Podcasts about lyotard

French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist

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Best podcasts about lyotard

Latest podcast episodes about lyotard

Roma Tre Radio Podcast
CHÁOS. Il frammento e l'onda: dialoghi tra Lyotard e Hokusai

Roma Tre Radio Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 18, 2026 38:57


Cos'è il sublime? Cosa accade quando l'immagine supera ciò che possiamo comprendere? In questa nuova puntata, Carlotta e Alisia ci guidano in un percorso che fa incontrare l'Oriente di Hokusai con l'Occidente di Jean-François Lyotard. A Palazzo Bonaparte arriva per la prima volta una grande mostra dedicata a Hokusai, il maestro che ha trasformato l'onda in visione e il paesaggio in esperienza dell'infinito. Per Lyotard, il sublime nasce proprio da questa tensione: dal tentativo di rappresentare ciò che eccede ogni rappresentazione. Interviene la direttrice scientifica, la dottoressa Francesca Villanti.

Ping!
#68 Pourquoi 80% des transformations d'entreprise ne marchent pas ? avec Ibrahima Fall

Ping!

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 9, 2026 61:00


Ibrahima Fall, dirigeant de Hommes & Décisions, président-fondateur de l'Institut du Travail Réel et intervenant à Polytechnique exécutive éducation. il est de ces invités qu'on attend depuis longtemps : un homme qui pense vraiment, qui ne cède rien sur les mots parce qu'il ne cède rien sur les choses. Je l'ai découvert grâce à Emmanuel Duez, qui me l'a recommandé et je comprends pourquoi. Dès les premières minutes, j'ai senti que cet épisode allait bousculer beaucoup d'idées reçues sur le management, le leadership et la transformation des organisations. Dans cet épisode, nous parlons de la différence fondamentale entre le travail prescrit et le travail réel et pourquoi ignorer cette distinction fabrique du malheur dans les entreprises. J'ai questionné Ibrahima sur ce qu'il appelle le "trétentisme", cette fuite en avant qui consiste à soigner les individus plutôt que de soigner le travail lui-même. Nous parlons aussi de la confusion entre changer et transformer, entre problème et situation, entre esprit critique et esprit de crête. Et bien sûr, nous n'évitons pas l'IA — non pas pour savoir quel outil utiliser, mais pour nous demander ce qu'on a vraiment intérêt à lui confier. Ibrahima pose une question que presque personne ne pose : est-ce que parce que c'est techniquement possible, c'est forcément souhaitable ?3. CITATIONS MARQUANTES"Tout ce qui se fait sans le réel va périr avec le réel." (28:34)"Ce n'est pas le management qui donne du sens au travail, c'est le travail qui donne du sens au management." (09:27)"L'IA, je la considère comme un voleur très compulsif. Je ne lui donne pas mon portefeuille à garder." (44:47)"Les limites de mon langage sont les limites de mon monde. On a besoin de fertiliser le regard." (22:16, citant Wittgenstein)"Il n'y a pas de bien-être sans bien vivre, il n'y a pas de bien vivre sans bien faire." (27:04)4. IDÉES CENTRALES 1. Le travail réel vs le travail prescrit (00:54 – 05:00) Quelle que soit la qualité des procédures, les gens mobilisent toujours leur intelligence pour faire face à l'imprévu. Ce gap entre prescrit et réel, c'est là que vit l'innovation — et c'est ce que la plupart des organisations nient. Ignorer le travail réel, c'est fabriquer du désengagement et de la maladie. Pourquoi c'est important : C'est le fondement de tout le reste. Si on ne reconnaît pas que travailler c'est toujours plus que ce qui est écrit, toute démarche managériale repose sur du sable.2. Changer ≠ Transformer — et confondre les deux coûte cher (16:57 – 20:03) "Changer" vient de cambiare (échanger) — on peut changer un process du jour au lendemain. "Transformer" vient de transformare (métamorphoser) — ça ne se décrète pas. Entre 60 et 80 % des projets de transformation échouent précisément parce qu'on fait du "transformisme" : du changement habillé en transformation. Pourquoi c'est important : Toutes les entreprises se réclament de la transformation. Presque aucune ne comprend ce que le mot signifie vraiment.3. Le problème n'est pas un problème — c'est une situation (21:16 – 23:05) Un problème, on peut en faire le tour et le résoudre (le dissoudre). Une situation, on est pris dedans — il n'y a pas de solution, juste des arrangements et des issues possibles. L'IA excelle à résoudre des problèmes. Elle ne dit rien sur les situations. Pourquoi c'est important : La quasi-totalité des défis réels en management sont des situations, pas des problèmes. Penser qu'une loi, un process ou une IA va "résoudre" ça est une illusion dangereuse.4. L'IA augmente les facultés, pas le jugement (33:32 – 46:47) Plus on a de facultés, plus on requiert du jugement pour les orienter. Or le jugement, ça se nourrit de culture, de temps, d'expérience — pas d'optimisation. La vraie question sur l'IA n'est pas technique : c'est de savoir quels métiers on a intérêt à lui confier, et lesquels nécessitent d'être "encastrés dans le contexte humain". Pourquoi c'est important : On se trompe de débat sur l'IA. Le vrai enjeu est philosophique et éducatif.5. Manager, c'est formuler des problèmes — pas les résoudre (49:07 – 54:25) Résoudre des problèmes, c'est le niveau inférieur de l'intelligence. Un vrai manager/leader formule de nouveaux problèmes, voit ce que les autres ne voient pas, et crée les conditions pour que les équipes fassent un travail de qualité. C'est ce qu'Ibrahima appelle le "travaillement" — travailler sur le travail. Pourquoi c'est important : Ça redéfinit radicalement ce qu'on attend d'un manager et explique pourquoi séparer "leadership" de "management" est une erreur intellectuelle majeure.5. QUESTIONS POSÉES DANS L'INTERVIEWQu'est-ce qu'on appelle le travail réel, et c'est quoi la réalité d'une certaine manière ? (00:24)Comment se fait-il qu'autant d'entreprises semblent déconnectées du réel — ou est-ce une vue de l'esprit ? (05:03)Est-ce qu'il ne manquerait pas aux dirigeants d'avoir vraiment "fait le job" sur le terrain — pas une journée d'exploration, mais un mois ou deux ? (08:02)Est-ce qu'il y a seulement une vraie formation au management — ou est-ce que le management n'est pas censé être une école de l'expérience ? (10:19)Quand tu parles de "diplomatie des disciplines", à quoi tu fais concrètement référence ? (13:10)Comment fait-on bouger les lignes dans une culture d'entreprise ? Par où on commence ? (16:20)Est-ce que la même problématique ne s'applique pas en politique — on rajoute des process alors qu'il faudrait transformer ? (21:02)C'est quoi le mot le plus mal utilisé en entreprise en ce moment ? (23:05)Comment toi tu travailles avec l'IA — comment tu trouves l'équilibre entre ce que tu lui délègues et ce que tu gardes ? (44:17)Les gens ne veulent plus être managers : comment tu lis cette tendance ? (50:42)6. RÉFÉRENCES CITÉESPersonnes & penseursGaston Berger — philosophe et directeur de l'enseignement supérieur (années 50). Formule : "voir loin, voir large, analyser en profondeur, prendre des risques, penser à l'homme." Aussi : "Les machines sont comme les habitudes, elles asservissent les faibles et affranchissent ceux qui ont des choses à dire." (15:02 / 45:46)Karl Krauss — satiriste viennois début XXe. "Parler c'est penser" / "La quantité n'est pas une pensée, mais que la quantité dévore la pensée, c'est une pensée." (20:03 / 24:04)Ludwig Wittgenstein — "Les limites de mon langage sont les limites de mon monde." (22:16)Jean-François Lyotard — philosophe. "Dans un univers où avoir du succès c'est gagner du temps, la pensée n'a qu'un défaut incorrigible : celui de le faire perdre." (35:37)André Maurois — écrivain (années 20). Sur le bon sens : "lorsque la raison l'emporte sur le sentiment, et que l'expérience l'emporte sur le raisonnement." (35:37)Paul Valéry — cité sur les mots qui "chantent plus qu'ils ne parlent." (23:22)Napoléon — "Je ne pense pas vite, j'ai pensé avant." (35:37)Henry Mintzberg — cité sur l'erreur de séparer leadership et management. (49:07)Jacques Ellul — "éthique de la non-puissance" (≠ éthique de l'impuissance) : être capable de faire mais décider de ne pas faire. (39:42)Marcel Just — concept d'algébrose : quand la représentation ne représente plus rien, quand on est dans une abstraction folle. (59:34)Jacques Lemuel — consultant années 70. Sophisme de l'efficacité : "ce qui est efficace est vrai, or ce qui est vrai est juste, donc ce qui est efficace est juste." (56:53)Jacques Baudrillard — "journalisation de la pensée" (ce qu'on dit est valable pour le jour, après c'est fini). (56:04)Emmanuel Duez — a recommandé Ibrahima Fall à Gregory. (16:20)Concepts & œuvresErgonomie de langue française — découverte de l'irréductibilité du travail réel au travail prescrit. (00:54)L'anthropologie du geste — livre du chercheur français Aujus (années 40-50), base de la "loi de jus" sur les métiers encastrés dans le contexte humain. (38:43)Loi de Gabor — "tout ce qui est techniquement possible sera fait, quel que soit le prix à payer." (38:43)Tribune dans la presse — le président de Veolia et le président du groupe Française des Jeux, appelant à une rénovation intellectuelle des entreprises. (20:03)7. TIMESTAMPS CLÉS 00:00 – Introduction 00:54 – Le travail réel vs prescrit : la découverte fondamentale de l'ergonomie française 02:27 – L'exemple du chauffeur de bus RATP et la sonde déconnectée 05:03 – Pourquoi les entreprises sont-elles déconnectées du réel ? 06:57 – Le "trétentisme" : soigner les individus plutôt que le travail 09:27 – "Ce n'est pas le management qui donne du sens au travail" 10:29 – Il n'y a (presque) pas de vrais cours de management dans les écoles 13:49 – La "diplomatie des disciplines" : c'est quoi vraiment ? 15:02 – Gaston Berger et l'exigence subjective 16:57 – Changer vs transformer : une confusion qui coûte très cher 18:29 – Pourquoi 60 à 80 % des projets de transformation échouent 21:16 – Problème vs situation : l'IA ne peut pas tout 24:04 – Tout ce qui est réel n'est pas mesurable — et c'est un problème 25:56 – Prendre soin des collaborateurs : les baby-foot ne marchent pas 28:34 – "Tout ce qui se fait sans le réel va périr avec le réel" 33:32 – L'IA augmente les facultés mais pas le jugement 38:43 – Loi de Gabor vs loi d'Aujus : que doit-on vraiment confier à l'IA ? 44:47 – Comment Ibrahima utilise l'IA sans lui abandonner sa pensée 48:43 – Leadership et management : l'erreur de les séparer 50:03 – Le vrai manager formule des problèmes — il ne les résout pas 51:16 – Les gens ne veulent plus être "préposés au management" 54:25 – La refondation de l'entreprise : par quoi commencer ? 56:53 – Le sophisme de l'efficacité : confondre justesse et justice 59:34 – L'algébrose : quand les organisations décrochent totalement du réel 01:00:27 – Conclusion : "La philosophie ne s'oppose pas à la pratique, elle la suppose"Hébergé par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Bad at Sports
Bad at Sports Episode 929: Dan Attoe

Bad at Sports

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 24, 2026 54:42


Recorded on the fly during art fair week, live at NADA, this conversation with Dan Attoe moves from metal-kid origin stories to Zen meditation, daily practice, tattooing, landscape painting, and the unexpected turn toward writing a horror novel. Duncan opens with a personal note: a Dan Attoe painting has been hanging in his home for 22 years, a wedding gift that quietly embedded itself into the fabric of his life, which frames the conversation, and traces Attoe's arc from rural Idaho and northern Minnesota outsider to one of the most recognizable painters of his generation. Attoe talks about the seven-year run of making a painting every weekday, a discipline that functioned less as a productivity hack and more as a survival strategy. What began as wild, sex-and-drugs-and-rowdy-party imagery rooted in imagined social worlds gradually shifted toward the meditative landscapes he's now known for. These aren't observed sites but constructed psychic spaces, built from memory, attention, and what he calls a process of "composting" experience. Zen practice, daily drawing, and tattooing form a three-part studio structure that keeps the work in motion. Learning to tattoo on his own body sharpened his attention to contrast, permanence, and empathy, feeding directly back into the paintings. Along the way we get patches, skate culture, Methodist guilt, Barry McGee installations, Walker Art Center bookstore theory dives, and the long road from being told to abandon heavy-metal imagery to fully embracing it as the engine of a mature practice. The conversation closes on writing: how Stephen King, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and decades of accumulated art-world experience led Attoe to channel theory, narrative, and lived history into a horror novel. It's a talk about attention, energy, and letting the work tell you what it needs to become. Images courtesy of Western Exhibitions -  A party for children, 2019 India ink and graphite on paper 7h x 7w in   Fingertip Mountain, 2020 Oil on Canvas on Panel 24h x 24w in   Forest Path with Glowing Orb, 2021 Oil on Canvas on Panel 36h x 24w in   Dual Falls with Painted Arches, 2021 Oil on Canvas on Panel 36h x 24w in Names Dropped: Dan Attoe — https://www.danattoe.com Dan Attoe at Western Exhibitions — https://westernexhibitions.com/artists/dan-attoe Dan Attoe at PPOW — https://ppowgallery.com/artists/dan-attoe/ Clouds Tattoo (Attoe's shop) — https://www.cloudstattoo.com A Talking Tree — https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Tree-Dan-Attoe/dp/B0D4JGYR2F Barry McGee — https://www.ratio3.org/artists/barry-mcgee Chris Johanson — https://altman-siegel.com/artists/chris-johanson Jean-Michel Basquiat — https://gagosian.com/artists/jean-michel-basquiat/ Titian — https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/titian Giorgione — https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/giorgione Arthur Danto — https://www.columbia.edu/cu/philosophy/faculty/danto.html Dr. Woo — https://drwoo.com Natalie Goldberg — https://nataliegoldberg.com Stephen King — https://stephenking.com George Saunders — https://georgesaundersbooks.com Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — https://www.harpercollins.com/products/zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance-robert-m-pirsig Jean-François Lyotard — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lyotard/ Jean Baudrillard — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/ Walker Art Center — https://walkerart.org Iowa Writers' Workshop — https://writersworkshop.uiowa.edu Iron Maiden — https://www.ironmaiden.com Danzig — https://www.danzig-verotik.com Twin Peaks — https://www.sho.com/twin-peaks Dragonlance / Larry Elmore — https://larryelmore.com New Art Dealers Alliance –– https://www.newartdealers.org/

Slow Learners
VINELAND EP 5: It's The Libidinal Economy, Stupid! (W/Subliminal Jihad)

Slow Learners

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 23, 2025 145:06


THIS WEEK: John and Asher reads through Chapters 10-12 of Vineland, which takes them back in their shared semester at the College of the Surf (John was Asher's RA). We also learn about the scintillating backstory of Frenesi Gates and her love affair with a COP (ew)--the betrayal of all her ostensible values. We also talk Marx, Freud, Lyotard, Thorazine as a bad-trip-killer, cinematic radicalism, the horny monster who lives inside of you and makes you do stuff you shouldn't want to (or even don't want to) do, May '68, the Emerald Triangle, and the Pynchonian figure of the evil dentist.THEN: Asher is joined by Dimitri and Khalid of the Subliminal Jihad podcast to talk about Pynchon's ties (literary and otherwise) to deep state conspiracism, occult machinations, and all things para-political (or as the boys would say it: political). The truth is out there? WRONG AGAIN. The truth is in...here.MUSIC:Kimi-Bogdan Raczynski

Kreisky Forum Talks
Onur Erdur und Monika Mokre: DIE SCHULE DES SÜDENS

Kreisky Forum Talks

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 9, 2025 69:32


Robert Misik im Gespräch mit Onur Erdur und Monika MokreDIE SCHULE DES SÜDENSDie kolonialen Wurzeln der französischen Theorie »Wer das Buch von Onur Erdur liest, spürt das befreiende Gefühl, dass die Welt des Denkens widersprüchlicher, reicher, auch trostreicher ist als die anstrengenden Moralisierungen der Gegenwart.« – Elisabeth von Thaden, Die ZEIT»Brillant und elegant.« – Robert Misik im FALTERIn seiner Ideengeschichte in acht Porträts erschließt Onur Erdur eine neue Geografie des französischen Denkens, das die zweite Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts prägte: Die Theorien von Intellektuellen wie Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Pierre Bourdieu, Hélène Cixous uva. wurden maßgeblich in Nordafrika oder in der Auseinandersetzung mit den französischen Kolonien geformt.Was Erdur gelungen ist, ist schlicht und einfach eine packend zu lesende Geschichte der (post-)kolonialen Hintergründe französischer Philosphie.Erdurs Spurensuche führt ihn nach Algier, wo der junge Soldat Pierre Bourdieu mitten im Algerienkrieg seinen Wehrdienst ableistet; ins Küstendörfchen Sidi Bou Saïd nördlich von Tunis, wo Michel Foucault zu einer Haltung des philosophischen Hedonismus gelangt; oder nach Casablanca, wo sich Roland Barthes in einer Art Erleuchtung zu einem Romancier fantasiert – und zu Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous oder Jacques Rancière, die ihre algerische Herkunft philosophisch reflektieren.Die Wiener Kulturwissenschaftlerin Monika Mokre kommentiert und diskutiert Erdurs Studie zwischen französischem Poststrukturalismus und den gegenwärtigen Positionen postkolonialen Denkens.Onur Erdur, 1984 in Diyarbakir geboren, ist Historiker und Kulturwissenschaftler. Er forscht und lehrt an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin zu Fragen der globalen Ideengeschichte.Monika Mokre, geboren 1963, ist Politikwissenschaftlerin und arbeitet an der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.Moderation:Robert Misik, Autor und Journalist

Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour
Sigmund Freud - Debasement in the Sphere of Love

Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 8, 2025 74:46


This week Cooper and Taylor discuss a short piece from Sigmund Freud: On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love. We focus on the implications on libidinal economy. We tie the piece to Deleuze & Guattari, Lyotard, Lacan, and Rene Girard. Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/muhh Twitter: @unconscioushh

Les chemins de la philosophie
Le retour du grand récit ? 3/3 : Comment reconstruire un grand récit ?

