There’s a lot here, I’ll begin I suppose by asking tongue in cheek- where *does* one see these ridiculous literary conversations? I mostly hear you about liberalism’s empire, though I get jittery about the rainbow flag/empire stuff- it makes me think a bit too much of an unholy horseshoe between the orthodox Marxist reading of homosexuality as bourgeois decadence to abolished with capitalism and the old and new right’s fixation on normative gender roles and biological reproduction as prerequisite for the validity of the sexual citizen. That said, I know what you mean (from the other side) esp regarding the moral blackmail liberalism is able to do because the right’s allegiance to tradition trumps its anarchic individualism on this etc. As for postmodernism-imo there’s a more-or-less organic and indeed entirely native to the tradition variety I love and a more abstracted, enervating logic-trap variety I find very annoying, so maybe we’re on the same page in the end.
I didn't do justice to the "Subaltern" essay, but it's about just this problem: how can she be a feminist when the British Empire justified itself on feminist grounds, how can she be a postmodernist when Deleuze and Foucault (but not Derrida!) indulge a primitivist rhetoric encouraging oppressive nationalism? The way she puts it in the case of liberal empire is "white men saving brown women from brown men." If I were to caricature my own political position, I might say "techno-fascist empire saving black lives, trans kids, and the climate from MAGA chuds." I won't though, even if (no fistfights, I promise) Ulysse went on Contain podcast and said Russia—Russia tout court—needed to be, and I quote, "dismantled," an almost literally Hitlerian caricature of the counterposition. Having coming of political age in 2001-2003, I will probably always be knee-jerk anti-empire and anti-war before anything else—always with Glenn Greenwald and against Bill Kristol, as it were; always more libertarian (leave all people alone) than left-liberal (empower some people with state and corporate authority)—but I do understand the historical and ethical complexities involved.
"Where does one see...?" When I saw her live she was delivering some endowed lecture at the University of Minnesota. She came onstage and announced that Baudrillard had just died and then she denounced "reproductive heteronormativity" and claimed "both sides were in it," i.e., both the colonized and the colonizer. Edward Said's protege and later biographer, then my own theory professor, the self-styled "left Hegelian" Tim Brennan, demanded of her from the audience, "How can you as a Bengali say such things," and she threw her finger in the air to cut him off, shouting, "No, Tim! No, Tim!" I assume they'd been having that argument since Columbia in the '80s, but I detected some real venom on both sides. Too bad that's not on YouTube.
That’s a wonderful anecdote. I suspect all of our politics (and that of our enemies too!!) are more contradictory than we would like, although that caricature you won’t go for probably roughly describes my position as well, if to different degrees and extents. Actually now that I think of it I suspect I have read that subaltern essay at some point, having myself albeit at a later date come of age in the aftermath of Bush’s misadventures (I read Falling Man for a class on the media afterlife of 9/11. I didn’t like it.) Without exactly condoning (as a Mexican-American, friend of one of my cousins said nearly a decade ago, if the Soviet Union deserved to be dismantled as an artificial multiethnic imperial construct, where does that leave the United States?”) the perhaps hitlerian tones of “our Québecois friend” as an associate of mine and I sometimes refer to Ulysse, my limited exposure to Contain has all followed the format of “soft-redpilled host interviews someone who fundamentally does not inhabit the same reality as the rest of us” (thanks for sharing the miladies episode though, it was grist for the mill of a minor plot in my own novel about an evil pseudo-German nonsense word somehow embodying everything evil in modernity escaping into the world via my main character!)
Yes, I'm genuinely ambivalent about these things... On the one hand, overthrow all governments! On the other hand, we may need "strategic nationalisms" of all sorts to protect what Aime Cesaire called "the root of diversity" in Discourse on Colonialism (we read that in Brennan's theory class; Spivak was not on the syllabus).
I like Contain because, again confounding deconstruction's hostility to speech and presence, it takes the edge off the dangerous discourses it invites because you can always sense Barrett's basic decency and warmth. Unpredictable guests, too: it's where I discovered Emmalea Russo whose Dante-Tarot-astrology Substack I always recommend.
Your novel sounds fun, send it to me if you want. MA is about to take a series of delirious turns, too, the strict realism of Part One being something of a deliberate feint.
Thank you! I’ll be sure to take you up on that when I have a full draft ready to go (if nothing else, writing this has made me understand why so many novels are fragmentary now-why bother harmonizing the whole when you can just make the process part of the finished product? I’d like to harmonize mine though.)
Haha it’s because he’s got that aww-shucks Austinite voice. I will say, though, that sometimes his episodes feel like they drag on and on. One thing about your podcast is it always felt like it had an arc to it (and this is something I just either immediately find in people’s podcasts or it never emerges later). Probably your lecture experience can’t have hurt. I was thinking of McLuhan’s distinction between media suited to “packages” (radio) versus “processes” (TV, etc.). Podcasts would *seem* to be about processes (“just me and a guest with a microphone, kicking it”) but actually the best are packages masquerading as processes. Did you edit much of yours and Sam’s conversations?
Lol, I think he's from LA originally, so there's a SoCal drawl in there too, either way enchanting to those of us from more wintry climes. Sam did all the editing, but, as you said, my years of lecture classes accustomed me to speaking in 45-60 minute increments that arrive (or feel like they arrive, if you speak resonantly in conclusion) at some end. I listen to podcasts pretty much exclusively while walking around the city, so I don't mind pure processes since I'm only half listening a lot of the time, trying not to get hit by busses and the like.
