What does culture look like in a “sustainable” world? In episode of 10 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay, Isi, and guest Rebecca Ariel Porte examine the problems with “green” technology and consumption—which, it turns out, do little, nothing, or less than nothing to sustain the environment—and talk about the kinds of cultural forms, from literature to architecture to games, that are not only sustainable in terms of ecology and society but also aesthetically compelling and beautiful. How does genuine ecological sustainability depend on social sustainability for artists and engineers and other creative workers, and promote far richer aesthetic expressions? Why is so much “Green”-branded work—in everything from the built world to fine art—anything but? What forms of aesthetic creation not usually thought of as ecological, are actually sustainable in every dimension? How does our current unsustainable social and ecological society constrict imagination and creative effloresce? And how would even a modestly more sustainable world, actually enable and support such creative flourishing? Looking to both current and historical examples, Isi, Rebecca, and Ajay review art installations like Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room and the MOMA’s Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism; architecture from the “PR-architecture” of projects like “Oceanix” to the actual sustainability found in works like Võ Tr?ng Ngh?a’s “Farming Kindergarten”; unexhausted forms in music (from Bach to Stravinsky, pop music to the vast world of jazz) and in verse, such as the ghazals of poet Anthony Madrid; film, tv, and even videogames, whether low-powered and low-tech (as with recent critical and commercial successes like Hades (Supergiant) or Stardew Valley (Concerned Ape)) or high-powered and high-tech (and highly popular), like Zelda, Elden Ring, and more. How is production—from emissions to mineral inputs, exploitative assembly and “crunch”—key to understanding aesthetic exhaustions? How does unsustainable ecological design and an ever accelerating model of production stifle creativity and promote ever narrower, more costly, and less interesting work? How does a model like streaming—and other modes of supposedly “dematerialized” distribution—actually obscure ecological damage while simultaneously making aesthetic production more difficult for artists and aesthetic consumption less compelling for everyone? What is the “trickle up misery” of “defensive architecture”? In the face of a capitalist ethos that always insists on creativity as bound to a logic of “bigger, faster, better, more,” the conversation explores the ways in which working, creating, designing, and engineering within limits has produced some of the most exciting aesthetic forms and experiences, and how the necessity of ecological and social limits can act as the “enabling constraints” of a far more compelling aesthetic life than the all-too-real dystopia of today.

In episode 74 of the Podcast for Social Research, BISR faculty Ajay Singh Chaudhary sits down with writer and artist Molly Crabapple to discuss his new book, The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World (Repeater). Live-recorded at P&T Knitwear in New York City, the conversation encompasses, among other things: the ubiquity of exhaustion (and how feelings of exhaustion might form the basis for new international solidarities); right-wing approaches to climate mitigation (and why, in the realm of climate policy, the Right has a "leg up"); "growth," "degrowth," and how the status quo actually thwarts abundance; the limits (or, illusions) of climate technocracy (and the kinds of climate technologies that can work); and international social movement responses climate catastrophe—and the lessons they might provide for U.S. activists.

In episode 73 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live following a screening of Daniel Goldhaber’s cinematic adaptation of Andreas Malm’s polemic against pacifism How to Blow Up a Pipeline, BISR faculty Isi Litke, RH Lossin, and Ajay Singh Chaudhary explore the aesthetic, historical, and thorny practical terrain of violence as activist strategy and political tool in the face of climate crisis. With Goldhaber’s film as a jumping off point, they ask—and answer—questions like: how can cinema represent the complex harms wrought by climate devastation, in all their manifold temporalities, from freak accidents to slow disease to historical expropriations? How are solidarities built across ideological divides? What unites anti-colonial movements across the Global South with the struggles of subaltern groups in the Global North? And what underpins the belief in non-violence as the righteous mechanism for political change—and why is this wrong? Along the way, they touch on everything from the heist film (wherein the question is not whether one ought but whether one can pull it off), how comrades are not friends, workplace violence, radical flanks, Fanon’s “stretched Marxism,” and much else besides. Plus a sneak preview from Ajay’s new book, The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World, out this February from Repeater Books!  

In episode 72 of the Podcast for Social Research, Nara Roberta Silva, Rebecca Ariel Porte, Lauren K. Wolfe, Mark DeLucas, and Ajay Singh Chaudhary look back at their 2023 in cultural objects, or their 2023 experiences of objects washed up on present shores from other times, observing as they do how year-end compendia reveal surprising throughlines. A tally, in brief, of their preoccupations include: the itinerant dance party Laylit celebrating Arab/SWANA music, Argentina, 1985 (and why historical contingency is such a problem for theory), paper architecture, Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost and global Shakespeares, Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger and demonic doubles, Ruth Beckermann’s Mutzenbacher (and cis-male hetero-sexuality as at once the most and least visible), Anita Brookner’s novels of mid-life resignation (a revival for aging millennials?), the origins of Fauvism, actually interesting YouTube trends, vinyl records and deliberate listening, and what there is to look forward to in 2024.

