The Chatterbox

The China adventure continues for your two co-hosts. Cymene and Dominic report from Zhangzhou, a small city of five million in Fujian province, and talk about party hotel life and what might have been the first energy humanities workshop in the country. And then (9:02) we welcome Ryan Cecil Jobson to the podcast to discuss his groundbreaking book, The Petro-State Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago (U Chicago Press, 2024). We begin with how petrostates seek to assert their permanence even in times of obvious crises and Ryan's insights into how the performance of permanence becomes all-powerful in maintaining petrostate legitimacy. We move from there to exploring the significance of Caribbean culture in T&T fossil fuels, thinking about the tension between the state masquerade and the people's masquerade, and the historical transition from plantation labor to oil field labor. We close talking about petronostalgia, speculative sovereignty, efforts in T&T to unlock ultradeepwater drilling, and the importance of "dwelling in the hyphen" when it comes to nation-states and petro-states. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.

For

Professor

The many roles that cats have played throughout history

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book

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Martin Heidegger’s sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement’s philosophical preceptor, “to lead the leader.” Yet for years, Heidegger’s defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough. The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger’s philosophy was suffused with it.

In Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology, Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas—and why his legacy remains radically compromised. Join YIVO for a discussion with Wolin about this book led by YIVO's Executive Director Jonathan Brent.

This book talk originally took place on September 20, 2023.

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Roger Lancaster on socialism, Nicaragua, México, ethnography, sexuality, machismo, guns, and punishment

You can read about his work here:

https://culturalstudies.gmu.edu/people/rlancast

It is a time of disorienting, sometimes surreal shifts in the worlds of politics and technology. There aren’t too many artists who you might trust as a guide, but Trevor Paglen is one of them.

Paglen has long functioned as an artist-researcher, with a fascination for pushing to the outer limits of what is seen or known. His work has often not just responded to but anticipated major conversations around government surveillance, conspiracy theory, and the politics of Silicon Valley.

And he has an important new book just out from Verso, How to See Like a Machine: Images After A.I. It collects his writings on how the world of culture is mutating, exploring the secret networks of power that we can’t see but that govern how we see.

Paglen also has a new art piece, “Voyager,” currently on view in a show called “Strange Rules” in Venice. In essence, it is an artwork whose medium is hypnosis. Paglen has invented a device that guides you into a trance state to permit you to have otherwise impossible artistic experiences.

Art Critic Ben Davis jacked into “Voyager” and, for a spell, was unleashed from gravity and levitated in the air—in his own mind at least.

Paglen joins Davis to talk about how he’s theorizing the forces reshaping culture now, and also how this new type of art he has created works, and how it fits in with that theory.

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Jung and the Post-Human Age, with Pacifica professor and author Glen Slater is a deep dive into what digital culture is doing to the human psyche as we internalize the fractiousness of the outer world.

Glen studied psychology and comparative religion at The University of Sydney before coming to the United States in 1992 for doctoral work in clinical psychology. He has been teaching at Pacifica for over twenty years and is currently the Associate Chair of the Jungian and Archetypal Studies specialization. He also teaches in the Mythological Studies program. His publications have appeared in a number of Jungian journals and essay collections, and he edited and introduced the third volume of James Hillman’s Uniform Edition, Senex and Puer, as well as a collection of faculty writings, Varieties of Mythic Experience: Essays on Religion, Psyche and Culture. Beyond his work in Jungian and Archetypal Psychology, he writes on psyche and film as well as the psychology of technology. He lectures internationally in these areas of interest.

Books by Glen Slater:

Patricia Martin, MFA, is the host of Jung in the World. A noted cultural analyst, she applies Jungian theory to her work as a researcher and writer. Author of three books, her work has been featured in the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Huffington Post, and USA Today. She holds an MFA in writing and literature from Bennington College and an MA in cultural studies at the University College, Dublin (honors). In 2018, she completed the Jungian Studies Program at the C. G. Jung Institute Chicago where she is a professional affiliate. A scholar in residence at the Chicago Public Library, for the last decade she’s been studying the digital culture and its impact on the individuation process. Patricia travels the world giving talks and workshops based on her findings, and has a private consulting practice in Chicago.

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Executive Producer: Ben Law
Hosts: Patricia Martin, Judith Cooper, Daniel Ross, Adina Davidson, and Raisa Cabrera
2024-2025 Season Intern: Kavya Krishnamurthy
Music: Peter Demuth

In his study of how a new and messy set of codes about playfulness took shape in the postwar US, Peter D. McDonald illuminates how playfulness became essential for understanding cultural, technical, and economic production. From Fluxus to the Easy-Bake Oven to Tetris to SimCity, The Impossible Reversal: A History of How We Play charts the transformation of our understanding of what it means to play. Here, McDonald is joined in conversation with Tiffany Funk and Chaz Evans.

Peter D. McDonald is associate professor of design, informal, and creative education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of The Impossible Reversal: A History of How We Play.

Tiffany Funk is an artist, critical theorist, and researcher who teaches in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Funk is editor-in-chief of Video Game Art Reader and author of HPSCHD: Inside John Cage and Lejaren A. Hiller Jr.’s Radical Multimedia Collaboration.

Chaz Evans is assistant professor of media arts in the School of Visual Art and Design at the University of South Carolina and author of a forthcoming book in MIT Press’s Platform Studies series.

REFERENCES:

Hannah Higgins / Fluxus Experience 

Barbara Stafford

Rube Goldberg

George Brecht

Yoko Ono

Seth Giddings / Toy Theory

Fredric Jameson

Benjamin Patterson / A Game: Three Capacities and One Inhibition

Shigeko Kubota / Video Chess

Brian Sutton-Smith

Marjory Allen and the playground movement

Mouse Trap

SimCity

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:

"Offers a new model for thinking about imaginative intellectual engagement with the material world."
—Amy F. Ogata

"Essential reading for scholars of play and games alike—and perhaps even the seed of a new and exciting field of play studies."
—Aaron Trammell

The Impossible Reversal: A History of How We Play by Peter D. McDonald is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Humans have collected data for thousands of years—but now we’re doing it on a whole new level.

This week, Ellen and Alona and joined by Roopika Risam, professor of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, whose new book Data Empire explores the ancient roots of data-gathering and the rise of the “data state”.

Drawing on examples from the East India Company to Palantir, she explains why advances in technology—and our means to collect, sort and deploy data—have almost always been captured by colonial powers or companies for profit, rather than for public good.

She reveals how data is used to monitor and control, and how AI is rapidly accelerating the capacity of states and private companies to surveil populations, including against the Uyghur people of Xinjiang. Roopika also explains the disturbing reason she had to rewrite one section of the book three times

Has the “Data Empire” effectively moved beyond the reach of the democratic social contract? And will the future be dystopian—or is there another way?

Roopika Risam’s book “Data Empire: How information shaped human history” is published by Torva. To read to more on this topic, click here: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/technology

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In this episode of We Talk to Really Smart People, we talk with Maya Rupert, progressive political strategist, author and yes even occasional podcaster. Maya has the experience, the political imagination, and the can-do spirit we need right now. So have a listen, buy her book, and vote. It is not all we have to do, but it is something we must do if we want to create a more just and feminist future.