Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 99: Marcuse and the Rise of the New Left 鈥� with Andrew Feenberg
Speakers: Paige Smith, Am Johal, Andrew Feenberg
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Paige Smith 0:01
Hello listeners. I'm Paige Smith with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. For our first episode of 2021. Our host Am Johal is joined by Andrew Feenberg, a philosopher and professor at 丁香园AV鈥檚 School for Communications. They discuss critical theory, anti-imperialist student movements in the United States, and Andrews experiences studying under and engaging with the German-American philosopher . I hope you enjoyed this episode.
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Am Johal 0:39
Hello there. Welcome to Below the Radar. We're really excited to have Professor Andrew Feenberg from the School of Communication at 丁香园AV in Vancouver with us. Welcome, Andrew.
Andrew Feenberg 0:52
Nice to be here.
Am Johal 0:53
Andrew, I'm wondering if we can just begin by introducing yourself a little bit in terms of describing yourself and your area of study?
Andrew Feenberg 1:00
Well, I'm Andrew Feenberg, and I am a professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser. Before I taught at Simon Fraser I taught in San Diego, San Diego State University for many years. I studied with Herbert Marcuse, who we're going to talk about soon. So that got me interested in critical theory, and I've written quite a bit about it. But my main specialty is philosophy of technology. There's a connection because the Frankfurt School wrote about technology, especially Marcuse, but rather abstractly, I tried to be a little more concrete. So that's some background. I mean, there's much more to say. I've been around a while. You can elicit whatever it is you're interested in hearing about during our conversation.
Am Johal 1:57
So the context in which you encountered Marcuse, he'd been living in the United States for some time, and you were a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, so I'm wondering if we can talk about how you first encountered him and his work.
Andrew Feenberg 2:11
When I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, I was interested in what in the US was called , , especially. But I couldn't find a school with more than one person to teach it. A friend told me there was a guy named Marcuse, and the new University of California, San Diego, who I should look up, and I asked him, 鈥淲hat does he do?鈥� And my friend said, 鈥淗e is creating a synthesis of and .鈥� And I was astonished. I said to him, 鈥渁ny place crazy enough to hire that guy is crazy enough for me.鈥� And I applied and they accepted me and I went from Baltimore to California.
Am Johal 2:57
And Marcuse at that time had been in the United States for some time. And when you encountered him in graduate school, you were involved in taking courses with them, but also a reading group. I saw a talk where you talked about reading with Marcuse and other graduate students.
Andrew Feenberg 3:15
Yes. Well, I had studied in Paris, where I did a lot of work on and Heidegger with . And so when I arrived in San Diego, I had heard that Marcuse had studied with Heidegger, so I just asked him, 鈥渨ould you read Being and Time with me?鈥� And he said, 鈥淵es.鈥� And every week we would meet and have big arguments about the meaning of Being and Time. I was much more and would argue that the analysis in Being and Time was similar to Husserl's phenomenological analysis. Marcuse kept protesting. No, that's not correct. So we had a lot of fun, for a term, reading. I guess we got through division one of Being and Time.
Am Johal 4:02
And of course, Marcuse had a very intense and agonistic relationship with Heidegger at a personal level, for obvious reasons. And I'm wondering in your encounters with Marcuse, how he spoke of, not just Heidegger's work, but Heidegger in other realms. There was correspondence with them after the Second World War, as well, shortly after his work with the , but in the Marcuse that you met in the mid to late 60s. How would you characterize his placing of Heidegger's work?
Andrew Feenberg 4:37
Well, he didn't talk to me directly about this, but one of the other professors in the department was . And Olafson was a Heideggerian. And so he was interested in Marcuse's views and interviewed Marcuse. And that is published, you can find it. He asked Marcuse what do you think about Heidegger and what did you think about him when you were a student and Marcuse said that when he was Heidegger's student, he was a loyal Heideggerian. And then later he had completely broken with him. That's just not true. His memory was faulty. If you read the things he wrote while he was Heidegger's assistant in the late 1920s, it's quite critical. He was transforming Heidegger's theory in Being and Time into a Marxist theory. And so he said things like, Heidegger had this category of world, and Marcuse said, Well, you can't just talk about world, you have to talk about the different worlds of the peasants and the petty bourgeois and the bourgeois. So, he's Marxifying Heidegger in the late 1920s. And this is very different from being a loyal disciple. And then later on, there's still an influence. He absorbed some fundamental ideas of Heidegger's into his Marxism. And there's only a few traces of this, for example, in , there's a quotation of Heidegger's essay on technology. But there's more to it, that he just didn't want to talk about. So I think it's because one of the great philosophical debates of the 20th century, until French theory took over, was between Existentialism and Marxism. You had to be on one side or the other and Marcuse was a Marxist so strongly influenced by phenomenology that he had to hide the complication, in order to fit into the schema, either Existentialism or Marxism.
