Outsider Theory

Lockdown diaries became a literary fad in 2020, but few if any were memorable. What if the real literature of lockdown was written over a century ago? This is the hypothesis behind "The Machine Book of Weird," an anthology of fiction from the late 19th and early 20th century that explores isolation, domestic confinement, and the uncanniness of home. Publisher Tim Abrahams joins me to discuss this project, plus Freud, Mark Fisher, and more. You can donate to the project's Kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mbow/machine-book-of-weird

In this special episode, guest host Daniel Hadas interviews Medical Nemesis on covid, Illich, industrialized medicine and thought, and more. https://twitter.com/DanielHadas2 https://twitter.com/Medical_Nemesis https://medicalnemesis.substack.com/

Matthew Crawford joins me to discuss his essay, "Was the Sexual Revolution a Government Psy-Op?," the politics of masturbation, Wilhelm Reich, the Frankfurt School, masculinity, the therapeutic state, and more. https://unherd.com/2022/12/the-politics-of-masturbation/ https://mcrawford.substack.com/

Brian Chau returns to Outsider Theory to discuss ChatGPT's woke catechism. https://cactus.substack.com/

Blaise Bayno (@urgurlblaise), former critical theory PhD student and co-organizer of the conference "Society Must Be Inoculated," joins me to discuss how critical theory became uncritical cheerleading for biopolitical authoritarianism, academic labor issues, the history of the UC Santa Cruz History of Consciousness program, and more.

Thomas and Brett from Psyop Cinema join me to discuss Hollywood and cultural engineering. Psyop Cinema: https://www.spreaker.com/show/psyop-cinema My Psyop Cinema episodes on Roland Emmerich: https://www.spreaker.com/user/15144188/shullenberger-interview https://www.spreaker.com/user/15144188/geoff-shullenberger-2

Brian Chau (Cactus Chu on Substack, @psychosort on Twitter) joins me to discuss institutions and why midwits rule them, decentralization, sorting mechanisms, right-wing aesthetics, Curtis Yarvin, William F. Buckley, and more. https://cactus.substack.com/ https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/rule-of-midwits

Jon Askonas joins me to discuss his ongoing series of essays in The New Atlantis, "Reality: A Post-Mortem." Read the series here: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/collections/reality-a-post-mortem

Essayist and poet Alice Gribbin joins me to discuss her recent essay in Tablet, "The Great Debasement," on the ideological transformation of museums and other cultural institutions into propaganda organs; the utilitarian attitude to art; the continued relevance of John Berger's "Ways of Seeing"; and more. https://substack.com/profile/5192682-alice-gribbin https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/great-debasement-art https://quillette.com/2021/06/05/the-artist-and-the-censor/

Tablet senior writer Jacob Siegel joins me to discuss the rightward trajectory of certain insights of Frankfurt School-derived critical theory, especially in light of the history of the journal Telos and its founder and editor, Paul Piccone. We also discuss Piccone's friend Paul Gottfried, the continued relevance of Herbert Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance," the Thiel-affiliated New Right's cultivation of a counter-elite, the recent Vanity Fair profile of the Thielverse, and more. Telos http://www.telospress.com/ Jacob's work https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/elon-vs-obama https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/red-pill-prince-curtis-yarvin https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/spencer-gottfried-alt-right https://manifesto.fireside.fm/ The Thielverse https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance" and the right https://outsidertheory.com/right-marcuseanism/

Writer and policy researcher Michael Cuenco joins me to discuss his recent American Affairs essay "'Victory is not Possible': a Theory of the Culture War," and two related essays on post-material politics and post-literate epistemology: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/02/victory-is-not-possible-a-theory-of-the-culture-war/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/05/immigration-and-citizenship-the-canadian-model-and-the-american-dream/ https://palladiummag.com/2021/04/17/americas-new-post-literate-epistemology/

Jacob Shell is Associate Professor of Geography at Temple University and the author of Giants of the Monsoon Forest: Living and Working with Elephants (2019) and Transportation and Revolt: Pigeons, Mules, Canals, and the Vanishing Geographies of Subversive Mobility (2015). He joins me to share his insights into the Canadian trucker convoy, the congealment of radical theories into stale academic orthodoxies and establishment aplogias, the blind spots of environmentalism, plus Ivan Illich, de-growth, elephants, and more. https://liberalarts.temple.edu/academics/faculty/shell-jacob https://twitter.com/JacobAShell

