Max Haiven (and company)

An excerpt from the introduction to Max Haiven's 2020 book "Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts," published by Pluto Press. For more information, visit maxhaiven.com/revengecapitalism

How has capitalism weaponized anxiety? And how might that weapon be turned against capitalism? We speakn with A. T. Kingsmith about the "anxiety industry," new affective technologies and the lonely terr of individualism.

A.T. Kingsmith is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at York University and co-founder of EiQ Technologies, an emotion-AI start-up based out of the Design Fabrication Zone (DFZ) at Ryerson University. He is currently writing an open access book entitled "Anxiety as a Weapon" at AU Press.

On this episode of the Order of Unmanageable Risks we speak with author, teacher, broadcaster, film-maker and columnist Juliet Jacques about the generational cleavages of the past decade as represented by Jeremy Corbyn's Labour campaign in the UK, for which she campaigned. We also discuss movements for trans rights as they signal broader struggles against austerity, as well as the backlash against them.

Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker based in London and author of Rayner Heppenstall: A Critical Study (Dalkey Archive, 2007) and Trans: A Memoir (Verso, 2015). Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, for whom she documented her gender reassignment in a landmark series entitled "A Transgender Journey" (2010-12), as well as London Review of Books, Granta, Sight & Sound, Frieze, Art Review, New York Times and The Washington Post. Her short films have been screened in galleries and festivals worldwide. She is founder and co-host of Suite (212), first on London's Resonance FM, lately as a listener-supported podcast.

Mikkel Krause Frantzen explores the way that neoliberal, financialized capitalism ensnares us in a perpetual mode of suffering and then offers insufficient, individualizing "solutions" to our woes through the medicalization of mental illness.

Mikkel Krause Frantzen, author of Going Nowhere, Slow: The Aesthetics and Politics of Depression (Zero Books 2019), literary critic at the Danish newspaper Politiken, and postdoc at the University of Copenhagen, where he focuses on financialization and literature. In this episode we discuss his essay of 16 December 2019 "A Future with No Future: Depression, the Left, and the Politics of Mental Health" published in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

This episode we're joined by notaed sociologist Nikolas Rose to discuss his 2018 book "Our Psychiatric Future" which explores how the "epidemic" of mental ill-health has been framed by policy, medical institutions and the media.

Rose is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London where he is also co-director of the recently established Centre for Society and Mental Health. His many books include "Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood" (1998, "Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self" (2nd edition, 1999), and co-author of "Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind" (2013). He is co-editor of "The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984."

Hosts Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and Max Haiven discuss 'The The Order of Unmanageable Risks: a Podcast about Capitalism and Anxiety'

* Main themes

* The story of how it came to be

* Three bad explanations for today's "anxiety epidemic"

* Past, present and future episodes

* Connections to the hosts' research

For more information about the podcast, visit http://anxious.community

This episode we speak to celebrated anthropologist Arjun Appadurai about his book "Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance," as well as about the current pandemic and its links to a culture of unequal uncertainties around the world.

Arjun Appadurai is Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and Professor of Anthropology and Globalization at the Hertie School in Berlin. He is an internationally recognized scholar of globalization, the cultural dimensions of economic development, and struggles over national and transnational identity. He specializes in South Asia. Appadurai is the author of numerous books and articles on migration, transnational dynamics, sovereignty and media.

{please note some minor technical issues in this episode}.

Eulogy for a Village: Gentrification and the Dis/appearance of Queer Sexual Geographies

Presented by C.G. Smith (aka Christopher Smith)

[the third stop on The Bank, The Mine, The Colony, The Crime walking tour to explore extraction, colonialism and financialization in Toronto's financial district, organized by WalkingLab and the ReImagining Value Action Lab]

This talk considers the rise of gentrification in the Church/Wellesley village in Toronto. Once understood as a necessary site to ensure an autonomous LGBT+ community, rising rental costs have facilitated the displacement of persons and historic establishments. With the homonormative turn in queer politics one guiding assumption was that an alliance with corporate institutions would benefit queer communities through the redistribution of finance through corporate sponsorship. This however is far from the truth as seen in the gradual disappearance of venues that enabled a vibrant sexual culture. Whether speaking of bathhouses, night-clubs, or one’s favorite watering hole, these sites of pleasure are increasingly lost amidst a rising condo boom. Thus, this talk is framed as a eulogy for those cherished spaces gone but not forgotten.

*This recorded talk on October 5th 2019 occurred on a cold windy day, which prompted written notes to flap, flip, and return to my sight. Listen with kindness.

[Dr. Christopher Smith](https://utoronto.academia.edu/ChristopherSmith) received his Ph.D. from the Dept. of Social Justice Education - Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) / University of Toronto in 2020. Their research interests reside in the productive interstices of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies, Queer and Feminist Theory, including Post-Colonial and Decolonial studies. They are currently teaching as a Sessional Lecturer in the Dept. of Historical & Cultural Studies (University of Toronto, Scarborough).

On 5 October 2019 WalkingLab and the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) assembled a temporary community of activists, artists, scholars and other peripatetic counter-speculators in Toronto’s financial district to share our knowledge, ideas and forms of resistance through a series of presentations at various locations.

This episode we speak with consultant, educator, writer and speaker Hári Sewell about the ways in which anxiety in the context of societies structured around race and marked by racism, including in the fields of mental and social care.

Hári Sewell is founder and Director of HS Consultancy and is a former executive director of health and social care in the NHS. He is a writer and speaker in his specialist area of social justice, equalities and ethnicity, race and culture in mental health. Hári is honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Central Lancashire and was the co-founder of the national Social Care Strategic Network (Mental Health) and was chair until November 2010. Hári has had various books, articles and book chapters published, with new material emerging regularly, usually ever year.

Hári worked with another local campaigner to secure services for survivors of sexual violence and currently runs a campaign “Men Supporting Women’s Rights” including “Men Against Rape”. He is increasingly studying forms of masculinity and the possibilities in practice and employee relations to recognise the intersections between masculinity and other aspects of identity.

In this episode we speak with race-critical scholar Alana Lentin about the dangers of racial illiteracy, why talk of race makes so many (mostly white) people so anxious, and how "not racism" became the dominant paradigm for talking about race and racism today.

Alana Lentin is Associate Professor in Cultural and Social Analysis at Western Sydney University. She is a European and West Asian Jewish woman who is a settler on Gadigal land. She works on the critical theorization of race, racism and antiracism. Latest book, Why Race Still Matters, is now out from Polity.