Am Johal 6:46
Now his arrival in the United States, he worked with the Office of Strategic Services, which was a predecessor to the CIA, a quite well developed part of the government that began during the Second World War. And he was doing analysis of Central and Eastern Europe and of the Nazi regime and the post-war German context and wondering the part of the work that he did and developed later, some of which into books, how you characterize that period of his life in terms of working inside of governmental contexts and how that might have inflected his theoretical work later on.
Andrew Feenberg 7:24
Well, he studied Nazi-ism, and the Nazi regime in Germany and he wrote a book about it. For the OSS, called, it's in German, published in Germany, and it's called And it's an interesting theoretical discussion of the workings of a totalitarian state. He worked there with , a famous historian. And later, when I was a student at UCSD, he introduced Barrington Moore, gave a lecture there, by saying that he and his friend had tried to understand the Nazi regime for the US government, and then been sent to Germany to figure out how to denazify the new Germany. And he concluded, we failed completely. So I don't really know what effect it had on his later work. Having worked for the government, it's hard to know, and he certainly didn't discuss that. I think after he did that, he went to Columbia, and he wrote about the Soviet Union. So he wrote a book called Soviet Marxism. So perhaps it did sort of get him started on a different track. Before that, he'd mostly been writing kind of theoretical intellectual history. And with The Analysis of the Enemy, he started to actually study regimes and their ideologies. And so that may be a factor.
Am Johal 9:04
Now, in his time at UCSD, it's coinciding with the student movement, the anti-war movement, a whole series of political events happening that kind of was affecting the entire world in many ways, but in UCSD, it came across at a particular time. And wondering if you can talk a little bit about Marcuse's relationship to the student movement in the States.
Andrew Feenberg 9:27
Well, I arrived in San Diego in 1965. The student movement was very small. Remember the war in Vietnam was escalated by Lyndon Johnson only in the summer, I guess, the fall of 1965. Before that, there was really not much going on. There was some civil rights activity and a very small amount of anti-war activity. No feminist movement, no environmental movement, none of the things that we get excited about today. So we were maybe, I don't know, 25 students at UCSD, who thought we were leftists, we created an organization called the Students of the Independent Left. And we had some activities, your speeches and things. And Marcuse was quite supportive. And some of us decided to create a magazine, mainly to write about the war in Vietnam. We called our magazine Alternatives. And we went and got some money from faculty and from Marcuse we got an article called the 鈥�Individual in the Great Society鈥�, a very interesting article. So our magazine could start out with some class. And he then participated in debates with other faculty members about the war. And gradually the resistance of the war grew. Remember, there was the in Berkeley. And that began to signify the University of California as a locus of student revolt. And it gradually came down to the southern regions of the state. So Macuse was speaking to more and more people. The movement was growing rapidly at the end of the 60s. And he was a key figure in terms of the sort of the theoretical basis of the movement and the authority of Marxist. I'm not sure how to put this, you know, there was a Marxist tradition, of course, not this Communist Party, which no one was interested in, except maybe Angela Davis. Most of us were thinking in terms of the participatory democracy ideas, democratic socialism, we were not part of the communist movement. But we were anti-imperialist, and for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam. And that describes the mainstream of the new left in the late 60s and early 70s. And there was a connection to Marxism for many of the people in the new left. And we were especially interested in Marcuse鈥檚 version of Marxism. There was no awareness of the , soon to be classics like and were totally unknown, but except for a few people like me, who had studied in Europe, but Marcuse stood out as the sense of spokesperson for a radical Marxism distinct from the Soviet Marxism that had very little resonance with most of us in the new left.