Sam Biagetti of Historiansplaining podcast joins me to discuss what's good, what's bad, and what's ugly in David Graber and David Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything." We begin with an appreciative account of their dismantling of deterministic accounts of human social evolution, and then turn to a critical assessment of their theoretical assumption, their peculiar revisionist account of the Enlightenment, and their undervaluing of myth, ritual, and transcendence. The Dawn of Everything: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything Listen to and support Historiansplaining here: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5530632 Sam's cross-post of this episode has a useful list of other sources discussed: https://www.patreon.com/posts/dissecting-dawn-63996926

With the 2001 publication of Angels and Demons, Dan Brown shifted away from his early focus on the US security state and its post-Cold War identity crisis and introduced a new protagonist: Harvard professor of "Religious Symbology" Robert Langdon. This improbable hero's first two adventures transport him to the Old World and entangle him with a secretive institution far more ancient than the American deep state: the Roman Catholic Church. Curiously, the rise of Langdon signals Brown's turn away from the national security preoccupations of his early writing just as the 9/11 era brought the challenges facing the US state to the center of most people's attention. Despite its apparently obscure subject matter, 2003's The Da Vinci Code became a sensational hit – one of the bestselling novels of all time – and turned Brown's fictional avatar Langdon into a household name worldwide. Pseud Dionysius MPH joins me once again to try to make sense of Brown's success at forging a new, global anti-postmodern mythology just as the "end of history" consensus of the 1990s was beginning to fracture.

George Orwell's "The Road to Wigan Pier" begins as a report on life in the depressed coal and industrial region of Northern England and expands into an ambivalent critique of socialism and progress. It's a book that belongs to its era – which saw the Great Depression, the peak of industrialism in the capitalist core countries, the rise of both communist and fascist challenges to the interwar liberal order – but also speaks in interesting ways to ours. Angela Nagle returns to Outsider Theory for an appreciative discussion of Orwell's book and its relationship to her longstanding interests. Follow Angela's Substack: https://angelanagle.substack.com/

Malcolm Kyeyune (@tinkzorg) joins me to map out the contours of class conflict today. Beginning with a discussion of the Canadian trucker convoy and other recent challenges to biomedical authoritarianism, we explore the managerial class's demand for ever-expanding intermediation (diversity consultants, localized public health bureaucracy, etc) in response to the spectral threats it confronts, from "fascism" to "misinformation." We also examine elite overproduction theory, the crisis of meritocratic ideology, the questionable prospects of the populist right, and much more.

Dan Brown is one of the best selling authors of all time; just fifteen years ago, "The Da Vinci Code" was a ubiquitous document of global popular culture. Yet Brown, now immensely wealthy from his novelistic success, is oddly neglected today. Pseud Dionysius MPH returns to the show to investigate the unlikely rise of Brown, his protagonist, Harvard Professor Robert Langdon, and the fictional discipline of "symbology" out of the demise of the cold war techno-thriller and the new threats of the information age. We explore Brown's two lesser known pre-Langdon novels, Digital Fortress and Deception Point, which despite being "bad" by most standards, are surprisingly prescient works that anticipate everything from Wikileaks to privatized space travel. We consider Brown's personal origins as a failson of the New England WASP elite who ultimately cashed in on his insider status as a popularizing mythologist of American power. His two early novels, we argue, clue us into the concerns underlying all of his fiction: the transformation of the "Cathedral" institutions of elite education and the Deep State in response to the post-Cold War dispensation of globalized and digitalized capitalism and feminized labor and the emergent risks of information warfare, extremism, and terrorism. This is the first in a multi-part series that will examine the arc of Dan Brown's career and its implications.

Dr Benway returns to the show to discuss his extensive research on the vast oeuvre of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, as well as William S. Burroughs's prolonged engagement with Hubbard's doctrines and practices and their odd resonances with post-structuralist thought. We examine both the genealogical and analogical relations between Hubbard's thinking and ideas developed in more respectable realms of 20th century ideological life, including psychoanalysis and Foucauldian theories of technologies of the self and technologies of power. David Wills's "Scientologist!": https://www.google.com/books/edition/Scientologist/k9JtnQEACAAJ?hl=en https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/scientology-psychiatry https://nonsite.org/the-first-privilege-walk/

