Disintegrator

• LONGUE DURÉE Pt. 2 (w/ Timothy Morton)

  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.

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• LONGUE DURÉE Pt. 1 (w/ Ray Brassier)

  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. Ray Brassier influenced a generation of philosophers not only with his outstanding and highly rigorous writing, but also his absolutely stunning translations of Quentin Meillassoux and François Laruelle, and in so doing is subcutaneously responsible for literally a decade of earthquakes in the discourse. Ray joins us to evaluate the status of Marx in the 21st century.Ray traces the long arc from Nihil Unbound through Marx, Sellars, and the inferentialist tradition, opening up an unapologetically rationalist framework for understanding both science and emancipation, without reducing either to liberal platitudes or metaphysical fantasies. We discuss the seductive dangers of naive anti-humanism, the legacy of German idealism, the automation of reason, and why political theory today needs to be deeply embedded in materialist accounts of scale, finance, and abstraction. Ray shares a trenchant critique of both the empiricist and idealist strands of Enlightenment thought, offering instead a dialectical, normatively grounded, socially embedded concept of rationality that returns to Kant and Hegel by way of Wilfrid Sellars. We strongly recommend:Ray’s book Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction His essay “The View from Nowhere”His exceptional piece "Politics of the Rift" on Théorie Communiste in e-fluxWork from the journal Endnotes (https://endnotes.org.uk/)In the episode, we also discuss theorists such as Badiou, Larouelle, Meillassoux, and Marxist reinterpretations by Moishe Postone, Théorie Communiste, and the German “New Reading” school. Ray elaborates on how capital’s increasing abstraction—especially in financialized regimes where labor is decoupled from value—is not the end of Marx, but a reason to read Marx more seriously and materially than ever.

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• 28. Imperative Pythagoreanism (w/ Giuseppe Longo)

  It’s such an honor to welcome Giuseppe Longo to the pod! Professor Giuseppe Longo is the Research Director Emeritus at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. His work spans mathematics, computer science, biology, especially through the connective theoretical tissue of epistemology. Our conversation orbits around the limitations (or specific capacities) of computation, especially as computation becomes more and more central to mainstream theories of thought, being, life, and even physics. Longo pushes back on computationalism, grounding his critique in the sciences and in mathematics, especially as it becomes more and more established as an ideological foundation underneath applied biological research. No, for Longo the body is not a computer, the brain is not a computer, the world is not a computer, and the universe is not a computer — a computer is something altogether very specific, and should be afforded the dignity of its specificity. The title of this episode (imperative pythagoreanism) refers to pythagoreanism (the ancient worship of numbers in the 6th-4th century cult of Pythagorus, specifically the idea that the universe is fundamentally made of and reducible to numbers) and the imperative mode of computation (a determinative command structure).

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• 27. Critique as Commodity (w/ Morgane Billuart)

  We’re on with Morgane Billuart, a writer and artist and a researcher whose work engages critically with technologically mediated and determined worlds — not least within her exceptional book “Cycles, the Sacred and the Doomed: Inquiries in Female Health Technologies.” Morgane joins us to talk about a large, recent research project on a particular character that many of us identifies with, what Geert Lovink calls the “critical internet researcher” — a figure who engages in a kind of postdisciplinary media theory while at the same time producing and publishing their work through the very media they are studying, the Online. We strongly recommend:Morgane’s podcasts Becoming the Product and Girl Employee with Carmen HinesMorgane’s substack Becoming the ProductMorgane’s book Cycles, the Sacred and the Doomed: Inquiries in Female Health Technologies on Set MarginsIn the episode we discuss the work of Geert Lovink and the Institute of Network Cultures and Joshua Citarella (and the associated entity Do Not Research), and we briefly touch on Yancy Strickler (and the associated MetaLabel), Trust, the New Center for Research and Practice, Are.na, New Models, and RADAR (https://www.radardao.xyz/). All are mentioned in the context of being institutions undertaking the extremely admirable charge of iterating upon new vehicles and structures for the exchange of information. Marek also briefly mentions the blogger RM (@NilsEdison) and the artist Maria Tsylke.

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• 26. The Great Outdoors (w/ Gordon White)

  Gordon White is a chaos magician, shamanic practitioner, and permaculture designer based in Tasmania. He podcasts and teaches through the vehicle of Rune Soup, the world's largest magic academy, and he writes prolifically -- not only on the Rune Soup blog but in several incredible books. Gordon's breadth and depth of knowledge is unbelievably humbling, and it was an honor to spend an hour or so with him.We came to Gordon for perspective, to some bring context and breadth and dimension to our relatively narrow world. Disintegrator sits in a kind of para-academic space, where we tend to limit the things we allow ourselves to write and think in terms of what's acceptable in mainstream academia. And there are so many people in this space, squashed between the outer walls of the academy and a totally vast, teeming ocean of different ways of thinking and being.((An academic might chastize us for using 'outside' as a kind of euphemism for an alien or an other, but we'd push back -- it is the inside that we're all kind of bunched up against, like feudal serfs huddling for protection and warmth. As we look outside, we've started to speculate about what might be out there, inventing our own 'pseudosacreds' that preoccupy our minds without forcing us to change anything about ourselves.))Gordon brings sledgehammers from magical practices and shamanic tradtions around the world, alongside a potent alternative canon of Western, and, well, pummels our walls a bit.Tons of references packed in here, but a good place to start would be his books Chaos Protocols and Ani.Mystic (in order). Marek fell in love with Gordon's world through these three podcast episodes (one, two, three) and this lecture at the Guggenheim (with visual media from friend of the pod Refik Anadol).Further references:A big and loving shoutout to Jay Springett, who just absolutely rules in every possible way, you gotta be a JayMo fan fr.Gordon references Dr. Jeff Kripal on the subject of the 'imaginal' -- which becomes a helpful concept later in the episode as we talk through technology. The imaginal is an ontological layer or that is not necessarily physical but still real.The most significant reference here is of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, a Brazillian anthropologist discussed in the context of pespectivism and what a truly decolonized anthropology (and philosophy) might look like.Gordon references Ephesisans 6:12 ("powers and principalities") in the context of a Christian ontology that affords an idea the status of a being.Dr. Jack Hunter's concept of "ontological flooding" -- an "opening of the floodgates" of what is discussible in ontological terms. Here's a discussion on the subject from 2021.Marek references a recent trend in philosophy ("object oriented ontology") that grapples with the autonomy of the non-human world. This episode is cheekily named after Quentin Meillassoux's concept of the "great outdoors" -- a plane of reality that exceeds human experience or human conception.Gordon references Paracelsus, Edgar Cayce, Rudolf Steiner, and Allan Kardec in the context of a Western spiritualist canon.Gordon discusses Matías De Stefano specifically in the context of mineral intelligence. Here's an absolutely wild talk on the subject.For those unfamiliar, the "Dieta" that Gordon refers to is a period of isolation, strict diet, and deep work with plant medicines like ayahuasca.Ambient track is 'Respect for the Medium' by friend of the pod They Became What They Beheld, show them some love on Bandcamp.

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