Outsider Theory

Timothy Wilcox (@PreCursorPoets) is one of my my favorite writers on contemporary literature. He joins me to discuss three very online novels published in the past year or so: Hari Kunzru's Red Pill, Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts, and Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking about This. He shares his thoughts on the genre of internet fiction and the evolving phenomenon of "hyperconnectivity" as manifest in literary texts. We also consider the complicated interaction between the temporality of fiction and the temporality of the internet, the outsized role of Donald Trump in recent internet novels, and recent writers' attempts to channel and appropriate the dark energies of the internet. https://www.precursorpoets.com/always-online-prelude/ https://www.precursorpoets.com/uninterrupted-connection-infinite-grace/ https://medium.com/arc-digital/writing-the-great-american-novel-in-the-age-of-meme-warfare-273006eb85de

Default Friend is a writer investigating the deep history of the internet on her substack, Default Wisdom. She joins me to discuss one of our mutual interests: the work of the sociologist Sherry Turkle, and the light her pioneering 1995 study Life on the Screen sheds on the early history of the internet and the way the 90s internet anticipated present realities. We also explore the implications of Turkle's argument that the internet rendered concrete the abstractions of postmodern theory, as well as Default Friend's own work on fandom, Tumblr and other facets of "the millennial internet." https://defaultfriend.substack.com/ http://www.mit.edu/people/sturkle/Life-on-the-Screen.html

Critics often present recent ideological convulsions at the New York Times as an embarrassing deviation from the paper's illustrious history. Ashley Rindsberg, author of The Gray Lady Winked, joins me to explain why they're wrong. The Times, as he documents, has been plagued by scandal after scandal over the past hundred years, and its journalistic and editorial failures reveal more continuity than declining standards. Rindsberg also explains why the standard critiques of the paper from the right and the left are incomplete: far more than any consistent ideological agenda, the Times pursues the agenda of the powerful dynastic family that owns and controls it, whose interests are in tension with the paper's supposed commitment to truth and the public good. https://www.thegrayladywinked.com/

My pseudonymous native informants from the illustrious realms of Science make the provocative case that medicine has become a quintessentially postmodern field. They attribute this development to the rise of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) in the 1990s in Canada, which has occasioned (as its pioneers intended) a Kuhnian paradigm shift in the field. After surveying the spread and impact of the EBM revolution, we explore its after-effects in the Covid era. https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j5676 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/1785467 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0141076816649883

Federico García Lorca is revered as a literary martyr to the barbarity of fascism. His lesser-known friend and contemporary Leopoldo Panero narrowly escaped execution by fascist insurgents around the same time. In a strange twist, Panero later ended up as a fervent supporter of the regime that had killed his friend. Panero's loyalty allowed him to become an influential cultural commisar under Franco's government and placed him and his family at the pinnacle of the Franco-era literary elite. But he died at 52, leaving his brilliant and charismatic wife, Felicidad, and his three sons – all of whom had literary ambitions – to grapple with his ignominious legacy. What happened next was even stranger. Just as Franco's regime was falling in the mid-1970s, the cult documentary "El desencanto" offered an intimate picture of the decadent and eccentric clan, making their Oedipal struggles a symbol of the nation's reckoning with its past. Felicidad and her three sons became celebrities, characters in the novel of their own lives, lived out in public. In this way, their trajectory points us not only backward to reactionary modernism but forward to reality TV and the internet. Aaron Shulman, author of the collective biography "The Age of Disenchantments," joins me to discuss the allure of the Panero family, who he descibes as something like the Royal Tenenbaums meet Succession, as told by Roberto Bolaño.

The author and radio personality William Milton Cooper exercised a remarkably broad influence on conspiracy theory in the United States and beyond in the late 20th century. After his death in a shootout with police at his Arizona compound just months after 9/11, his name passed into legend, but the extent of his influence is often overlooked. Cooper's 1991 book Behold a Pale Horse, which claimed to document the Illuminati's scheme for a New World Order, was often described as a manifesto of the militia movement; it also circulated widely as contraband in prisons, especialy among African Americans, and as a result, became a frequent reference in hip hop lyrics in the 90s. Journalist Mark Jacobson was introduced to Cooper by one of his most prominent fans, the Wu Tang Clan's Old Dirty Bastard. He subsequently immersed himself in Cooper's writings, broadcasts, and career, and in 2018, published the first biography of him, Pale Horse Rider. Mark joins me to discuss the book, its subject, conspiracy culture in the Trump era, and more. Follow Mark on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/palehorseriderbook/?hl=en Buy Pale Horse Rider: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/316378/pale-horse-rider-by-mark-jacobson/ Buy Behold a Pale Horse: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780929385228 Listen to The Hour of the Time: http://hourofthetime.com/

