Social Discipline

In this episode of Social Discipline, we talk to Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo about their book Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits. Can we rethink capitalism beyond the familiar language of labour, ideology, social construction, and historical origin? Poliks and Alonso Trillo argue that capital should be understood less as a human-centred mode of production than as a logic of arbitrage: the extraction of value from differentials across time, markets, substrates, and scales. The conversation asks whether contemporary capitalism can still be fought with the concepts we have, or whether the problem has to be reformulated from first principles.

SD52 Andreas Petrossiants "We Can Now See Clearly What We Are Up Against" In this episode, we begin by expressing our admiration for and inspiration from our late friend Marina Vishmidt. We actually met last year in Vienna at the conference celebrating her work "What Is Infrastructural Critique?”. We discuss Vishmidt critical insights into the collapse of the myth of artistic autonomy and how art operates within broader infrastructures of capital. Petrossiants, who has been involved in housing struggles in New York City for some time, is now pursuing a PhD at NYU, working with Michelle Castañeda and Fred Moten. He has been researching the struggles of 1970s Italy from the perspective urban development and spatial composition (following Neil Gray), including autoreduction movements, proletarian shopping, and mass refusals of work and payment, alongside movements such as lotta continua, potere operaio and Nuclei Armati Proletari (NAP), and figures like Silvia Federici and Henri Lefebvre. We address the contradictions of art and institutional critique, where even radical themes, such as incarceration, are absorbed into liberal museum frameworks. From both U.S. and Italian perspectives, we consider the emergence of a post-liberal order and ask what defines citizenship today, as new forms of exclusion and racism become more explicit. The conversation turns to ongoing struggles in the US against ICE, asking how these different fronts articulate within a social field where production and reproduction have increasingly merged. Finally, we examine how infrastructures, such as those developed by companies like Amazon, are not only economic but increasingly carceral, enabling new forms of control in which subjects risk becoming disposable. We ask what defines citizenship today, as more explicit forms of racism re-emerge. In this context, Israel’s treatment of Palestinian lives appears as a forerunner of broader tendencies across the West, where similar logics of exclusion and disposability are beginning to take hold in regards to immigrants for example. The podcast situates these trajectories within a broader question: how to understand and confront a system in which urban space, culture, and social life are increasingly subsumed while a new wave of fascism emerges. We can now see clearly what we are up against, however we still have to see what forms of radicalisation will emerge.

Avgi Saketopoulou "Towards a Psychoanalytic Theory of Resistance: Exigent Sadism & The Revolutionary Impulse" In this podcast we discuss the radical figure of the Marquis de Sade, the revolutionary potential of sadism, and how the meaning of the concept changed in the aftermath of the Holocaust. But what does it mean today to speak about sadism in the midst of the current genocide in Gaza? Saketopoulou proposes the sexual drive as an anarchic energy that can be mobilised for political purposes: revolutionary impulses against the current memory culture, proprietary relationships to the past, the policing of narratives around Gaza, and the pinkwashing of colonial violence. We also discuss current psychoanalytic debates around trans life, considering the ongoing genocide against trans people in the United States, alongside broader questions about the legitimacy of armed struggle and resistance in the face of institutions such as ICE. We talk about opacity and the “noise in the communication line,” following Édouard Glissant and Jean Laplanche. These entropic and anarchic energies, what Laplanche’s psychoanalysis calls the noise in the communication line of the other, point to a fundamental opacity at the heart of subjectivity. The sexual drive introduces something that cannot be fully understood or translated; yet this very opacity becomes a condition of possibility for subjectivation and for ethics, challenging the self-centering and narcissistic limits of empathy. Saketopoulou suggests that we develop a different relationship to trauma, not as something that just can disappear. Trauma is also an unbound psychic energy that destabilizes the sovereignty of the ego, a wound that can also be a force that sets things into motion. Taking into account the complex relationship between violence and sexuality, revolutionary politics must confront power, sovereignty, and aggression directly, refusing the liberal management of suffering and recognizing that colonized people retain the right to resist by any means necessary.

The Escalation of Struggles: Social Reproduction & Formal Subsumption Alessandra Mezzadri discusses how formal subsumption can be understood through the diverse and rich perspectives of social reproduction, drawing in particular on the Italian Marxist Feminist tradition, to which the concept of the social factory owes a great deal. Through a feminist reading of her fieldwork in India, and in dialogue with the work of Jairus Banaji, she shows how the Global South reveals the ways in which formal subsumption continues to function through multiple, heterogeneous forms of labour. Rather than understanding these processes as producing paralysis and political powerlessness, she suggests that they may also open up new forms of antagonism, creating the conditions for the escalation of new struggles.