Les chemins de la philosophie

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2025 3:49


durée : 00:03:49 - Le Pourquoi du comment : philo - Du conte au grand récit, l'humanité cherche du sens. Après l'effondrement des grands récits, Jean-François Lyotard questionnait le rôle de la science. Faut-il reconstruire un récit commun fondé sur elle pour affronter les défis planétaires ? - réalisation : Louise André

Overthink
Post-Truth

Overthink

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 26, 2025 59:57 Transcription Available


With conspiracy theories, fake news, and anti-science rhetoric everywhere, we are living in an age of post-truth. In episode 137 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss the meaning of truth in our contemporary political and social landscape and how post-truth has increased in the recent years. How do phenomena like opinion overload, news fatigue, and information overload contribute to the spread of post truth? And are we really “post” truth, or do we simply live in an age of “many” truths? Ellie and David explore different conceptions of truth, the differences between misinformation and disinformation, and between lying and bullshitting. And what's the connection between post-truth and postmodernism? Have so-called “pomo professors” contributed to the rise of political dishonesty and deception? In the bonus, your hosts talk about Michael Hannon's article “The Politics of Post-Truth” and consider whether “post-truth” is even the right word for the crisis we're facing.Works Discussed: Max Black, “The Prevalence of Humbug”Harry Frankfurt, “On Bullshit”Ralph Keyes, The Post-Truth Era Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern ConditionLee McIntyre, Post-Truth David M. Peña-Guzmán and Rebekah Spera, “The anatomy of a philosophical hoax: The politics of delegitimation in contemporary philosophy”Simon Truwant, De waarheid heeft vier gezichtenSupport the showPatreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast Website | overthinkpodcast.comInstagram & Twitter | @overthink_podEmail | dearoverthink@gmail.comYouTube | Overthink podcast

5 Star Tossers
Vats for Brains: AI and Automated Intelligence (Part I)

5 Star Tossers

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 14, 2025 101:36


Hello there audient,How's life?So, for this summer of lovely weather and lovelier news the Tossers bring you the first of a two-part series of pods dealing with A.I. It'll be fun and light, much like this summer!This one was just me and Jake, as Andy and Jack are (surely) having the time of their lives elsewhere.. and we discuss so, so much.What is AI? Sagi argues it's not deserving of its name, giving a bad rap to intelligence, assuming we can indeed create it, that intelligence is within our grasp to make. What we get with AI is a probablistic imitation of reason, minus all the pesky desires (except of course behind the AI scenes), which has its uses... not all of which are necessarily healthy or sustainable.Jake evokes the area of teaching and learning, writing and reading, as an area particularly vulnerable to AI exploitation, as more and more college students use ChatGPT to pass their courses (and more and more teachers use ChatGPT to grade their "students"). He sees this as what Derrida called absolute ash, the dead burying the dead...Ensuing is a debate we took through Stiegler and Kant, through Hegel (and Jesus), to Silicon Valley metaphysics (and its shoddy, responsibility-shirking nature). Far too much to recount. And there's more to come......let's just hope Jake doesn't make it all Marx GrudgeP.S.Pay no attention to the man behind the bleeps.Stars: Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais; Marx Grudge (see we already did it!..); WWJD; Beast & Sovereign.