Am Johal 12:36
You ended up being in Paris during May 68, yourself.
Andrew Feenberg 12:40
Yes. I went there to continue my studies with Goldmann and I also studied with some other, and with . I had a very interesting time. Derrida was talking about . Famous text was later published called 鈥溾��. And I was there with about, I don't know, 30 students, we were a small group because he wasn't famous yet. And then, the university was closed by the government, the police entered the university, arrested a bunch of activists. And I had never got to the punch line of Derrida lecture. So we were out in the street. And we did what you did out in the street. In those days, we attacked the police, tried to get back into the university. It wasn't entirely clear what we wanted to do when we got back in, but we were determined to get back in. And a few days after this all started Marcuse arrived for, believe it or not, an international conference at . I still remember Marcuse鈥檚 arrival at the conference hall. And he was suddenly surrounded by reporters, with microphones poking in his face and TV cameras, and I think he was scared. He had never been so famous. And it was all because of a fake press campaign that labeled him the idol of the students in revolt, the guru of the revolution, none of which was true. Practically no one had read Marcuse in France at that time, but newspapers just refuted their own myth a few weeks later. So then, a young reporter who later became a famous right wing journalist, came up to me and he said the professor looks really upset by all this attention. I could take him anywhere in Paris, he wants to go and I said to the reporter, well, if you've promised not to ask him any questions, I'll relay your message. And so we escaped, and he had a little car and we drove out of the UNESCO parking lot and he said, 鈥淲here do you want to go鈥� and Marcuse said, 鈥淚 want to meet the North Vietnamese delegation.鈥� The Paris Peace Talks had just started and we went to the Lutetia Hotel, fancy hotel in the six, where the delegation was lodged. And we asked for a delegate to come and speak with Professor Macuse. And they sent somebody down and had a nice conversation. And I mean, the story goes on, I can tell more of it. If you're curious.
Am Johal 15:24
For sure, I was gonna also ask about, in terms of Marcuse, publicly defending Angela Davis when she was arrested around that period and the controversy that ensued.
Andrew Feenberg 15:36
Yeah, that's a little later Angela Davis was his student at Brandeis. And you have to remember this is before segregation had been outlawed and eliminated. When I was at Johns Hopkins, I believe there was only one black student in the whole school. And I think probably the case was not so different at Brandeis. So Angela was a brilliant undergraduate and Marcuse brought her with him to San Diego when he moved to UCSD. And I'm sure that in her writings, you can find out a lot more about what it meant to her to go through this college experience. With Marcuse, she became more and more politically active. And eventually, she was involved in a sort of Communist Party front group in Los Angeles, and became friendly with people in the Black Panther Party. And when there was a breakout in a jail by Black Panthers. She was accused of having supplied them with a gun, and she was on the 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list of the FBI. And they tracked her down, took a long time. But they finally caught her and put her in jail and tried her some many months later. And she was acquitted. And so you have to believe she was innocent, even though there was all this fuss about her and a lot of the attacks on Marcuse for having been her teacher. And those attacks led to tremendous hostility on the part of the conservatives in California and Governor . He was hung an effigy in front of the city hall. There's a wonderful movie about all this called . You can find it on YouTube. So university administration resisted for a while, but they finally succeeded in firing Marcuse. And luckily, he had made a deal that allowed him to finish with his last students. And so I think and I were the last two students to get degrees with him after he was fired.
Am Johal 17:52
Now I want to go back to Paris for a second in May 68, to talk about sort of his ongoing involvement in the student movement, not just in the States, but in terms of how his work was circulating back in Europe at that time.
