The Archipelago

In the years of the Greek crisis from 2010 onwards, a new style emerged in Greek cinema. Named by curators and journalists “Weird Wave,” it gradually took over international audiences despite its vast diversity in themes and styles. In 2018, “The Favourite,” the latest feature film of one of Weird Wave’s pioneers, Yorgos Lanthimos, was nominated for 10 Academy Awards. Following years of work in the field of Modern Greek Studies, Dimitris Papanikolaou, an Associate Professor and Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford has published the book “Greek Weird Wave, A Cinema of Biopolitics.” In this episode, he talks about this peculiar cinematic style, the understanding of power it proposes and the concept of biopolitical realism.

With his first book ‘The Capitalist Unconscious’, Samo Tomšič, a philosopher and researcher at the Humboldt University in Berlin, provided a thorough account of the influence of Karl Marx on the work of French Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Then, in his second book, ‘The Labour of Enjoyment’, he moved even further, by proposing a fusion of the works of Marx, Freud and Lacan as a means to unravel the workings of politics, economy and society. In this episode of The Archipelago, Samo Tomšič talks about the articulation between psychoanalysis and marxism, the damaged life of the subject they both describe, the importance of enjoyment in the reproduction of capitalism and the multiple meanings of alienation as a default way of being.

Twenty five years ago, Stathis Gourgouris, a Professor of Classics, English and Comparative Literature published his seminal work “Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece”, in which he applied the tools of psychoanalysis and post-colonial theory in Modern Greek history. In this episode of The Archipelago, the second of two specials to coincide with the bicentennial of Greek Independence, Stathis Gourgouris talks about the fragmented dreams of different groups that came together to imagine Modern Greece, Europe’s need for a Greek state to connect their own nations with classical antiquity, as well as the remnants of orientalism that still shape the European gaze towards Greece today.

In her latest book, ‘Unknown Country’ (Άγνωστη Χώρα, Πόλις, 2020), Efi Gazi, a Professor of History at the University of Peloponnese, freezes the frame halfway through the 200 years of Modern Greek History, at the turn between the 19th and the 20th century, in order to focus on a group of intellectuals who gave shape to their anti-western ideas on national identity. In this episode of The Archipelago, the first of two recorded to coincide with the bicentennial of the Greek Independece, Efi Gazi talks about these intellectuals, the battle between ideas of East and West in defining Greekness, the peculiarities of Greece’s relation to the West and the legacy of the debate on orientalism.

Following the murder of George Floyd, Alex Vitale, a Professor of Sociology in Brooklyn College, New York, and author of the best-selling 2017 book “The End of Policing” became one of the most cited authors in public discourse on defunding or even abolishing the police. In this episode, recorded after a wave of protests against police brutality took over Greece, Alex Vitale talks about the transformation of the meaning of crime over the last sixty years, the perils of extending the role of police to more and more aspects of our everyday lives, and how we could move away from policing towards relying on our communities.

Since her influential book Network Culture - Politics for the Information Age came out in 2004, theorist and activist Tiziana Terranova has been studying the workings of technology's effects on society. She has elaborated on these themes in numerous essays and has been part of many research groups that dive into the various ways social relations are organized and mediated. In this episode, Tiziana Terranova talks about her recent work on the concept of recursive colonialism, how colonialism is reproduced through repetition and diversification, as well as her interest in how technology affects the Mediterranean and the importance of looking at the history of technology from a non-Western perspective.

For many years, Yannis Stavrakakis, a Professor in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, has been studying the issue of populism as part of his thorough research on discourse analysis. His interests range from the relationship between psychoanalysis and the political to the workings of ideology in politics. His work on populism has produced numerous books and collections of essays and has spurred the working group Populismus, dedicated to the study of the phenomenon. In this episode, Yannis Stavrakakis talks about one of the most contested political terms of our time, how this discourse transforms the political field, as well as the interesting findings of the Populismus working group's recent study on Populism and the Pandemic.

In his second book, titled “Shard Cinema,” writer, theorist, and artist Evan Calder Williams used the all-too-familiar slow-motion images of breaking glass in blockbuster films as a means to unravel the ways in which images are produced, circulated, and consumed. In the second episode of The Archipelago with Evan Calder Williams, he talks about this certain cycle in contemporary visual culture, permeating everything from action movies to visions of disaster, while also interpreting the recent shift in his interests towards architecture, infrastructure, sickness, toxicity, and conspiracy theories.

