Culture, Power and Politics » Podcast

This is the second of a series of online seminars hosted by the journal New Formations (current editor: Jeremy Gilbert) in Autumn 2021, organised by Rebecca Bramall and Jeremy Gilbert. The series marks the publication of the journal’s series of issues published under the title This Conjuncture and dedicated to the memory of Stuart Hall. This session features contributions from Anthony Barnett, Ellie Mae O’Hagan and Scott McCracken

This is the first of a series of online seminars hosted by the journal New Formations (current editor: Jeremy Gilbert) in Autumn 2021, organised by Rebecca Bramall and Jeremy Gilbert. The series marks the publication of the journal’s series of issues published under the title This Conjuncture and dedicated to the memory of Stuart Hall.Angela Merkel stands down as German Chancellor this autumn after 16 years in the role, but will Merkelism – the mode of crisis management that has dominated since the mid-2000s – continue to inform German politics? Fresh from the polls, join Moritz Ege and Alexander Gallas to discuss the legacies of Merkelism and the nation’s cultural-political future. Speakers: Moritz Ege is Professor of Cultural Studies and Popular Cultures at the University of Zurich. Moritz is the co-editor of two books: Against the Elites! The Cultural Politics of Anti-Elitism (with Johannes Springer, forthcoming) and Urban Ethics (with Johannes Moser, 2021). Alexander Gallas is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Kassel, and one of the editors of the Global Labour Journal. He is the author of The Thatcherite Offensive: A Neo-Poulantzasian Analysis (2015). Moritz and Alexander are the co-authors of The exhaustion of Merkelism: a conjunctural analysis, published as part of This Conjuncture.

An analysis of, and response to, UK Labour Party leader Keir Starmer’s project-defining pamphlet ‘The Road Ahead’. With Alan Finlayson and Jeremy Gilbert.

I volunteered to record a lecture on ‘Postmodernism’ after Tory minister Liz Truss denounced it this week. This is the long version. The short, 1-hour version immediately precedes this one in the feed, so feel free to skip back to that one instead ;). If you like this and want to show some appreciation, please consider donating a pound or two to The World Transformed. This isn’t their product, but I do a lot of work with them and they deserve support. Merry Christmas!

I volunteered to record a lecture on ‘Postmodernism’ after Tory minister Liz Truss denounced it this week. This is the long version. The long, 3-hour version follows next. I wouldn’t bother listening to this if you plan to listen to the long one. If you like this please throw a quid or two in the direction of The World Transformed. Merry Christmas!

  In January 2019 we were planning a public event with Anna Minton and Richard Seymour, discussing the aftermath of the December 2019 general election and the then-ongoing Labour Party leadership election. We had to cancel the event because of a problem with the venue and instead recorded a conversation between Anna, Richard and Jeremy as a podcast a few weeks later. This was all before the Covid-19 crisis struck and before the leadership election was resolved. Also, I had a heavy cold while we were doing it (no, it wasn’t Covid). Still, there were many interesting insights from Anna and Richard that we thought worth preserving, so here it is. Links: https://www.annaminton.com https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2020/03/rise-disaster-nationalism-why-authoritarian-right-resurgent https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/labours-defeat-and-triumph-johnsonism/   https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/in-the-aftermath-of-defeat.mp3

The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonising Human Life and Appropriating it for Capitalism with Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias     Just about any social need is now met with an opportunity to “connect” through digital means. But this convenience is not free-it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to generate profit. Colonialism might seem like a thing of the past, but in their new book, The Costs of Connection, Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias show that the historic appropriation of land, bodies, and natural resources is mirrored today in this new era of pervasive datafication. Apps, platforms, and smart objects capture and translate our lives into data, and then extract information that is fed into capitalist enterprises and sold back to us. Nick and Ulises argue that this development foreshadows the creation of a new social order emerging globally: and that it must be challenged. In this session they’ll present their diagnosis and their prescriptions for this dangerous new condition of ‘data colonialism’. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/the-costs-of-connection.mp3

    High Weirdness with Erik Davis, Debra Benita Shaw and Jeremy Gilbert Presented in Association with #ACFM – the Home of the Weird Left Since the 1990s, Erik Davis has been charting the multiple interfaces between consciousness-expansion, technological trickery, drug cultures and social change: in books such as Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, Visionary State and Nomad Codes, and on his pathbreaking podcast Expanding Mind. Erik’s  new book High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the Seventies is a  study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality—but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America? In High Weirdness, Erik Davis—America’s leading scholar of high strangeness—examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America’s West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality. In this wide-ranging discussion, Erik will introduce some key themes and discoveries from his crucial excavation of our countercultural history, discussing with Debbie and Jem the legacy of the radical 70s, the perils of the psychedelic mysteries, and the politics of the weird. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/high-weirdness.mp3

With Will Davies, and Jeremy Gilbert    What on Earth is happening to British politics, culture and society? What is at the root of the present crisis of political representation and objective knowledge? Should we care about the crisis of liberal democracy? Is the internet a powerful new tool of democratic engagement, or is it just driving everyone crazy? What are the causes of Brexit and what are the causes of Boris Johnson? These and other topics are discussed by Will Davies, author of The Limits of Neoliberalism and Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World and Jeremy Gilbert, author of Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/britains-nervous-breakdown.mp3    

With Debra Benita Shaw and Alberto Duman Vitruvian Man, Leonardo’s perfectly proportioned human based on the recommendations of a Roman architect who thought that strong and stable (and beautiful) buildings would guarantee a strong and stable state, still provides the template for architectural design. What this suggests is not only that the built environment is designed to privilege able bodied white males but that architecture is, in itself, inherently political. This seminar will address the politics of space from the position of critical posthumanism in which Vitruvian Man stands for the exemplary human that no body can approximate. If we entertain the idea that we have never been human, then new possibilities emerge for thinking the politics of the social as it is constructed in urban space. The powerpoints for these talks can be found at these links:TALKING GHOSTS;  Vitruvian Mantology https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/vitruvian-man.mp3