Andrew Feenberg 18:06
Well, One-Dimensional Man was translated into French and Italian. And it was sold widely, it was popular. I don't know how many people actually understood it, even bothered to read beyond the first few pages, but it had an impact. Because, I don't really know about the other countries in Europe, but in France and Italy, the Frankfurt School was not well known at this point. Very few texts were translated and Marcuse was kind of the public face of the Frankfurt School. And that meant he was the leading Marxist theoretician who was not a Soviet-style Marxist, who was not part of the official Marxist discipline of Marxism. Now, there was of course, also in France. There were other Marxists in Italy, but Marcuse was the one who had the most impact on the student movement, which was a big deal. In Marcuse鈥檚 work, theory and practice seem to somehow come together. Although actually, Marcuse was not the leader of the student movement, not at all. But students read his books and it resonated with them. It wasn't some kind of dry theoretical discourse, like Althusser鈥檚, or an apology for Soviet practices like some of the other Marxists. This was stuff you could get your teeth into, could get you excited. And so he became quite famous. All of a sudden, very quickly in France and Italy. I think especially in Italy, I remember visiting there, and on every bookstore there was a poster showing Marcuse advertising . I was asked by a wealthy friend who had a sort of philosophy club in Milan, to give a lecture on Marcuse, to all these businessmen and lawyers, in his group, who were, you know, it's a book club kind of thing with for cultivated, middle class, wealthy people in Milan, that was quite interesting. So there was this moment, you know, during which 300,000 copies of 鈥淥ne -Dimensional Man鈥� were sold, when Marcuse was really long with , the most famous philosopher in the world.
Am Johal 20:29
Now going through his work with grad students today, how do you think his work resonates today or what did you find in Marcuse鈥檚 work that remains relevant and timely?
Andrew Feenberg 20:42
Well, actually, I think I've taught One-Dimensional Man, and occasionally even the and , mostly with graduate students, because that's mostly who I've been teaching. I think the students like it a lot, they find it very interesting. And somehow, it connects much more with people's concerns today, than a lot of very abstract Marxist theorizing. You know, it helps you to see how your own society is implicated, not just at the level of policies that you disapprove of, but at the level of daily life, you know, language, technology. So Marcuse, I think, is still very relevant and students find it very interesting. Now his writing is not easy, but it does not have the intentionally obscure character of the work of . And nor is it as sort of scholastic as the work of and , it's something else. It is in some intermediary zone, where he really can connect with young people who are in a radical mood. So I would suggest that he be taught much more than it is, Marcuse鈥檚 reputation has declined. I'm not sure how to explain this. Probably has something to do with the fact that a lot of people see the as an error of their youth. Actually, there's not a lot of difference between the left today and the New Left back then, these same issues are being discussed and the forms of organization are similar. We're living in that era that opened with a New Left, as far as radical politics is concerned, but I don't think everybody believes that a lot of people see that time as a time of illusions. And there's a kind of cynicism about, you know, politics among academics, and careerist interest in what is most obscure and difficult. And so there's some excitement around thinkers like , who are also I mean, I think, much more obscure than Marcuse. But they managed to inspire some excitement among young people who read them. But again, the things you can take out of that are not so different from the things being discussed in the late 60s and 70s, that are reflected in Marcuse鈥檚 work. I mean, what is a 鈥溾��, if not, what Marcuse talked about, in terms of the actualization of potential realities that are obstructed by the system. You could probably have a lot of fun finding links between what people assimilate from fashionable thinkers today like Deleuze or and what was being discussed in the New Left 50 years ago.
Am Johal 23:52
Now Marcuse's book on aesthetics. I believe it was published in the late 70s. Wondering if you can talk a little bit about his sort of contribution to aesthetics in his theoretical work. It does get taken up within art departments and other areas, but where did that part of his work, would you characterize that he was working on later on after his time at UCSD?
Andrew Feenberg 24:14
Well, that's his last book, the book called . It's an attempt at a corrective to earlier positions. So it's important to know what those earlier positions are, to understand that book. He wrote a famous essay in the 1930s on the 鈥溾��, in which he argued that high culture played a compensatory role. It was sort of the equivalent of religion, the thing where you put your high ideals on display on the weekend, while during the week you made money. So it was a critical discourse about the place of art in the social system. And then, many years later, in [An] Essay on Liberation, Marcuse completely reevaluated his position and talked about art as the source of a new sensibility that would immediately, through the senses, engage with the potential realities of society and the possibilities of a more peaceful and just society. So there's a kind of realization of art idea there, which is familiar from the early 20th century avant-garde that Marcuse adopted in that period. And then, in some later texts, including The Aesthetic Dimension, Marcuse went back on both of these positions. And he argued that even if you could realize art, in social reality, as he had envisaged in [An] Essay on Liberation, there would still be a vast area of human experience that would be conflictual, that would be difficult, and could not possibly be made part of an utopian scheme. And that art talked to that dimension of human life as well as giving us insight into how we could create a better society. So he then argued that art had a message that would be enduring and could not be absorbed into the social reality, even by the most radical revolution.
