Disintegrator

We’re joined by Ramon Amaro, Creative Director of Design Academy Eindhoven — an engineer, philosopher, writer, curator, and altogether critical-force-to-be-reckoned-with on the subject of computation as it intersects with concepts like culture, race, and being. We were drawn to his tour-de-force “The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being” (2023), which is an absolute banger, re-reading Gilbert Simondon’s technical object through the lens of blackness, race, and racialized technologies. This one is a wild ride, a really deep and incredibly thoughtful episode, and we make an effort to define some initial terms on the podcast — specifically the ‘pre-individuated milieu’ (the space where things or ideas live before they become crystalized into social or racialized relations) and the ‘technical object’ (a way that Simondon helps us think through the autonomies enjoyed by technology, that even though technological objects may be initially bound in some ways to their human partners, they are able to exert influences not just backwards on us, but influences that determine their own design evolution over time). Ramon starts the conversation with a distinction that is critical to the whole episode — that blackness is not a racial category, or moreover, that blackness is distinct from race. Race is something that happens after blackness, that impinges upon blackness as it moves from pre-individuated space and enters into the field of social relations we currently live within. This independence is critical, because it invites alternatives (and suggests, we think very rightly, that this field of social relations we currently live within, while historically situated in imperial or colonial violence, is arbitrary and exchangeable with any other possibility). A few works that are important to consider here: W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk — total canonSylvia Wynter’s work is discussed throughout, specifically on the concept of “Man” (particularly Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument).Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects and Two Lessons on Animal and Man — both places to look for autonomy in Simondon’s workFrantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks — implied by discussions of phenomenology/perception under racialization.Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons — no spoilers, but more on this later :)Thanks soooo much to Dr. Amaro for joining us! 

We couldn't be more honored to have Catherine Malabou on the pod, a serious inspiration for all of us. This episode covers so much, moving from AI to education to anarchism to feminism, but all grounded within a focus on automony -- the autonomy of language from us, the autonomy of an anarchic subject or an anarchic collective, the autonomy of the clitoris from gender, the autonomy of the plastic being or form with respect to change.If you're unfamiliar with Malabou's work, this is actually a really great place to start. Her work includes all of the above topics, and it pushes further into language, neuroscience, and politics than most philosophers dare. We've been following her since the epic What Should We Do With Our Brains?, the legendary Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (whose fleshing out of Malabou's reading of the plastic inspired so many theorists, arists, and researchers across endless fields and disciplines), and our personal favorite, the recent Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy. We'd almost recommend working backwards from this episode (as an Anglophone, I'm thinking in terms of English translation), going into Stop Thief and Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought before taking on the works on Hegel, Derrida, and plasticity.We're so so inspired by the freshness of Catherine Malabou's perspective on AI -- as always, she dares to say and formalize things that many philosophers treat reflexively. We hope to have more conversations on the topic of AI and education soon, following from Malabou's hot takes. :)

Charles Mudede & Claire from Becoming Press sit down to discuss Exocapitalism: Economies w/ Absolutely No Limits!Charles Mudede is an author, critic, filmmaker, and thinker whose work is everywhere. Watch Zoo, it's absolutely nuts. We were honored to have him write the prologue to Exocapitalism. You will almost never get a chance to watch a master get to work like this in this interview, absolutely dancing through the entire legacy of Marx with incredible speed and approachability, lobbing grenades and jokes at every turn. He's so incisive and clear-eyed; it's just really refreshing -- and Claire knows exactly how to set him up!Buy the book -- buy the whole catalog. If you haven't bought the book already you're missing out on "the Das Kapital of the 21st century," "the most anticipated book of the year," "the book drop of the century" (your peers' words not mine :p).

We're back to our regularly-scheduled Disintegrator programming! We've been hard at work on our book (buy it, wtf!) but have a number of killer episodes queued up for release.Émile P. Torres is a philosopher of the end times. You'll most likely associate their name (and that of collaborator Timnit Gebru) with developing the acronym TESCREAL, a grab-bag of ideologies that undergird the romance between venture capital and Silicon Valley. We strongly recommend their podcast Dystopia Now! (w/ Kate Willett) and their newest book Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation.The T in TESCREAL is 'transhumanism,' a frequent topic of the pod, which tends to mean an application of technology to human bodies and in such a way that allows humans to transcend human limitations (e.g. speed, efficiency, senses, mortality). From there, the rest of the ideologies follow from a relationship between the human and its 'rationalized' extensibility through technology: E (extropianism), S (singularitarianism), C (cosmism), R (rationalism), EA (effective altriusim), and L (longtermism). Here's a gentle and clean explainer of all of the above. In this episode, we talk extensively about some elements that aren't actively represented in TESCREAL but sit beneath it: accelerationism, extinction-neutrality, and left-adjacent positions with respect to both (e.g. l/acc, xenofeminism, ahumanism -- this episode might pair really nicely with our interview with Patricia MacCormack for this very reason).

