion.

Will Beaman  1:26:08

And whatever that phrase that you read, like, flopping around the world aimlessly or whatever, like, that’s me, like, I think I totally am, yeah. Like a fish on the deck of a boat constantly.

Charlotte Tavan  1:26:21

Like a goldfish Pokemon.

Will Beaman  1:26:26

Seaking. No, Magikarp!

Charlotte Tavan  1:26:28

Magikarp, yeah! bloop bloop Yeah.

Will Beaman  1:26:37

So yeah, Nathan has this internal monologue. And kind of external acting that the monologue is related to, and that is never off, right? And that’s a common criticism of neoliberalism. And in some way, I think that what neoliberalism gets critiqued for, I think that that also is kind of like he is being critical of it, right? Like, he’s showing that this kind of need to manage everything, even though it is sort of what we’re all always doing all the time. It doesn’t need to be anxious.  Like, it doesn’t need to be as anxious as it is. I don’t know, I feel like a part of this, that we haven’t talked about, is that there’s a coming of age theme here. The show, as it goes on, of course, is like passing all these milestones in his own kind of development. And, at one point, he has his parents come, and he’s practicing being a parent, and he’s learning and he’s learning acting from kids. And he’s learning parenting from other people, right. From other actors.

Charlotte Tavan  1:28:06

He’s reflecting on his previous serious relationship as well.

Will Beaman  1:28:11

Yeah. And I think it’s interesting that scene in the last episode, or that problem in the last episode, where it’s unclear whether the child fully understands that this is a performance and that Nathan is not really his dad, and Nathan worries that that’s going to be exploitative. Right? Like, that’s a coming of age moment for the child. But also what that coming of age moment is, is teaching the child what acting is. In a certain way, that’s what adulthood is, right? Is acting. And this kind of neurotic, like, I feel like there must have been times, also, where people told Nathan that like, you need to grow up or something. Right. When he gets ringed out by that actress who plays his rehearsal co parent or something. And she’s like, you know, “you’re never gonna feel anything that’s real…This is just what you do all day?”

Charlotte Tavan  1:29:15

The one who pretended to be Angela, yeah, yeah. That was harsh, yeah.

Will Beaman  1:29:25

So there’s this ambiguous question of work and leisure, and is he really acting? Is he not acting? But then there’s also these ambiguities as to, whether or not he’s acting, who is he acting for? Right, like, is he the director? Or is he in someone else’s rehearsal when he’s in his own rehearsal? There’s like a, I’m trying to think of some kind of examples of like, I do think it’s not fully clear exactly like, it’s not like there’s just a director at the top of everything where he is the puppet master or something. Because he is also like the client of the show.

Charlotte Tavan  1:30:21

Totally. I think the “Finding Frances” episode kind of brings that up because he’s kind of like going along with somebody else’s project.

Will Beaman  1:30:33

Yeah, that’s the perfect example. Yeah.

Charlotte Tavan  1:30:36

Yeah, he wasn’t like pulling the strings there. I mean, it was obviously to a degree, but a lot of it was just like being passive.

Will Beaman  1:30:46

To the degree that we all are, and maybe this can get us into this question of money, and just kind of how the show treats money, right? Because at first glance, it doesn’t seem like it’s really a show about money, except kind of implicitly, I would argue in a lot of ways. But one of them is that a lot of memes that you see online about the show are like me if I had Nathan Fielder’s budget…

Charlotte Tavan  1:31:15

Oh, yeah. And he knows. He comments, he makes jokes about his huge budget. Like it’s a thing.

Will Beaman  1:31:25

I’m reminded, also, of that plotline in the first episode where he has like a fake blog called thrifty boy that’s all about “here are free things that you can do in the city,” and there actually is a whole team behind that blog, right? But the blog also ends up organizing a free meeting that happens in a park between two characters. A meeting that happens at a bar. Basically not totally free activities. But like, as he says, thrifty, right? And activities that are paid for by somebody, in the sense of like, if you meet somebody at a park, there are people who are paid to maintain the park.

