Culture, Power and Politics » Podcast

With Sarah Banet-Weiser and Sara R. Farris Once an insurgent movement against patriarchy, feminism now finds itself occupying a far more complex position in the world. Powerful institutions,  major corporations and almost all political parties – even the nationalist, xenophobic right – routinely pay lip-service to the goal of sexual equality. What are we to make of all this, and what remains to be done in the pursuit of women’s liberation? We’ll discuss these questions and more with Sarah Banet-Weiser, author of Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, and Sara Farris, author of In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism.  https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/whose-empowerment.mp3

Sorry for the poor sound quality on the recording here – we’ve figured out the technical causes and should be back to normal next week! You should be able to find a video you can watch at http://www.antiuniversity.org/Culture-Power-Politics-course-2019 As the world moves online, politics does too. Despite anxieties about the dangers and limitations of ‘clicktivism’,  online organising has become an indispensable tool for actors on every part of the political spectrum: from independent activists to major political parties. Hacking, open-source development, mobile telephony, piracy and cryptography are indispensable tools for activists all over the world, and for individuals and communities facing power-imbalances of any kind.  What are the implications for democracy and citizenship in the 21st century, and what should we be doing about it?  We discuss  all this with Alex Worrad-Andrews, software-engineer and founder member of Common Knowledge (a workers cooperative dedicated to building digital infrastructure for grassroots non-representational politics), Paolo Gerbaudo, author of The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy and Amit S. Rai, author of Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/digital-politics.mp3

  Sorry for the poor sound quality on the recording here. It’s listenable, but you can also find a video you can watch at http://www.antiuniversity.org/Culture-Power-Politics-course-2019 What do the members of today’s ruling elite think they are doing, and why? What stories do they tell themselves, and us, to justify their right to rule? Why has almost every senior politician since the 1980s promised to increase ‘social mobility’, and why have they failed? Aeron Davis, author of Reckless Opportunists: Elites at the End of the Establishment and Jo Littler , author of Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobilitydiscuss this and other issues in the class culture of modern Britain with Jeremy Gilbert and a great group of attendees at the latest Culture, Power, Politics seminar. See https://culturepowerpolitics.org for details of the series. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/the-deserving-rich.mp3

Keir Milburn discusses his new book Generation Left with Lynne Segal, Jeremy Gilbert, and many others. For information about the culture, power, politics seminar series, go to: https://culturepowerpolitics.org. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/generation-left.mp3

  With Alex Williams    In this session Alex and Jeremy go into more detail on some of the key conceptual arguments of their forthcoming book Hegemony Now, talking about platforms as a modality of power, the nature of material and social interests, and the affective dimension of hegemonic relations. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/hegemony-now-part-2.mp3

With Grace Blakely      The ‘Private Finance Initiative’ still sounds like a dry, technical procedure that nobody could get too excited about. That’s what it’s supposed to sound like. Journalists and government have colluded for 25 years in making sure that the public don’t take too much interest in it. In fact the PFI has been central to UK government policy since the mid 1990s and has been the vehicle through which huge chunks of the British public sector have been privatised without any mandate from the people. One of Stuart Hall’s last great public interventions was to call for the launch of a public campaign against this programme in 2000 – he could see how serious its implications were. The story of the Private Finance Initiative reached its long-predicted denouement this year with the collapse of Carillion, a company employing 43,000 workers, responsible for dozens of contracts to deliver services across the UK public sector. The biggest bankruptcy in British history has exposed what many economists and political commentators have been saying for years: the PFI was a disastrous policy that was never really intended to benefit the public, but to enable multinational corporations to generate vast profits at the expense of the tax-payer, local authorities, schools and hospitals But what exactly is the PFI, how does it work, and why are the Blairites still opposed to actually scrapping it?   https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pfi.mp3

with Anna Minton and Jacob Mukherjee London’s housing market is in crisis because the global super-rich use our homes as piggy-banks and the government does nothing to stop them. Rent is becoming completely unaffordable (never mind buying a place). Gentrification is killing cultural venues all over the city, as overpriced flats crowd out the places where people gather to make some noise. At the heart of the city, the Corporation of the City of London is a law unto itself, and isn’t even democratically elected. The residents of Grenfell Tower have still not been re-housed. None of this is happening by accident, and none of it is going to change without a radical re-think of what London is for, and a radical challenge to the power of finance capital. In this session we’ll discuss these issues with two expert campaigners, and think about how they fit into the wider history of global neoliberalism. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/the-right-to-the-city.mp3

The Black Lives Matter movement has seen arguably the most significant revival of Black radicalism in the English-speaking world for many years. What has led to this situation and what are the political, historical and theoretical issues raised by it? Is ‘black’ still a meaningful term of political identification for non-white peoples outside the African diaspora? What is the legacy of slavery and colonialism in the contemporary West? Why is racism amongst police forces such a perpetually intractable problem, even in apparently liberal countries like the UK (is the very concept of policing, as Foucault seemed to suggest, itself just inherently racist?). How have new philosophies of materiality and embodied experience contributed to the understanding of ‘race’ as a historical and lived experience? What is the place of ‘black music’ in contemporary culture, 100 years in to the history of recorded sound, and what was been the historical relationship of music to black radicalism?   https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/black-lives-matter.mp3

  with Debra Benita Shaw   At a time when the meaning of democracy is challenged by the power of algorithms and the politics of misinformation what has become apparent is that the valorisation of data is the defining characteristic of contemporary digital capitalism. Big Data is sold on the basis of accurate retrieval; the promise that a series of perfect signals can be abstracted from the background noise of the world’s incessant uploading of information. Against this background, the rise of digital ‘glitch’ art is interesting in terms of how it privileges noise over signal and aestheticises error. Glitch artists randomly re-assort ordered sequences to demonstrate that order itself is arbitrary, contingent and open to transduction. In deliberately confounding the apparently smooth interface through which digital messages are received, the glitch aesthetic suggests a productive imagery for a politics which confronts the hierarchies embedded in and reproduced by digital culture. The recording of the packed seminar, that was also part of the 2018 London anti-university, didn’t come out well, so Debbie has recorded this podcast lecture for us. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/glitch-art-politics.m4a

  with Alex Williams  Gramsci’s concept of ‘hegemony’ remains indispensable to understanding the relationships between culture, politics, economics and technology. Every generation since the 1930s has had to update the idea and its application in the light of new developments in the wider world and in the domain of theory and philosophy. In this session Alex and Jeremy will introduce some key concepts and analyses from their forthcoming book Hegemony Now: Power in the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2019). This will be the fist of two seminars in the series to will explore this material. https://culturepowerpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/hegemony-now-1.mp3