@fitnessfeelingz posted a recent Twitter thread arguing that Covid is a modern myth: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1465794640481857542.html By this he means not that the pathogen SARS-COV-2 is not real, but that the existence of the pathogen does not account for its manifold social and political impacts. To make sense of these, we turn to René Girard's understanding of myth as a social technology that binds societies together in response to a common enemy. We consider how Covid-19 has come to perform this function, and why its limited efficacy in this regard only spurs more ritualized responses to it. https://outsidertheory.com/girards-revelation/ https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/rene-girard-cancel-culture-and-the-logic-of-sacrifice

"[The pandemic] is a monetary event aimed at prolonging the lifespan of our finance-driven and terminally ill mode of production." This is the provocative thesis of Fabio Vighi, who joins me to discuss the series of recent articles for The Philosophical Salon where he elaborates this argument in full. He explains how Covid has served as a useful crisis, justifying unprecedented and indefinite "monetary doping," keeping finance capital afloat, and why the flipside of this largesse is the increasing regimentation of all facets of human life through digitized biopolitical control. https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-central-bankers-long-covid-emergency-noise-and-conspiracys-best-kept-secret/ https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/a-self-fulfilling-prophecy-systemic-collapse-and-pandemic-simulation/ https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/slavoj-zizek-emergency-capitalism-and-the-capitulation-of-the-left/

Timothy Wilcox (@PreCursorPoets) is one of my my favorite writers on contemporary literature. He joins me to discuss three very online novels published in the past year or so: Hari Kunzru's Red Pill, Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts, and Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking about This. He shares his thoughts on the genre of internet fiction and the evolving phenomenon of "hyperconnectivity" as manifest in literary texts. We also consider the complicated interaction between the temporality of fiction and the temporality of the internet, the outsized role of Donald Trump in recent internet novels, and recent writers' attempts to channel and appropriate the dark energies of the internet. https://www.precursorpoets.com/always-online-prelude/ https://www.precursorpoets.com/uninterrupted-connection-infinite-grace/ https://medium.com/arc-digital/writing-the-great-american-novel-in-the-age-of-meme-warfare-273006eb85de

Default Friend is a writer investigating the deep history of the internet on her substack, Default Wisdom. She joins me to discuss one of our mutual interests: the work of the sociologist Sherry Turkle, and the light her pioneering 1995 study Life on the Screen sheds on the early history of the internet and the way the 90s internet anticipated present realities. We also explore the implications of Turkle's argument that the internet rendered concrete the abstractions of postmodern theory, as well as Default Friend's own work on fandom, Tumblr and other facets of "the millennial internet." https://defaultfriend.substack.com/ http://www.mit.edu/people/sturkle/Life-on-the-Screen.html

Critics often present recent ideological convulsions at the New York Times as an embarrassing deviation from the paper's illustrious history. Ashley Rindsberg, author of The Gray Lady Winked, joins me to explain why they're wrong. The Times, as he documents, has been plagued by scandal after scandal over the past hundred years, and its journalistic and editorial failures reveal more continuity than declining standards. Rindsberg also explains why the standard critiques of the paper from the right and the left are incomplete: far more than any consistent ideological agenda, the Times pursues the agenda of the powerful dynastic family that owns and controls it, whose interests are in tension with the paper's supposed commitment to truth and the public good. https://www.thegrayladywinked.com/

My pseudonymous native informants from the illustrious realms of Science make the provocative case that medicine has become a quintessentially postmodern field. They attribute this development to the rise of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) in the 1990s in Canada, which has occasioned (as its pioneers intended) a Kuhnian paradigm shift in the field. After surveying the spread and impact of the EBM revolution, we explore its after-effects in the Covid era. https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j5676 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/1785467 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0141076816649883

Federico García Lorca is revered as a literary martyr to the barbarity of fascism. His lesser-known friend and contemporary Leopoldo Panero narrowly escaped execution by fascist insurgents around the same time. In a strange twist, Panero later ended up as a fervent supporter of the regime that had killed his friend. Panero's loyalty allowed him to become an influential cultural commisar under Franco's government and placed him and his family at the pinnacle of the Franco-era literary elite. But he died at 52, leaving his brilliant and charismatic wife, Felicidad, and his three sons – all of whom had literary ambitions – to grapple with his ignominious legacy. What happened next was even stranger. Just as Franco's regime was falling in the mid-1970s, the cult documentary "El desencanto" offered an intimate picture of the decadent and eccentric clan, making their Oedipal struggles a symbol of the nation's reckoning with its past. Felicidad and her three sons became celebrities, characters in the novel of their own lives, lived out in public. In this way, their trajectory points us not only backward to reactionary modernism but forward to reality TV and the internet. Aaron Shulman, author of the collective biography "The Age of Disenchantments," joins me to discuss the allure of the Panero family, who he descibes as something like the Royal Tenenbaums meet Succession, as told by Roberto Bolaño.