CW: eating disorders are discussed a few times in this episode.Vespers is a limited series within Disintegrator that focuses on the creative feedback loops between music and social media. It follows from the Nobody Listens to Music Anymore superlecture, where themes of youth identity formation, reference-as-medium, generative AI, and the complexities of working with the total archive are discussed in more detail.For this episode, we're joined by Millaze -- an iconic face and musical voice on Instagram. We talk about love, cringe, the open-endedness of her craft (we barely scratch the surface here), and performance.Favorite Millaze-core:RamenOverrideDrivewaysBedside TableVisceraBut I really recommend her Instagram in general (as well as the fountain of Youtube Shorts)

Vespers is a limited series within Disintegrator that focuses on the creative feedback loops between music and social media. It follows from the Nobody Listens to Music Anymore superlecture, where themes of youth identity formation, reference-as-medium, generative AI, and the complexities of working with the total archive are discussed in more detail.For this episode, we're joined by RayonBase. If you've opened TikTok or Instagram over the past few years, you recognize RayonBase's face, voice, instrumental composition, and video editing style. This is an open-ended conversation about character, craft, love, innocence, and the future. <3 Favorite RayonBase-core:The Swagger Song (Badder Than You)EVER CLOSER PT. 2ShelterCan Eye Kiss You?Innocence Found^ The above are videos / shorts primarily used as teasers for full songs, all of which is available on any streaming platform. 

Artist and curator Dana Dawud joins Disintegrator to talk about Open Secret, her touring platform for internet cinema, and her evolving film series Monad. We discuss the blur as a visual device and trend, the impossibility of representing Palestine, being trained by AI and building myth in the age of the feed. The audio is laced with reflections by collaborators orbiting Open Secret: redactedcut @redactedcut, Palais Sinclaire @palais.sinclaire, Mischa Dols @mischaapje, 0nty @the.ontological.turnt, Angel Kether @user_goes_to_kether. References mentioned:Gore Layer by Alex Quicho in Spike (July 2024): https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/discourse-the-gore-layer-alex-quicho,The novel Aliens & Anorexia by Chris Kraus: https://www.semiotexte.com/aliens-anorexia-new-edition,Further reading on CoreCore by 0nty (July 2023): https://becoming.press/corecore-the-return-of-speculative-irony-by-0nty,We spoke about Serge Daney’s observation that “there is no image of Palestine” (or, more precisely, that there is “no complex image of Palestinian reality”) which arises from his deep engagement with the politics and ethics of representation, particularly in the context of Jean-Luc Godard’s film ‘Ici et ailleurs’ (Here and Elsewhere). Read more in Serge Daney’s seminal ‘Before and After the Image’ (1999): https://www.jstor.org/stable/41389528.,Watch ‘The Sight is a Wound’ (2025), a visual essay by Parham Ghalamdar: https://www.ghalamdar.com/tsiaw,‘The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque’ (1988). In this work, Deleuze interprets monads not as isolated points but as folds of space, movement, and time, each containing the world within itself as a unique point of view.,Jaques Rivette’s almost-13hr-long-film: ‘Out 1’ (1971),Sven Loven at No Gallery: https://www.nononogallery.com/exhibitions/sven-loven-humiliation-ritual/#press-release,Links to explore Dana’s work:Monad+ : https://hybrida.space/monad,PalCoreCore: https://donotresearch.substack.com/p/dana-dawud-palcorecore,Pleasure Helmet Podcast: https://soundcloud.com/pleasure-helmet-977951874,https://www.instagram.com/dansdansrev/,https://www.instagram.com/_opensecrett_/

Philosopher Peter Wolfendale, known for his insights on cognition and autonomy, joins the discussion. They tackle the philosophical dilemmas of artificial general intelligence, focusing on what it truly means to think and reproduce. Wolfendale illustrates the significance of embodiment in intelligence, challenging traditional views on rationality. The conversation also touches on the future of selfhood in the age of AI, exploring how autonomous systems could redefine identity and cultural understanding while navigating the complexities of control and experimentation.

CW: There is some brief discussion of abusive familial relationships at several points within this episode.Two titanic figures in contemporary theory join us for two separate and strongly divergent episodes on the status of revolutionary thought in political philosophy today.Timothy Morton is one of the most outspoken and controversial voices in the discourse, someone whose impact punched hard into the artworld, defining a decade of new ecological and object-oriented aesthetics. For almost the entire 2010s and much of the 2020s it was hard to read a single exhibition text without recognizing Morton’s impact.Timothy joins us for an expansive conversation that moves through Buddhism, Christianity, communism, trauma, poetry, and the question of whether “love your neighbor as yourself” might actually be a planetary-scale software instruction. Morton describes communism and Christianity as radically entangled modes of relation, both grounded in care and unknowing.We strongly recommend:Most people should already be familiar with Morton's most iconic concept and contribution: HyperobjectsTimothy’s book Ecology Without Nature Their more recent Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology And we spend a lot of time talking about SpacecraftIn the episode, we also touch on the work of Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Thomas Merton, Raymond Williams, and Simone Weil.

Ray Brassier, a prominent philosopher known for his insights on nihilism and Marxism, delves into the relevance of Marx's thought in today's financial capitalism. He challenges naive anti-humanism and contrasts idealist with empiricist views of rationality. Brassier revisits Marx's critiques, emphasizing the social embedding of economic relations and the importance of class solidarity amidst rising inequality. He also critiques technology's role in capitalism, arguing for a reevaluation to foster human liberation and social change.