The Catacombic Machine

"A machine is not a given, it is a construction; an organization of separate elements. A machine is made up of partial objects, forming a whole out of heterogeneous bits. Not because they belong together. Not because they were meant for each other, but because creation is possible, construction is possible. Nothing is given but the abstract machine—the very possibility to construct, and construction as immanent action." —Petra Carlsson

In this episode of The Catacombic Machine Josef speaks to Petra Carlsson about Russian constructivists and #MeToo.

Music: Jacob E. Andrade
Support: www.patreon.com/thecatacombicmachine
Outro: The World Produced by the Imagination of God

The audio for this episode of The Catacombic Machine is taken from the Westar Institute's God Seminar on Religious Naturalism and the Human Future at AAR in Boston which took place in November 2017. Bart Campolo presents, Jeffrey Robbins presides, and Jack Caputo responds along with questions from several others.

Special thanks to Alex Waggoner for her hospitality at AAR. 

Live audio, music by Matt Baker. Bart Campolo (tenor).

It has been noted that in the age of global capitalism virtually everything is for sale. Nothing lies outside of the reach of the market. Today, education is increasingly instrumental, a means to an end known as the so-called “good life.” Squeezed between the demands of capital and budgetary shortfalls, the global priests of education in turn demand ever greater sacrifices from students such that universities that were once sites for the production of knowledge aimed toward the common good, have now become territories of capitalist reproduction which has led to the creation of an entire generation of indoctrinated, indentured, and thus largely depoliticized subjects. 

We live in an age where the Sophists are the chief philosophers, where the Socratic injunction to “know thyself” is transposed such that the means by which we now make ourselves known is a twin inscription upon a capitalist surface. It is at once prescription and postscript whereby desire congeals in collective ritual consumption, as well as one’s marking of various promissory notes which signal an individual’s desire for absorption within the capitalist matrix. We have misplaced our hope into an asymmetrical covenant with an abstraction that cannot make good on its promises. Thus for those coming under the weight of massive student-debt, these promises and hopes have begun to ring hollow. The promise of the good life, it seems, does not come without a significant price tag. The true cost becomes more apparent with each decade that passes, for many persisting into old age until finally receiving redemption in the form of a new tag; one that hangs solemnly from the naked toe.

The revolution Marx envisioned will likely never come. Indeed, where today are the proletariat? The vanguards? Are they the ones we see smashing windows, punching nazis, or wearing pussy-hats? Perhaps revolution has always hidden itself in the modest form of a seed. Today, strategies aimed toward authentic change must extend beyond the tiresome and endless barrage of criticism which often functions to merely reconstitute the world-as-it-is. Education must now begin with the question of one’s own willing participation in false consciousness. This is at once a political and a spiritual discipline. It is from here that we might begin the task of imagining a new collective paradigm. But, this should not be misconstrued as a form of enlightenment, but rather as a form of endarkening, a case of strange and sudden blindness where together we may yet learn to see in the dark, to feel our way forward.

A Catacombic ethos resists the commodification of our very souls. When we withdraw from the effort of self-making, from engaging in a hermeneutics of the self ala Foucault, the sign of the skull no longer indicates hope or the possibility of new life, but becomes merely the expression of a ghastly and cartoonish aesthetic where death becomes us.

Is it true? Are we unable to imagine another world in light of what we are witnessing today? And must we go it alone, or might we traverse this abyss together? As a subterranean refuge for constructive theology, the catacombs present a horizontal ascent. Not a way out, but a way in. The functional binary between the catacombs and the cathedrals places two paths before us: one, of death-in-life; the other, of life-in-death.

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Coauthored by Preston Price and Matt Baker

In this episode of The Catacombic Machine, David speaks to Jeffrey Robbins about Charles Winquist.

In the intro Josef reads a text which is available here.

Support: https://www.patreon.com/thecatacombicmachine

Matt Baker and Preston Price talks to An Yountae about his book The Decolonial Abyss: Mysticism and Cosmopolitics from the Ruins, published in 2016 by Fordham University Press:

In the upcoming episode, Yountae raises a common critique aimed at Deleuze and Guattari, namely that their abstract level of thinking allows for them to be exploited by virtually anyone, and he is then quoted from The Decolonial Abyss:

I believe this is an unfruitful dichotomy. Contrary to Yountae, I would describe the preoccupation with our endless becomings as a deeply ethical endeavor. I would also go as far as to say that we are all colonized, in the sense that we are all nailed downed as subjects. By that statement I do not mean that we all benefit equally from the current set of folds, we clearly do not, but it is my way of saying that no one can simply escape organization as such. Hence I am convinced that ethics cannot be reduced to fetishizing victims of colonization or oppression, as if they could somehow save us all. This all to common fixation among self-flagellating progressives is not a solution, rather it coagulates the behavioral, intellectual and institutional habits that enforces the pressure on all colonialized subjects, including themselves. Rather than pitting the preoccupation with the selves endless becomings against accountability and mourning for the loss and suffering of others, my claim is that joyfully affirming one's own difference is exactly how we make an ethical way life possible, since by simple accepting our ready-made identities we keep reproducing the habits that made the world what it is. If our aim is to transform the world, we should not demand from people who has suffered deep socio-political traumas to re-membering themselves by putting the pieces of their tragic past back together to be able to imagine a new future. In my mind this would in effect result a kind of repetition with no difference–a deathly repetition. Rather I believe that the preoccupation with the selves endless becomings is precisely how we assume accountability for the loss and suffering of others.

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Music by Jonatan Bäckelie

In the season finale of The Catacombic Machine, Josef talks to Tad DeLay about his recently published book The Cynic and the Fool: The Unconscious in Theology & Politics.

In this episode of The Catacombic Machine you will get to listen to a talk given by Bryce Maxwell at University of Chichester during the Radical/ized Religion Event.

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Josef speaks to cyber philosopher Alexander Bard who is the co-author, with Jan Söderqvist, to the Futurica Trilogy and Syntheism - Creating God in the Internet Age. They're currently working on their fifth book.

Early in the episode, Alexander mentions a TEDx talk he gave a few years ago: What if the Internet is God?

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Josef speaks to Ola Sigurdson during the Katakomb Event about Ola's newly published book Heavenly Bodies: Incarnation, the Gaze, and Embodiment in Christian Theology.

Support The Catacombic Machine at Patreon.com/thecatacombicmachine