"Foucault in Warsaw," just out in English translation from Open Letter Books, is a fascinating investigation of the time Michel Foucault spent as a cultural attaché in Warsaw in the late 1950s. The book is at once an intellectual biography of the philosopher during the pivotal year when he wrote much of his first major work, "History of Madness," an archival detective story set amidst the records of the Polish secret police, and an oral history of the underground gay community of Communist Poland. Author Remigiusz Ryziński and translator Sean Bye join me for a discussion of the book, its various contexts, and the significance of Foucault's Polish sojourn for the development of his thought. Buy "Foucault in Warsaw": https://www.openletterbooks.org/products/foucault-in-warsaw Read an excerpt: https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/june-2018-queer-issue-ix-foucault-in-warsaw-remigiusz-ryziski-sean-bye

Writer Daniel Oppenheimer joins me to discuss his new book on the legendary art critic Dave Hickey, "Far From Respectable." We explore Hickey's case for the continued vitality of beauty as a criterion for thinking about art and culture, his defense of controversial artist Robert Mapplethorpe and simultaneous critique of Mapplethorpe's other defenders, his aesthetic populism, his abandoned project "Pagan America," and the relevance of all of these to the current cultural panorama. We also explore Hickey's critique of institutions alongside the ironic fact that institutions sustained his best work – and what that might mean for current institutional outsiders in the Substack economy and elsewhere. Daniel's website: http://www.danieloppenheimer.com/ Far From Respectable: https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/oppenheimer-far-from-respectable

Phil Cunliffe, co-host of Aufhebunga Bunga and co-author of The End of the End of History, joins Outsider Theory to discuss the shifting co-ordinates of the post-Fukuyamaite world, the rise and fall of left populism, post-politics and anti-politics, the typology of the political outsider, the exemplary career of Silvio Berlusconi, and much more. The End of the End of History: https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/end-end-history Aufhebunga Bunga: https://aufhebungabunga.podbean.com/

Writer Sam Munson joins Outsider Theory to discuss the uncanny relevance of Dog Symphony, his prescient 2018 novel of plague and biopolitics, in which a nebulous entity called the Department of Social Praxis has assumed complete control over a dreamlike Buenos Aires. Other topics include the spectral place of Argentina in the North American imagination, Borges, maps and territories, and the acquiescence of the creative class to state power during the Covid era. Buy Dog Symphony here: https://www.ndbooks.com/book/dog-symphony/

Illustrator and designer Sterling Bartlett joins Outsider Theory to discuss his comic book "How Did We Get Here?" We explore why recycling is the master metaphor for our cultural predicament, the rise of post-hipster aesthetic of aneasthetized minimalism, why Jordan Peterson and Marie Kondo are two sides of the same coin, and more. Buy "How Did We Get Here?": https://firsttoknock.com/products/how-did-we-get-here Follow Sterling on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sterlingbartlett/?hl=en Sterling's website: https://www.sterlingbartlett.com/ My postmodernism seminar: https://www.speakeasy.com/e/what-is-postmodernism

Emmet Penney, writer and co-host of ex.haust podcast, joins Outsider Theory to discuss Fredric Jameson's canonical essay "Postmodernism, or the Culltural Logic of Late Capitalism" and its continued relevance, as well as cultural fragmentation, nostalgia, the return of affect, LA architecture, and other themes. More info on my June 10/17 seminar on Jameson's Postmodernism and Lyotard's Postmodern Condition: https://www.speakeasy.com/e/what-is-postmodernism Exhaust podcast: http://exhaust.fireside.fm/ Emmet's essay on "Lectureporn": https://www.pastemagazine.com/politics/liberals/lectureporn-the-vulgar-art-of-liberal-narcissism/