The author and radio personality William Milton Cooper exercised a remarkably broad influence on conspiracy theory in the United States and beyond in the late 20th century. After his death in a shootout with police at his Arizona compound just months after 9/11, his name passed into legend, but the extent of his influence is often overlooked. Cooper's 1991 book Behold a Pale Horse, which claimed to document the Illuminati's scheme for a New World Order, was often described as a manifesto of the militia movement; it also circulated widely as contraband in prisons, especialy among African Americans, and as a result, became a frequent reference in hip hop lyrics in the 90s. Journalist Mark Jacobson was introduced to Cooper by one of his most prominent fans, the Wu Tang Clan's Old Dirty Bastard. He subsequently immersed himself in Cooper's writings, broadcasts, and career, and in 2018, published the first biography of him, Pale Horse Rider. Mark joins me to discuss the book, its subject, conspiracy culture in the Trump era, and more. Follow Mark on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/palehorseriderbook/?hl=en Buy Pale Horse Rider: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/316378/pale-horse-rider-by-mark-jacobson/ Buy Behold a Pale Horse: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780929385228 Listen to The Hour of the Time: http://hourofthetime.com/

"Foucault in Warsaw," just out in English translation from Open Letter Books, is a fascinating investigation of the time Michel Foucault spent as a cultural attaché in Warsaw in the late 1950s. The book is at once an intellectual biography of the philosopher during the pivotal year when he wrote much of his first major work, "History of Madness," an archival detective story set amidst the records of the Polish secret police, and an oral history of the underground gay community of Communist Poland. Author Remigiusz Ryziński and translator Sean Bye join me for a discussion of the book, its various contexts, and the significance of Foucault's Polish sojourn for the development of his thought. Buy "Foucault in Warsaw": https://www.openletterbooks.org/products/foucault-in-warsaw Read an excerpt: https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/june-2018-queer-issue-ix-foucault-in-warsaw-remigiusz-ryziski-sean-bye

Writer Daniel Oppenheimer joins me to discuss his new book on the legendary art critic Dave Hickey, "Far From Respectable." We explore Hickey's case for the continued vitality of beauty as a criterion for thinking about art and culture, his defense of controversial artist Robert Mapplethorpe and simultaneous critique of Mapplethorpe's other defenders, his aesthetic populism, his abandoned project "Pagan America," and the relevance of all of these to the current cultural panorama. We also explore Hickey's critique of institutions alongside the ironic fact that institutions sustained his best work – and what that might mean for current institutional outsiders in the Substack economy and elsewhere. Daniel's website: http://www.danieloppenheimer.com/ Far From Respectable: https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/oppenheimer-far-from-respectable

Phil Cunliffe, co-host of Aufhebunga Bunga and co-author of The End of the End of History, joins Outsider Theory to discuss the shifting co-ordinates of the post-Fukuyamaite world, the rise and fall of left populism, post-politics and anti-politics, the typology of the political outsider, the exemplary career of Silvio Berlusconi, and much more. The End of the End of History: https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/end-end-history Aufhebunga Bunga: https://aufhebungabunga.podbean.com/

Writer Sam Munson joins Outsider Theory to discuss the uncanny relevance of Dog Symphony, his prescient 2018 novel of plague and biopolitics, in which a nebulous entity called the Department of Social Praxis has assumed complete control over a dreamlike Buenos Aires. Other topics include the spectral place of Argentina in the North American imagination, Borges, maps and territories, and the acquiescence of the creative class to state power during the Covid era. Buy Dog Symphony here: https://www.ndbooks.com/book/dog-symphony/

Illustrator and designer Sterling Bartlett joins Outsider Theory to discuss his comic book "How Did We Get Here?" We explore why recycling is the master metaphor for our cultural predicament, the rise of post-hipster aesthetic of aneasthetized minimalism, why Jordan Peterson and Marie Kondo are two sides of the same coin, and more. Buy "How Did We Get Here?": https://firsttoknock.com/products/how-did-we-get-here Follow Sterling on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sterlingbartlett/?hl=en Sterling's website: https://www.sterlingbartlett.com/ My postmodernism seminar: https://www.speakeasy.com/e/what-is-postmodernism