Charlotte Tavan  1:32:20

Yeah.

Will Beaman  1:32:22

If you meet somebody at a bar, that bar was built. And it costs a lot more money to build it than your drinks cost. And so there’s this kind of interesting way in which, on the one hand, to be thrifty is to be using infrastructures that cost a lot of money to do right, but they’re infrastructures that didn’t cost you money, specifically.

Charlotte Tavan  1:32:53

Well, that’s like the whole joke about Nathan For You, as well. Do you know what I mean? He’s like, “Oh, we’re gonna make your business money.” But then all of his solutions actually cost like a shit ton of somebody else’s money. Like usually sometimes his or do you know what I mean? You know what’s a really funny example of that? So an episode in Nathan For You is probably like one of my favorite ones, which is the tax rebate collection scheme episode, which is where he has this idea to make this this independent petrol station money by saying “oh, we’re the lowest gas prices in America, but like put after rebate in the fine print.”

Will Beaman  1:33:41

Right.

Charlotte Tavan  1:33:42

And then, to collect the rebate, you have to go through this insane process where you have to mail it, and the only mailbox is at the top of this nearby mountain, and you have to hike up it, and it’s like an overnight trip, and he tells all these riddles and stuff. And then it’s like, he expects nobody to take the rebate, but then like, I think like four people end up staying overnight. And he keeps on having interviews with them, like reality shows style, where it has a confessional, but then underneath will have their name and then “rebate collection amount,” and they’re all like spending 24 hours of their lives trying to get back like $11 or something. But what happens is like, it kind of turns into like a divorce counseling session. Do you know what I mean? Like, he’s created this infrastructure. And it just got filled…it’s these people just talking about their relationships and bonding, and then the next day he’s like, “there never was a rebate. This was just like bonding.” And they were all like, “yeah, that’s what we thought.” We were just in it for lifelong friendships, but there’s something to that. All of this money created this infrastructure that looks useless. The joke is like, obviously this is not saving money in that sense, because they’re all like, spending 24 hours of their lives trying to get back like 14 or 11 dollars or whatever. It’s not like going to work for the business, obviously, because nobody’s going to facilitate that on a constant basis. But it still ended up serving a purpose for people that isn’t usually, formally accounted for in that way.

Will Beaman  1:35:49

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, even just taking that back to just the MMT kind of main point that gets made, right, is that money, in its most bare form, just as credit that’s created out of nothing: it’s not profitable. Right? Like, it’s not actually about making a profit. Credit is a gift, right? You just mark something on the paper, and you say, “here you go.” And so in a way, even though we do have all of these neoliberal governments that want to push austerity, and so they insist that every piece of infrastructure has to somehow make money in order to justify existing or something like that. I mean, when you take a wider view, it’s so kind of, I mean, that’s just like the misanthropic person that you know, who’s like trying to nickel and dime arbitrarily about, “well, I, you know, I’m not gonna help clean this, because, you know, an hour ago, I did this other thing.” That, like, maybe is true, but it’s also there’s a way in which it’s subjective, right, and it’s missing a lot of ongoing social dependence anyway that it’s already nested within. So you can have infrastructure that’s made not particularly to make money, right, it just costs money. And it just costs money in order to be funny. But then, also, you don’t know what it’s being used for, necessarily, right. So like, there’s an intention, but then you can’t actually police what people talk about in your cafe, or like, what role it plays in people’s lives.