Buddhist Geeks
TPOT, Palestine, & True Bodhisattvahood

Buddhist Geeks

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 1, 2025 82:25


This episode of Buddhist Geeks features a candid and heartfelt conversation between Vince Fakhoury Horn and Tasshin Fogleman about Palestine, the TPOT subculture, and what it means to embody true Bodhisattvahood. They explore the limitations of online discourse, especially around contentious issues, and reflect on the importance of good-faith dialogue, friendship, and spiritual integrity in times of crisis.Join Vince Fakhoury Horn and Brian Newman outside of Lisbon, Portugal at the beginning of 2026 for a 10-day intensive jhāna retreat. There, we'll be exploring The Flavors of Jhāna.Episode TranscriptVince:Hey Tasshin.Tasshin:Hi Vince.We just talked before I hit record. We just talked still. It's like formally. Hi. Hi. Tasshin: We're here. Vince: Yeah, exactly. That's good to see you. Tasshin: Yeah, good to see you too, brother. Yeah. Vince: Yeah, man, I appreciate you being willing to I invited you to have this conversation on X or my favorite platform to hate, Tasshin:My favorite platform to love.Vince: Great. I was there with you for a while, but yeah, it's getting a little weird. It's it's getting a little Faschy, X but we'll probably talk about that. So I propose that we talk about, this was the theme I proposed to you, which is Palestine, TPOT, and True Bodhisattvahood.. And it's, I guess in response to a lot of frustrated, angry, maybe righteous and not in a necessarily, in all bad sense. But yeah, in some posts that I've been sharing on X since I don't know it's been ongoing since the October 7th in my case. So I guess I wanted to explore that with you because I consider you to be one of my friends in the TPOT subculture, which we can get into and talk about what that actually is, Uhhuh because it's pretty, and it's it's vagueish, but, or decentralized at least.But it seems like you're well respected in this decentralized subculture and I think I'm part of that as well, but I seem to be taking a very different role from you and how I relate to it, which is a little bit more critical and Challenging and, I haven't found that's really endeared me to many people in the community.But some people like yourself have engaged with my critiques in what feels like a good faith way, and I've really appreciated that. So I thought, it'd be cool to have a, an even more personal conversation where people could see potentially if we decide to release any of this.And I don't know, just the human side of this, which doesn't come across often in 280 characters. Tasshin: Yeah. I appreciate all that context. I think that's really helpful and I think it's good to have a conversation about this. I think that I've been really struck by your perspectives on this and in general, I really value your perspectives and your opinions about the path and about practice and, we've had a number of disagreements over the years, but I've always walked away, like really learning a lot. And yeah, I do try to engage in good faith and I think especially one of the practices I have just for any kind of conflict in general is if I feel like text-based mediums especially can only hold so much.I don't even like to discourse or disagree on Twitter. I use it for other things and it's hey, if I'm, I've said this to you before, if we have a disagreement, let's get on a call and actually talk about it. And because it's just, you can actually hear the other person's perspective and where they're coming from in a way that text just really doesn't afford.So I'm glad we're talking about this. Yeah, I think it's great. Yeah. Vince: And the downside of doing that without recording it and sharing it back, because of course then it's just like a private thing that happens Right, and doesn't necessarily filter out in the same way to the collective. Tasshin: Totally. Totally.SoVince: This is cool. Yeah. Thank you. Tasshin: Do you have any suggestions for where you'd like to start or what feels like a good starting place?Vince: I would be curious to see your take on what TPOT is or how you'd describe that phenomena. I did spend a little bit of time reflecting on it, and I came up with a little, like micro definition, but I don't think it's exhaustive this a starting point.But I'm curious even before sharing that, if there's anything, thoughts on TPOT and what it is, if you've thought, have you meditated on that? How do you can, Tasshin: yeah. I love that and I'm so curious what your definition will be. I suspect it'll be spicier than mine, but I liked what you said earlier about it being a decentralized community.because I, I felt a little bit of trepidation before this conversation for really all three of the things you want to talk about. I feel like, so woefully inexpert in and I really don't know as much as I ought to about the war, and I don't know as much. I, I don't know. I'm not, I'm in TPOT certainly, but I'm not, there's no elected four figure leader or something.It's decentralized, as you said. And then also at the Bodhisattva path, I'm like still figuring it out very right. As we all are so right. But yeah, TPOT, I think for me it's very much about specific people, like their specific friends that I've cultivated very deep friendships with, that I've met through Twitter, and developed those relationships through Twitter and their, I think some of my closest friends at this point are people I've met through Twitter and they're friendships that I treasure and I think it is decentralized.I think it's. Spread throughout the world at this point. Like I can go to any major city and meet people who are connected to this network. And I, like my friend Andrew Rose has been talking about it recently as the network where it's yeah, it's not really about Twitter anymore. And it's not really, it's a larger cloud of people that are connected and I think it's not necessarily ideologically on the same page, like people having the same perspectives or even shared practices.There might be shared interests and common overlaps, but I think people have very different perspectives on the world. And it's more, if anything, I'd say it's like a developmental similarity where, for me at least, it really helped me to, I started to enter TPOT. I could go into detail, but as I was individuating from being at the monastery for many years and it's I mean it from a developmental perspective, it helped me jump from three to four in the Keegan stages where it's like I was in a tribal state of mind identified with the maple ideology and worldview and practices, which was great for me at the time. It really was. And then it's, it stopped being great for me and I had to find a new way and being with so many weirdos from around the world who saw things so differently really helped me to find my own way and find my own life. So I feel a sense of connection and intimacy with it, and like indebtedness to it, where it's these are my people and a help that helped me to find myself in the world.Yeah, that's what TPOT is to me at least. Vince: I like what you're saying about the developmental part. I guess I see the phenomena similarly like this is something that. There's a lot of people coming together, not, like you said, around a particular ideology or like framework.Which is very common. Like a bunch of people come together on a specific book or teacher or teaching or whatever. This is different because there are teachers and teachings that are, you see commonly in that community. But it's pretty broad. Yeah. Tasshin: And you don't have to buy into any of them.I think there are major, if anything there's like themes, like non coercion is a big one or Right. And people bring their own interests and you don't have to be interested in the same things other people are interested in. Vince: But there's something, if you put all those themes together, you'd start to see like broader theme of Absolutely.Yeah. The connection there. Yeah. Which I think you're totally right. It's, there's something maybe developmental underneath that. I was thinking about the book, The Postmodern Condition. Which David Chapman originally recommended to me. He's one of the, he's a TPOT Philosopher.Maybe he wouldn't he probably reject that phrase term, but he is a philosopher and well respected in that space. Tasshin: Sure. Vince:And I remember the the author Jean-François Lyotard, he said, simplifying to the extreme, “I define postmodern as incredulity toward meta narratives.”And I find there's something very postmodern about this community where there's a kind of general skepticism toward meta-narratives, of thinking that like one way of describing reality could be totally comprehensive and true for everyone, everywhere, all the time.And I see that as one of the things I really appreciate about TPOT. In terms of it representing a move out of like the modern condition, which was much more like about trying to find the right ideology and all these clashing Isms, Communism versus Capitalism versus all these kind of clashing religions.Who's got the best, which framework is going to come out on top, and everyone's going to eventually believe it's like some, I see that as the more of the modern condition. And so in that sense it feels like a real relief, to see communities, that are forming around.Around this. And it, I guess that's the reason for me, I always connect my experience of coming up in the integral community, Ken Wilber's community with TPOT because it felt like a very similar kind of vibe there. Where so many people I met were just doing radically different kinds of things.And, there'd be someone who's super into, like spiritual surrender, the lineage of Adi da, who is also like a concert pianist that I'm literally describing an actual person I worked with. And then someone else would be like, super into video production and have no interest in spiritual practice or meditation, but they have a lot of interest in like psychological work.And yeah, I guess that's something I've seen is consistent with the TPOT world. Is this sort of like postmodern incredulity towards meta narratives?Tasshin: How would that fit with it being I've never really understood this, but would you describe TPOT as meta-modern, or not meta-modern.Vince: I guess for me, I would say the center of gravity of TPOT seems to be in the transition between modern to postmodern. Like that I would call that post rational. Because the main mode of modernity is rational individualism. It's this is Ken Wilber's and Jean Gebser's take, but I find that to be true.So people like are questioning the limits of rationality and model making are post rational. I see, and I think as a result they're postmodern. But there's a transition, it's like there's a awkward developmental phase where you're letting go of, the absoluteness of models and you can ken Wilber called it the “performance contradiction.” He said, you can you can absolutize that too, or you can say everything is relative. That statement isn't a relative statement, it's an absolute statement. All perspectives are valid. Okay. That perspective you're saying is more valid than any other perspective, which says that certain perspectives are more valid than others. And so like the whole idea of postmodernity rests on a performance contradiction. That's, or at least the early stages of it where you're deconstructing that mo deconstructive, postmodernism Robert Kegan, would call it.He also has a reconstructive postmodern phase. I don't think TPOT is in the reconstructive postmodern phase, but I think some people in it are. It's like there's a spectrum, within, there's a center of gravity, but there's a spectrum. As well or more, it's like a scatter graph, Uhhuh, where like most of the dots are in the center around this sort of modern to postmodern transition, but then there's like trailing off in both directions.You'll see some people that are more traditional that are there just treating it like a group. I'm sure you saw that probably at Vibe Camp. Probably some people there that are just like. Just drinking the Kool-Aid and don't really, aren't really, maybe vibing in the same way as everyone else.Tasshin: Uhhuh. Vince: And then you find some weird people too that are like aliens even within the space. Who seem to be like a David Chapman I mentioned. He seems like a, an alien to me. Tasshin: An example, Vince: I think he's talking, I think he's a meta-modern Tasshin: thinker.Vince: I don't know.So I, I see a mix, but I mostly see people in the Yeah. Like early postmodern stage, Tasshin: I recently saw a really nice tweet from Mechanical Monk where, which I can link you to later, but he drew this diagram or made like a video of what TPOT is, and he was arguing that like TPOT is a moving target where like i'm thinking of these people. And then you're thinking of these people and there's some overlap, like you and I are both friends with, like Daniel Thorson for example, or. Some other people that we'd have in common, or I know who David Chapman is or whatever. And so there, there's enough overlap that we could be like, oh, we're both pointing at TPOT, but then you don't know some people that I'm pointing to and I don't know some people you're pointing to.And then eventually this is happening more and more. Or people use the acronym TPOT and you're like, I've never seen you. I don't know who you're talking about, and I don't know what you're describing. I think you and I have enough of a shared sense of the thing, but yeah, I thought that was a really good point, that it's not like a homogenous group.Like it has a no, no one likes, this is a very probably like post rat thing to do. Nobody likes labeling it. So it's everyone's unhappy with the term TPOT. Nobody wants to identify as TPOT or as a post rat or whatever. Even the term, Vince: I mean in the phrase the acronym TPOT itself isTasshin: relative and it's like relational.Vince: This part of Twitter. Yeah, no, you're saying it's like a network and I see that. There was a site for a while, I don't know if you saw it, where you could like, you could see the sort of it was like a ranking or listing of the most sort of central, I do remember that inside of a network, it was like the tea, you could pull up TPOT and see a list.I was like, I'm on that list. Which I would, which I would take myself, I would opt out of that list if I could choose to. But it's not a choice as you're part of this network.Tasshin: Yeah. If you know the acronym ar arguably you are in it. It's just once and.Vince: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So what I hear you saying from like the network perspective is like you, you see it from your point of view of the network. And the network is evolving, it's not static. It continues to grow and change and shift. That's right. So your view of it is changing and shifting with the network.That's right. So you both, you have both a limited view and it of something that's changing. That seems true to me. Which doesn't mean we can't talk about it. Or try to, come up with something useful to say about it. I would describe it this way. I'll tell you how I would describe it.Yeah. Yeah. Let's hear it. Oh boy. I'm not so sure about the last part. No, it's not that bad. So I describe TPOT as a weird, and here I'm using the weird acronym, Western educated, industrialized rich and democratic post rational subculture that's connected by shared interest in self-agency and awareness.Tasshin: That seems good. Something that's popping out to me is just also how much of this is specifically enabled by the internet and Twitter in particular, or I think there's something starting to happen that you could call like a Twitter like Blue Sky is a Twitter or Mastodon is a Twitter. I hope we have other Twitter likes in the future.because as you said, X is becoming fahy. Or to me, the thing that a Twitter is very much like a public library, and then Twitter happens to be a company and it's that has skewed incentives and stuff like that. But any case I'm like, yeah that all, everything you said tracks and then it's I think it is meaningfully enabled by technology, right?And whatever a Twitter like is in particular. Vince: Okay. Yeah. That's good. So that's missing in my description here. I agree. It's enabled by that and there's something too like it. The tech, the technology itself is very postmodern. These platforms and microblogging platforms, like you're getting these really tiny little snippets that are largely decontextualized.And you're just seeing a bunch of decontextualized atomized information flowing constantly through your stream without, you have to put the context together. That's right. The platform itself does not do that. In fact, it, if you're not, if you don't have the capability to do that, it might actually be really problematic because That's Tasshin: true.Vince: Yeah. You don't know. So I'd say it's almost perfectly compliments the subculture, the design of it.Tasshin: That's true. And it makes sense of like why you would feel a resonance with, I wasn't in this myself, but from what I imagine the integral community and then also why that would be different of I imagine Twitter wasn't a huge part of that back then because it, I don't even know what the were, but wasn it wasn't even, it Vince: wasn't, no, Twitter launched the year after I left the Integral Institute. So yeah. It wasn't part of that blogging and podcast or very early, like web two was part of it for sure.But it was primarily an in-person community. It was centered. It was like centered in person and then had a sort of one to many kind of broadcast media kind of web 2.0 media thing to it. So it did look a lot different than that. It occurs Tasshin: to me that, at least in my experience, the technology feels really central to the thing.And the properties you named are almost like emergent or like the kinds of people that would resonate with it or something, or be able to make full use of it or Right. What have you. But it doesn't seem intrinsically necessary, but it does seem to me almost, like that if you have a Twitter, like something like this subculture would arise and I could see different, similar subcultures that had different properties or even an ideology or like different developmental stages or something.But I think that a Twitter is really good at clustering people who can vibe together or relate to each other and in a way that's more emergent. I think a lot about individualism and collectivism and I think that this kind of technology affords the possibility of yeah, basically a Hegelian synthesis of individualism and collectivism where each person can be their own individual, but also be in community with a larger network that respects their individuality, but can coordinate as a whole and.I think Twitter likes uniquely make that possible. And I could see ones that were like clusters that were meaningfully different. You'll see sometimes people talk about this, they're like, maybe there's a whole other cluster that's not connected to us at all that we have no idea about. Almost the I forget what the alien version of that is, but like the likelihood that there's an alien is civilization in any given solar system.It's maybe they're out there. Who knows. Vince: Something like, like the Drake equation would describe the Drake equation, how likely that would be. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. You're using the term Twitter. I don't know if we've talked about this, but I will explicitly not use that term anymore to refer to X, mainly because I think people are confusing the term Twitter with the term microblogging. Huh? Since it was the original Microblogging platform, I think a lot of times we conflate Twitter with Microblogging. And so when you say Twitter, like I, that's another way to me of saying Microblogging.What's Tasshin: important to you there? Vince: It's important to me to stop being so sentimental about Twitter because Twitter's dead and whatever that it was, is gone. But Microblogging is alive and well and it's probably doing better now than when Twitter was alive. So I think it's somehow by being sent sentimental Twitter, we mask our ability to perceive what's happening in broader terms with microblogging. And we potentially overlook a lot of nasty shit happening on X.com as well by doing that. Tasshin: I see. Yeah I tend to use the word Twitter for different, maybe sentimental reasons as you're saying, but it's an intentional use on my term. On my part. And maybe I'll just use the word Twitter and you can use the word X and we can Vince: Yeah, no, it's fine.Proceed accordingly. It's No, it's fine. I just wanted to point that out. Very good. That's a difference in frames. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. This has been very conceptual so far, but I'm curious to bring it a little downward too, because I remember maybe it was like a week after October 7th Hamas attacked civilians in Israel and.I knew from my own experience having grown up in a, as a Palestinian and American household and having watched this to some degree play out over 40 plus years, 40 years at the time that I was like the blow back from this is gonna be 10 x at least. Because that's consistent. Throughout time it's always Israel will respond with 10 times the amount of violent force at least. And so I was like, if you take the numbers, I was like, that's. That's catastrophic. That's gonna be terrible. And so I knew within the first week, and I shared this on X, that this is going to be a genocide.And so for me, this is the perspective I'm coming from is like I've known that a genocide has been going on for, from the beginning. Have known that the intention or that the likely the likely response was gonna be genocidal. And I think there's a lot of debate about whether or not this is I think that debate is now totally foolish from my point of view.You frame this for instance, as a war, I would call it a genocide. I would say the genocide rather than the war. Or the occupation, which more, more accurate description. because a war assumes that there's two countries, two sides that are equivalent and they're at war.But this is rather like a group of people who've been dispossessed and occupied for decades. Who wrongly lashed out and hurt civilians. But who did so from the point of view of being in a one up, one down power position? So like the group of people or Palestinian people, had been occupied, their movements are controlled.Things coming in and out of Gaza were controlled in terms of water, food, et cetera. Many people described it as an open air prison. Including a colleague of mine who lives in Tel Aviv. He described it that way to me one time. And so from my point of view, it's a lot of times people don't understand when they enter into this, the history of this, that just the basic history of occupation.And so to frame it as a conflict between two equals is a, in a way obscures the power. Dynamics at play where, one group has so much more power over the other and has so much more are literally like nuclear power that's backed by the most powerful military in the world. Who has a lock on the un Tasshin: In Vince: terms of our ability to veto the Americans. So it's David and Goliath rather than, two superpowers going to war. So that's one thing I'll just share is just the frame for me of Palestine. And so I'm, I've been seeing it that from the very beginning.And what I've found with, on, on platforms like X and with the community of TPOT is. Just this sort of maddening silence. Or this sort of schizo, in my experience is like a schizophrenic feed, where on the one hand I'm seeing Palestinian activists and intellectuals and people who are I think doing good work at bringing awareness to an ongoing livestream, genocide.And then an another group of folks more in the TPOT space who are kind of sharing their psychotic explorations and talking about their cool practices and giving, challenging takes and all of which has this other very different vibe which is much more self-focused. And and the two of them in contrast really, that's, for me, that's my, that, that's the tension I'm existing in.And I can totally relate to the self. Absorbed interest in my own transformation and wanting to play around. And it, I totally get that because that's where I've been. Like that's my background as well. But it's, yeah, it's maddening to see these two side by side. And I feel like there's so much missed opportunity with TPOT given that it's so influential right now in culture, in our mainstream culture.And so I guess I, I'm saddened by the fact that I don't see that community having really come around to care much about what's happening in these kind of global situations. Like you, you talked about individualism and collectivism. I feel like it's way more skewed toward individualism in the TPOT world than it is collectivism.So I, that's actually a criticism I'd have. I don't feel like they're both ending it at all. But. Anyway. Yeah, that's just a little bit where I'm coming from,Tasshin: I hear you. Just first off, really mourning and grieving the plate of the Palestinian people that's happening and feeling personally connected to that because of your family and watching the news very closely and really actively grieving that, of just the evil that's happening and caring about that and wanting to see that change and end, and seeing that as a genocide, not as a war.And really appreciating people who are speaking up and being vocal about it and trying to work for change to resolve that crisis and. It feeling used the word like schizophrenic to see TPOT, which seems like self-absorbed and individualistic, where it's like people are talking about whatever they're on about, and it's I got this metaphor hearing you talk about it, of someone who's starving, who's like incredibly hungry, and then they're like next to some rich people who are like having like coffee and talking about, some obstru philosophy and you're like, I'm starving.Can you please give me some of your food? There I'm having a real problem here and you're talking about this stuff that really doesn't matter. And yeah, that being really painful and then also a care about you're like, yeah, TPOTs incredibly powerful and culturally powerful and why aren't you talking about this?You should be talking about this so that we can use your power for good and change the world in that way. Vince: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a naive of me to expect that in some way. So this is where I get a little, this is where I feel the bind. It's on the one hand I intellectually get if this really is developmental as we're describing if this cultural phenomena has a developmental dimension to it, then why would I expect the bulk majority of people who are, coming out of individual rationalism to be focused on anything other than that kind of things are related to that.Who would be well Tasshin: positioned to make a change that had positive effect in the world from a developmental perspective? Vince: That's a good question. I guess anyone could. So maybe the issue isn't the underlying development, but it's the culture, the cultural expression of that. In this case, it's, WEIRD is, I think a good way of putting it, white sorry, Western, but those two are connected, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.It feels like a lot of what you're saying is true because we're, we are in this WEIRD culture in the US largely, especially the educated TPOT, whole US is not WEIRD. A lot of, there's a lot of uneducated people and people without access to resources, but but we're having this weird conversation.And meanwhile in the global Commons, we're like you said, right next to people that are posting videos constantly of people being, shot and killed and assassinated executed, like right there, children starving, et cetera. And it's it, this is the critique that Postmodernism has had for a long time of modernity.It's like the colonialist thing. It's like how is it that we have so much privilege to be able to have these conversations in the first place, because we ourselves are living on dispossessed land. Like we ourselves dispossessed the Native Americans to be able to be here, we ourselves brought African slaves from Africa to be able to take care of our cotton mills and our run our agricultural industry.And so we ourselves built a country on those very foundations and we ourselves as Western people escaped persecution in Europe. Our whole history of escaping persecution and then bringing it with us is what's happening with Israel and Palestine, from my point of view, it's the same basic pattern.I think it's hard to see that when you're focused on you Tasshin: On Vince: your individual journey of transformation and without being able to zoom out into these broader collective patterns that are shaping you as much as you are shaping yourself. And I wonder if sometimes, like we overestimate our agency, or we over-index on our agency in this community. That'd be my, I guess my question or challenge to folks. Tasshin: Can you say more about that? The over-indexing on agency? What you mean by that? Vince: Yeah, so like for me the synthesis of the agency, of agency and communion is what I'm most, most interested in right now.Because that schizophrenic split feels like it's a split of these two, where it's like you have people that are high agency and have lots of opportunity and privilege, and then you have people that have extremely low ability to opt to effectively exercise their agency. They barely can get food. So it's like such a huge contrast there. And what's the difference between these two groups of people? Like historically it's the only reason I'm on this side of the street is because my grandfather was able to get into this country in 1950.And he was lucky, essentially. So like the only difference is basically luck of birth. Like where are you born? And we, I think we take so much credit for the stuff that is, has nothing to do whatsoever with us. It's like when Obama, said you didn't build that and everyone fucking flipped out.You don't know if you remember that he was talking about, I don't know, he was talking about infrastructure and there was a huge backlash from the Right. Like we built that, in hyper American individualism. And it's I think, you know what the genocide and Gaza's taught me is I'm just lucky.I'm just lucky because I have cousins who are in the West Bank right now and they're living in concentration camp type environments. Like they, they're scared to leave their home because people around them are getting shot by settlers and, five Palestinian Americans have died in the West Bank this past year.People who are just going over there to visit family. So it's extremely bad right now, even in the West Bank, which is considered to be the more stable of the two Palestinian regions. In Gaza, I have two family members here in North Carolina and Asheville that are mar married into my family. So they're not direct family members, but their spouses, and they both have lost over 200 family members in Gaza. Which is hard for people even in the West to understand, because they don't, we don't come from big families like that where you could even imagine having 200 family members.But yeah, like whole family trees are essentially being wiped out. Yes. Are cut down. So it's, to me it's very, because I'm in both worlds. I'm teaching meditation and I'm hearing about, what's going on for my cousin in the West Bank, and I'm hearing about what's happening for other Palestinians that I know.I'm like, this is, it's a very hard tension to hold. So for me, the synthesis of agency and communion is I can recognize, like I have a certain amount of agency in part because of the communal situation. Like we have a community that optimizes for agency. And it optimizes for agency at the at the negative at the expense of many other communities, agency and has historically and even presently, like a lot of.The opportunities we have are because of they've been taken rather than, it's like not an omni win situation. So I feel like there's a lack of kind of acknowledgement of that, that often in part because you start to feel really bad. And if there's anything I've noticed about TPOT is like, people don't want to feel bad.Like people wanna empower each other and raise each other up. And I think there's something beautiful about that. But to me it's come, it comes at the expense of valid criticism, of being open to hearing valid criticism. And that's the kind of, that's, that adds how I felt. I've been res