The Chatterbox

Today's episode of The Break Down explores the idea and the power of utopian fiction with guest Kim Stanley Robinson, the acclaimed science fiction author whose most recent novel, The Ministry for the Future, offers a harrowing and detailed vision of how we might respond to the climate crisis. 

Among other things, Adrienne and Stan discuss the politics of science and technology; the place of speculative fiction in an era dominated by nostalgia and the importance of utopia at a time when our political imaginations are so constrained. 

Like The Ministry for the Future itself, this episode is dedicated to the late Fredric Jameson. You can find many of Jameson's incredible works here: https://shorturl.at/fYDNJ

Find more about the Break Down at break-down.org and be sure to follow us across social media to stay up-to-date with upcoming episodes, essay launches and more.

Why do our news headlines often focus on war and crime and mortgage rates? Do we spend too much time focused on transactional markets and not enough on our unconditional existence as part of humanity? On this episode, we talk with Rob Faure Walker of University College London, author of Love and the Market: How to Recover from the Enlightenment and Survive the Current Crisis.

Capitalism’s addiction to growth doesn’t just show up in the external world. It can also be found inside us—in our manufactured desire for more and better. Not only do we have to keep wanting to keep the machine going, we have to keep wanting what is “scarce” and easily privatizable or commodifiable so that the capitalist class can continue to profit.

Critical hedonism(s) is an approach to pleasure and care that is critical of capitalism. It is a politics of pleasure that invites us to remake our desires to be less antisocial, competitive, and harmful, and to instead be more prosocial, collaborative and mutually beneficial. 

The idea of critical hedonism(s) has been deeply studied and explored by our guests in today’s episode. Zarinah Agnew is a trained neuroscientist formerly at University College London, and then UCSF, a self-described guerrilla scientist, and part of the Beyond Return organization. Eric Wycoff Rogers is a historian, writer, community organizer, and designer currently based in London. Eric runs a thirdspace project in London, convenes a discussion series on the politics of pleasure, and is the author of the Critical Hedonist Manifesto.

This is Eric and Zarinah’s second time on the podcast, they joined us in 2022 to talk about Fully Automated Luxury Communism, which is a great compliment to this episode. This is also a great episode following our most recent conversation with Jason Hickel, Better Lives for All. Where that conversation focused on human needs, this one takes up the topic of human wants. 

In this conversation, we explore what capitalism tells us to desire and why, we interrogate what is truly “cheap,” “expensive,” and “valuable,” and explore what it would be like to participate in a politics of pleasure based on critical hedonism(s)—creating conditions and opportunities for distributed pleasure that don’t cause harm to people or the planet. Finally, we are invited to learn about community gatherings and how to do the work of reclaiming and remaking pleasure.

Further Resources:

• Critical Hedonist Manifesto
• Critical Hedonism(s)
• Beyond Return
• Decoding Labs
• The Joyless Economy, by Tibor Scitovsky
• The Right to Sex, by Amia Srinivasan
• The Zero Marginal Cost Society
• I Dream of Canteens
• The Listening Society: Possible and Necessary
• Post-Growth Living: For An Alternative Hedonism, by Kate Soper
• Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, by Adrienne Maree Brown
• Becoming Feminist: Consciousness Raising and Social Ecology, Eric Woycoff Rogers (blog)

Related Episodes:

• Fully Automated Luxury Communism with Zarinah Agnew and Eric Wycoff Rogers
• Better Lives for All w/ Jason Hickel
• Grassroots Urban Placemaking with Mark Lakeman
• Sex, Desire, and the Neoliberal Subject
• Suburban Hell and Ugly Cities

Intermission music: Night Cafe Radio

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Niobe Way, author of Rebels with a Cause, talks about the emotional and social lives of boys and what they’re telling us about society. Branko Milanovic, author of Visions of Inequality, reviews what economists have said about the topic over the centuries.

Behind the News, hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. Find the archive online: https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/radio.html

Terrence G. Peterson is Assistant Professor of History at Florida International University. He researches and teaches on France, modern Europe, and their connections to the wider world, with a particular focus on war, empire, and migration. His first book, Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency, was just published with Cornell University Press. His current work focuses on the Rivesaltes Camp in Southern France, which the French government used to detain a wide array of migrant populations from 1939 to 2007.

Soon after gaining independence from Belgium in 1960, the new Republic of the Congo was rocked by the assassination of its young firebrand leader, Patrice Lumumba. Stuart A Reid unpicks this story in his Cundill History Prize-shortlisted book The Lumumba Plot. He speaks to Elinor Evans to unravel the tumult that followed independence and the devastating implications of Lumumba's death. Plus, Stuart reveals more about the CIA's murky role in the leader's brutal execution.

(Ad) Stuart A Reid is the author of The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination (Knopf, 2023). Buy it now from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lumumba-Plot-Secret-History-Assassination-ebook/dp/B0BRMMVWBY/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty.

Find out more about the Cundill History Prize here: https://www.cundillprize.com

The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine.

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Born in the pandemic lockdown of 2020, when Britain’s restaurants had closed their doors, Jonathan Nunn founded the online newsletter Vittles, which rapidly established itself as the premier platform for exploring food cultures in Britain and around the world. Out of Vittles was born London Feeds Itself, a fascinating collection of essays written at the intersections of food, architecture, history, and demography. First published by Open City in 2022, London Feeds Itself now appears in a new edition in association with Fitzcarraldo.

In this episode, Jonathan Nunn speaks about the project with architectural historian Owen Hatherley, whose essay ‘The Housing Estate’ from the book serves as a springboard for the discussion.

Get the book: https://londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/london-feeds-itself-jonathan-nunn

Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspod

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Science journalist Sarah Scoles has written extensively about astronomy and the UFO community, including in her 2021 book They Are Already Here. She joined David Priess to discuss how scientists look at ETs, pop cultural takes on first contact with extraterrestrials, the incredible influence of Carl Sagan's Contact, the Allan Hills meteorite, the evolution over time of beliefs about aliens contacting humans, how the Roswell myth emerged, the International UFO Congress, the Mutual UFO Network, UFO investigators, seeing lights around Area 51, SETI salvationalism, extraterrestrial-visitation belief as a religious movement, and more.

Works mentioned in this episode:

The book Contact by Carl Sagan

The movie Contact

The book Making Contact by Sarah Scoles

The book They Are Already Here by Sarah Scoles

The book Countdown by Sarah Scoles

The event "UAP: The Search for Clarity," at the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security, November 15, 2023

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Jay Venables of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

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