In this episode, James interviews Kaif Syed, aka Bad Infinity, an EDM artist based out of Detroit. The conversation covers Bad Infinity’s Deleuze-Spinoza-Leibniz-inspired notions of musical creation, the affective limits of language vs. musical communication, and closes with a rallying cry for democratic musical production. Do you dare let the musical flood overtake your human subjectivity into a flowing plane of immanent sensuous being? Take a listen!
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In this episode, James talks with Dr. Alfie Bown about his book Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism. The conversation delves into the sticky relationship between enjoyment and 21st century global capitalism, and ranges from touching on your favorite mobile phone games to “Gangnam Style,” what a Department of Enjoyment Studies might look like, and the commodity fetishism that ironically attaches itself to some radical critical theorists. Only Epistemic Unruliness will bring you analysis of Zizek and Miley Cyrus in one interview! Think your enjoyments are innocent? Take a listen to this episode to find out…enjoy!
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.
Join James, John, and Emily for an extra special episode of Always Already “After Dark,” a potentially new series. This episode is “after dark” in two senses: 1) we recorded it dangerously near bedtime, and 2) we deviated from our usual format and content! The conversation takes up two broad topics, both of which are anchored in a series of short internet articles. In part 1, we tackle the amorphous and illusive “Academy,” and whether it is good or bad. We discuss academia’s forsaking of the affective body, the “public” with which it is engaged, how it engages with that public, our own understandings of the role the podcast plays in our academic lives, and the sheer volume of airquotes required to develop this episode description! (Okay, not that last part.) Part 2 grapples with the philosophy of Jaden and Willow Smith, their understanding of time, whether they are the Deleuzians of our day, the Afrofuturist art of Willow’s ARDIPITHECUS album cover, and the cosmologies of “New-Age” thinking. We know what you’re thinking: The Smith children are philosophers? Tune in to hear our take on their now (in?)famous interview with T Magazine.
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.
New Feminist Formationsissue on “Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women’s Studies in the Corporate University”, including a roundtable featuring friend of the podcast/previous guest host Lindsey Whitmore
James Mulholland, “Academics: Forget about Public Engagement, Stay in Your Ivory Towers”
Emily, John, and B take on cinema theory at the intersection of critical race theory in this installment of Always Already, discussing Kara Keeling’s book Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, The Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. How does the concept and figure of the “black femme” create the conditions for the possibility of rethinking race, gender, and sexuality–or common sense? But, conversely, what conditions the creation of the black femme in cinematic space that make the normative white and capitalist subject safe? Using Deleuze as a creative font, Keeling offers us a glimpse into “the cinematic” in order to untangle how a radical repositioning of our thinking can offer new ways of understanding common sense. Along the way we also talk about the figure of the witch, Afro-pessimism and Black optimism, racial capitalism, the importance of affectivity and the sensor-motor complex, rationality, and Keeling’s interventions into critical theory.
Don’t miss out on advice on how to deal with family members during the holidays disrespecting your romantic partner, and dream analysis for a nightmarish dream featuring accidental killing.
Thanks to listener Hanna for suggesting the Keeling text. 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. NEW intro music, “Static Loops”, from our friend Leah, with the old standby music from B as our outro music. Stick around all the way until the end for the full version of another of Leah’s original songs, “Swim Swim Swim”.
Video of Keeling on “Black Futures” at the Between Nothingness and Infinity: Ontologies of Blackness symposium at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, July 2015
Keeling writes of a “soundtrack” that could accompany the book, where “each chapter corresponds with a song” (6); we put together a Spotify playlist of Keeling’s soundtrack
Join B and John as they interview Nicholas Tampio, Associate Professor of Political Science at Fordham University, about his new book, Deleuze’s Political Vision, which comes out later this summer from Rowman & Littlefield. Professor Tampio tackles Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, mining it for its political and ethical possibilities. Using imagination as his theoretical impetus, Tampio tells us how our tree-like vision of politics ought to be replaced by the diversified Deleuzian garden of flowers. Could a rhizomatic ethic of the garden permeate our everyday political world, shaping new political imaginaries, making room for a praxis of creativity and coalition-building? Are we, or should we be, living in a Deleuzian era, as Foucault once predicted? Can Deleuze be read as a “cutting edge” liberal? What does a Deleuzean reading of Islamic political thought look like? And just as importantly, find out where Tampio would go, and when, if he could time travel with Deleuze. Tune in and find out!
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. Like our Facebook page. Get the mp3 of the episode here. RSS feed here. This episode’s music by B.
Toward the end of the interview, Tampio discusses education activism as Deleuzean politics; read his op-eds at Al-Jazeera America, The Journal News, and WYNCand watch his public talk on Common Core test refusal
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