Emmet Penney, writer and co-host of ex.haust podcast, joins Outsider Theory to discuss Fredric Jameson's canonical essay "Postmodernism, or the Culltural Logic of Late Capitalism" and its continued relevance, as well as cultural fragmentation, nostalgia, the return of affect, LA architecture, and other themes. More info on my June 10/17 seminar on Jameson's Postmodernism and Lyotard's Postmodern Condition: https://www.speakeasy.com/e/what-is-postmodernism Exhaust podcast: http://exhaust.fireside.fm/ Emmet's essay on "Lectureporn": https://www.pastemagazine.com/politics/liberals/lectureporn-the-vulgar-art-of-liberal-narcissism/

Oliver Traldi (@olivertraldi) joins Outsider Theory to answer an important question: is he now or has he ever been a member of the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW)? We discuss the latter formation's place within the online culture war dynamics of the past decade, its relation to the more recent controversies around Substack, what its members got right about the coalescence of "successor ideology" orthodoxies and what their analyses lacked. Finally, I apologize profusely for the poor audio quality of this episode on my end. I made some errors with a new mic setup that I wasn't yet used to when I recorded. I promise dramatically improved sound quality in all future episodes. Oliver's personal website: https://olivertraldi.weebly.com/

Tom Syverson (@syvology on Twitter), author of the new book Reality Squared, makes the case for why reality TV is the essential cultural form for grasping our bewildering contemporary panorama. More broadly, we discuss the problem of how to undertake a materialist analysis of culture in the face of an increasingly dematerialized and abstract economic reality, and the related problems confronting materialist politics in the present. Buy Tom's book: https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/reality-squared-reality-tv-left-politics Read Tom's recent essay on the limitations of materialist politics: https://www.thebellows.org/culture-politics-and-the-unreal-economy/ Read Tom's other work: https://linktr.ee/tomsyverson

Fiction writer and cultural critic Alex Perez joins Outsider Theory to discuss a mutual favorite writer, Roberto Bolaño, and in particular his short story "Labyrinth." We also cover the contemporary literary prestige economy, the professionalization of literature, the propagandification of culture in the Trump era, and the prospects for literary outsiders today. Read Bolaño's "Labyrinth" here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/23/labyrinth-roberto-bolano https://im1776.com/2021/04/27/the-new-literary-bad-boys/ https://twitter.com/Perez_Writes https://alexperez.substack.com/p/coming-soon

Documentary filmmaker Alex Lee Moyer joins Outsider Theory to discuss her 2020 film TFW No GF and its reception during the year after its release, as well as the film she edited prior to that, The New Radical. We also discuss the broader project of documenting countercultures, the ambivalent role of technology in channeling and enabling the control of oppositional cultural energy, and the prospects for creative work outside of the mainstream today. TFW No GF is now available on Amazon, iTunes, and YouTube: https://www.tfwnogfthemovie.com/ The New Radical is also available on Amazon, etc: https://www.amazon.com/New-Radical-Cody-Wilson/dp/B077W1PTJH

The writer Michael Sacasas joins Outsider Theory to discuss what the tech critics pre-Internet generations – especially Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan, Ivan Illich, and Neil Postman – have to say to us today as well as what contemporary tech criticism tends to miss, and how he understands his own critical and philosophical project. We also explore two of his essays from the past year, "Narrative Collapse" and "The Paradox of Control." Michael is one of my favorite contemporary writers on tech, and I hope you find this as rich and stimulating a conversation as I did. Subscribe to his substack here – you won't regret it: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/

Justin Murphy joins Outsider Theory to discuss leaving academia, his book Based Deleuze, why political correctness is only ones symptom of the real ailments afflicting the contemporary university, what conservatives get wrong about critical theory, and the current prospects of independent intellectual life, especially on the internet. Justin's projects: https://otherlife.co/ https://www.indiethinkers.org/ Geoff's course on Foucault: https://www.speakeasy.com/e/biopolitics-covid

Historian and writer Blake Smith joins Outsider Theory to discuss the teaching theory and the formation of elites; the surprising affinities between Strauss and Foucault; the parallel grooming practices of Straussians and Derrideans; the perverse economy of enjoyment in the Trump era; Obama’s failed use of theory as seduction prop; and why Foucault was the original Bronze Age Pervert. Blake on "Foucault Through Strauss": https://im1776.com/2021/02/19/foucault-through-strauss/ Blake's writing at Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/blake-smith Geoff's seminar on Foucault and Covid: https://www.speakeasy.com/e/biopolitics-covid