Am Johal 26:37
There's an interesting part in taking that work into art schools where, you know, there's a part of his work where he discusses, you know, art is art, and art can be political, but art isn't politics. There's the sort of distinctions he brings in. And I'm just wondering why that book is his final book? Or why was he interested in those questions at that time?
Andrew Feenberg 26:59
I'm not sure that the answer to that question, perhaps because of the decline of the movement, he became more interested in what could sustain a long term presence of the Idea in society without a strong social movement backing it. And of course, art and philosophy are the main carriers, the bearers of the hopes of humanity against the cruel reality. Once religion is no longer the main source of consolation. So perhaps it's because of that, perhaps it's also because as he got older, you know, he may be thought more in terms of those aspects of life that are not political, you know, beyond political. Love, and death, and art has something to say about that.
Am Johal 27:59
And in terms of how his work gets taken up within philosophy of technology, what parts of it do you find the most relevant in terms of philosophy of technology?
Andrew Feenberg 28:12
Well, that's what I've been writing about. I've written the manuscript of a new book on Marcuse. And the last two chapters are on these questions. He has actually several different criticisms of technology in his work. One criticism focuses on the way in which practices in everyday life infiltrate and influence scientific ideas and technical ideas. So his example is the notion of rationalization in , the idea that management must be bureaucratic, which Weber developed in his sociology in the early 20th century. And Marcuse argues, what he's done is accept without criticism, the actual conditions of management in capitalist society, where it has to be bureaucratic, it has to be imposed from above, because the workers don't have any share in the wealth of the enterprise. You know, they're not interested in success. So you have to make them do the things that keep the enterprise successful. And that then becomes a principle in Weber's sociology. So this methodology is a kind of ideology critique of scientific technical ideas and designs that's present in his work in the 1960s. Then in One-Dimensional Man, he introduces a much more radical critique, where he argues that your worldview prevails in modern capitalist societies based on the principles of natural science, and that worldview eliminates everything but the facts from the purview of rationality. And if the potentialities that are contained in the facts are obscured, people have no way of developing a critical relationship to their world. And so this much more radical critique is developed in One-Dimensional Man and leads him to the suggestion that science should be transformed so that it incorporates more than just the facts. It incorporates also, the potentialities those facts make possible. This idea of transforming science and technology along with it has not had much success. It's a speculation that's hard to believe. What I've tried to do in my book is to draw on that first criticism, the ideology critique, in order to see how it can be adapted to a more realistic critique of science and technology and to show what place the ontological critique of the scientific worldview might have in this revised version of a sort of quasi-Marcusian approach.
Am Johal 31:13
Andrew, wondering what else is in the book, particularly discussions around democracy that you find in Marcuse?
Andrew Feenberg 31:20
Well, this is a controversial issue because Marcuse was not an enthusiastic democrat. He was skeptical. There is an influence on the Frankfurt School, the whole Frankfurt School, of , who of course, was not a democrat. The idea of the masses as a kind of problem rather than the solution appears already in Nietzsche. And obviously, for those people who experienced the collapse of democracy in the , the rise to power of Hitler. It's difficult to be uncritical of democracy. There's something dangerous going on in the public sphere, and you have to take it seriously. Well, so of course, people countered, 鈥渨ell, this is very elitist, who is Marcuse to talk about, you know, the flaws in democracy, I mean, we should just go with what the public wants.鈥� But the public, Marcuse said, is so thoroughly manipulated, that if you just accept whatever the public wants, you are accepting essentially, the product of a manipulation. Of course, not always, but often. And so you need to be critical of the public and not just accept it as the voice of God. Vox Populi [Voice of the People] is not the Vox Dei [Voice of God]. You have to look at the sources, the reasons behind what the public chooses. And that means that there is a role for enlightenment of the public, for arguing with it, disagreeing with it. Now, you understand that in the 1950s, and the early 60s, the US was a country of extraordinary conformism, essentially, the television determined people's views to a very great extent. It was very difficult to penetrate that conformist veil that covered over the whole public sphere. So it's not surprising that Marcuse, as a Marxist in the US in that period, would have a critical relationship to democracy. And of course, today, with the 72 million people voting for Donald Trump, who is a catastrophe of the worst sort, you can understand that this is not just a personal, elitist attitude. It's a reckoning with a real problem in democracy, the problem of the credulity of the public, the success of demagogues, and the danger of democracy.
