The Podcast for Social Research

In episode 26 of the Podcast for Social Research’s “Practical Criticism” series, Ajay Singh Chaudhary surprises Rebecca Ariel Porte with György Ligeti. They talk the newness of New Music, sparkling dissonance, champagne dissonance, weak shock, the poetry of Monk and Evans, generosity and difficulty, Adorno, modernism, working pluralism, theory and praxis.

In episode 55 of the Podcast for Social Research, BISR faculty Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Rebecca Ariel Porte, and Isabella Katrina Litke sit down after our Occasional Evening screening of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 masterpiece The Last Emperor to discuss the film’s making, themes, and fascinating approach to the grand sweep of 20th-century Chinese history. What can The Last Emperor, in its depiction of the Pu Yi’s fall from emperor to re-educated common gardener, teach us about the interplay of aesthetics, politics, and history? How does the film manage, where so many period pieces fail, to aestheticize history while also eschewing nostalgia? And what does it mean, cinematically, to democratize the past?

Episode 54 of the Podcast for Social Research, a companion piece to Episode 53, is a live recording of Suzanne Schneider’s 11pm lecture at the 2022 Night of Ideas. In answer to the evening’s prompt “Where are We Going?” Schneider delves into the realm of risk, which has come to structure ever-increasing portions of individual, social and political life. And as risk has become “privatized,” its management has become a site for profit-making, with industries ranging from health care to firearms selling “safety” products pitched to privileged, middle- and upper-middle class subjects. How can we distinguish risk, fear, and paranoia? In what sense is risk a commercial concept? And what are the effects—individual and societal—of assuming an actuarial mindset when navigating social and political interactions? Does the culture of constant vigilance, of security hoarding as a lifestyle, in fact make us less safe?

Episode 53 of the Podcast for Social Research is part one of two episodes recorded live at the 2022 Night of Ideas at the Brooklyn Public Library, co-sponsored by Villa Albertine. The theme of the evening was "Where are We Going?" Ajay Singh Chaudhary's response, "Against Resilience: Exhaustion, Ecology, and Emancipation" traces the genealogies and uses of the concept of resilience and its limitation in social and political theory. The foundation for "left-wing climate realism," Ajay argues, are to be found in rejecting the atomizing and internalizing imperatives of "resilience" in favor of the externalization of "exhaustion" into a real politics of power and conflict, citing anti-colonial and even Civil War precedents. Why is the ubiquitous concept of resilience so vague and yet so deleterious? How should we understand ecological and social exhaustion today? And what are the discomfiting implications of a political theory entirely structured by this ecological moment?

In episode 52 of the Podcast for Social Research, BISR faculty Nara Roberta Silva, Sophie Lewis, Jenny Logan, Abby Kluchin, and Alyssa Battistoni discuss Samuel Alito's Dobbs draft opinion, recently leaked, and the impending overturning of Roe v. Wade. Questions considered include: Alito’s reasoning, its implications for other rights, the validity of the “rights-based” approach itself (grounded in what’s implicitly a masculine (while also dis-embodied) liberal subject), abortion discourse (and the tendency to euphemize), the violence of enforced gestation, political strategy, the need for a truly mass feminism—and beyond.

In episode 60 of the Podcast for Social Research's Practical Criticism Series, Ajay Singh Chaudhary plays Lingua Ignota for Rebecca Ariel Porte, who, as usual doesn't know what the object of the week will be. They discuss commitment, committing to the bit, metal and its iconographies, ritual, decadence, Hildegard von Bingen, Audre Lorde, catharsis, exorcism, and choosing an enemy.

In episode 51 of the Podcast for Social Research, Rebecca Ariel Porte welcomes the poet Yanyi for a discussion of his newly published collection Dream of the Divided Field. The episode kicks off with readings from Yanyi's work, before turning to a discussion, both playful and serious, of the genesis of Dreams, the role of dreams in the writing process, the power of the poetic line, and how writing can move one from a place of loss to new self-understandings.

In Episode 63 of the Podcast for Social Research's "Practical Criticism Series," Ajay Singh Chaudhary plays "The Band Played Waltzing Matilda," as covered by The Pogues, for Rebecca Ariel Porte, who, as usual, doesn't know what the sonic object of the week will be. Their conversations covers resonances between World War I and our own historical moment, uses and abuses of nationalism, internationalism, periphery and metropole, proxy wars, balladry, pastiche, trauma, missed opportunities, disillusionment, and propaganda.

In episode 58 of the Podcast for Social Research’s “Practical Criticism” series, Ajay Singh Chaudhary plays Pavement’s “Stereo” for Rebecca Ariel Porte, who, as usual, doesn’t know what the object of the week will be. Over the course of the discussion, they explore the strange aesthetic, social, and economic category of “indie”, the potential virtues and vices of non-virtuoso performance and “de-skilling”, musical absurdism, the Benjaminian physiognomy (and anxiety) of the slacker, the surprising genius of doggerel lyrics, the vaudevillian, the dark undercurrents of comfortable emptiness in a tired nation, and music with its corners chipped.

In episode 59 of the Podcast for Social Research, Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Lygia Sabbag Fares, Rebecca Ariel Porte, Suzy Schneider, and Michael Stevenson look back at their 2021 in cultural experiences: painting of the Italian Renaissance, language lessons, television, film, poetry, theater, translations, music, games, high-brow, the low-brow, and the middle-. Common threads include exhaustion, recycling (for better and worse), recuperation, the kitsch of "art experiences," and making a liveable life right now, wherever we happen to find ourselves.