Jesse Walker, author of the excellent United States of Paranoia (2013) and books editor at Reason, joins Outsider Theory to revisit his book's arguments in light of Trump era politics. We discuss the Capitol riot and why it reveals not a unified front but a highly fractured right-wing fringe, and the continuities between liberal establishment paranoia of recent years and the militia panic of the 90s. Jesse also makes the case that playful internet conspiracy theorizing is a continuation of the much older "ironic style" of paranoia that originated with figures like Kerry Thornley and Robert Anton Wilson in the 1960s. Finally, we critique Adam Curtis's treatment of all these themes in his new film "Can't Get You Out of My Head." https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-united-states-of-paranoia-jesse-walker https://reason.com/people/jesse-walker/

Biz Sherbert, a theorist and writer focused on online fashion and Gen Z subcultures, joins Outsider Theory to discuss the current landscape of digital fashion, the shifting nature of subcultures, and the persistence of hauntological nostalgia of contemporary culture. We consider the acceleration of the trend cycle in online spaces and how it dramatizes the evolving relationship between present and past, explore the strange fusion of counterculture with the norms it once rejected in trad, normie, and basic aesthetics, and reflect on the political correlates of this development. Biz's new podcast is Nymphet Alumni: https://nymphetalumni.transistor.fm/1 Links: https://sherbert.biz/ https://www.instagram.com/markfisherquotes/?hl=en https://www.tiktok.com/@bimbotheory

Chris Gabriel, creator of the MemeAnalysis Youtube channel, joins Outsider Theory to discuss why memes are now the royal road to the collective unconscious. We also discuss how the internet traps Dionysian energies in an Apollinian dreamworld; why Burroughs's word virus is a better model than Dawkinsian memetics for understanding the meme form; what the most revealing memetic formations of the present are; and why we need mythmaking more than therapy. MemeAnalysis: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb4pvsyqNrmBIGJFQxEukUA Effluvia: https://goddisk.substack.com/ Meme Intelligence Agency: https://open.spotify.com/show/4GPyOdF5f4Ja02lIq407zl?si=D6ticZDvSdS4Ennv95pNFg Aeonic Comics: https://www.instagram.com/aeoniccomics/

Adam Lehrer is a critic and artist, the co-host of System of Systems podcast. His new substack is Safety Propaganda. He joins Outsider Theory to discuss how we got Marxpilled, how Marx got mainstreamed among the professional class in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and why the "ruthless criticism of all that exists" especially means criticism of your own class. We then examine why Marx and Engels loved the reactionary monarchist Balzac, and what comparable value some writers on the right might offer to the critique of contemporary capitalism. From there, we discuss the propagandistic functions served by art today and the prospects for meaningful dissent in the arts and literature. Adam's work: System of Systems: https://www.patreon.com/systemofsystems?fan_landing=true Safety Propaganda: https://safetypropaganda.substack.com/ "A Marxist Defends the Great Reactionaries": https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/01/a-marxist-defends-the-great-reactionaries/ "Art's Moral Fetish": https://caesuramag.org/posts/arts-moral-fetish

Outsider art historian and hypnotist collector Mónica Belevan joins Outsider Theory to discuss her various attempts to track the structures of feeling of the present. We explore the aesthetics and sensibilities of the Baroque and their relevance for grasping the topoi of the Covid era – in particular, the image of the labyinth, the theme of the madness of the world, and the figure of the clown (embodied lately in Joaquin Phoenix's Joker). Finally, we reflect on the awakening of the sacrificial unconscious by the Dionysian onslaught of the plague and the still unfulfilled need for symbolic resolution. https://covidianaesthetics.substack.com/ https://www.lapsuslima.com/

In recent years, memes have risen to prominence as a medium for witty, irreverent, surreal engagement with the canon of High Theory. At the speed of the internet, memes now circulate the ideas of thinkers from Deleuze to Dugin, from Land to DeLanda, in humorous and fragmentary forms, instantiating in their mode of dissemination the sorts of positive feedback loops, rhizomatic growth, and strata hopping that some such thinkers have theorized. Beyond Woke and Problematic, a premier poster in the "theorygram" space, joins Outsider Theory to survey the dramatic ascent of the theory meme in the new millennium and explore the relationship of this popular form to the ideas it purveys. With reference to François Cusset's "French Theory," we also compare the meme to earlier vehicles of pop theory. Follow Beyond Woke and Problematic: https://linktr.ee/beyondwokeand_problematic François Cusset, French Theory: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/french-theory