Am Johal 34:07
How would Marcuse read Trumpism today in his work, that Trump is one type of figure, but Trumpism is a phenomenon that goes around the globe in different ways?
Andrew Feenberg 34:18
You know, the authoritarian populace, who have become popular now, in many countries, in India and Hungary and Poland and United States, England, they present a challenge to the kind of Marxist theory that Marcuse was developing. On the other hand, you would certainly recognize this as an intellectual challenge to meet, but it's different from what he was describing in One-Dimensional Man. In One-Dimensional Man, you had a kind of collapse of any notion of there being something deeper than the surface appearance of the facts. And if you just lived by the facts, then those who create the facts control you. So that was the system that he was denouncing as a kind of dystopian system in the 60s. But today, nobody trusts the facts anymore. All these demagogues are pointing at some deep conspiracy, something going on behind the scenes. That's the cause of all our miseries. So it's a different logic. And it's a logic, of course, in which racism plays a very big role. Again, racism was not central to Marcuse鈥檚 conception. I mean, he knew it was there. Of course, he was opposed to it, but it wasn't what he thought generated the consensus, the conformism in American society in the 50s, and 60s. But now racism is really central to the operations of this demagogic machinery. So you'd need a somewhat different approach. He did write something in the mid 70s, about what he called the Preventive Counter Revolution. And his idea was, this is maybe sort of halfway to what's going on now. His idea was that the system feeling threatened by the left had moved into a new phase in which it was no longer going to encourage reform and integration, but rather precarity and surveillance, prosecution of the left, and economic precarity for the masses, which would keep them too concerned with their daily needs, and too frightened to resist. So this is the Reagan Revolution, viewed from the standpoint of Marcose鈥檚 Marxist perspective, you can see that as a kind of intermediary stage in which racism was not yet a central component, as it has now become. But some of the other features, such as the economic oppression, the intensification of economic oppression were already visible.
Am Johal 37:04
Andrew, anything else you'd like to add about what makes Marcuse relevant today in terms of his work, and how it circulates in the times that we're living in now?
Andrew Feenberg 37:15
Well, I've been troubled by the evolution of the academic left, it seems too much focused on issues of identity and academic kinds of elaborate scholarly, sort of philological struggles with the text of the masters, not enough talk about what's actually going on, and Marcuse鈥檚 a good cure for this. With his work, you go straight to the problems. And you can see there are things that have changed, and you can adjust for that. But you're given some very important conceptual tools for talking about how to be critical in a society that, as Marcuse put it, in the 60s, 鈥渄elivers the goods,鈥� maybe not as much goods as we'd like, but it's certainly not the 19th century anymore, with starving masses in the advanced countries. So we need a critical vocabulary that's adjusted to this situation, and one that resonates with our feelings about what's wrong with the world. And Marcuse offers that and it's still relevant. I mean, the last thing I'd say is, for those people who think that the New Left was something in the distant remote past, sort of like Napoleon or the Crusades, forget it. We are still in the New Left, we're still in that era. Nothing fundamental has changed, at least as far as the radical opposition is concerned. And we need to learn from that past both of mistakes that were made, which were numerous, and also from the innovations that appeared then and which we are still operating with today.
Am Johal 39:04
Andrew, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar.
Andrew Feenberg 39:07
Thank you.
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Paige Smith 39:11
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by 丁香园AV鈥檚 Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to this episode with Andrew Feenberg. You can learn more about his research and work by visiting the links in this episode鈥檚 show notes. Thanks again for listening and we hope you have a Happy New Year. We'll see you next time on Below the Radar.
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