largely, my, my criticisms have been responded to.It's oh yeah, this is, you're just like it's I'm a downer. I'm like, yeah, sorry. It's fucking, it is a downer. It really is. How do you, I know that's general and broad, but how do you respond to something like that?Tasshin: Can you ask a, I there's a lot of thoughts running through my mind. Can you ask a specific question? Vince: I'm just curious what your general Yeah. Sense of that is.Tasshin: First off, my heart hurts. It hurts to know that violence is happening at scale and it hurts to hear that. And I'm okay hurting.I know, I've done a lot of, I, I can feel that, but it hurts and I feel sad and I feel grief knowing about this travesty that's happening. AndI feel that about a lot of things that I know about in the world now, including this. And that's always,yeah. Hard to be with. And I try to learn how to be with that and, i'm grateful for the opportunity to be reminded of what's happening and to be connected to it. I feel a desire to have change occur that feels like it matters. I would like war, genocide, evil violence to end. I'm a pacifist.My, one of the worst days of my life every year is when I pay taxes. I hate paying my taxes, partly because it's annoying bureaucratically, but even more so because I feel like I'm compromising my own ethics by supporting the US military. And that I every year I decide I'm gonna pay my taxes so that I can contribute, continue to be part of this society in a legal and upright way.I'm not morally opposed to taxes as such, but I am morally opposed to what my government does with those taxes, including I don't know the full extent of this. I'm sure you know much more, but certainly being complicit in this war, genocide, violence, murder. Bombing evil. Yeah. And other evils known and unknown.I know that and I've been around a little bit. So that hurts. That's the first and foremost thing. And I feel for you, having family i's just I went through just a couple years ago my mom dying of cancer, and we knew about it four years before she died, three, four years before she died.And she lived a blessed life, and I felt perfectly ready to let her go. And it was still really hard. And it's imagine my family members being murdered at scale and being starving and being oppressed and in all kinds of ways that I can only imagine. It's that my heart would just be breaking on a daily basis.And I feel for you, my friend, going through that and, for the Palestinian people more broadly, such that I'm connected to them and for all who are subject to war. It's just it's just evil. It's just e that, like you, you wanna call it genocide? I'll just call it evil, like it's, I think violence is evil and war is evil and genocide is evil and bombs are evil and guns are evil.And murder is evil and killing children is evil. And it's just, my heart breaks at that. As far as the other specific things you were saying, I'm reminded of a an argument that I've had or witnessed many times where there's kind of two recurring schools of thought in our culture where how do I summarize this? Because I've seen this in a lot of specific instances, and I don't wanna get into the specific instances, but let's take a simple example like say your relative was a Trump supporter, and you personally didn't vote for Trump and don't want Trump to be president. There are people in our culture at this time who would say the thing to do is to be disconnected from that Trump supporter and to never talk to them and to shame them for who they are and or give them radio silence and cut ties.And that's a whole school of thought that applies to many issues. And then there's a school of thought that says how are you gonna change their mind if you don't stay connected to them, if you don't really understand where they're coming from and listen to them and talk to them and share your own perspective.And I tend to be more in the latter school of thought of connection is the basis of change. Actually hearing other people's perspectives, sharing my own, to the extent that it's possible. And you're not. Beating each other up or whatever shooting at each other. But I think being connected to people is the basis of change.And I'm getting here somewhere here with this, which is to me, I hear you saying, I'm not part of TPOT. These are the people that are in TPOT. They're silent, they have these, I don't know, I hear you talking about like collective blind spots, which I think are very valid. I'm glad you're mentioning them, but it's like those people have the blind spot.And this is their problem. And to me I could be wrong, but think, Vince: It's really the Palestinians problem. They're the ones that are suffering for the collective blind spot. They're suffering a lot more. Tasshin: Yes.I think that. You could usefully see yourself as part of TPOT, and that by staying connected to people in TPOT and speaking to them, you can change their minds. I think you've changed my mind about things about this and had an impact on me and had a causal influence on me. And I see you having that impact on a other people.And I think that if you took that perspective, there's more or less efficacious ways of doing that. Ways that, that, that's a question that's come up for me about this is actually about like theories of change. And just one more thing is I was recently in Santa Fe, my dad moved to Santa Fe and when I was there, there's a lot, my dad is like very near the Santa Fe is the capitol, and he is very near the capitol where the government is.And so there's just always protests there like at least once a week. And I get, I personally, me, Tasshin, get so angry at these protestors because I, in my current worldview, think that their theory of change is just shit. They're like, by going to this place and having a sign, I'm gonna change the world. It, to me, I see that is like by and large, incredibly efficacious and not gonna produce the change that they want.And do I know what the theory, what a theory of change is that would produce it? No, but I am spending all of my time and energy on things that I think will have a positive change in the world. Even if they're not enough, even if they're not direct enough, even if they're not gonna end or resolve all the issues I care about, which are many.I am putting all of my time and energy into things that I believe are efficacious. And presumably they think it's efficacious too. They think this is worth doing because they're doing it. And in a way I'm wrong about it because demonstrably people think that holding a sign in front of a capitol is gonna change the world.But, Vince: It does boost their agency when people protest that's, it's an exercise in agency. Tasshin: I do think there's a critical threshold where if enough people protest something, I can't have a change. Obviously that's happened Vince: Arab Spring. Tasshin: Exactly. So it's not, it's definitely not useless. But my point to you as an individual that I care about as my friend, is I think you're actually incredibly well positioned to have a cultural impact on this group that you already are connected to, and that there are more or less efficacious ways of doing that.Like this conversation is efficacious, right? We're having a real conversation between two people who respect each other. We're recording that so that other people can listen. I think that's actually likely to produce the change that you're desiring to some extent. Is it gonna it's hard to say.Vince: It's hard to say. I hear what you're saying. Yeah, I think you and I have talked about this in the past too. I have, some of the biggest changes I've been through have come through people challenging me even violently. And my whole upbringing, as you can hear, it's rooted in violence. Yes. So it's like the story of my family.Is one of resilience in the face of violence, Tasshin: Uhhuh. So this is the recurring thing we always argue about. Yeah. Or one of the several things. Vince: Yeah. It's an, it's like in a place where we rub, I think, but Yeah. But it's understandable. So I'm a little more Okay. Ruffling feathers and even having active conflict with people because I know that sometimes that's actually good.Sometimes if you're too nice, people won't hear you. If you have something powerfully challenging to say, it will just be like, oh yeah, that's nice. And I can just incorporate that into my worldview and feel good about knowing about it, but actually not really be doing anything significantly differently.So it's like a, I don't know, this is in the abstract, but. Tasshin: There's two things there. What there's one is, which is like, how nice are you? And I actually do honestly believe that you would be more efficacious at seeing the changes you want to see, at least in the local community if you were nicer.In addition to being kind. I do think you're kind, that's not an issue. But separately from that, like you, one of the things we talked about recently on the timeline was you're like, I've just been considering blocking people left and right. And I think that Oh, I have been blocking them lost.Exactly. Vince: I've lost half of my friend network in the last year. Tasshin and so that's where I am. So here let me push back a little bit. I lo yeah. I lo I love what you're saying, but I don't think it's my job to do that. I think it's your job to do that, to, to be the one that can be nice and change people's minds on this topic.Tasshin: Oh, that's true. It is my job. You're right. I Vince: agree with you. Yeah, because because I'm too close to it. It's too painful for me. Like people start saying stuff to me. It is like I'm hearing them deny the entire, like truth of my whole identity, my family identity. It's no, like this is true.I'm not, I'm gonna have argue with you like you are dehumanizing me and everyone that's Palestinian right now. Even by having an argument, having even framing this as a debate, is there a war going on? Who's responsible? Et cetera. So it's like what I find is I want to keep talking because I want, it's like the Buddha, he's, and I'm comparing myself to the Buddha here.I know he is gonna fly really well, there, there's an analogy here where he's I'm awake. Okay. Who can I, teach this to, very few are gonna understand it. Because it's subtle and hard to get grasp. My companions, the ones I was practicing with they seem like they'll get it.They have very little dust in their eyes. So I guess I see my role as really more like the people that have very little dust in their eyes. Maybe I can reach them. What's the difference Tasshin: in this case between someone who has dust in their eyes and someone who doesn't, from your perspective?Vince: Are they, yeah. Are they awake to their complicity in a gen, in an active livestream? Genocide? Are they aware? I pay Tasshin: my taxes and, Vince: That's part of it. That's part of it. Yeah. It's like paying taxes. You, like you said, you can't really stop paying your taxes.My uncle did that. Went to prison. I actively Tasshin: choose Vince: to pay Tasshin: my taxes. I think I could stop paying my taxes. Could, I'm saying every year I considered you can do that. Vince: I seriously Tasshin: consider it. Every you'll to prison. Every year. Vince: You'll, you will go to prison. Tasshin: Yeah, exactly. And I believe I can have more impact, positive impact on the world by paying my taxes and not, and I, every, it's a trade off.Literally every year I make this decision again. Vince: Yeah. So it's, to your point, it's not it's not like a black and white thing where it's like. I'm complicit in this very obvious way that I'm just choosing not to. It's, it, the complicity is deep and it's multidimensional, subtle and Tasshin: systemic and multi-generational.And even, Vince: and yeah, and for me it's I was hanging out with a couple of my cousins recently who are from Palestine. They immigrated here in the early nineties when Palestinians were kicked out of Kuwait. And so they were here, they had to rebuild their life. They lost everything. And I grew up with them.And they're doing advocacy work now in the us And when I hear them, talk about their experience, it's like they're being, they're dealing with shit that I'm not having to deal with. Like one of my cousins recently lost her job. She was a high level exec at a tech company in San Francisco.And she thinks it's likely that she lost it because of her advocacy work within the company. So when I guess when I see. I've lost the thread a bit here in terms of connecting back to what we were talking about. But where was I going with that? Tasshin: You were saying something as my job as being TPOT versus your job.Vince: So like when I talk to, say I'll talk to my great uncle my grandfather's brother who grew up in Palestine, and I'll hear the kinds of things that he'll share. And like I, I don't have those kind of views. Like he's extreme compared to me in terms of like how he's viewing things.This is my interpretation. There's a definitely antisemitic tendencies in, in the family system that I've seen explicit and I understand why. Like I have a lot of compassion. I don't actually let it stand. I challenge it when it arises. Even now. This is this uncle I'm talking about.It's his family and his daughter that's in the West Bank right now. He's considering going to visit her in a couple months. He might get shot and killed while he is there. It's quite possible. For me it's like I, I see I can listen to him and I can hear him talk about stuff and I can sort through the pain and the antisemitism to hear, some of the, what's genuine and sincere and I can be there for him.And then I feel like I can reach out and connect with some people and share my pain and what I'm going through and, offer challenges or whatever to some folks. Recently right after September October 7th someone from he lives in Israel. He is American. We have the same background lineage of a pasta tradition.He invited me on to, to have a dialogue about this about what was happening. And and then after our we split, and we're not able to have any conversations anymore. Because some of the things I saw him writing on X and so the perspectives that he seemed to be taking, and we got to a point where we pulled in a mutual mentor someone someone who's like a master mediator.And their basic feedback was like, sometimes you can't have a conversation. Sometimes it's just not possible. And I feel like that's where I'm getting largely, it's it's just not possible for me to have a conversation with a lot of people right now. Because of how 10 how sensitive this is. And so you say, when you say to or I hear if you were kind or if you were nicer, you'd be more efficacious, if I were able to be, I would. But I'm not. Tasshin: And the second part of what I was saying there is that when you block people, you are closing yourself off from the possibility of changing them.And from what I've just heard from, and I'm okay with that. Yeah, exactly. That makes a bit more sense to me now from what you've said. But Vince: I'm not gonna change a Zionist's mind, I don't think, someone who's like a, Christian or Jewish Zionist, I don't think I'm gonna change their mind by sharing something on like a micro blog.Tasshin: That, one of the really urgent questions for me here is what is a theory of change that produces genuine end to war violence, genocide? What actually resolves that? Actually because if I let me figure out how to put this. I am currently putting my time and energy.Into the things that I think I can do that will have the highest benefit from my current understanding and vantage point. I literally spend every day of my life waking to sleeping, doing the thing that I think is best based on my, admittedly flawed, limited perspective, my own weaknesses and blind spots.But I do that every day. Every day. And if I thought that I could lead to the end of war, genocide, violence, evil in a scaled way I would work much harder to bring that about. I'd have to think about how it fits into all the things I'm doing and balance. But I really wanna know how someone like, I, I would hope for example, that the service guild at some point will have a peace department.Currently, we, as we have a love department, a curiosity department, an empowerment department. I would love for us to have a peace department. I want other departments, us to be able to have infrastructure for other focused crews. At some point it's the Peace Department should be bringing about peace.And I don't know how to do that. Even peace Pilgrim my hero, she spent 30 years working in the way that she knew how for peace. And I don't think she wasted her time far from it. But there is still not peace on earth after her doing that. Vince: Sure. Some of this reminds me, has echoes of the effect of al altruism movement.Yeah.Tasshin: I think they I feel how to put this, I have different aesthetic and ideological views with them on specific points, but I feel very sympathetic to their larger efforts and yeah, what do we actually do to actually have a real impact? I feel very I feel kinship with that, even if there's specific things I disagree with or don't vibe with.So yeah, that's noted. Vince: Yeah, I think if we were to zoom, like not to take the two global perspective of like, how do we stop all genocide, war, et cetera. And that's a good question, but to me it's like, how do we stop this specific one that's happening right now, Tasshin: Uhhuh.Like how, Vince: Because that's sure. So how do we stop it? Obviously you Tasshin: don't have to know, but what a different way of putting the question that's maybe a bit more reasonable. I think it, it's very Vince: noble. Like you, you stop Israel from killing Palestinians. That's how it, okay. And what leads Tasshin: to that causally?Vince: Probably having a Palestinian state would be a necessary part of that. And what leads to that? The US has to stop vetoing it in the us. And what leads Tasshin: to that? Vince: They change in US leadership and change. And what leads to that? People putting pressure and voting and grassroots organ organizing.Ah, that's Tasshin: where you lose me. Vince: Yeah. Look at look at Zohran Mamdani. He's a good example of how that's actually happening right now in the, he's the only candidate, like major candidate that I've seen recent in recent times. Progressive candidate who's actually vocal about this, who isn't on the, both parties, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump both supported the ongoing genocide. They're equally complicit. Tasshin: So basically we should or not leaders that are clear this in your perspective. What I'm hearing is Yeah. Yeah. The salient thing is elect leaders who are clear that this is a genocide who will end us complicitness and help and who are focused on economic populism.Vince: because our country really need, we need that right now. Tasshin: You lost me there. How does, what does that have to do with ending this genocide? Vince: You could it's both and so it's if you look at, this is a good example, I think part of, I grew up in the as probably you did too, in the.In the fading years of the political consensus between the neo-conservative and neoliberal parties, Tasshin: Uhhuh, Vince: who largely agreed on most everything, Tasshin: Uhhuh. Vince: They were both totally fine with military expansion. They were both fine with free trade agreements that hollowed out rural America and towns like in North Carolina, textile towns.Yeah. To save 5 cents, on a shirt made in Vietnam, we're totally fine letting an entire communities die, In towns we haul it out. So it's that kind of mentality, it's like what I grew up in and, it's like the arguments were mostly like stylistic. It's which style of the same ideology do you prefer?Tasshin: Coke versus Pepsi Vince: Ex. Exactly right. Coke and Pepsi. And Obama. He was, you fit right into this. He was not a departure, he was a rhetorician. Tasshin: Yeah,Vince: he sounded like a departure, but wasn't so true. Bestie. Yep. I think when I look at it in those terms, I say, okay what is so interesting about Donald Trump and the MAGA movement?It is actually presenting an alternative to the previous consensus. And I, the way I see American politics right now, and I could be wrong, is there's an emerging, there's a new emerging polarity. That alt left and right, quote unquote yeah, gosh, ne neo fascism and neo progressivism.And there's, and are you saying Tasshin: neo progressivism is the answer here? Vince: I'm, no, I'm not actually Uhhuh. Okay. Although, because some neo fascists don't want us to be sending money to Israel, Tasshin: Uhhuh, Vince: Marjorie Taylor Greene there, there's been a number that recently people who are like, why are we sending billions of dollars to Israel every year when we can't even take care of our own people?Yeah. And so I agree with that Uhhuh, what I actually think is emerging and has to emerge as an alt middle. It's a new. Consensus. And that alt middle will almost certainly not wanna continue propping up an American em military empire. Both alt-right and alt left. That's something they agree on.They don't want to be constantly waging endless wars. They don't wanna be always sending all of our money into our military budget. And is Tasshin: that connected to the populism you're talking about? Vince: Yeah, it is. Okay. It's a it's a strand of populism that's interested in retracting the American Empire and not continuing to create so many problems abroad.And who recognizes that doing so hurts us at home, Uhhuh, and because these things are interconnected. I see. Tasshin: Okay. Thank you for explaining that. Can I recount what I heard just now? Your, I, our, a shared goal that we have is we would like this war, genocide, violence, evil to end. We'd like it to end.And the way that comes about is Israel stops doing what it's doing. And the way that comes about is Palestine is a state and the US stops vetoing certain things at the un. And the way that happens is there's political pressure on the US to show up in a different way. And you're saying that the way that happens is we elect politicians who are want that course of action and also care about this populism and the relationship of how we're spending our money at home.Yeah. And the way that we do that is get involved in local political movements that support candidates that have that perspective. Vince: I think that's one of the most direct ways that uhhuh, that we can as Americans affected this. I'll tell Tasshin: you right now, I, I need to do due diligence on learning more about this, but I will very seriously both take that into consideration for my own voting and then also in how I speak about voting to my friends and people I'm connected to.That's not much. But this is more. That's what I really care about. I wanna make sure that whatever actions I take, I am that I can see. It matters to me that I can see how there could be a causal chain where this actually results in the things that we want, if that makes sense.I don't know why that matters to me so much, but it does. Vince: Yeah. Okay. We haven't talked about Bodhi Safa hood yet. Yes. So maybe I could bring that in. Yeah. Tasshin: Thank God, please. Someone helped me. Yeah. Vince: I don't know if you, it's a Tasshin: struggle out here. Vince: I don't know if you've heard this quote from Ujima Roshi Japanese Zen teacher.He said a Bodhi Safa is an ordinary person who acts like a true adult. Tasshin: I had never heard that before, but I love it. And what does true adult mean to you? Vince: I think a true adult is someone who sees a problem and they respond to it. And. A true adult recognizes the complexity of the situation and acts anyway with that with incomplete information with whatever resources and ability that they have while acknowledging that they're limited.So that's a start. True adult cares about themselves and others. I could even, I could actually inhabit as a true adult. I both take care of my life at home and I care about the impacts that that the country and systems I'm embedded in are having in the world. That I'm causal in, that I have some causal influence over, even if it's minimal.Tasshin: You know what I'm reminded of Vince is video game levels and I feel like. It seems it seems cr crass to pick levels, but I feel like, I don't know, let's say a level eight Bodhi Safa I'm not level one anymore. I'm not even level five anymore, but I feel acutely, like I'm really only level eight and I think it's gonna there are 10 Vince: levels aren't there In this game?I, oh no. Bodhi the boomie, the boom. No.Tasshin: I know what you're talking about. But also that's not the measurement system I'm using. Okay. You're not, Vince: it's not a traditional boomy model. No. Tasshin: I'm thinking like, I never played it, but like World of Warcraft, I'm pretty sure 80 is like a threshold in World of Warcraft.It's I'm pretty sure you need like a level 60 or 70 Bodhi Safa to have global systemic change at the level that's needed for the thing we're talking about. And I'm like I know if I have a friend that has a mental health crisis, like I'm struggling to barely be able to support them in a meaningful way.Like I'm embarrassed by how. Incompetent. I am at even that helping one person that's having a mental health crisis. Like I can help a little bit, but like I know someone who's an extended network right now is having their partner's having a major schizophrenic episode and I'm like, here, I can send you a link that might help you.That's that's so pathetic. That is so disgustingly pathetic for actually having an impact in the world. It's humiliating to admit, but here we are because there's real suffering and you have to do whatever we can to help. And so I would like to it would be great if I ended this year as a level nine Bodhi, that would be awesome.And do I want to have global systemic positive change on a historic scale? Absolutely. I hope that every passing year I'm more and more capable of. Large scale, positive impact, and I'm just so acutely aware of how incompetent I am and how limited I'm really doing everything I can to have a positive impact at the scale that I can right now.And it's it's pathetic and humiliating in the context of this larger suffering. I'm fine with that. I'm not embarrassed to say that, but it is humbling, it's it's not nearly good enough. And I think the more acquainted you are with how much suffering there is in the universe, the more humbled you are by that, by one's own incompetence to, and then you do, that's the Bodhi SA of vows, anyway, is just to be like greed, hatred, and end without end like vow to end it. Like you just, you get up and do something anyway. Vince: Yeah. I've. There's a distinction that's commonly made in like a, I would call it like in the woke pluralistic cultural scene of like intention versus impact.And that's an important distinction when you're starting to get into questions of race and racialization, because people will say things with a good intentions that hurt other people because they're ignorant of the impact that has for someone else. And here I think it's I think of that too with what you're saying, where it's okay yeah, like I want to become a, be a more impactful Bodhi Safa.I want to have a more net positive impact in the world. And on the one hand yeah, I could say, like you're saying it, I feel humbled and maybe embarrassed by how ineffectual I am. And. I also feel humble about the fact that I don't know the impact that I'm having. I don't understand it. And I feel like this is really, you probably have had a similar experience putting media out into the worlds, like with Buddhist geeks when we launched that, the hundreds and hundreds of people that I heard from over the years who are like, that had such a powerful impact on my life.And I'm like wow, okay. I, that was definitely not what I was aiming for. I was just doing something I thought was cool at the time. Honestly. And so that wasn't even necessarily my intention, but that was the impact. And so I'm amazed, I am amazed at how effective people can be without even knowing it. It's like hard sometimes. Hard to know. It's hard to measure. And that's where I would say it's the challenge here with what you're saying is I want to see if I'm effect. You have to be able to measure the effectiveness to be able to know, and we can't fully measure, we can get better at measuring, like we can maybe get more sophisticated in seeing and understanding our impact both negative and positive.But it's really difficult without going into you really have to have an understanding of the whole to be able to see your individual impacts on the whole. And I don't know, where am I going with this? Just to say there's some kind of feedback loop here that I think is like what the Bodhi Safa is driven by.It's like constantly coming back to. A wise or compassionate intention. And then do trying your best to live from that place, even if you're, not effectual. And then doing your best to understand the impacts of your actions So that, you can, that can inform how you act the next time that you're trying to be, coming from this place of genuine wisdom and compassion. And there's some kind of sharpening of like skillful means that happens in this feedback loop. Tasshin: Yeah. Vince: And to me, it's like the Bodhi Safa is one who's engaged in the pro in that process rather than Yes. Then there are different levels then are depths or degrees of skillfulness.And probably in different domains too.Tasshin: Yeah, of course. Multiple axes. Vince: So I hear what you're saying and I think that's valid. Like it isn't up to any, I don't think it's up to individuals to solve the global challenges.Tasshin: No, but I'm also like, I'm aware that I think I am I was just humble, so now I can be a little arrogant.I think I'm uniquely well-suited to create systems that actually do have causal impact on the historic scale over time. It just takes a long time and it takes very careful thought and a lot of care and consideration and love and effort. And so I would like to build systems that have a net positive historic impact on the scale of humanization.And as far as I can tell I'm playing my cards that way, where like I would really hope that if we fast forwarded 30 or 40 years, we would be like, Hey. The Service Guild did really good stuff that was net positive on human society and our civilization and the planet. And of course there'll be fuckups along the way where we mess up and I make just dumb mistakes and whatever.But I would hope that it's net positive and that it has a genuinely historic obvious impact on the world that was positive. So that's part of why my care, that's why I would wanna have this conversation at all, is like, how can I build systems that actually do have that kind of impact on ending, yeah.Including ending violence of all kinds and this conflict, this genocide, this war, this evil in particular. Vince: Yeah. I think that's a great intention. I, there's like a, there's a quote in the Bava Gita that's coming to mind. I can't remember the exact quote, but it's some, something about acting without any thought of results or it's happens in that famous dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna. Yeah, there's Tasshin: a difference in da I, I've been influenced a lot by DAAs strategy, and they talk a lot about the difference between means ends and conditions, consequences.And we're really trying to create the conditions for good consequences. So can I guarantee that we would have a particular result? Absolutely not, but absolutely not. But I think we can create the conditions for historic benevolent beneficent impact.Vince: It's interesting you're talking about a guild. Because to me it's I think of the Bodhi Safa as a more of like a. A relational phenomena. Tasshin: It's Vince: Team Bodhi Safa. Rather than a Bodhi Safa.And so it seems like a lot of the challenge here is around coordinating and connecting and aligning, collective alignment. And these are the things I think are very hard for people who've been trained to individuate and who are focused on their own agency. John Vey, the philosopher, he points out like when you take role, you are rolling yourself into that. You're losing a certain kind of agency by inhabiting a role, say role of father, role of teacher role of whatever you're limiting yourself in that role.And, but, and yet you have to play roles in cult in community Tasshin: to do anything. Yep. Vince: So I guess, yeah I don't know where to go from there. From here. Tasshin: I would summarize our conversation so far as follows. TPOT such as it is an emergent developmental p