There’s a lot here, I’ll begin I suppose by asking tongue in cheek- where *does* one see these ridiculous literary conversations? I mostly hear you about liberalism’s empire, though I get jittery about the rainbow flag/empire stuff- it makes me think a bit too much of an unholy horseshoe between the orthodox Marxist reading of homosexuality as bourgeois decadence to abolished with capitalism and the old and new right’s fixation on normative gender roles and biological reproduction as prerequisite for the validity of the sexual citizen. That said, I know what you mean (from the other side) esp regarding the moral blackmail liberalism is able to do because the right’s allegiance to tradition trumps its anarchic individualism on this etc. As for postmodernism-imo there’s a more-or-less organic and indeed entirely native to the tradition variety I love and a more abstracted, enervating logic-trap variety I find very annoying, so maybe we’re on the same page in the end.
I didn't do justice to the "Subaltern" essay, but it's about just this problem: how can she be a feminist when the British Empire justified itself on feminist grounds, how can she be a postmodernist when Deleuze and Foucault (but not Derrida!) indulge a primitivist rhetoric encouraging oppressive nationalism? The way she puts it in the case of liberal empire is "white men saving brown women from brown men." If I were to caricature my own political position, I might say "techno-fascist empire saving black lives, trans kids, and the climate from MAGA chuds." I won't though, even if (no fistfights, I promise) Ulysse went on Contain podcast and said Russia—Russia tout court—needed to be, and I quote, "dismantled," an almost literally Hitlerian caricature of the counterposition. Having coming of political age in 2001-2003, I will probably always be knee-jerk anti-empire and anti-war before anything else—always with Glenn Greenwald and against Bill Kristol, as it were; always more libertarian (leave all people alone) than left-liberal (empower some people with state and corporate authority)—but I do understand the historical and ethical complexities involved.
"Where does one see...?" When I saw her live she was delivering some endowed lecture at the University of Minnesota. She came onstage and announced that Baudrillard had just died and then she denounced "reproductive heteronormativity" and claimed "both sides were in it," i.e., both the colonized and the colonizer. Edward Said's protege and later biographer, then my own theory professor, the self-styled "left Hegelian" Tim Brennan, demanded of her from the audience, "How can you as a Bengali say such things," and she threw her finger in the air to cut him off, shouting, "No, Tim! No, Tim!" I assume they'd been having that argument since Columbia in the '80s, but I detected some real venom on both sides. Too bad that's not on YouTube.
That’s a wonderful anecdote. I suspect all of our politics (and that of our enemies too!!) are more contradictory than we would like, although that caricature you won’t go for probably roughly describes my position as well, if to different degrees and extents. Actually now that I think of it I suspect I have read that subaltern essay at some point, having myself albeit at a later date come of age in the aftermath of Bush’s misadventures (I read Falling Man for a class on the media afterlife of 9/11. I didn’t like it.) Without exactly condoning (as a Mexican-American, friend of one of my cousins said nearly a decade ago, if the Soviet Union deserved to be dismantled as an artificial multiethnic imperial construct, where does that leave the United States?”) the perhaps hitlerian tones of “our Québecois friend” as an associate of mine and I sometimes refer to Ulysse, my limited exposure to Contain has all followed the format of “soft-redpilled host interviews someone who fundamentally does not inhabit the same reality as the rest of us” (thanks for sharing the miladies episode though, it was grist for the mill of a minor plot in my own novel about an evil pseudo-German nonsense word somehow embodying everything evil in modernity escaping into the world via my main character!)
Yes, I'm genuinely ambivalent about these things... On the one hand, overthrow all governments! On the other hand, we may need "strategic nationalisms" of all sorts to protect what Aime Cesaire called "the root of diversity" in Discourse on Colonialism (we read that in Brennan's theory class; Spivak was not on the syllabus).
I like Contain because, again confounding deconstruction's hostility to speech and presence, it takes the edge off the dangerous discourses it invites because you can always sense Barrett's basic decency and warmth. Unpredictable guests, too: it's where I discovered Emmalea Russo whose Dante-Tarot-astrology Substack I always recommend.
Your novel sounds fun, send it to me if you want. MA is about to take a series of delirious turns, too, the strict realism of Part One being something of a deliberate feint.
Thank you! I’ll be sure to take you up on that when I have a full draft ready to go (if nothing else, writing this has made me understand why so many novels are fragmentary now-why bother harmonizing the whole when you can just make the process part of the finished product? I’d like to harmonize mine though.)
Haha it’s because he’s got that aww-shucks Austinite voice. I will say, though, that sometimes his episodes feel like they drag on and on. One thing about your podcast is it always felt like it had an arc to it (and this is something I just either immediately find in people’s podcasts or it never emerges later). Probably your lecture experience can’t have hurt. I was thinking of McLuhan’s distinction between media suited to “packages” (radio) versus “processes” (TV, etc.). Podcasts would *seem* to be about processes (“just me and a guest with a microphone, kicking it”) but actually the best are packages masquerading as processes. Did you edit much of yours and Sam’s conversations?
Lol, I think he's from LA originally, so there's a SoCal drawl in there too, either way enchanting to those of us from more wintry climes. Sam did all the editing, but, as you said, my years of lecture classes accustomed me to speaking in 45-60 minute increments that arrive (or feel like they arrive, if you speak resonantly in conclusion) at some end. I listen to podcasts pretty much exclusively while walking around the city, so I don't mind pure processes since I'm only half listening a lot of the time, trying not to get hit by busses and the like.