In the final episode for 2023, Isi, Ajay, and Joseph address the vexing nature of End-of-Year lists—and then go through the vexing process of assembling our own! Isi leads us through our year in cinema; Ajay, the year in games; and Joseph, the year in television, culminating in three top picks (and some honorable mentions) for the year in each category. Discussions range from the surprising success of cinematic restorations to films which shape, subvert, and show the optical unconscious; games of visceral pleasure, systemic fascination, and astonishing simplicity; and the politics (and possibilities) in contemporary anime and the anxious and wonderfully character-driven year in television. Proceeding in part through negative examples (Oppenheimer and Final Fantasy XVI receive perhaps the harshest treatments), the cast ultimately records in the world of film: 1. Stop Making Sense (2023, remaster); 2. Killers of the Flower Moon (2023); and 3. May December (2023), with honorable mentions for How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2023) and The Boy and the Heron (2023). In the world of games: 1. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (2023); 2. Armored Core 6 (2023); 3. Super Mario Brothers Wonder (2023) / Pikmin 4 (2023), with honorable mentions for Star Ocean: The Second Story R and a whole slate of tiny games for Panic's "Playdate" lo-fi handheld: Questy Chess, Omaze, Zipper, Casual Birder, among others. In the world of television: 1. Rap Shit (2023); 2. Beef (2023); 3. Attack on Titan (2013-2023), with honorable mentions for the live-action adaptation of One Piece (2023) and our collective 2022 hangover shows: Peaky Blinders (2013-2022) and Ozark (2017-2022). Stay tuned in for talk of the unbearable “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, what makes old action movies so good, unsustainable labor practices in the world of commercial game production, and making a “Breaking Bad” that is actually good. Wishing you all a critically reflective holiday season from PCM!

In episode 67 of Practical Criticism, Rebecca and Ajay surprise each other with songs and compositions drawn exclusively from their respective algorithmically-generated Spotify "Wrapped" playlists! Pieces include Erza Furman's "Can I Sleep in Your Brain"; Linked Horizon's "Guren No Yumiya" (from the Attack on Titan soundtrack); Lucy Dacus's "Night Shift"; The Smashing Pumpkins's "Mayonaise"; Monteverdi's "Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria"; Phish's "Cavern" (from Atlantic City, 10/30/2010); CeeLo Green's cover of "No One's Gonna Love You" by Band of Horses; and Nirvana's "All Apologies." Along the way, the conversation turns to overcoming the All-Roads-Lead-to-Coldplay-Problem of automatic curation, the subtle and the transformative, time changes and genre conventions, unadorned pop and unromanticized classics, the dialectic of sincerity and absurdity, cute aggression and martial pop, fascist aesthetics, narcissistic injury and pathic projection, epics of the ordinary, the strange proliferation of 2-part pop songs, soft edged vs. soft with edges, unleashed elegance, what the machine wants you to listen to, coolness and anomie, the many modalities of anger, musical artifacts and ur-forms, ariosos vs. arias and the nascent opera of the early 17th century, brilliant failures, and, above all, writing soundtracks. Listen to what rises out to shine from the digital (and other) mucks of 2023.

Is a recipe a text? What happens when it’s translated, via cooking, into food? In episode 71 of the Podcast for Social Research, live-recorded at BISR Central, author Rebecca May Johnson joins BISR faculty Sophie Lewis and Rebecca Ariel Porte and Dilettante Army's Sara Clugage to read from her autotheoretical "epic in the kitchen" Small Fires and discuss the ways cooking relates to language, the body, knowledge, politics, power, and thinking. What's creative about cooking from a recipe? What kinds of bonds and connections do recipes create—between both intimates and strangers? Why is Donald Winnicott wrong about sausages (and, can we ever be recipe-less)? Why cook a recipe 1,000 times? When is cooking labor; and when, if ever, is it not? What would it mean to abolish the kitchen?

In this very special crossover episode, the compound cast—Isi, Rebecca, and Ajay—are back together after hiatuses of various lengths to discuss the Talking Heads and A24's recent re-release of Jonathan Demme’s much-celebrated 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense. Kicking off with some reunion talk (to wit: research rabbit holes, early modern gardens, avant-garde architecture, automata, and, naturally, more Zelda), the trio then sets out to explore what it is that makes this film such a brilliant exemplar of the genre—joyful, affirmative, but nevertheless critical in sensibility. Along the way, they discuss: first encounters with the film, soundtrack versus album versions (controversial!), David Byrne’s pas de deux with a lamp, fashion and theatrical influences (kabuki, noh, Brecht), laying bare the device, the more integrated musical scenes of the 1980s, satire, collective composition, Tina Weymouth as secret sauce, and so much more. What kind of story does this film tell about music? How did the restored version come to be? And what does it restore?    

Scholar Sophie Lewis reflects on early experiences of injustice in middle-class institutions. They discuss overlooked insights from second wave feminists, time of transition from feudalism to capitalism, unruly undertows of entertainment, autotheory and autofiction, children's liberation, and the pin-up career of Barnacle the cat.

In episode six of Faculty Spotlight, Mark and Lauren sit down with R.H. Lossin, postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Warren Center of Studies in American History and a leading scholar of the theory and practice of sabotage. The three discuss: what led R.H. to the study of sabotage; why sabotage is more ordinary than you think; R.H.’s beef with the “universal library”—i.e., the total digitization of books; how readers have become producers; why Luddites have a bad rap; the meaning of “capitalist sabotage”; and the violent origins of all private property—among other scintillating subjects.