Charlotte Tavan  1:37:58

Totally. Like, for example, this is like a public square around where I live, well in like a more gentrified neighborhood. And it’s like, supposed to be like a piazza style square, but like, all these young people use it for skateboarding. And then some people are angry about that, they’re like, “this is public money. I don’t want it to be used for skateboarding.” But it’s like, that is what it’s being used for, right? And “that doesn’t help our property prices, that doesn’t help our, like, you know…”

Will Beaman  1:38:32

Yeah. And it becomes a little bit similar to copyright sorts of arguments that people make. That’s like, “well, that’s so similar to something that I did where my intention wasn’t for it to be used or for it to inspire you to do something derivative of it, or something like that,” But, actually, to use something or consume something or whatever, right. Like, that’s no straightforward thing, right? There’s an element of kind of creative imitation of what you’re supposed to do with it, that is also a little bit freestyling and what you want to do with it, as well. Which, if we’re talking about political economy, right, like, it’s the whole issue with “use values” for things is that these are, just in terms of the semiotics and stuff, these things have multiple purposes and meanings and the sign can be interpreted in a lot of different ways and go into a lot of different things. And then on the other hand, you can have, like in the first episode of The Rehearsal, Nathan wants to get…what’s the name of the character in that first episode, the trivia guy?

Charlotte Tavan  1:40:05

Kor. Like K-O-R.

Will Beaman  1:40:09

Right, right. I remember that. Yeah. Or yeah, like in the first episode, Nathan is trying to teach Kor, his client, the answers in this trivia game without Kor knowing that that’s what he’s doing. And so there’s this whole thing where Nathan is arranging these hangouts and walks in the park and using all this mix between infrastructure, and then also paid actors who are like plants around who will feed him information, you know, randomly tell him where the world’s tallest building is. And like that kind of thing. It’s this ambiguous thing where Nathan has multiple intentions for the outing. Right? And Kor doesn’t necessarily know any of them. And he certainly doesn’t know that he’s being fed answers, right. And Nathan is taking a little bit of a risk there. But that’s also a risk that is kind of an unavoidable risk, right? Like, in the sense that you never know what someone else’s wants or intentions are when you go to hang out with them. Or like there’s all kinds of ways in which that ambiguity of like, if we’re hanging out and there’s two people and one of them is like, “Oh, is this a date?” And the other person isn’t sure that that’s a date, right? Like, that’s a similar kind of anxiety?

Charlotte Tavan  1:41:44

Yeah, totally.

Will Beaman  1:41:48

And it’s not like dishonesty isn’t implicated as a potential problem there, right? Like, it could be that this was supposed to be a date, and one person is gaslighting the other person. Or it could be that this was very clearly not a date. And one person is trying to project that onto the situation. Should probably have named that one first so I don’t sound like an incel. And then yes, sometimes it’s not a date.

Charlotte Tavan  1:42:23

Mostly, you get friend-zoned.

Will Beaman  1:42:33

But yeah, there’s this kind of constant question of is Kor able to fully consent to being in Nathan’s show? Is he in Nathan’s show when they’re just going on these walks? Is he in Nathan’s show when they’re off the clock or whatever? And ultimately, who’s paying for it? Right? Who’s footing the bill? And all of these are questions that have a lot of different answers, depending on how you look at them. Right? Like, the money is coming from a lot of different places. There’s something that people are trying to get out of being on the show that will kind of give them what money can give them. Right, which is kind of access to the world in a certain way. Yeah. So like, there’s all these moments where it’s not clear exactly like whose production is this necessarily?

Charlotte Tavan  1:43:35

Yeah, the word production, it’s interesting in this and it’s like a big theme. I think it’s a big theme in all of his shows, like, just in the obvious way, which is that he’s always talking about behind the scenes or not so behind the scenes, like production, right? It’s being played, who is doing what we’re, what infrastructure is there, but then also like, yeah, like, who is producing the show?

Will Beaman  1:44:03

Right there political economy questions of production, too.

Charlotte Tavan  1:44:07

Like production, as kind of creative or monetary provisioning, which is like not being done by Nathan, necessarily.