Future Histories
S03E40 - Jan Overwijk on Cybernetic Capitalism and Critical Systems Theory

Future Histories

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 8, 2025 113:16


Jan Overwijk discusses critical systems theory, sociologies of closure and openness, and cybernetic capitalism.   Shownotes Jan Overwijk at the Frankfurt University Institute for Social Research: https://www.ifs.uni-frankfurt.de/personendetails/jan-overwijk.html Jan at the University of Humanistic Studies Utrecht: https://www.uvh.nl/university-of-humanistic-studies/contact/search-employees?person=jimxneoBsHowOfbPivN Overwijk, J. (2025). Cybernetic Capitalism. A Critical Theory of the Incommunicable. Fordham University Press. https://www.fordhampress.com/9781531508937/cybernetic-capitalism/ on the website of the distributor outside of North America you can order the book with a 30% discount with the code “FFF24”: https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781531508937/cybernetic-capitalism/ on Niklas Luhmann: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann Baraldi, C., Corsi, G., & Esposito, E. (2021). Unlocking Luhmann. A Keyword Introduction to Systems Theory. transcript. https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-5674-9/unlocking-luhmann/ Fischer-Lescano, A. (2011). Critical Systems Theory. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 38(1), 3–23. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0191453711421600 Möller, K., & Siri, J. (2023). Niklas Luhmann and Critical Systems Theory. In: R. Rogowski (Ed.), The Anthem Companion to Niklas Luhmann (pp. 141–154). https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/anthem-companion-to-niklas-luhmann/niklas-luhmann-and-critical-systems-theory/982BC5427E171D2BA0D14364377A40F5 on Critical Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory on Cybernetics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics Future Histories explanation video on cybernetics (in German): https://youtu.be/QBKC9mM8-so?si=64v0OgBKV3xjXvLl on Humberto Matuarana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humberto_Maturana on Francisco Varela: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Varela Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1992). Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Shambhala. https://uranos.ch/research/references/Maturana1988/maturana-h-1987-tree-of-knowledge-bkmrk.pdf on Ferdinand de Saussure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure on Post-Structuralism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism on the differentiation of society into subsystems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiation_(sociology) on Jaques Derrida: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida Bob Jessop on Luhmann and the concept of “ecological dominance”: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318543419_The_relevance_of_Luhmann%27s_systems_theory_and_of_Laclau_and_Mouffe%27s_discourse_analysis_to_the_elaboration_of_Marx%27s_state_theory Jessop, B. (2010). From Hegemony to Crisis? The Continuing Ecological Dominance of Neoliberalism. In: K. Birch & V. Mykhnenko (Eds.). Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism: The Collapse of an Economic Order? (pp. 171–187). Zed Books. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318524063_The_continuing_ecological_dominance_of_neoliberalism_in_the_crisis on Surplus Value in Marx and Marxism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_value on Louis Althusser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Althusser Althusser, L. (2014). On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Verso. https://legalform.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/althusser-on-the-reproduction-of-capitalism.pdf on Stuart Hall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Hall_(cultural_theorist) on Capital Strikes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_strike on the concept of “rationalization” in sociology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(sociology) on Max Weber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber Weber, M. (2005). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Routledge. https://gpde.direito.ufmg.br/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/MAX-WEBER.pdf Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books. https://profilebooks.com/work/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/ on Surveillance Capitalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism on Herbert Marcuse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse Marcuse, H. (2002). One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Routledge. https://files.libcom.org/files/Marcuse,%20H%20-%20One-Dimensional%20Man,%202nd%20edn.%20(Routledge,%202002).pdf on Jürgen Habermas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas on Jean-François Lyotard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Lyotard Lyotard, J.-F. (1988). The Differend. Phrases in Dispute. University of Minnesota Press. https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816616114/differend/ on Thermodynamics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamics on the Technocracy Movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Polity. https://giuseppecapograssi.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/bauman-liquid-modernity.pdf on New Materialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_materialism on Gilles Deleuze: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze on Bruno Latour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour on Donna Haraway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Haraway for criticisms of new materialism and associated tendencies and authors: Malm, A. (2018). The Progress of this Storm. Nature and Society in a Warming World. Verso. https://www.versobooks.com/products/574-the-progress-of-this-storm Brown, W. (2019). In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. Columbia University Press. https://www.social-ecology.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/The-Wellek-Library-Lectures-Wendy-Brown-In-the-Ruins-of-Neoliberalism_-The-Rise-of-Antidemocratic-Politics-in-the-West-Columbia-University-Press-2019.pdf Hendrikse, R. (2018). Neo-illiberalism. Geoforum, 95, 169–172. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016718518302057 on N. Katherine Hayles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._Katherine_Hayles Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the Societies of Control. October. Vol. 59. (Winter 1992), 3-7. https://cidadeinseguranca.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/deleuze_control.pdf Brenner, R., Glick, M. (1991). The Regulation Approach. Theory and History. New Left Review. 1/188. https://newleftreview.org/issues/i188/articles/robert-brenner-mark-glick-the-regulation-approach-theory-and-history.pdf on the “Regulation School”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_school Chiapello, E., & Boltanski, L. (2018). The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso. https://www.versobooks.com/products/1980-the-new-spirit-of-capitalism Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Harvard University Press. https://monoskop.org/images/9/95/Hardt_Michael_Negri_Antonio_Empire.pdf on the Tierra Artificial Life Program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation) on Gilbert Simondon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Simondon on Karen Barad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Barad on Post-Fordism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Fordism on Taylorism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform Capitalism. Polity. https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=platform-capitalism--9781509504862 Hayek, F. A. (2014). The Constitution of Liberty. Routledge. https://ia600805.us.archive.org/35/items/TheConstitutionOfLiberty/The%20Constitution%20of%20Liberty.pdf van Dyk, S. (2018). Post-Wage Politics and the Rise of Community Capitalism. Work, Employment and Society, 32(3), 528–545. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0950017018755663 on Rosa Luxemburg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Luxemburg on Luxemburg's thought on imperialism: https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/44096/rosa-luxemburgs-heterodox-view-of-the-global-south Fraser, N. (2022). Cannibal Capitalism. How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It. Verso. https://www.versobooks.com/products/2685-cannibal-capitalism on Mariarosa Dalla Costa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariarosa_Dalla_Costa on the “Wages for Housework” Campaign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wages_for_Housework Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso. https://www.versobooks.com/products/74-capitalism-in-the-web-of-life on Stafford Beer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Beer Pickering, A. (2010). The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo8169881.html Foucualt's quote on socialist governmentality is from this book: Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Palgrave Macmillan. https://1000littlehammers.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/birth_of_biopolitics.pdf Groos, J. (2025). Planning as an Art of Government. In: J. Groos & C. Sorg (Eds.). Creative Construction. Democratic Planning in the 21st Century and Beyond (pp. 115-132). Bristol University Press. https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/creative-construction   Future Histories Episodes on Related Topics S03E30 | Matt Huber & Kohei Saito on Growth, Progress and Left Imaginaries https://futurehistories-international.com/episodes/s03/e30-matt-huber-kohei-saito-on-growth-progress-and-left-imaginaries/ S03E29 | Nancy Fraser on Alternatives to Capitalism https://futurehistories-international.com/episodes/s03/e29-nancy-fraser-on-alternatives-to-capitalism/ S03E19 | Wendy Brown on Socialist Governmentality https://futurehistories-international.com/episodes/s03/e19-wendy-brown-on-socialist-governmentality/ S03E04 | Tim Platenkamp on Republican Socialism, General Planning and Parametric Control https://futurehistories-international.com/episodes/s03/e04-tim-platenkamp-on-republican-socialism-general-planning-and-parametric-control/ S03E03 | Planning for Entropy on Sociometabolic Planning https://futurehistories-international.com/episodes/s03/e03-planning-for-entropy-on-sociometabolic-planning/ S02E31 | Thomas Swann on Anarchist Cybernetics https://futurehistories-international.com/episodes/s02/e31-thomas-swann-on-anarchist-cybernetics/   --- If you are interested in democratic economic planning, these resources might be of help: Democratic planning – an information website https://www.democratic-planning.com/ Sorg, C. & Groos, J. (eds.)(2025). Rethinking Economic Planning. Competition & Change Special Issue Volume 29 Issue 1. https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/ccha/29/1 Groos, J. & Sorg, C. (2025). Creative Construction - Democratic Planning in the 21st Century and Beyond. Bristol University Press. [for a review copy, please contact: amber.lanfranchi[at]bristol.ac.uk] https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/creative-construction International Network for Democratic Economic Planning https://www.indep.network/ Democratic Planning Research Platform: https://www.planningresearch.net/ --- Future Histories Contact & Support If you like Future Histories, please consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/FutureHistories Contact: office@futurehistories.today Twitter: https://twitter.com/FutureHpodcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/futurehpodcast/ Mastodon: https://mstdn.social/@FutureHistories English webpage: https://futurehistories-international.com   Episode Keywords #JanOverwijk, #JanGroos, #Interview, #FutureHistories, #FutureHistoriesInternational, #futurehistoriesinternational, #NiklasLuhmann, #FrankfurtSchool, #CriticalTheory, #SystemsTheory, #Sociology, #MaxWeber, #Economy, #Capitalism, #CapitalistState, #Cybernetics, #Rationalization, #PoliticalEconomy, #DemocraticPlanning, #DemocraticEconomicPlanning, #Governmentality, #Ecology, #NewMaterialism, #Posthumanism, #CyberneticCapitalism, #Totality

5 Star Tossers
Sherlock Holmes: Limited Bandwidth (Inc.)

5 Star Tossers

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 31, 2025 88:47


Audient!This episode imposes upon us (well Jake mostly) the horrors of shoddy writing and bad aesthetics. And yet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation seems to be very much alive. How is that? Why?We get to touch on some long-neglected Star here, Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais, hearkening back to its post-structuralist origins.  We go back down memory lane to when me and Jake were reading this exact critique of that exact attitude, that time between Analytic philosopher John Searle and the evil Continentalist Jacques Derrida and his essay Signature, Event, Cuntext. There, Derrida shows how each utterance, of necessity, breaches whatever context is assigned to it, thus always opening the way for what Holmes keeps pretending to have had already hermetically closed: the other possibility. Sherlock Holmes is shown to play out a fantasy of control, one that professionalizes thinking in much the same way an AI does. Holmes' "method of logical deduction" is explored in this vein to reveal a logical abduction, where Truth is nowhere acknowledged, and the process simply arrives at the least improbable outcome. Alas, since the entire context, the full "One", will always be breachable - we were thinking also of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem here - the probability will forever be dangling, insecure; or worse, open to various biases of 'normativity.'Jake, once again, recalls Jack Bauer, as a distilled version, a sublimated Sherlock Holmes; one that stopped bothering about that (quite flimsy) justification, along with the 'method' Holmes uses to construct it. If it was always bullshit, why not go right to the point?Our perverts also hone in on the obvious closeted Homosexuality that emanates from this dynamic duo, and all the libidinal affirmations and denials that move this - many times unspoken, but always quite present - sexually-tense relationship. 'No Homo,' this time operating as a literary device...Stars:IL VAUT MIEUX LYOTARD QUE JAMAIS; Pervs 'R Us; Beast & Sovereign.

5 Star Tossers
The Hustler with an Unconscious of Gold: Homage to David Lynch

5 Star Tossers

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 23, 2025 96:20


Greetings, audient!David Lynch passed away, and Sagi insisted on embarrassing his memory and us by making a tribute pod.Of course an oeuvre analysis is not Tossers style, but we found a nice angle in comparing his The Lost Highway with David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. Both movies deal in the impasses and monstrosities of masculine desire, a shared theme that reveals a deep, informative, difference between the two directors, each using the literary device of the double in his own film, but in each director's own unique way, unique language. Jake saw this difference in the light of Nietzsche's old distinction, from The Birth of Tragedy, between the Apollonian and the Dionysian; Sagi suggests that Lynch to Cronenberg is like dream to trauma.We unpack this huge set of knots, and toss many more strands into the air besides.And there's a beautiful Nietzsche quote at the end! So......have a listen.Stars: Beast & Sovereign; Pervs 'R Us; Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais.

Podcast Filosofie
Jean-François Lyotard

Podcast Filosofie

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 30, 2025 64:47


'Met een extreme simplificatie noemen we "post-modern": het ongeloof aan de meta-vertellingen. (...) De narratieve functie verliest haar functoren: de grote held, de grote gevaren, de grote omzwervingen en het grote doel. Ze valt uiteen in wolken van narratieve, maar ook denotatieve, prescriptieve, descriptieve en andere taalelementen.'  Op deze manier introduceerde de Franse filosoof Jean-François Lyotard de term postmodernisme in de filosofie.  Waarom brengt Lyotard het postmodernisme naar de filosofie, maar stapt zelf al snel weer van die term af? Hoe ziet hij het sublieme terug in de avant-gardistische kunst? En welke rol speelt het kind-zijn in zijn filosofie?  Te gast is Frans van Peperstraten De denker die centraal staat: Lyotard

Sweeny Verses
Parallax Poetry Salon #2 - David Salzmann Herz

Sweeny Verses

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 8, 2024 23:40


Join our poetry Salon and Open Mic: https://parallax-media-network.mn.co/share/5hSLvQW7bNszFGEo?utm_source=manual About David Herz: Hello. My names are David Salzmann Herz. I was born in Boston 70 years ago when McCarthy was getting his comeuppance. I lived with my family somewhere in Massachusetts before moving to Belo Horizonte, Brazil , as part of the Department of the Interior's Punto Quatro program where my father was instrumental in mapping the geology and training a generation of Brazilian geologists. I began writing aged ten at the American school of Sao Paolo which had scorpions in the sandbox. I won a turtle for my prose. Then we lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland before moving to Athens, Ga. Where I met the poet Colman Barks and other luminaries. I moved to Chicago and studied briefly under Del Close at Second City and David Mamet who was then directing the Goodman Theater. As well as Richard McKeon at the University of Chicago who taught Susan Sontag among others. Then I returned home and drove a car from Selma, Alabama to Warminster Pennsylvania, possibly damaging the transmission while accelerating against the snow and ice. The next three years in a bankrupt New York City were richness incarnate. I worked at the Oh Ho So restaurant in SoHo and as a busboy served Harry Belafonte, one of the reasons God created humans, a glass of water. I had Alice Notley, poetess supreme, for a teacher and read my prose work at the Saint Marks in the Bowery Poetry Project. Those were wild times, buildings burning, trash uncollected, rapes a'plenty, and great generosity from compassionate lawyers, doctors and dentists for the impoverished lot we were. You could easily meet people such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, John Giorno, Ted Berrigan, David Byrne, Patti Smith, Fred Sherry, Nam June Paik, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Charles Bernstein, Tony Towle, Bill Berkson, Eileen Myles, Ted Greenwald, John Cale, Lydia Lunch, Alan Vega, and avoid others such as Valerie Solanas. And then just as I was about to join a rock and roll band I moved to Paris. It's been 45 years. Odd jobs subtitling movies and Sipa Photopress Agency photographs. Doing journalism for English language papers, interviewing the B- 52's, Peter Brook, Zouc, Herbert Achternbusch, Paul Lederman, Boris Bergman and then working for Bull and Alcatel two fine French corporations employing hundreds of thousands who equally vanished into the capitalist sunset. Thanks to a flutist friend in Ircam I got to meet Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez but I don't think they remember me. I did a translation for Sophie Calle before she became Sophie Calle. Also some work for the Royal family of Afghanistan. Back when there was one. At Paris VIII University still in the Bois de Vincennes with the whores whom we did not try to lead to culture I got to attend classes by Lyotard & Deleuze and the Miller Brothers, Lacan's son in laws? Noam Chosmky spoke. I thought to become a consultant in a moment of delusion and ended up teaching for the last 24 years: Polytechnique, SciencesPo, ENST, INT, Supelec, Ecole Centrale, ENPC, ENSTA, Paris V, ICP, ESIEE, ECE, Ecole du Louvre. Before that I was a technical translator, a field I am happy to report that has been almost entirely taken over by machines, bless their soulless bodies. I also got married and my wife and I had two children. But we hadn't really grown up much to the needless suffering of the children and so that marriage went painfully bust...Then I married again and we had a daughter. She's on the phone right now, de rigueur for all 16 year olds. I am a loving observer of the human experiment of which I am inextricably a part, how so ever much I would like to be apart. As we advance, not necessarily progress, into the numbing, memory erasing age of AI, already sinking its canines deep into our pranic jugulars, lose ourselves in our beloved electronic devices, we must look to our hands, our analog writing devices such as pencils and pens and give them a try. Along with all the rest.

Geist.Zeit
Waren wir jemals postmodern?

