Ep. 38 – Annemarie Mol on Ontology, Science, and Politics

Join John, Emily, and the lamp specter of B for this week’s discussion of some of the work of Dutch anthropologist and philosopher of medicine, Annemarie Mol. In this episode, we read several essays of Mol’s spanning three decades, and grappling with such questions as: who know what a woman is and how do the sciences both create and obscure her? What does Actor Network Theory (ANT) make of such terms as “coordination” and “order,” and can ANT make good on the promise of “theory” more generally? How are the “real” and “political” implicated in and through one another, and what is the ontological turn in Science and Technology Studies?

Our conversation asks about the relationship between epistemology and ontology, about the consequences of these views for democratic theory and democracy more broadly, and we even try our hand at engaging in a little Rawlsian thought experiment! We’ll leave it up to you to decide how well it plays out. The episode closes with a My Tumblr Friend from Canada question regarding some recents comments made by Bill Nye the Science Guy about the relevance of philosophy to science and in general.

We would also like to announce the launch of our new Patreon account. The first few minutes of the episode are replete with details regarding donating to the podcast, and rewards for our patrons. Please give it a listen, check out the site here, and consider sponsoring us if you are a fan! We are greatly appreciative and (we hope) appropriately humbled and reflexive by/about our neoliberal subjectivity. Thank you for your support!

Thanks to listener dmf of Synthetic Zero for suggesting we read these texts.  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.

 

Links!

• Mol’s homepage
• Essays we read: “Ontological Politics“; “Actor-Network Theory“;  “A reader’s guide to the ‘ontological turn’“; “Who knows what a woman is…“
• Mol’s book The Body Multiple
• Mol lectures on YouTube: “Feeling, wording, eating” (2013) and “What methods do” (2009)
• Bill Nye’s BigThink video on philosophy; “Why are so many smart people such idiots about philosophy” by Olivia Goldhill on qz.com

 

Ep.11 – Rancière, The Distribution of the Sensible

This episode we discuss Jacques Rancière’s “The Distribution of the Sensible” from The Politics of Aesthetics. We start by parsing the first sentence of this text for several minutes, which sets the tone for a discussion of the interconnectedness between aesthetics and politics and the “self-evident” systems of the political order that determine that which is visible/invisible, audible and silent, and even thinkable and unthinkable. Listen as we debate the merits and demerits of exclusion as a concept, the bodiless embodiment of Rancière, and the potential for prefigurative politics found in this work. We’ll also give shoddy advice to our friends Fritz and Alexis about the weather and PhD application writing samples, respectively.

Thanks for Katie for suggesting we read Rancière. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Advice questions to submit? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Like our Facebook page. Get the mp3 here. RSS feed here. This episode’s music by B (intro and outro) and Jordan Cass (inter-segment).

Links!

• A blog on all things Rancière
• Rancière’s “Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art” in Art & Research
• Video of Rancière on the “The State of Things” and the distribution of the sensible

A distribution of the sensible at criticaltheorydesigns.wordpress.com