Will Beaman  1:44:20

Right? It’s including Nathan, but it’s also including all these other infrastructures that like, if acting as a middle position between working and just kind of free time or interior reflection or something like that. I feel like this broader sense of production that includes both paid actors and people who are walking by and parks that just happens to be created and like all of these things, we’re getting at something that’s a little, again, less positive and more apophatic society as production. Right? And like as a kind of a microcosm of just heterogeneity, right? Like, you know, different jobs and non jobs and actors and directors and you know, everybody walking around being a director and an actor and some people not knowing each other. And it’s in that context, with all of these different registers of production, that that experience of acting continues. Right, like Nathan is acting as a director, and he’s acting as an actor, and he’s acting as the editor.

Charlotte Tavan  1:45:48

He’s taking actions and making decisions.

Will Beaman  1:45:53

Yeah, and that acting versus actions is so kind of interesting, too, because I feel like when we talk about actions, we’re thinking about, like, doing a thing, right? In like, such a specific, it’s like a physics metaphor.

Charlotte Tavan  1:46:08

Yeah.

Will Beaman  1:46:09

Like a force pushing something. Like that metaphor for a will being exercised. But when we talk about acting, instead of taking action, acting is much more passive and ambiguous than that.

Charlotte Tavan  1:46:26

Yeah.

Will Beaman  1:46:27

Like, it’s not just reducible to somebody exerting their will. Right?

Charlotte Tavan  1:46:33

“Action this memo!”

Will Beaman  1:46:38

Yeah, because there’s a bigger question that acting involves, which is, how am I going to exert my will? If we even do want to stick with that language of exerting a will. That still has to be decided and given form and…

Charlotte Tavan  1:46:57

And usually by other people, as well.

Will Beaman  1:46:59

Yeah, by a whole production, right. Like, that’s a collective effort.]

Charlotte Tavan  1:47:03

Yeah.

Will Beaman  1:47:05

In all these ways, yeah. And so similarly, I think that there’s a narrow political economy definition of production that’s like what happens in the workplace. And then we kind of expand that more with like, okay, and then we also talk about social reproduction, although often social reproduction is framed as kind of what happens at home to reproduce the workplace.

Charlotte Tavan  1:47:35

Exactly.

Will Beaman  1:47:36

Where everything is still kind of centering primary production, and then kind of the secondary appendages or something like that.

Charlotte Tavan  1:47:43

Yeah. Or concepts like unproductive labor, which is, again, it’s so reductive.

Will Beaman  1:47:48

Yeah, right. It’s that question of: productive towards what? And in this show, it’s unclear what things are being productive towards because everybody has different goals, and they don’t know where it’s gonna go. And so I think that maybe the richer definitions of production, you already brought up audio and video production, which I think is really important here because the timing isn’t clear. Like when you’re watching a TV show, you don’t know when it was edited. The acting you do see, but you don’t see the process of what was cut out, when it was cut, what’s on the B-roll. There’s all this stuff that happens off screen, and not just off screen, but you don’t even know when it happens. I feel like the temporal ambiguity and murkiness of “when did things happen?” Just as it unfolds, it implicates more and more things from longer and longer times ago, and like for more and more distant places, and it’s dizzying, and it’s overwhelming, right? But again, following this negative kind of apophatic method, the point is not to come to a positive answer of when was this produced?

Charlotte Tavan  1:49:22

Yeah, like in the last episode of Nathan For You “Finding Frances”, it opens with him doing the DVD commentary for the previous episodes of the show, in this like, behind the scenes way. Yeah.

Will Beaman  1:49:38

Right. Totally. Yeah. And he’s always keeping that layer alive and ambiguous in the show where that layer of editing and of him being a showrunner talking about the show that he’s making right now. Where it’s not really clear. Like in film studies, we’ll say what is the diegesis of the film, like the world of the film that the characters live in, as opposed to the world that we live in. So a diegetic soundtrack would be a soundtrack that actually is playing from a radio in the frame, whereas an actual soundtrack that we hear would not be that. And so he’s implicating the show in our world by talking to us in the world that is not of the show, right? Like he’s talking to us during the production process. And I mean, maybe one definition of what the diegesis of a show is it’s like, the diegesis is not the production process in its fullest sense, I guess. But even then it’s kind of an unstable term, right? Because acting is also part of a production process, even if it’s like, the real thing, or whatever. Anyway, TV shows aren’t our real life, that’s not an interesting thing for me to come to, I guess.