Evan Calder Williams began exploring his ideas on post-apocalyptic thinking and politics in the blog “Socialism and/or Barbarism.” Since then, his work has expanded in two books, numerous essays, as well as films. He is part of the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine and a founding member of the film collective Thirteen Black Cats. In this episode of The Archipelago, the first of two conversations with Evan Calder Williams, he talks about how his ideas of Salvagepunk and the Apocalypse have evolved during the decade, his thorough study on the history of sabotage as a practice, and the impact of established visions in our collective thinking.

In the following episode, Geert Lovink talks about the repercussions of the proliferation of Zoom in our everyday routine during Covid-19, the underestimated politics of social media, as well as the strategies and practices that could move us beyond our subjugation by platforms. For two decades, media theorist Geert Lovink has been writing and researching on critical internet culture. In his 2019 book “Sad by Design,” he studies the emotional effect of the domination of digital platforms on society and lays the foundation for a new field of internet studies. This episode features music from the album “Sad by Design” by We Are Not Sick (Geert Lovink and John Longwalker).

In this episode of The Archipelago, journalist Florian Sievers, co-editor of the book, talks about our changing perspective on clubbing when we move past the Detroit-Berlin-Chicago-Manchester axis, the radical transformations of culture in Berlin and how minimal techno went stale. Sean O’Toole, author of an essay on the politics of clubbing in Johannesburg, joins in to talk about the South African city’s clubbing culture as formed by its history of racial segregation, followed by a discussion on the future of clubbing post-Covid-19. Starting in 2012, the project “Ten Cities” brought African and European music producers in collaboration, resulting in a collection that was released to the public in 2014. An upcoming book bearing the same title dives deeper into the project, through an anthology that examines both music and politics of the clubbing culture in five European and five African cities.

In today’s episode of The Archipelago, she talks about these changes that shaped the post-war world, as well as her most recent work on the concepts of resilience and the “smartness mandate,” through which she sheds a new light on neoliberalism’s fifty-year history. In her 2014 book “Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason Since 1945,” Orit Halpern traced the history of post-war design and planning from Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics through influential figures like Gyorgy Kepes and Charles Eames, examining how their work shaped new modes of perception and cognition based on data visualization, leading in turn to new ideas in governmentality.

In this episode of The Archipelago, Leigh Alexander talks about the evolution of the internet over time and how it affects us, the conclusions drawn from having moved our lives online during the pandemic, digital memories, magical thinking in the online world, and toxic gamer culture following Gamergate. Leigh Alexander is a narrative designer whose credits include “Her Majesty” and “Game of Thrones” from the acclaimed “Reigns” video game series. Her work studies all aspects of the digital and is spread between writings in outlets such as The Atlantic, the Columbia Journalism Review and Vice, a podcast on The Guardian, fiction, as well as books.

In this episode, Owen Hatherley, the author of numerous books including “Militant Modernism” and “Ministry of Nostalgia,” and culture editor of The Tribune magazine, talks about the municipal socialist roots that built London's multiculturalism, the various innovative experiments of London’s municipal authorities, and how all this can inspire its residents to deal with their growing problems in action.

In this episode of The Archipelago, recorded deep in the second wave of the Covid-19 global pandemic, Mike Davis talks about the present and future of global pandemics, the tectonic shifts shaking US politics and the importance of preserving the memory of the movements in 1960s Los Angeles, as documented in his latest book “Set the Night on Fire,” co-authored with Jon Wiener.

In his second appearance on The Archipelago, Matt Colquhoun uses Oneohtrix Point Never albums as a starting point to examine cultural practices that re-energize imagination and examine how perceptions of different temporalities affect our collective psyche. He also talks about Tarantino films, depression as illness and metaphor, and the ideas that advance or block the potential of radical politics today.

This episode of The Archipelago features the first of two conversations with Matt Colquhoun, in which he discusses Mark Fisher’s trajectory from the experimental counterculture of the CCRU lab in the mid-90s to his pessimistic take on Capitalist Realism. He also talks about the concept of “Egress” in practice: how Fisher’s passing affected his community, which is finding new potentialities in his writings under the presence of his absence.

Yannis-Orestis Papadimitriou discusses with Christopher King about his connection to Epirus, his next steps in preserving its cultural heritage and his views on the ongoing battle between authenticity and modernity, still seeking a resolution.