Oliver Traldi (@olivertraldi) joins Outsider Theory to answer an important question: is he now or has he ever been a member of the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW)? We discuss the latter formation's place within the online culture war dynamics of the past decade, its relation to the more recent controversies around Substack, what its members got right about the coalescence of "successor ideology" orthodoxies and what their analyses lacked. Finally, I apologize profusely for the poor audio quality of this episode on my end. I made some errors with a new mic setup that I wasn't yet used to when I recorded. I promise dramatically improved sound quality in all future episodes. Oliver's personal website: https://olivertraldi.weebly.com/

Tom Syverson (@syvology on Twitter), author of the new book Reality Squared, makes the case for why reality TV is the essential cultural form for grasping our bewildering contemporary panorama. More broadly, we discuss the problem of how to undertake a materialist analysis of culture in the face of an increasingly dematerialized and abstract economic reality, and the related problems confronting materialist politics in the present. Buy Tom's book: https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/reality-squared-reality-tv-left-politics Read Tom's recent essay on the limitations of materialist politics: https://www.thebellows.org/culture-politics-and-the-unreal-economy/ Read Tom's other work: https://linktr.ee/tomsyverson

Fiction writer and cultural critic Alex Perez joins Outsider Theory to discuss a mutual favorite writer, Roberto Bolaño, and in particular his short story "Labyrinth." We also cover the contemporary literary prestige economy, the professionalization of literature, the propagandification of culture in the Trump era, and the prospects for literary outsiders today. Read Bolaño's "Labyrinth" here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/23/labyrinth-roberto-bolano https://im1776.com/2021/04/27/the-new-literary-bad-boys/ https://twitter.com/Perez_Writes https://alexperez.substack.com/p/coming-soon

Documentary filmmaker Alex Lee Moyer joins Outsider Theory to discuss her 2020 film TFW No GF and its reception during the year after its release, as well as the film she edited prior to that, The New Radical. We also discuss the broader project of documenting countercultures, the ambivalent role of technology in channeling and enabling the control of oppositional cultural energy, and the prospects for creative work outside of the mainstream today. TFW No GF is now available on Amazon, iTunes, and YouTube: https://www.tfwnogfthemovie.com/ The New Radical is also available on Amazon, etc: https://www.amazon.com/New-Radical-Cody-Wilson/dp/B077W1PTJH

The writer Michael Sacasas joins Outsider Theory to discuss what the tech critics pre-Internet generations – especially Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan, Ivan Illich, and Neil Postman – have to say to us today as well as what contemporary tech criticism tends to miss, and how he understands his own critical and philosophical project. We also explore two of his essays from the past year, "Narrative Collapse" and "The Paradox of Control." Michael is one of my favorite contemporary writers on tech, and I hope you find this as rich and stimulating a conversation as I did. Subscribe to his substack here – you won't regret it: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/

Justin Murphy joins Outsider Theory to discuss leaving academia, his book Based Deleuze, why political correctness is only ones symptom of the real ailments afflicting the contemporary university, what conservatives get wrong about critical theory, and the current prospects of independent intellectual life, especially on the internet. Justin's projects: https://otherlife.co/ https://www.indiethinkers.org/ Geoff's course on Foucault: https://www.speakeasy.com/e/biopolitics-covid

Historian and writer Blake Smith joins Outsider Theory to discuss the teaching theory and the formation of elites; the surprising affinities between Strauss and Foucault; the parallel grooming practices of Straussians and Derrideans; the perverse economy of enjoyment in the Trump era; Obama’s failed use of theory as seduction prop; and why Foucault was the original Bronze Age Pervert. Blake on "Foucault Through Strauss": https://im1776.com/2021/02/19/foucault-through-strauss/ Blake's writing at Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/blake-smith Geoff's seminar on Foucault and Covid: https://www.speakeasy.com/e/biopolitics-covid

Jesse Walker, author of the excellent United States of Paranoia (2013) and books editor at Reason, joins Outsider Theory to revisit his book's arguments in light of Trump era politics. We discuss the Capitol riot and why it reveals not a unified front but a highly fractured right-wing fringe, and the continuities between liberal establishment paranoia of recent years and the militia panic of the 90s. Jesse also makes the case that playful internet conspiracy theorizing is a continuation of the much older "ironic style" of paranoia that originated with figures like Kerry Thornley and Robert Anton Wilson in the 1960s. Finally, we critique Adam Curtis's treatment of all these themes in his new film "Can't Get You Out of My Head." https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-united-states-of-paranoia-jesse-walker https://reason.com/people/jesse-walker/