Charlotte Tavan  1:51:20

Lots of people are very interested in that with Nathan For You, though, like, if you go on message boards, everyone is very concerned about how real elements of it were, who is acting, who is not acting, and stuff. l think that does speak to how open he leaves those questions.

Will Beaman  1:51:43

Totally, yeah. And then I guess another meaning of production is like a theater, right? Like, there’s a theater meaning of production that is, I would say, a little bit like that audio video thing, in the sense that a theatrical production includes what’s on stage and what’s off stage. Right? Like, if you say, I saw the production of something, you’re not just talking about, like, I saw a bunch of scenes. You’re talking about “I saw an orchestration of this play,” right? And there’s also a way where in theater, and certainly there are theater genres and traditions…you think of like, The Rocky Horror Picture Show where the audience is part of the production in a way that they really kind of call attention to, right? Where there’s kind of calling and response and that kind of thing. But here also, I feel like there’s all kinds of ways where we, as an audience, are part of the show, too, a little bit. Because certainly in this reality show form, the characters are anxious about how they will look to us?

Charlotte Tavan  1:53:16

Yeah. And he’s anxious about, yeah, how he looks to us. He’s constantly, it’s like he’s defending himself to the audience, or like, trying to explain his motivations to the audience constantly.

Will Beaman  1:53:31

Yeah, it’s like a long confessional. It’s like production in this very broad sense of the word that’s irreducible to the will of the director or the will of a boss, right? Because it kind of refers to everything a little bit. Even if it’s not referring to everything in a flat way, like we’re all on the clock, and we can never leave or something like that. In a certain way, it’s like nothing but everybody not being quite on the clock. Right? Where he’s anxious is, you know, “I wasn’t sure if she was really here for the show, or just to be on vacation.” Right? There’s an anxiety that people can never actually fully be at work. And maybe that’s a good thing, right? Yeah, these are all really kind of open questions.

Charlotte Tavan  1:54:32

Yeah. Like, he’s like attempting to survey her at certain points, but, you know, realizes that it’s kind of pointless.

Will Beaman  1:54:41

Right. Which is then of course ironic because all that we’re doing as audience members is surveilling her.

Charlotte Tavan  1:54:48

Yeah.

Will Beaman  1:54:49

And surveilling him and surveilling everything. And he’s in the world surveilling people too, right? I think it’s interesting that he’s a spectator in the frame a lot of times, watching a conversation play out and then interjecting. Yeah, I feel like we’ve said a lot and this might be a good place to start wrapping up. I’m not sure how we want to like…

Charlotte Tavan  1:55:17

Well, I think we can just leave it open a la Nathan Fielder.

Will Beaman  1:55:21

Ooo, I like that. Yeah. Let’s leave this open. That concludes today’s rehearsal.

Charlotte Tavan  1:55:28

Yeah. Thank you so much.

Will Beaman  1:55:31

Thank you.

Charlotte Tavan  1:55:32

This has been such a fun project. And also we love you Nathan, if you ever hear this.

Money on the Left

Rising Tides Sink All Boats

By David M. Fields

So, what is the Fed’s deal? Has Jerome Powell fallen prey to inflationary paranoia and hysteria for all the wrong reasons? Or is a “strong’ dollar a manifestation of a particular response to a policy choice that is more calculated and direct? By facilitating aggressive monetary austerity, the Federal Reserve is ensuring the US dollar is a safety asset to insulate the global rentier from cost-push-markup inflationary unpredictability.

The US dollar is surging to new heights. For instance, the US Dollar Index, which values the greenback against a basket of currencies, has advanced considerably. One of the burning questions is whether this will last? For now, I think, yes, it will, simply because there is no alternative for global trade invoicing and financial accounting. Aggressive monetary austerity policy from the Federal Reserve, a project aimed at using unemployment to tame cost-push-markup inflation, is pushing rival currencies lower, particularly in emerging market economies that suffer from balance of payments constraints, as investors from around the globe rush to purchase US Treasuries for security in the face of world-systemic economic uncertainty.

