I was interviewed last weekend for the Santa Cruz Run Internet radio show hosted by Vernon Bohr. It is similar to my last interview with David Baillie, which is slightly disappointing. I simply have not sufficiently developed a common language with which to discuss my intellectual endeavors, and this leads to a very rhetorical and fatuous version of Mark Dyal. Nonetheless, the 2-hour interview is available for downloading or streaming.
The latter portion of the interview might be useful in a maddening way: a neocon listener called in to chide me for a number of heresies: running big business from American soil, misrepresenting the purpose of education, and delimiting the importance – both strategic and financial – of American taxpayer funding of Israel.
Even if one is disinclined to listen to the whole interview, the comments of the neocon caller warrant attention. In fact, I am crediting the caller with the quote of a lifetime – the kind of quote that one can only ever hope to hear from the mouth of his enemy. Pause for a moment to remember my pedigree: maximum hostility toward modernity, bourgeois ontology, and the Judeo-Christian truth/moral regime; and full commitment to the creative and revolutionary affirmation of Nietzsche and Deleuze. Sense for a moment the always/already weariness with which I engage in any exchange with neocons (or any other form of liberal). Then listen to my veiled attempt at obsequiousness.
After I sportingly threw the guy a bone by criticizing Israel, he was gracious enough to conclude without malice or irony that, “without multinational corporations the United States would not exist.”
This is as radical a critique of America and its modernity as one will ever find, and yet it was mouthed as a defense of both America and global capitalism. No matter: I am taking it as my own. In some future project – right now slated to be my second book with Arktos – I will explain how the homogenizing forces of American/global capitalism have been almost uncontested in reducing contemporary life to the service of consumption, while creating and animating a set of affects that both formalize utterances (somewhat obviously in the combined energies of morality and truth and even less so in the image of thought utilized by the bourgeois form of life) and machinize relations and bodies (making us unwilling and unable to defend ourselves from the regime at hand).
For now, I am working on my first book for Arktos – a reworking of my academic work on Roman Ultras – as well as a new version of the Homeric Gods review essay for The Initiate. The former will be the basis of a new understanding of political language and behavior, while the latter will combine Homer, Otto, and Nietzsche with a mildly-Spinozan Deleuze.
markdyal 
Hi All….
I’m Vernon, the one who interviewed Mark. Don’t despair, Mark is not the only one that was critical of the interview. Another mutual friend was lavishly critical of the interview as well, constructively I might add.
I think there is much to be gained from the interview when listened to from the perspective of Mark’s comment: “I simply have not sufficiently developed a common language with which to discuss my intellectual endeavors,.” a goal that can only be achieved by much practice, speaking to non-academic audiences, in their world.
At the end of the interview, I asked Mark if he’d be willing to do future, more topically focused, interviews. This I look forward to, with the commitment to the real academic Mark outshining the rhetorical and fatuous version of Mark Dyal as he describes himself showing through in this and previous interview. I look forward to these interviews if Mark is up for them…
Sincerely,
Vernon C. Bohr Jr.
I also look forward to not merely an-other interview, but many more. Mark has so much to say that challenges so many of “our” assumptions.
One major problem is “translation” from the visible-written mode … Into the audile-tactile mode which radio is. Each of these mediation modes are vastly different in their ability to transmit certain kinds of intellectual “depth”. While I’m pessimistic about the ability of radio to dip much below the “surface”, and I cannot hold anything against either Dyal or Bohr for the inherent limits of the medium, I still say, “Soldier On! These topics deserve at least an ATTEMPT at transmission in a non-print medium.
“I simply have not sufficiently developed a common language with which to discuss my intellectual endeavors.”
Oh, please. Try speaking English that hasn’t been raped by ‘European philosophy’ and disfigured by egotism.
Was Brutus your given name?