The Hungarian countess Erzsébet Báthory (1560-1610), allegedly one of the most prolific mass murderers ever, occupies the border zone between history and legend. She has become a part of the vampire mythology associated with Southeast Europe as well as a subject of fascination for avant-garde writers and artists and a frequent pop culture reference. Báthory emerges out of the shadowy depths of archaic magic, but also stands as a proto-modern female Faust whose commitment to her own all-consuming violent passions anticipated the visions of the Marquis de Sade. In an age of attenuated taboos, her extreme acts retain the capacity to shock us; she still hovers on the Outside of civilized life. My guest Alex Kaschuta and I use Báthory as a starting point for discussing the paroxysms of the modern ideal of individual freedom, with some help from Sade, Camille Paglia, and the surrealist writers Valentine Penrose and Alejandra Pizarnik. We also address the tendency of recent pop culture to domesticate the terrors of Báthory's crimes, and the way that her type of Sadeian sexual depravity, often denied or downplayed, resurfaces in discussions of porn and sex robots. Alex's writing and podcast: https://linktr.ee/alexkaschuta Alejandra Pizarnik, "The Bloody Countess" Valentine Penrose, The Bloody Countess: Atrocities of Erzsébet Báthory_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElizabethB%C3%A1thoryinpopularculture

The "contrarian" is an outsider on the edge of the inside: attached to a particular group but defiant of its pieties and orthodoxies. Contrarians often seem to be one of the most despised figures in online spaces – yet strategic contrarianism can also be a career-building strategy. Hence, accused contrarians are often accused of "grifting" and similar sins. But are they any worse than more orthodox-minded hustlers? Oliver Bateman, writer for the Ringer, Mel, Splice Today, and many other publications and co-host of What's Left? podcast, joins Outsider Theory to try to make sense of the role of this spectral figure in reinforcing ideological orthodoxies and (para)social formations online. Preliminary Theory of the In-Group Contrarian: https://outsidertheory.com/preliminary-theory-of-the-in-group-contrarian/ Oliver Bateman, The Cooties Theory of Criticism: https://www.splicetoday.com/writing/the-cooties-theory-of-criticism Oliver Bateman, The Grifters: https://www.splicetoday.com/writing/the-grifters

Francis E. Dec (1926-1996) was a disbarred lawyer who wrote and circulated a series of pamphlets detailing the world's subjugation by the Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God. He was largely ignored for much of his life, but his writings eventually gathered a cult following because of their unique depiction of a theme common both to late twentieth century science fiction and critical theory: the ubiquitous and subtle operation of technological control systems. Artist writer, and gonzo philsopher Gio Pennachietti joins Outsider Theory for a wide-ranging discussion of Dec's work and its connections to an array of other cultural phenomena from Dec's era and our own. We conclude with a brief and only tangentially related discussion of the art of the late Thomas Kinkade, another shared interest of ours. Follow Gio and read his writing: * Twitter: https://twitter.com/giantgio * Instragram: https://t.co/WNZfDA10zQ?amp=1 * YouTube: https://t.co/2vsKCsvFVO?amp=1 * https://gioscontentcorner.wordpress.com/ * https://terrorhousepress.com/product/ending-bigly/ Also related: * The Collected Rants of Francis E Dec (https://www.bentoandstarchky.com/dec/rants.htm) * Jeffrey Sconce, The Technical Delusion (https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-technical-delusion) * Geoff Shullenberger, We All Wear Tinfoil Hats Now (https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/we-all-wear-tinfoil-hats-now)

For the inaugural episode of the Outsider Theory podcast, I speak to Angela Nagle, author of Kill All Normies, about the Capitol riot and what it reveals about the right-wing embrace of transgression and subversion; the shift in the liberal consensus from celebratory views of technology to more censorious attitudes; and the ongoing weaponization of the left's countercultural energies by the neoliberal center. Links: Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies (https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/kill-all-normies) Geoff Shullenberger, "Theorycels in Trumpworld (https://outsidertheory.com/theorycels-in-trumpworld/)" Geoff Shullenberger, "Goodbye Trump, our carnival king (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/goodbye-trump-our-carnival-king)"