This scenario is vastly different than the monetary policy from only a year ago or so. Then, to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic, central banks around the world cut interest rates sharply — to near 0 — and governments deployed aggressive fiscal support of their economies. As a result, Federal Reserve actions were important in stabilizing world financial markets, specifically with respect to Fed swap lines and the establishment of the Foreign and International Monetary Authorities (FIMA) Repo Facility, which ensured a “buyer of last resort” for foreign central banks desiring to sell U.S. dollar reserves. Capital flowed throughout the world and the dollar fell sharply. In a sense, this was to be expected, and was seen as temporary. Eventually, the dollar was bound to bounce back up. And now it is. And the post-pandemic world paved the way.

Indeed, as the world economy reopened from pandemic lockdowns, supply chain bottlenecks arose, coupled with pandemic profiteering, generating worldwide upsurges in inflation. The response from the Fed, as mentioned, has been to raise the federal funds rate, which has translated into a sharp dollar appreciation as a result of global capital inflows, as the US dollar is a reserve asset to cope with worldwide economic uncertainty.

Yet, is this influential role of the dollar in the world economy an indication of the United States’ core commitment to internal price stability and external cooperation for the deliverance of efficient world capital markets and global trade links? Or acute deposition of the monetary power of the United States? In my view, the answer is the latter.

Here’s why.

The Fed is the world economy’s central bank, which acts as the safety valve for mass amounts of international liquidity. The role of the US dollar in international markets, and the advantages that come with it, are the spoils of its monetary hegemony. The provision of this asset allows the United States to become the source of global demand, and to insulate itself from fluctuations and contradictions of perilous cumulative disequilibria that may arise in the world economy, like the adverse price effects of supply chain bottlenecks and financial contagion that stem from foreign currency devaluations. The US dollar is the numeraire currency in international markets, which is not emblematic of credible macroeconomic performance that fosters confidence, but an arbiter of authority that regulates and dictates the flows of international financial commitments for global economic activity.

Given the current state of world economic dynamics, along with the foreseeable future, there does not seem to be a direct challenge to the dollar’s preeminence, in the same vein as the Euro was not a likely contender given its fallout from the Great Recession. There is not any indication of the greenback’s fall from grace as the dominant international currency. This does not preclude, nevertheless, eventual dollar dethroning, just confirms that the process is (very) long-term.

Despite hysterical contestations of inflationary fragility, the US dollar insulates the United States from global fluctuations and contradictions that may arise. This provides the country the effective means by which the world economy can be stabilized with global demand expansion, without spurring assumed demand-pull inflationary spirals. So, what is the Fed’s deal? Has Jerome Powell fallen prey to inflationary paranoia and hysteria for all the wrong reasons? Or is a “strong’ dollar a manifestation of a particular response to a policy choice that is more calculated and direct? By facilitating aggressive monetary austerity, the Federal Reserve is ensuring the US dollar is a safety asset to insulate the global rentier from cost-push-markup inflationary unpredictability. As such, expectations of future dollar depreciation arising from a return to loose monetary policy is, unfortunately, unlikely.

I hope I am wrong.

***Republished from the Monetary Policy Institute Blog***

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Debt Cancel Culture: Media Strategies for Democratic Coalitions (ft. Erica Robles-Anderson, @fstflofscholars)

Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) is joined by Erica Robles-Anderson  (@fstflofscholars) for an examination of the Biden Administration’s public communications around student debt relief. If Trump-era communication was characterized by direct broadcasts from the Tweeter-in-Chief, this new style uses public policy to strategically hail online discussion. Erica and Will read “This You?” debtor discourse as an example of how political media forms can be suited to coalitional, democratic politics.

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Music: “Lilac” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

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