music

Ep. 64 – Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

This long overdue episode brings James, B, and John together for a discussion of Robin James’s most recent book, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics, focusing on the Introduction and Chap. 1. The AAP team starts with a reparative approach to the text’s central set of questions. What is the qualitative side to neoliberalism’s quantitative, rationalizing regime of knowledge? How does music and its study anticipate and, by dint of metaphor, reproduce the neoliberal mathesis? How does the sonic actually enable the subordination of historically marginalized groups?

To these questions the team has many varied but passionate responses. Some include questions about the book’s large, diffuse archive to question its central critique about capitalism and sound. Others explore the totalizing thematic of “neoliberalism” and its usefulness in discussing pop music, representation, and race, as in the book’s reading of Taylor Swift’s financialized neoliberal whiteness. But all invite listeners to ponder the political consequences of the text’s emphasis on music’s power to alter the allegories theorists use to tell stories about the world we share.

Thanks to Patreon supporter Roddy for the request to read R. James. 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 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:

Find her book here, from Duke UP
Robin James: website; essays at the Sounding Out! sound studies blog; on Twitter
A review and discussion of the book at e-flux
Eve Kosofky Sedgwick’s essay on paranoid and reparative reading (and our AAP discussion of Sedgwick)
Relevant texts and scholar-artists: Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake; Ashon Crawley; Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format
AAP throwback episode on Foucault, neoliberalism, and race

Ep. 39 – Marcuse and Radiohead: A Special Episode with Theory for Turntables podcast

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!

Also in this episode, your favorite segments My Tumblr Friend From Canada and a very special edition of One or Several Wolves. We discuss our own neoliberal subjectivities (one dimensionality, perhaps?) in relationship to our new Patreon account, and our guests engage in an excellent dream analysis, replete with veganism and father figures.

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.

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

Interview: Bad Infinity on Making Deleuze-Inspried EDM Music – Epistemic Unruliness 8

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!

Links for Bad Infinity: Soundcloud , Facebook, Twitter, Bad Infinity can also be found on Spotify.

AAP After Dark 1: The Badness of Academia; Willow and Jaden Smith

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.

Links!

Karen Kelsky, “Is The Academy Good“
New Feminist Formations issue 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”
Slate Culture Gabfest podcast episode talking about Mulholland’s piece (at 39:30)
Interview with Willow and Jaden Smith in T Magazine by Su Wu
An anonymous philosophy prof interprets the Smiths, at Vice
Jaden Smith models Louis Vuitton womenswear
Jack Qu’emi Gutiérrez on Jaden Smith’s modelling and gender binaries, at Black Girl Dangerous
Willow Smith’s ARDIPITHECUS on Spotify
Willow explains the album title and origin to Fader

From the T Magazine interview: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/jaden-and-willow-smith-exclusive-joint-interview/

Ep. 33 – Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight

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”.

Links:

Keeling’s website at USC; follow Keeling on Twitter
The Witch’s Flight at Duke University Press
Holly Mayne reviews The Witch’s Flight at Black Camera
Sydnee Thompson on the black queer femme, at Black Girl Dangerous
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
Our previous episodes on Afro-pessimism and Black Optimism and on Wilderson’s Red White and Black
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