Geist.Zeit

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 21, 2024 72:50


Leben wir in der Postmoderne? Einige sind sich da sehr sicher und glauben, dass postmoderne Philosophien uns in eine Welt des Relativismus geführt haben. Für andere handelt es sich um eine Zeitdeutungsdebatte der 1970er und 80er Jahre, die längst Geschichte geworden ist. Gemeinsam mit dem Philosophen Luca Di Blasi schauen Andreas und Thorsten auf dieses offenbar strittige Phänomen: Wie kommt es, dass Philosophen wie Lyotard den Dogmatismus ihrer früheren Überzeugungen hinterfragten und sich für die Anerkennung von Pluralität und Fremdheit einsetzten? Was hat es mit der berüchtigten Haltung der «Dekonstruktion» (Derrida, Foucault) auf sich, eine Hinterfragung von Machtstrukturen bis tief in Sprache und Gesellschaftsordnung hinein? Und wie verträgt sich die deutliche Gesellschaftskritik dieser Ansätze mit den Impulsen zu einem «schwachen Denken» (Vattimo), das manchen auch eine neue Annäherung an Religion erlaubte?

New Books Network
Jonathan Judaken, "Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism" (Columbia UP, 2024)

New Books Network

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 7, 2024 76:29


Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between mediaeval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in attacks on Jews today? Considering these questions and many more, Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism (Columbia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Judaken is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges, examining the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, alongside the works of sociologists Talcott Parsons and Zygmunt Bauman and historians Léon Poliakov and George Mosse. Dr. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

New Books in Jewish Studies
Jonathan Judaken, "Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism" (Columbia UP, 2024)

New Books in Jewish Studies

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 7, 2024 76:29


Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between mediaeval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in attacks on Jews today? Considering these questions and many more, Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism (Columbia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Judaken is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges, examining the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, alongside the works of sociologists Talcott Parsons and Zygmunt Bauman and historians Léon Poliakov and George Mosse. Dr. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

New Books in Critical Theory
Jonathan Judaken, "Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism" (Columbia UP, 2024)

New Books in Critical Theory

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 7, 2024 76:29


Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between mediaeval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in attacks on Jews today? Considering these questions and many more, Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism (Columbia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Judaken is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges, examining the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, alongside the works of sociologists Talcott Parsons and Zygmunt Bauman and historians Léon Poliakov and George Mosse. Dr. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

New Books in Intellectual History
Jonathan Judaken, "Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism" (Columbia UP, 2024)

New Books in Intellectual History

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 7, 2024 76:29


Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between mediaeval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in attacks on Jews today? Considering these questions and many more, Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism (Columbia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Judaken is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges, examining the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, alongside the works of sociologists Talcott Parsons and Zygmunt Bauman and historians Léon Poliakov and George Mosse. Dr. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

New Books in Israel Studies
Jonathan Judaken, "Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism" (Columbia UP, 2024)

New Books in Israel Studies

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 7, 2024 76:29


Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between mediaeval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in attacks on Jews today? Considering these questions and many more, Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism (Columbia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Judaken is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges, examining the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, alongside the works of sociologists Talcott Parsons and Zygmunt Bauman and historians Léon Poliakov and George Mosse. Dr. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/israel-studies

New Books in Sociology
Jonathan Judaken, "Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism" (Columbia UP, 2024)

New Books in Sociology

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 7, 2024 76:29


Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between mediaeval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in attacks on Jews today? Considering these questions and many more, Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism (Columbia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Judaken is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges, examining the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, alongside the works of sociologists Talcott Parsons and Zygmunt Bauman and historians Léon Poliakov and George Mosse. Dr. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

New Books in Religion
Jonathan Judaken, "Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism" (Columbia UP, 2024)

New Books in Religion

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 7, 2024 76:29


Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between mediaeval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in attacks on Jews today? Considering these questions and many more, Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism (Columbia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Judaken is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges, examining the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, alongside the works of sociologists Talcott Parsons and Zygmunt Bauman and historians Léon Poliakov and George Mosse. Dr. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast
Jonathan Judaken, "Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 7, 2024 76:29


Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between mediaeval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in attacks on Jews today? Considering these questions and many more, Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism (Columbia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Judaken is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges, examining the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, alongside the works of sociologists Talcott Parsons and Zygmunt Bauman and historians Léon Poliakov and George Mosse. Dr. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

NBN Book of the Day
Jonathan Judaken, "Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism" (Columbia UP, 2024)

NBN Book of the Day

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 7, 2024 76:29


Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between mediaeval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in attacks on Jews today? Considering these questions and many more, Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism (Columbia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Judaken is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges, examining the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, alongside the works of sociologists Talcott Parsons and Zygmunt Bauman and historians Léon Poliakov and George Mosse. Dr. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

5 Star Tossers
Steve Bannon: Militant of the Western Church

5 Star Tossers

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 1, 2024 98:38


Hello listener,How's it been? Great, right?Right?..This episode follows Naomi Klein's recent book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, and Errol Morris' 2018 documentary around Steve Bannon, called American Dharma (2018). In both, we get a rare glimpse into the mind of this highly effective manipulator, or enemy, of (social) media; who treats it like a political actor that understands only (algorithmic) violence... It's like being stared in the face by the hard pragmatism of a delusion.But this delusion is the American delusion. It's just the violence they don't see, that they talk (and walk) around, what had to be paved over to reach that shining destiny, manifest by God Himself (look they don't even have agriculture, lazy savages).Bannon is a toxin parasite that teaches us where we hide ours, if we care to look. The American "dream" means many underground veins of denial, suppressing historical crimes that undermine the principles 'America' claims to hold. And while the left is busy ridiculing the right for being religiously intolerant, racist, greedy, or belligerent and insensitive towards the other, they ignore this contradiction of their own complicities with exactly such things. Those that cannot ignore it -- because they had to enact the religious and racist hatred against the brown Muslim at play when they enlist in the army (to give just one example of Bannon's target audience) -- are left, by the left, for dead. Hence, these deep veins of denial produce deep veins of resentment rage  that Bannon knows not only how to weaponize, but how to conjoin disparate rages in a metonymous coherence of "(we may hate each other for all we know, but) we all hate X!". It is true, this is an old tactic, but Bannon adapted it to an algorithmic framework of recruitment and propaganda. At the same time, he will exasperate the left's abandonments by fomenting more and more fake controversy like a button to release a tired, long-leaking valve of Christian denial.This is just one point. We had many others, but I'm putting it here like a warning label, a basic blueprint, for the Bannon propaganda machine.Stars tossed in this one: Beast & Sovereign; Marx Grudge; Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais; WWJD.

The Taproot Therapy Podcast - https://www.GetTherapyBirmingham.com

Healing the Modern Soul is a series about how clinical psychology will haave to change and confront its past if it is to remain relevant in the future. Part 1    Part 2    Part 3     Part 4      Healing the Modern Soul Appendix    The Role of Psychotherapy as a Third Space and Meaning-Making System   Psychotherapy can be seen as a third space that exists outside of the dogmas of both science and religion, serving as a bridge between our medical and spiritual needs. In this space, therapists and clients engage in a process of meaning-making that allows the inner world and understanding of the self to better reflect the reality of the outer world.   This process of meaning-making occurs through both conscious thought, which is aware of time and language, and implicit memory, which is only aware of our somatic and deep emotional cues that can only partially be known by the conscious mind. In this way, psychotherapy itself can be considered a kind of simulacra, a symbol that does not point to an original source of meaning, but rather serves as a guide to help individuals navigate their own unique experiences and challenges.   #PsychotherapyFuture #MentalHealthRevolution #ThirdSpacePsychology #IntegrativePsychotherapy #ScienceAndSpirituality #MeaningMakingProcess #ImplicitMemoryHealing #ConsciousAndUnconscious #SelfDiscoveryJourney #PsychotherapyEvolution #HealingTrauma #HumanExperienceInsights #CompassionatePsychotherapy #HolisticMentalHealth #TransformativePsychology Suffering Without Screaming In the first part of this series, we explored the concept of the modern world as a simulacrum, a copy without an original, and how this phenomenon is related to the increasing emphasis on hyper-rationality and objectivity in our culture. We also discussed how the work of philosophers and psychologists, as observed by Friedrich Nietzsche, can reveal their own fears and insecurities through their insistence on perfect logic and objectivity. In the second part of the series we discussed the need for a coherent sense of self in new therapy models and a dialectical relationship between the self and the world. William Gibson,  Memory Palace When we were only several hundred-thousand years old, we built stone circles, water clocks. Later, someone forged an iron spring. Set clockwork running. Imagined grid-lines on a globe. Cathedrals are like machines to finding the soul; bells of clock towers stitch the sleeper's dreams together. You see; so we've always been on our way to this new place—that is no place, really—but it is real. It's our nature to represent: we're the animal that represents, the sole and only maker of maps. And if our weakness has been to confuse the bright and bloody colors of our calendars with the true weather of days, and the parchment's territory of our maps with the land spread out before us—never mind. We have always been on our way to this new place—that is no place, really—but it is real. The Simulacra Effect and the Disconnect from Felt Experience The simulacra effect, as described by Jean Baudrillard, is a result of our culture's increasing emphasis on hyper-rationality and objectivity. As we prioritize logical and rational thinking over subjective experiences and emotions, we create a world that feels hyper-real, yet simultaneously disconnected from our authentic selves. Nietzsche recognized this phenomenon in the work of philosophers and psychologists who claimed to have discovered objective truths through pure logic and reason. He argued that the more these thinkers insisted on their own rationality and objectivity, the more they revealed their own madness and disconnection from reality. In today's world, we find ourselves in a similar situation. On the surface, everything appears normal and rational, but there is an underlying sense of wrongness or disconnection that we struggle to articulate. This is because our culture has taught us to prioritize objective, rational thinking over our subjective, felt experiences. As individuals and as a society, we must reconnect with our felt experiences to recognize and address the insanity that surrounds us. This requires us to embrace our emotions, intuitions, and subjective perceptions, even when they seem to contradict the dominant narrative of rationality and objectivity. Psychotherapy, as a discipline, must play a crucial role in helping individuals engage with their felt experiences, even if it means navigating the complex and often paradoxical relationship between the rational and the subjective. By doing so, therapy can help individuals develop a more authentic sense of self and a deeper understanding of their place in the world. The Dangers of Denying the Self in Psychotherapy Models In the second part of this series, we explored how different models of psychotherapy reveal their own assumptions and biases about the nature of the self and the goals of therapy. By examining these models through the lens of Nietzsche's critique, we can identify potentially dangerous or dehumanizing approaches to treatment. One particularly concerning example is Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), a common approach to treating autism spectrum disorders. In the ABA model, the self is reduced to a collection of observable behaviors, with little or no consideration for the individual's inner world, emotions, or subjective experiences. This approach is deeply problematic, as it essentially denies the existence of a soul or psyche in individuals with autism or other neurodivergent conditions. By focusing solely on external behaviors and reinforcing "desirable" actions through rewards and punishments, ABA fails to recognize the inherent humanity and agency of the individuals it seeks to treat. In contrast, a truly effective and ethical model of psychotherapy must acknowledge and support the development of a coherent sense of self, while also recognizing the existence of other selves in the world. Therapy should be a dialectical process, helping individuals navigate the complex relationship between their inner world and the external reality they inhabit. This is particularly important for individuals who may not fit neatly into the objective, outcome-oriented modes of expression and socialization that dominate our culture. Rather than discounting or suppressing their unique perspectives and experiences, therapy should encourage and support the development of their authentic selves. The Case of the Autistic Child and Neuromodulation To illustrate the importance of a holistic and integrative approach to psychotherapy, let us consider the case of an autistic child who experiences sensory overwhelm and distress when exposed to cold temperatures. In a traditional ABA approach, the focus would be on modifying the child's behavior through rewards and punishments, with the goal of reducing the outward expression of distress. However, this approach fails to address the underlying neural and sensory processing issues that contribute to the child's experience of overwhelm. By contrast, a neuromodulation approach, such as that described in the case study involving QEEG brain mapping, seeks to identify and target the specific areas of neural dysfunction that are contributing to the child's distress. In this case, the QEEG brain map revealed a disconnect between the thalamus, which processes sensory information, and the long-term memory regions of the brain. By using neuromodulation techniques to bridge this gap and facilitate communication between these areas, the therapists were able to help the child process and integrate their sensory experiences more effectively, leading to a reduction in distress and an increased ability to tolerate cold temperatures. This case study highlights the importance of looking beyond surface-level behaviors and considering the complex interplay of neurological, sensory, and emotional factors that shape an individual's experience of the world. By addressing these underlying issues, rather than simply trying to suppress or modify outward expressions of distress, psychotherapy can help individuals to develop a greater sense of self-regulation, resilience, and overall well-being. The Role of Implicit Memory in Shaping Our Sense of Self To effectively address the complexities of the modern soul, psychotherapy must also grapple with the role of implicit memory in shaping our sense of self and our relationship to the world. Implicit memory, also known as the unconscious or subcortical brain processes, encompasses the vast array of experiences, emotions, and assumptions that operate beneath the level of conscious awareness. These implicit memories can have a profound impact on our behavior, relationships, and overall well-being, often in ways that we struggle to understand or articulate. They may manifest as trauma responses, maladaptive patterns of thinking and behavior, or a pervasive sense of disconnection from ourselves and others. Effective psychotherapy must find ways to access and work with these implicit memories, helping individuals to process and integrate their experiences in a way that promotes healing and growth. Different Types of Memory and Therapeutic Approaches One key insight in understanding the role of implicit memory in psychotherapy is recognizing that there are different types of memory, each requiring distinct therapeutic approaches to effectively treat the associated trauma or dysfunction. Relational memory: This type of memory encompasses our assumptions about communication, identity, and how we want to be perceived by others. Individuals with attachment disorders or relational trauma may have impaired functional memory, leading to maladaptive patterns in their interactions with others. Therapies that focus on building secure attachments, such as emotionally focused therapy (EFT) or interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT), can be particularly effective in addressing relational memory issues. Visual-spatial memory: This type of memory is associated with flashbacks and vivid re-experiencing of traumatic events. While relatively rare, visual-spatial memory trauma can be highly distressing and debilitating. Treatments like eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) and prolonged exposure therapy (PE) have been shown to be effective in processing and integrating these traumatic memories. Kinesthetic memory: This type of memory is stored in the body and is related to how we budget energy and respond to stress. Somatic therapies, such as sensorimotor psychotherapy and somatic experiencing, can help individuals reconnect with their bodily sensations and develop greater self-regulation and resilience in the face of stress and trauma. Cognitive-emotional memory: This type of memory is associated with self-referential processes, such as problem-solving, obsessing, and rumination. Cognitive-behavioral therapies (CBT) and mindfulness-based approaches can be effective in addressing maladaptive thought patterns and promoting more flexible and adaptive ways of relating to one's internal experience. By understanding the different types of memory involved in trauma and psychological distress, therapists can develop more targeted and effective interventions that address the specific needs of each individual client. The Complexity of the Unconscious and the Limitations of Language While different psychotherapeutic approaches have their own conceptions of the unconscious, it is important to recognize that implicit memory cannot be perfectly mapped or described using language alone. The unconscious is a vast and complex realm that operates beneath the level of conscious awareness, and our attempts to understand and articulate its workings will always be limited by the constraints of language and cognition. In many ways, the relationship between the conscious mind and the unconscious can be likened to that between a democratic government and its constituents. Just as a democracy relies on elected representatives to make decisions on behalf of the larger population, our conscious mind relies on simplified models and representations of the unconscious to guide our thoughts and behaviors. Similarly, the unconscious can be compared to a graphics processing unit (GPU) in a computer, which is optimized for handling complex and repetitive tasks, such as rendering images or processing large datasets. In contrast, the conscious mind is more like a central processing unit (CPU), which is better suited for handling novel and sequential tasks that require flexibility and adaptability. While the CPU (conscious mind) may be the "decision-maker," it relies heavily on the GPU (unconscious) to provide the raw data and processing power needed to navigate the complexities of the world around us. Attempting to understand the unconscious solely through the lens of conscious, language-based reasoning would be like trying to understand the inner workings of a GPU using only the tools and concepts of CPU programming. The Influence of Silicon Valley and Corporate Interests on Mental Health This brings us to the problematic assumptions underlying certain models of psychotherapy, which are deeply embedded in the broader cultural and economic forces that shape our understanding of mental health and well-being. In particular, the influence of Silicon Valley and corporate interests on the field of psychology has led to a growing emphasis on treating individuals as programmable entities, much like computers or robots. This perspective is rooted in the belief that with enough data and processing power, human behavior can be predicted, controlled, and optimized. We see this belief reflected in the development of large language models (LLMs) and other AI technologies, which are often presented as capable of replicating or even surpassing human intelligence and creativity. However, this view fundamentally misunderstands the nature of human consciousness and agency, reducing the complexity of the human mind to a set of algorithms and data points. The notion that robots can be made into people through advances in AI and computing power is deeply misguided, as it fails to recognize the fundamental differences between human consciousness and machine learning. At the same time, the idea that people can be reduced to robots through behavioral conditioning and programming is equally dangerous, as it denies the inherent humanity and agency of individuals. These assumptions are not only flawed but also deeply dehumanizing, as they prioritize measurable outcomes and "optimal" functioning over the rich and complex inner lives of individuals. By treating people as objects to be fixed or optimized, rather than as meaning-making beings with unique subjective experiences, we risk perpetuating a culture of alienation, disconnection, and suffering. The Danger of Prioritizing Suffering Over Healing The case of the autistic child also raises important questions about the goals and priorities of psychotherapy in the modern world. In a culture that prioritizes hyper-rationality, objectivity, and measurable outcomes, there is a risk of reducing the complexity of human experience to a set of behaviors to be modified or eliminated. This approach can lead to a dangerous prioritization of suffering over healing, where the goal of therapy becomes to help individuals endure their distress without expressing it, rather than to address the underlying causes of their suffering and promote genuine growth and transformation. The idea that therapy should aim to help people "suffer without screaming" is a deeply troubling direction for the profession to take. It reflects a dehumanizing view of individuals as objects to be fixed or controlled, rather than as complex, meaning-making beings with inherent worth and dignity. Instead, psychotherapy should strive to create a safe and supportive space for individuals to explore their experiences, to develop a greater understanding of themselves and their place in the world, and to cultivate the skills and resources needed to navigate life's challenges with resilience, authenticity, and grace. This requires a willingness to sit with the full spectrum of human experience, including the painful, messy, and often paradoxical aspects of the self and the world. It also requires a recognition of the inherent value and wisdom of each individual's unique perspective and life journey, and a commitment to honoring and supporting their growth and development in a way that is grounded in their own values, needs, and aspirations. Screaming without Suffering The simulacra effect, as described by Baudrillard and anticipated by Nietzsche, is a direct consequence of our culture's increasing emphasis on hyper-rationality, objectivity, and the denial of subjective experience. As psychotherapists and as a society, we must resist the temptation to reduce the complexity of the human mind to a set of behaviors or data points, and instead embrace the inherent messiness and uncertainty of the human condition. By reconnecting with our felt experiences, acknowledging the existence of the self and other selves in the world, and challenging the dominant paradigms of mental health treatment, we can begin to navigate the complexities of the modern soul and find a sense of authenticity and meaning in an increasingly disconnected world. This requires a willingness to engage with the paradoxes and contradictions that arise when we attempt to bridge the gap between the rational and the subjective, the individual and the collective, the inner world and the external reality. It is a difficult and ongoing process, but one that is essential if we are to create a more humane and fulfilling vision of mental health and well-being in the 21st century. As we have explored throughout this series, the role of psychotherapy in navigating the modern soul is both complex and essential. By embracing a holistic and integrative approach that recognizes the full complexity of the human experience, therapists can help individuals to develop a more authentic and meaningful sense of self, one that is grounded in their own unique values, experiences, and relationships. This process of self-discovery and healing is not always comfortable or easy, but it is necessary if we are to resist the dehumanizing forces of hyper-rationality, objectivity, and corporate interest that threaten to reduce the richness and diversity of human experience to a set of measurable outcomes and data points. Ultimately, the goal of psychotherapy in the modern world should be to help individuals to connect with their own inner wisdom and resilience, to find meaning and purpose in their lives, and to contribute to the creation of a more compassionate and authentic society. By working together to navigate the complexities of the modern soul, we can begin to heal the wounds of disconnection and alienation, and to create a world that truly honors the full spectrum of human experience. In the end, it is our capacity for love, empathy, and genuine human connection that will guide us through the challenges of the modern world. While pain and suffering may be inevitable, it is our ability to love and be loved that gives our lives meaning and purpose. As we strive to navigate the complexities of the modern soul, let us remember that we have the power to choose love over fear, connection over isolation, and authenticity over simulacra. For in doing so, we not only heal ourselves but also contribute to the healing of the world around us.  "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom" -Viktor E. Frankl   References and Further Reading: Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacra and simulation. University of Michigan Press. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge. Deleuze, G. (1968). Difference and repetition. Columbia University Press. Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. Ace Books. Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id. W.W. Norton & Company. Jung, C. G. (1933). Modern man in search of a soul. Routledge. Nietzsche, F. (1882). The gay science. Vintage. Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W.W. Norton & Company. Schore, A. N. (2019). The development of the unconscious mind. W.W. Norton & Company. Siegel, D. J. (2010). The mindful therapist: A clinician's guide to mindsight and neural integration. W.W. Norton & Company. van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking. Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. Basic Books. Žižek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology. Verso. Baudrillard, J. (1994). The illusion of the end. Stanford University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage Books. Lacan, J. (1966). Écrits. W.W. Norton & Company. Lyotard, J.-F. (1979). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. University of Minnesota Press. Saussure, F. (1916). Course in general linguistics. Columbia University Press. Derrida, J. (1967). Of grammatology. Johns Hopkins University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1887). On the genealogy of morality. Hackett Publishing Company. Heidegger, M. (1927). Being and time. Harper Perennial Modern Classics. Sartre, J.-P. (1943). Being and nothingness. Washington Square Press. Camus, A. (1942). The stranger. Vintage International.26. Dostoevsky, F. (1866). Crime and punishment. Penguin Classics. Kafka, F. (1915). The metamorphosis. Classix Press. Borges, J. L. (1944). Ficciones. Grove Press. Calvino, I. (1972). Invisible cities. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Eco, U. (1980). The name of the rose. Harcourt. Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes' error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. Putnam. Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. Oxford University Press. LeDoux, J. (1996). The emotional brain: The mysterious underpinnings of emotional life. Simon & Schuster. Solms, M., & Turnbull, O. (2002). The brain and the inner world: An introduction to the neuroscience of subjective experience. Other Press. Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E. L., & Target, M. (2002). Affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of the self. Other Press. Stern, D. N. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant: A view from psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. Basic Books. Tronick, E. (2007). The neurobehavioral and social-emotional development of infants and children. W.W. Norton & Company. Beebe, B., & Lachmann, F. M. (2014). The origins of attachment: Infant research and adult treatment. Routledge. Schore, J. R., & Schore, A. N. (2008). Modern attachment theory: The central role of affect regulation in development and treatment. Clinical Social Work Journal, 36(1), 9-20. Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the body: A sensorimotor approach to psychotherapy. W.W. Norton & Company.  

