Join Rachel, John, and Sid as they tackle Part II of Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital. Picking up where Part I left off, the team waste no time in connecting Luxemburg's analyses of nineteenth-century economic debates to the neoliberal present. Spurred by Luxemburg's witty inquiry into the ways vulgar economists, classical and Marxist alike, understood capitalist crises (spoiler: they didn't quite get it), we try to think with Luxemburg about the crises of late capitalism. Should we be hopeful in moments of crisis? What's the relation between socialist theory and practice? How are the political forms available to us different from Luxemburg's time? From the Amazon model to Bernie Sanders's declaration to run in 2020 to the tension between determinism/teleology and contingency in Marxist thought, the team shuttle back-and-forth across two hundred years of history.
In other words, you don't want to miss the second installment of the first ever AAP podcast mini-series.
After a dissertating hiatus, James returns with a new Epistemic Unruliness interview featuring Dr. J.T. Roane, Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Univ. of Cincinnati. The pair discuss J.T.'s article, "Plotting the Black Commons," recently published in Souls, A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, that reads an archive of Black ecology and social life out of Black folks' engagements with the Chesapeake Bay estuary in the Tidewater region of Virginia and Maryland. Through multiple reads of "the plot" and "plotting," J.T. holds up practices of subsistence farming as well as small-scale fishing, oystering, and crabbing traditions as exemplifying a Black epistemology of reciprocity for the commons that stands in distinction to the theologies of dominion and mastery that undergird the logics of white supremacist settler colonialism, and that gave rise to our current climate crises — or as J.T. explains it, "the so-called Anthropocene or the racial capitalocene." James and J.T. also discuss pedagogical praxis, and James answers a listener email on-air about Afro-pessimist takes on the Anthropocene.
Sylvia Wynter, "Novel and History, Plot and Plantation," Savacou 5 (1971): 95-102.
In what could be their first trio podcast, co-hosts James, Emily, and B tarry with the Preface and a Chapter titled "Occult Philosophy" from Eugene Thacker's In the Dust of this Planet: Horror of Philosophy, vol. 1. Before launching in, James shares some good news, and B befriends a finger monster. The team was at first hesitant about the text. But why? Perhaps they were a bit bewildered by Thacker's arguments concerning the history of the philosophical "in-itself"? Or the world-for-us? Or their overall relationship to the horror genre? Was this Thacker's critique of the Western canon? Or is Thacker's archive unknowingly neo-colonial? Does the archive show us the limits of knowledge (as the promise of horror as the fear of the unknown forebodes) or does it reproduce "the ruse of [Western] reason" by another name and through another's pen? But why the Hell is post-colonial and anti-racist critique the "easy" critique anyway? Join and listen as all three of our co-hosts discuss one of the many purposes and pitfalls of academic publishing, the perils of public anti-intellectualism, and the dynamism of genres.
Support us on Patreon to help us upgrade our recording equipment, potentially provide episode transcripts, and more – plus, you may have the chance to jump your request to the top of the request queue. Thanks to Bağlan for requesting Thacker. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, "Post Digital," from their new album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.