Always Already Podcast, a critical theory podcast

Join Rachel, Emily, and B as they delve into Maggie Nelson‘s memoir The Argonauts. As they discuss the power of the memoir genre as a tool for thinking critically about social life, they explore its political potential. How can the memoir, like poetry and other ‘forms’ of writing, allow for the kinds of destabilizing ‘epistemic unruliness’ that familiar forms of academic discourses disallow? If the memoir is thinking, and thinking-politically, what kinds of everyday experiences can be politicized and theorized? Listen as they consider Nelson’s contemplations of the queerness of pregnancy; the function and status of canonical philosophers in the memoir; and the general problem/inadequacy of words.

Thanks to listener @angellemke for suggesting The Argonauts. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. Get the mp3 of the episode here. RSS feed here. Thanks to Leah Dion and to B for the music.

https://alwaysalreadypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/ep34.mp3

Links!

• Maggie Nelson at CalArts and Wave Books
• The Argonauts at Graywolf Press
• Reviews of The Argonauts at the NY Times, NPR, and Salon
• “Writing as Performance: An Interview with Maggie Nelson”, a video from Superstition Review
• Catherine Opie exhibit archive at the Guggenheim
• What are Argonauts, you ask? PBS has an answer.

Join B, John, and Emily for a patron-suggested discussion of Eric L. Santner‘s book The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. The conversation explores the book’s use of the terms sovereignty and flesh as we attempt to parse out its central aims and contributions. How do those concepts relate to biopolitics? What are the multiple uses of ‘flesh’? Is psychoanalysis a useful paradigm in which to think through sovereignty and modernity? We also attempt to put Santner in conversation with thinkers like Franz Fanon and Hortense Spillers, and wonder to what extent we ourselves have been guilty of a paranoid reading of the text.

The episode concludes with an advice question regarding some of the concerns that arise when deciding whether and how to continue on with higher education.

Thanks to Dana Logan (@popapologist) who requested this episode, and due to their support of us on Patron, got the request to the top of the queue! Support us on Patreon to help us upgrade our recording equipment. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Thanks to Leah Dion for the intro music, to B for the outro music, and to Bad Infinity for the music between segments. Get the mp3 of the episode here.

https://alwaysalreadypodcast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/santner.mp3

Links:

• The Royal Remains at University of Chicago Press
• Review forum for The Royal Remains in the Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory
• Hortense Spillers’ Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: Am American Grammar Book

John is joined by friends-of-the-show Tyler Tully and Danielle Hanley to discuss Audra Simpson‘s Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke UP, 2014). The book — simultaneously a work of political theory, ethnography, and settler colonial studies — thinks with the Kahnawà:ke Mohawks to examine the situated production and assertion of Indigenous political subjectivities, membership(s), sovereignties, knowledges, practices, and much more.

We talk through questions of a politics of refusal (and a politics of recognition and governance by settler states), ongoingness of settler colonialism (and how Simpsons confronts it), race and indigeneity (and why BIPOC might not be so great), Indigenous and settler epistemologies, dispossession and heteropatriarchy, the libidinal economy of white saviorism, and much more. Not to mention, there is extensive and extremely deserved dragging of John Locke. Are we in a post-, de-, and/or anti-colonial frame? Tune in to find out.

And, stay tuned for the glorious return of giving advice to listener questions! We tackle a question about organizing notes, texts, sources, etc., which unsurprisingly becomes a sort of meditation on our own academic trajectories, peccadillos, and bugaboos.

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

Links:

• Simpson’s homepage at Columbia
• Simpson’s 2016 Theory & Event article, “The State Is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gendered Costs of Settler Sovereignty”
• “Reconciliation and its Discontents: Settler Governance in an Age of Sorrow” lecture by Simpson
• Tyler Tully, “Epistemological Sacrifice Zones and the Decolonization of Religion“
  

Tune in to this week’s very exceptional episode of the Always Already Podcast! John, B, and Emily are joined by special guests Matt and Ryan from the Theory for Turntables Podcast for a spectacular crossover brand synergy event featuring a discussion of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, and Radiohead’s OK Computer. In this episode, we ask about Marcuse’s prescience of 21st century capitalism — what still resonates, and what would Marcuse make of the freelance economy? We also attempt to situate OK Computer alongside Marcuse’s critical social theory — is the auteur of the album the one-dimensional man? is he the philosopher? We close our discussion with several juicy cliff-hangers. Stay tuned for the second part of the crossover event, available over in the Theory for Turntables stream!

Remember to support us on Patreon to help offset/reimburse the cost of our fancy new microphone, which we have named Lacan.

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. Get the mp3 of the episode here. RSS feed here. Thanks to Jordan Cass for the music.

https://alwaysalreadypodcast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ep39.mp3

Links!

• Marcuse entry at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• “Marcuse Today” by Ronald Aronson at Boston Review
• Website dedicated to Marcuse and his works
• Transcribed Marcuse lecture on “Marxism and Feminism”
• Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter Happier More Deductive, edited by Brandon W. Forbes and George A. Reisch
• “Radiohead, or the Philosophy of Pop“, by Mark Greif at n+1

In this episode, James welcomes back friend of the podcast Joanna Steinhardt and introduces Tehseen Noorani, co-editors of the recent “The Psychedelic Revival” series published by the Society for Cultural Anthropology. From PTSD and opiate rehabilitation therapy, legalization and decriminalization initiatives, to “tech bro” microdosing and New Age spirituality eco-tourism, it seems that psychedlics are all the rage for everyone these days (including your Boomer parents!). But how did we get here?

Join James, Joanna, and Tehseen as they bring you up to speed on the plant and fungal movements and trajectories making up this psychedelic revival in its various post-1971 iterations following President Nixon’s declaration of the U.S. government’s War on Drugs. But does heralding the “revival” of psychedelia eclipse the traditional contributions of Indigenous American and African pharmacopic knowledges? Or might the revival lead to a revolution of ancestral consciousness capable of rescuing us from the crises of racial capitalism and the Anthropocene? “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” and give a listen! Special thanks to Joanna and Tehseen for providing an extensive episode bibliography!

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

https://alwaysalreadypodcast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/psychedelic-revival.mp3

Links:

• “The Psychedelic Revival,” Fieldsights series, Society for Cultural Anthropology
• Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)
• Johns Hopkins University Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research
• Website of Dr. Monnica T. Williams (also see Patricia Kubala’s profile of Dr. Williams in “The Psychedelic Revival” series)
• Oakland Hyphae, a self-described collective of “Oakland-based intersectional #mycology enthusiasts. 100% Black Owned”
• Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines
• Psymposia, “adversarial” investigative journalists working on a psychedelics and society beat
• Joanna’s 2016 Epistemic Unruliness interview on mycelial movements
• Joanna’s professional site
• Tehseen’s Durham University bio and Authority Research Network scholarship

• Giffort, Danielle. Acid Revival: The Psychedelic Renaissance and the Quest for Medical Legitimacy. Univ. of MN Press, 2020.
• Labate, Beatriz Caiuby and Clancy Cavnar, eds.