@theorypleeb critical theory &philosophy
Deleuze's IRL Student Tells ALL | Plus Learning French with Terence Blake

@theorypleeb critical theory &philosophy

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 28, 2024 81:15


Meet Terence Blake, IRL student of Deleuze, as well as Lyotard, Foucault, and many others. He we talk learning French, what it was like to study under Deleuze, and also we get into Theory Underground courses and activities a bit. Hope you enjoy!     ABOUT / CREDITS / LINKS Become a monthly TU Tier Subscriber to access to the TU HUB, which includes past, ongoing, and upcoming courses, special events, office hours, clubs, and critical feedback that will help you evolve your comprehension capacities and critical faculties, via the website here: https://theoryunderground.com/product/tu-subscription-tiers/ (Whatever tier you subscribe to in the month of March 2024 will be promoted to the privileges of the next one up (e.g. Tier 1 will have Tier 2 privileges, etc.!).)   Don't have time for that but want to help anyway? Consider supporting the patreon here: Welcome to Theory Underground. https://www.patreon.com/TheoryUnderground   Get TU books at a discount: https://theoryunderground.com/publications   Theory Underground is a lecture, research, and publishing platform by and for working class intellectuals, autodidacts, and academics who want to do more than they are able to within the confines of academia.   Think of Theory Underground like a Jiu Jitsu gym for your brain. Or like a post-political theory church. It doesn't matter. None of the analogies will do it justice. We're post-identity anyway. Just see if the vibe is right for you. We hope you get something out of it!   If you want to help me get setup sooner/faster in a totally gratuitous way, or support me but you don't care about the subscription or want to bother with the monthly stuff, here is a way to buy me something concrete and immediately useful, then you can buy me important equipment for my office on this list (these items will be automatically shipped to my address if you use the list here) https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/2MAWFYUJQIM58?   Buy me some coffee: https://www.venmo.com/u/Theorypleeb https://paypal.me/theorypleeb   If Theory Underground has helped you see that text-to-speech technologies are a useful way of supplementing one's reading while living a busy life, if you want to be able to listen to PDFs for yourself, then Speechify is recommended. Use the link below and Theory Underground gets credit! https://share.speechify.com/mzwBHEB Follow Theory Underground on Duolingo: https://invite.duolingo.com/BDHTZTB5CWWKTP747NSNMAOYEI See Theory Underground memes here: https://www.instagram.com/theory_underground/ https://tiktok.com/@theory_underground   Missed a course at Theory Underground? Wrong! Courses at Theory Underground are available after the fact on demand. https://theoryunderground.com/courses   MUSIC CREDITS Logo sequence music by https://olliebeanz.com/music https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode Mike Chino, Demigods https://youtu.be/M6wruxDngOk            

5 Star Tossers
Divided by the Lie: Animal contra Human, Jew contra Christian, Jacques contra Jacques

5 Star Tossers

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 27, 2023 99:32


Though absent from the title,  we watched Ricky Gervais's "The Invention of Lying" and Jim Carrey's "Liar Liar" for this episode. Mainly as an excuse to discuss whether lying is something like the fundamental human factor.Jake bundled the stars Beast and Sovereign, Pervs 'R Us, and Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais together to study Jacques Lacan's famous idea that animals cannot feign a feint, or falsify a falsification. The main idea here being that humans fundamentally lie at their core and animals never do. Jacques Derrida has a famous deconstruction of Lacan's idea, somewhat in defense of the capacity of the animal, and also in defense of the always feigning, effacing nature of a trace. Sagi helped us consider the possible Christian nature of Lacan's position, and Andy is a proud liar.We ended up trying to defend both Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, which was an impressive feat.

Rejected Religion Podcast
RR Pod E28 P1 Bob Cluness -An Esoteric Menagerie: The Weird & Eerie, Slenderman, CCRU, Accelerationism, Chaos Magic(k) and Digital Technology

Rejected Religion Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 6, 2023 89:07


This month's guest is Bob Cluness. Bob is a PhD candidate and researcher in the cultural studies program at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. Bob graduated in 2017 with a bachelor's degree in film studies on accelerationist aesthetics and action cinema, while in 2020 he received a master's degree in cultural studies with a thesis on the weird and eerie in contemporary and digital cultures. His current PhD project deals with the relationship between and esotericism and acceleration in UK subcultures in the late 20th century, through a discursive analysis of chaos magic(k) and the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit, also known as CCRU. As part of his Academic research, Bob's interests look at the myriad intersections between esotericism and contemporary subcultures, such as cyberpunk, cyberspace and technology, the counterculture and the New Age, comics, zine culture, and music. He has also given papers centered on Icelandic occulture and spiritual currents such as Ásatrú, spiritualism, and wellness.As you can tell from the episode title, Bob and I are talking about a little bit of everything, and while, on the surface, these things may seem unrelated, as the discussion unfolds, I hope it will become clear that all of these strands are indeed very much connected. As this was a long interview, I'm providing it to you in 2 parts.In Part 1, Bob begins by explaining the terms “the weird” and “the eerie” and how these literary concepts have helped to fuel the social imagination; as well as the tricky issue of how one discerns between ‘fiction' and ‘reality'. With the help of philosophical concepts such as ‘the hyperreal' and simulacra taken from Baudrillard, as well as other concepts from French philosophers such as Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard, Bob discusses the effects of signs, symbols, and other images on our understanding of what's ‘real', as well as the dissolving boundaries between ‘the real' and ‘the artificial'. This all takes us into the area of hyperstition, the CCRU, and a case study that is a good example of a hyperstition found in the Slederman character, and later incident in 2014 involving Slenderman where two girls come to believe that he is a real entity, attempting to kill their friend because of it. Bob also talks about how such a character becomes implanted in our collective consciousness through digital interactions such as memes, and later becomes a part of our cultural history. Bob also touches on the concept of acceleration, which he later expands upon in part 2. PROGRAM NOTESBob Cluness:(99+) Bob Cluness | University of Iceland - Academia.edu(99+) "I am an other and I always was…" On the Weird and Eerie in Contemporary and Digital Cultures Ritgerð til MA-prófs í menningafraeði | Bob Cluness - Academia.eduSocial media:Facebook Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism): Jean Baudrillard, Sheila Faria Glaser: 9780472065219: Amazon.com: BooksSelected articles about philosophers mentioned in E28:Gilles Deleuze (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)Félix Guattari - WikipediaJean François Lyotard (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)Hyperstition Primer (edith.reisen)The Weird And The Eerie [PDF] [3ufdj9jsm190] (vdoc.pub)Applied Ballardianism | Memoir from a Parallel Universe#ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader | libcom.orgSlender Man stabbing - Wikipedia(99+) Speculative Fiction | Aren Roukema - Academia.edu“Book Zero” through the Years in: Aries - Ahead of print (brill.com)Chapter 12 “Cthulhu Gnosis” in: Fictional Practice: Magic, Narration, and the Power of Imagination (brill.com)Intensive Care (album) - WikipediaWatch Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God (HBO) | TV Shows | HBO MaxNOTE about audio: At this time, I am recording at a temporary location due to extensive home renovations. Unfortunately, the building in which I'm located is also undergoing renovations. I had attempted to work around the noise, but sadly, I wasn't aware that wood floors were being sanded at the same time I was recording. The audio is therefore not optimal; I did my best to edit out the noise, but apologize for the (at times) poor audio quality. Theme Music: Daniel P. SheaOther Music: Stephanie Shea 

Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour
Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition

Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 19, 2023 96:53


This week Coop and Taylor discussed Jean Francois Lyotard's famous book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. We discuss meta-narratives, language games, science and more. Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/muhh Twitter: @unconscioushh

Political Theory 101

Alex and Benjamin discuss Jean-François Lyotard's critique of Marxism, his "evil book," intersections between politics, art, and science, and how Lyotard answered the charge of relativism.

Les Nuits de France Culture
L'Université de Vincennes, une université qui ne ressemble à aucune autre

Les Nuits de France Culture

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 2, 2023 25:00


durée : 00:25:00 - Les Nuits de France Culture - par : Albane Penaranda - En 1989, la Révolution française était deux fois centenaire et l'Université Paris 8 avait vingt ans. Pour saluer cet anniversaire, Espace Éducation avait invité Claude Frioux qui en avait été le président durant onze années. L'Université de Paris 8 était autrefois nommée l'Université de Vincennes. Aujourd'hui, on la connait sous le nom de l'Université Paris 8-Vincennes-Saint-Denis. Elle est l'héritière du Centre universitaire expérimental de Vincennes, créé dans la foulée du mouvement de 1968 pour être un foyer d'innovation ouvert au monde contemporain, où se sont investies de nombreuses personnalités intellectuelles de l'époque, comme Gilles Deleuze ou Hélène Cixous. Le Centre universitaire expérimental de Vincennes nait dans la foulée de Mai 1968 En 1989, l'Université Paris 8 avait vingt ans. Pour saluer cet anniversaire, l'émission "Espace Éducation" avait invité Claude Frioux qui en avait été le président durant onze années. Au micro de Michèle Chouchan, Claude Frioux rappelle dans quel contexte politique était née, au lendemain de Mai 68, cette université qui ne ressemblait à aucune autre, créée au cour du bois de Vincennes, dans l'urgence et l'improvisation. Une université dont les noms de ceux qui y enseignèrent suffisent, aujourd'hui encore, à entretenir le mythe : Foucault, Deleuze, Schérer, Lyotard, Badiou, Cixous, Châtelet, Serres, Castel et bien d'autres. Par Michèle Chouchan Réalisation : Brigitte Rihouay Avec Claude Frioux et les voix de Pierre Domergue, Yves Mourousi, Jacques Rougeot, Jean Rabaut et Jean-Pierre Soisson Espace éducation : Les vingt ans de l'Université de Vincennes, épisode 1 - 1ère diffusion : 10/04/1989 Archive Ina-Radio France Retrouvez l'ensemble de "La Nuit rêvée de Daniel Defert", proposée par Albane Penaranda.

Trinity Long Room Hub
Things and Ideas of Community in the Literary Works of Matthias Zschokke.

Trinity Long Room Hub

Play Episode Listen Later May 2, 2023 49:36


Recorded April 25, 2023. An in-person seminar by Trinity Long Room Hub Visiting Research Fellow Prof Dariusz Komorowski (University of Wroclaw) as part of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies Seminar Series. After decades of being trapped in discourse, where signs referred to other signs rather than reality, sentences were quotations or paraphrases of other sentences, and texts built on other texts, permanently questioning their own meaning and truth, a need for stability beyond discourse emerged in the 1990s. One turned to matter, which was reawakened from its slumber to join man as a reliable partner. Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law played a special role in this context. They wanted to abolish the traditional dichotomy of world perception with the opposition of nature and culture or subject and object and to establish a symmetry in its place. In the symmetrical conception of the world, human and nonhuman actors have agancy that no longer needs to be intentional and rationally motivated. In this talk, Komorowski will first examine the role things play in Matthias Zschokke's work and how the Swiss author perceives them. On this basis, the question of whether and how things contribute as effective actors to the creation of communities will be explored. In this respect, Komorowski links to the question of the representation of ideas about communities in time, when modernity becomes liquid (Bauman) and the lost metanarratives can no longer give support to individual stories (Lyotard). Here we draw on actor-network theory, which, originally developed as a sociological method, rather quickly found application in other disciplines of humanities. Whether and possibly to what extent and with what insight potential ANT can be applied in literary analysis is one of the aims of his investigation. Dariusz Komorowski is a Professor of German Philology at the University of Wroclaw in Poland. Since 2005 he has been the Head of the Research Centre for German-Swiss Literature and since 2017 the co-originator and editor-in-chief of the online magazine “CH-Studien. Zeitschrift zu Literatur und Kultur aus der Schweiz” which he leads in cooperation with Anna Fattori (Rome) and Jan Jambor (Prešov). From 2012 to 2018 he was the Head of the postgraduate studies in “Cultural Management in the Cooperation of Regions of the European Union" at the University of Wroclaw. Dariusz Komorowski has conducted seminars and given lectures at the universities in Göttingen, Zurich and Maribor and organised several international seminars for master students in cooperation with those universities.

5 Star Tossers
It's Always Sunny in the Marquis de Sade's Ass: Of Cannibalism and Hospitality

5 Star Tossers

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 14, 2023 113:16


Oh it's you again.. welcome back!So today it's always sunny in Philadelphia again, this time we're (loosely) talking about the first episode of Season 4, Mac and Dennis: Manhunters (2008). Jake found  in it a certain brilliance, by which I mean a glowing excuse mainly to talk about de Sade... oh, and to push his Cannibalist agenda.The cannibal appears originally as an ethnic reference, identified by the European colonist, before mushrooming into a particularly nasty (and suspiciously useful) metonym of the  good ol' 'savage.' With them good ol' Christians rushing to bring civilizing  light to the darkest continent, humbly accepting the enormous gains in Real Estate that such a charity mission necessitates (but only until such times as it can be re-entrusted to the reformed savages). In short, ripping land away from the savage mirrors itself in the limb-tearing savage, where one ripoff claims superiority over another: the cannibal becomes the "modern" foil to the andro-euro-fantasy  that underwrites modernity."We" also discuss the Marquis de Sade's Juliette, where we find Minski, the wholly-depraved "white cannibal," who holds on to the virtue of hospitality so tightly that he squeezes out its vicious underbelly. What is absolute hospitality in the case of the cannibal?  What does it mean to be a "white cannibal" (i.e. a cannibal who legitimately owns Real Estate)? Is it ok to play with your food? Serious stuff over here.Another theme that came up and refused to go down was  how cannibalism originally seems to be a homo-social activity, a transaction between men that carries meaning (like the incorporation of a defeated enemy). We left this strand hanging because we noticed that placing the burden of a civilizing foil on a taboo against maneating, begs to question what happened to the (supposedly central) taboo of 'civilization,' namely the sexual one (incest). Next time we plan to come back to this strand.Stars abused this time around: Beast and Sovereign; Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais; WWJD (a bit, something about the Eucharist and why the real Jesus didn't ask to be eaten after death).

5 Star Tossers
Bond, Jew's Bond: Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice

5 Star Tossers

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 26, 2023 117:51


Welcome back dear listener!5 Star Tossers grudgingly presents: Shakespeare's 1596 play The Merchant of Venice! And boy do the grudges flow in this one: Marx, Jew, Woman, Lacan... even Peggy Kamuf and Beyoncé were pretty miffed by the end there. Capitalism is of course (grudgingly) on the table, since both place and time are almost unanimously hailed as the cradle of global capitalism. But Christianity too, insofar as the play deals in the lives, loves, hatreds and pains of those that lived-out these realities in the context of Renaissance Europe (that just recently discovered Protestantism). The Jew -- by a necessity not of his making -- occupies an important structural support for the entire edifice as a money lender for expensive,  trust-unto-God's-mercy Capitalist ventures that involve Europe's colonial plundering of the rest of the world. The need for usury, for someone to bear the actual burden of risk, is prevalent, but no less "spiritually" reviled for it; perhaps even more.As you can see (notwithstanding Andrew's totally phoning-in the summary) this one was less dumb than the  last one!(you should really ask yourselves who is writing these blurbs at this point)..Jake shows how Shakespeare, in his subtle brilliance, calls upon the agency of the merchant and muses about the spirit of mercy, and how -- not coincidentally, if near-obliviously -- the two words come from a single etymological source. Alicia for her part spies a pervert in Shylock's insistence on the Letter of the Law (refusing the fantasy of "mercantile mercy"). Sagi wants to ossify everything, as per usual, in Jewish Law, and foreground how Christianity is only able to sustain its fantasy through foreclosing upon it, a denial of real-world stakes (and suffering) that underwrites Shylock's insistence on the flesh. We all agreed that the flesh in this case represents the real, a remainder of the  Christian-Capitalist "mercy-fantasy" that sticks in its throat ; something irreversible, that, unlike money, cannot be redeemed or reconciled.Put your flesh where your mouth is, mothafucka'! Then you'll see how easy you had it when it was just "money"...There were many more strands that our attentive listener can pull on, like the place and role of women in the play (and in masculine structures of property and power, like Dowry and Marriage); the use of "fair" and its white-Christian "implications" (or, as Sagi puts it, an axiom), where the Jew's demand for fairness is never as "fair" (or as felicitous) as the Christian man's; or the vagaries of Christian "fraternity," as the love between Antonio and Bassanio is shown -- again with subtle brilliance -- to be the strongest love in the play (and the world it takes place in). And there's also the origin story for this podcast, and our podcast in general...So we hope you forgive the length of this one which is almost 2 hours long.Stars that were tossed include: Marx Grudge; Beast and Sovereign; Pervs 'R Us; and of course WWJD. Plus tard, Lyotard...

Radio åt alla
Sätt att se #16: Att bli ”bra”

Radio åt alla

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 24, 2023 61:17


Gänget försöker få rätsida på å ena sidan Lyotard och å andra sidan Peterson Artikeln Leo läst: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve

5 Star Tossers
Sklaving Them Softly: America Puts the Cap on Thor

5 Star Tossers

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 28, 2023 90:34


Hello listener, and welcome!This episode got a little bit out of hand. Treating of the MCU's metaphysical maneuvering, we had to go deep into the bad air of ressentiment... Availing ourselves to Nietzsche, which sounds reasonable, had unfortunately gone to Sagi's head, who proceeded to channel the poor moustached genius throughout. And then a hammer became involved... Unfortunate.We are reverse-engineering perhaps the most cathartic moment of the MCU (phase 3 at least) -- where, in Avengers: Endgame, Captain America finally wields Thor's hammer, Mjolnir  -- and hopefully ruin it for everybody. We see a textbook example of Monotheistic ressentiment/slave-morality, whewre the symbol of pagan power undergoes, like Thor, a systematic humiliation, an infection, as a way  to prepare it to be "aufgehoben" into a Monotheistic value-system. The disease has two foci of corruption: for one, it is now tied to will rather than only the act; in the myths, Thor's hammer was indeed a boomerang, but could not be "summoned" -- by "force" of will -- like a Jedi does a lightsaber. Second, after Odin strips Thor of his power (for doing exactly what original Thor would do), he infects the hammer, and Thor's power, with  a western category of 'worth,' which then leads Thor on a journey where he learns to think like the weak, to alienate himself from his home and people so as to learn that "all life matters"...So by the time Captain America -- America's pure-of-heart, a-sexual, fight-for-justice eugenics experiment/prototype (but not a Nazi!) -- wields Mjolnir, the systematic usurpation of pagan power/valuation is complete, with no remainder. This is not new, but an old tradition, I daresay the 'western' tradition, at least since Thomas Aquinas. And the catharsis of the moment proves this fantasy is still lodged deep in the western psyche.Of course there's a lot more to unpack here, but I don't want to ruin it for you; tune-in, dear masochist! Hear Jake fail miserably at a Zizek accent! Empathize with Jack's PTSD (after being subjected to an Avengers amusement park)! Be edified by Andrew's lifelong crusade on homophobia! Fun for the whole family!!The stars that deigned to be tossed this time were, for the most part: What  Would Jesus Do; Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais; and Beast and Sovereign.

Theopolitics
Theopolitics: Ontological Violence

Theopolitics

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 10, 2023 96:30


Nearing the end of our series on Milbank's "Theology and Social Theory", we turn to the culmination of the genealogical excavation of modernity, securalism and liberalism. From the aporias of Liberalism culminating in Nihilist Ontology, a critical look is given to Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard and to the grand-daddy of them all, Friedrich Nietzsche. The Ontology of Violence throughout is juxtaposed with the uniquely Christian Ontology of Peace proposed by Milbank through an Augustinian lens.

Acid Horizon
Acid Archives - Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures of Mark Fisher (Full Episode)

Acid Horizon

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 2, 2022 98:51


Author, blogger, and photographer Matt Colquhoun joins us (as promised) for a first look at a compilation of last lectures given by Mark Fisher at Goldsmiths in 2016.  The lecture series on postcapitalist desire intends to explore the seemingly unsurpassable milieu of global capitalism and its pervasive affectivity.  Through figures like Marcus, Lukacs, Lyotard, Marx, and Deleuze and Guattari, Fisher explores possibilities for our collective extrication from capital. In the interview, we reflect on Fisher's acumen as a teacher and mentor as we take on elements of the project he left behind.Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures: https://repeaterbooks.com/product/postcapitalist-desire-the-final-lectures/Support the podcast:Linktree: https://linktr.ee/acidhorizonAcid Horizon on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcastMerch: http://www.crit-drip.comPreorder 'The Philosopher's Tarot': https://repeaterbooks.com/product/the-philosophers-tarot/Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/169wvvhiHappy Hour at Hippel's (Adam's blog): https://happyhourathippels.wordpress.com​Revolting Bodies (Will's Blog): https://revoltingbodies.com​Split Infinities (Craig's Substack): https://splitinfinities.substack.com/​Music: https://sereptie.bandcamp.com/ and https://thecominginsurrection.bandcamp.com/Support the show

5 Star Tossers
The Other Mister Rodgers: Dipping our Toes in the Incel Swamp

5 Star Tossers

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 29, 2022 102:14


Hello faithful listener! This Tossers episode tries to air-out the particularly pungent elements in the bad-air Ressentiment of 'Inceldom.' The incel, in our approach, may indicate the site of real pain and therefore allow insight for the very real crisis of heterosexual masculinity, its burning need of transvaluing behaviors that society can no longer abide.  Certainly not for the faint of heart, or the trigger-happy. Now just pop a red pill and listenWe talk about the fantasy of authentic, non-supplemental sex, and how the incel's concentric spirals -- whether psychotic or melancholic (we couldn't decide) -- may be a signal-flare of a lack that bedevils masculinity and intra-masculine networks or discourses. Why is it so important for incels to legalize rape? Why do they never go on raping-sprees? (Yes, we hold that misogyny is too broad of a term to understand the problem here; the Nietzschean nostril aims to do justice to the variety of toxicities therein). Is it because powerful men still gatekeep the "Stacys" of the western world?Our Mister "Rodgers" (the 's' was added so pervasively in the recording, I just decided to rename him) starts by seeking the validation of men, with women being used (resentfully) as the tool of this validation. Why was he not enough for them? (The bro-code takes a sinister turn here..) With Rodgres we also (re-)discover that the Capitalist - specifically American - ideology has lied, that the money he had was not enough. Capitalism embodies, in order to consume,  all other value-giving discourses, so that  at the end we are left with the nihilism of death, of the undisputable fact, the psychosis of absolute certainty (Eugenics plays an exorbitant role there). What else is left when all of us are exploitable whores?Main Stars in this one are: Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais; Pervs R' Us; and some What Would Jesus Do.

Acid Horizon
Lyotard or Marx? The Evil Legacy of 'Libidinal Economy'

Acid Horizon

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2022 87:08


Acid Horizon hosts Cooper and Taylor of Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour to discuss Jean-François Lyotard's Libidinal Economy, the infamous forceful poetic intervention which lambasted the French communism of the 1970s and the legacy of Marxism itself. This deep dive emerges out of Zer0's postcapitalist desire reading group which covers the incomplete final lecture series of Mark Fisher. Lyotard was an important mediator in Fisher's work and a pivotal figure in the accelerationist politics more broadly.Support Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour: patreon.com/muhhThe Wicked Lyotard series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhAQFtzY7fUSupport the podcast:Linktree: https://linktr.ee/acidhorizonAcid Horizon on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcastMerch: http://www.crit-drip.comPreorder 'The Philosopher's Tarot': https://repeaterbooks.com/product/the-philosophers-tarot/Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/169wvvhiHappy Hour at Hippel's (Adam's blog): https://happyhourathippels.wordpress.comDestratified (Matt's Blog): https://destratified.com/​Revolting Bodies (Will's Blog): https://revoltingbodies.com​Split Infinities (Craig's Substack): https://splitinfinities.substack.com/​Music: https://sereptie.bandcamp.com/ and https://thecominginsurrection.bandcamp.com/Support the show

Zer0 Books
Lyotard or Marx? The Evil Legacy of 'Libidinal Economy'

Zer0 Books

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2022 87:08


Acid Horizon hosts Cooper and Taylor of Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour to discuss Jean-François Lyotard's Libidinal Economy, the infamous forceful poetic intervention which lambasted the French communism of the 1970s and the legacy of Marxism itself. This deep dive emerges out of Zer0's postcapitalist desire reading group which covers the incomplete final lecture series of Mark Fisher. Lyotard was an important mediator in Fisher's work and a pivotal figure in the accelerationist politics more broadly.Support Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour: patreon.com/muhhThe Wicked Lyotard series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhAQFtzY7fUSupport Zer0 Books on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/zerobooksSubscribe: http://bit.ly/SubZeroBooksFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ZeroBooks/Twitter: https://twitter.com/zer0books-----Other links:Check out the projects of some of the new contributors to Zer0 Books:Acid HorizonPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcastYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/acidhorizonMerch: crit-drip.comThe Philosopher's Tarot from Repeater Books: https://repeaterbooks.com/product/the-philosophers-tarot/The Horror VanguardApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/horror-vanguard/id1445594437Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/horrorvanguardBuddies Without OrgansApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/buddies-without-organs/id1543289939Website: https://buddieswithout.org/Xenogothic: https://xenogothic.com/Support Daniel Tutt's work by visiting the Torsion Groups Patreon account: https://patreon.com/torsiongroups

Les Nuits de France Culture
Le Bon Plaisir - Michel Butor (1ère diffusion : 21/09/1985)

Les Nuits de France Culture

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 14, 2022 208:00


durée : 03:28:00 - Les Nuits de France Culture - Par Renée Elkaïm-Bollinger - Avec Alina Piechowska-Pascal, Agnès Yver, Michel Butor, Jean Starobinski, Jean Roudaut, Vahé Godel, Moriaki Watanabe, Jean-François Lyotard et André Villers - Réalisation Pamela Doussaud

5 Star Tossers
The Rehearsal: Nathan Fielder Giving Life the Business

5 Star Tossers

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 11, 2022 119:27


They say that one of the high-society ladies that was familiar with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (and his character) said, after he died, that he was an intriguing madman. In this episode, we delve head first into Nathan Fielder's foldy-folds, whether torture chambers, traps, or some choice slices of life (if you look there you can see Nathan's symptom holding the machete).Between the sketch(y) comedy and HBO's NDAs, our discussion seems to oscillate from wondering what makes the joke, to who's made the prop. Jake spies Derrida's metaphysics of presence  over-and-above Nathan's own over-and-above; and Sagi pushes Lyotard's distinction between damage and wrong (or plaintiff and victim) as the more nefarious ethical underpinnings of Nathan's gesture. The silenced price of life being made to work.The Rehearsal was a 6 episode, multilayered fake-shit-show, so forgive us going a bit overboard on running time (2h).Main stars this time around: Pervs R' Us and Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais ...okay, and some WWJD (because Sagi, again)* Image from Flickr: State Library Victoria Collections

The Courageous Economy
A New Conservative Age is Rising with Dr. Steve Turley

The Courageous Economy

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 31, 2022 30:16


If you are a conservative, there is a lot to be excited about, even in these tumultuous times. That's what internationally recognized scholar, speaker, and author Dr. Steve Turley says. He joins Andrew to share how the modernist myth has lost its hold, and why secularism is failing across the world, giving way to a new, conservative age.  From Russia to Europe to the U.S., citizens are rising up and reasserting their religion, culture, and nation as mechanisms of resistance against the dehumanizing tendencies of secularism and globalism. If you sometimes feel like fighting for freedom is a losing battle, Dr. Steve will convince you otherwise.     In this Episode www.turleytalks.com  Exhausting Modernity by Teresa Brennan  The Postmodern Condition by Jean-François Lyotard   Solzhenitzyn's Harvard Speech  www.walkawaycampaign.com  www.redballoon.work 

Occupational Therapy Insights
Being differently abled: Disability through the lens of hierarchy of binaries and Bitso-lebe-ke Seromo

Occupational Therapy Insights

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 6, 2022


The aim of this study is to subject the term disability to some relevancy litmus test with a view to prevent it from acquiring Lyotard's ‘grand narrative' and to propose and argue for the term ‘differently abled' because of its transformative and anti-discriminatory slant.

PlasticPills - Philosophy & Critical Theory Podcast
Pill Pod 81 - The Postmodern Condition (preview)

PlasticPills - Philosophy & Critical Theory Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 7, 2022 4:26


Pills, Erik and Victor tackle the boogeyman: Lyotard's Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, with reference to Wittgenstein's language-game methodology. Is postmodernism when there are too many gay characters on TV? Or is it the legitimacy crisis of state knowledge precipitated by finance capital, the computerisation of information, and the subsumption of politics by public relations?   Get the full episode and a ton more audio and video at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

5 Star Tossers
A Hunger Artist: The Tragicomic Fate of a Negation made Flesh

5 Star Tossers

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 14, 2022 88:31


In this glorious installment we will be continuing our actor/acting thematic, this time thinking of Franz Kafka's 1922 short story Ein Hungerkünstler. Slog along as we  tarry a bit over the slim, somewhat Marxist contribution of the character's Pathos with regards to the reactionary-soporific functions of the Theater.  But then, rejoice with the tragic overabundance of life, as we  broach the fracking of Mount Sinai, interrogate false prophets of Dionysian intoxication, and Babel the shiznit out of trickless magicians and their monological art. The two stars being tossed (upon) today are "What Would Jesus Do" and "Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais".https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9

5 Star Tossers
The Golden Buzzer: America's Got Spirit

5 Star Tossers

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 19, 2021 91:50


This week The 5 Star Tossers look at the cultural phenomenon that is the Golden Buzzer from America's Got Talent. We do a shallow deep dive into Kant's Critique of Judgment to think about the Christian humanism at the heart of any universal celebration of beauty and talent. We also introduce for the first time our Star il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais, so expect some Saussurean talk about fracking the signifier. Also, if you want to meet someone who thinks Susan Boyle can't sing, we somehow managed to find one amongst us.Here's a link to the Databyss Page, it includes some youtube clips of the Golden Buzzer: https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9