We’re incredibly honoured to be joined by Ray Brassier, a hugely formative thinker for both of us and one of the most important philosophers of the past 20 years. We talk about his upcoming book Fatelessness: Freedom and Fatality After Marx and, the contemporary condition of The Wretched of the Earth. Ray also gives an absolutely brilliant takedown of Nick Land and the speculative inhuman. Hope you enjoy it.

Social Discipline is incredibly excited to present the adventurous life of Jeff Perkins, a hidden gem of the American underground. This massive five-hour podcast, recorded in Berlin in June 2024, explores his fascinating journey—no one else can claim to have performed for Yoko Ono and John Cage, created legendary light shows with The Velvet Underground, Sly and the Family Stone, and The Germs, programmed the first Kenneth Anger retrospective in L.A., and encountered both Charles Manson and members of the satanic cult The Process. Jeff joined the military in the 1960s and was stationed in Tokyo, where he met Yoko Ono in the early ’60s. He began performing some of her pieces there and later in New York. Perkins also filmed Ono’s classic Film No. 4 (Bottoms), a Fluxus work. His first independent contribution to the Fluxfilm Anthology was Shout. He was at the heart of the 1960s New York avant-garde scene, surrounded by figures like La Monte Young, Jack Smith, and Angus MacLise. In January 1967, Perkins moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a programmer at Cinematheque 16. Influenced by Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, he began producing powerful light shows and collaborated with bands throughout the ’60s and ’70s—ranging from The Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Grateful Dead to the punk scene with X and The Germs. He even refused to do a show for the Sex Pistols due to a disagreement with the promoter. Perkins was a close friend of Terry Jennings and, in fact, entrusted his archive to La Monte Young. While in L.A., he was neighbors with the artist James Turrell. In 1980, Perkins moved back to New York and started a loft project just a block away from Ground Zero, reminiscent of George Maciunas’ artist loft spaces. To finance it, he worked as a cab driver. He remained deeply connected to cinema, particularly through Anthology Film Archives, where he proposed a John Cassavetes retrospective to Jonas Mekas and later became a manager. In 1994, Nam June Paik—who coined the term “The Fluxus cab driver” for Perkins—invited him to perform at Anthology Film Archives in a homage to Yoko Ono. His performance, Butthead, was a great success. His legendary loft became a hub where one could easily encounter visiting filmmakers like Pedro Costa and Albert Serra. In 1989, Perkins organized a series of lectures at Anthology Film Archives with Henry Flynt and Tony Conrad, reuniting the two after years of estrangement. Flynt would become a lifelong friend. In 2008, during the financial crisis, when I lived with Jeff, we organized a series of four-hour lectures by Flynt in the loft’s kitchen, focusing on the crisis and communist economics. I vividly remember Tony Conrad attending one of them in his elegant pajamas. Perkins has directed two critically acclaimed films—one on abstract painter Sam Francis and another on the legendary Fluxus figure George Maciunas. He is currently finishing editing a film about Henry Flynt in Berlin. This podcast concludes with an excerpt from his piece Movies for the Blind, which features recordings of conversations with passengers from his time as a New York cab driver.

Join us for an euphoric episode with our very good friends of the pod, Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic. Inspired by their work on Cute Accelerationism this episode explores the multiple dimensions of contemporary cuteness. From its sensory and cultural impacts to its erotic and semiotic layers, we unravel how Cute opens a gate to the transcendental process of acceleration itself.

In this episode of Social Discipline, we're joined by the renowned philosopher and complexity scientist, Alicia Juarrero. Alicia delves into the intricate world of causality in complex systems, offering insights from her seminal work, Dynamics in Action and Context Changes Everything. Throughout our conversation, she unpacks the principles of complexity and their implications for understanding human behavior and decision-making processes. We also explore how her theories challenge traditional views of causality and control in both social and natural sciences. Additionally, Alicia shares her thoughts on the ethical dimensions of complexity, particularly how they relate to issues of freedom and responsibility in contemporary society.

In this episode, we speak with artist Marwa Arsanios about her practice, documenta fifteen, feminism, and the possibility of reshaping the political potential of art. She talks to us about her ongoing project, Who Is Afraid of Ideology?, which Arsanios did as part of documenta fifteen. In this project, she explores through collaboration the possibility of communizing land and its practical, legal, and geological connotations. Furthermore, we discuss the aftermath of documenta fifteen and its problems. We also get to know about the origins of the title and the ideological differences in regards to feminism in Beirut in the last decade.

Miguel Prado and fellow Guild navigator (and co-host for today's episode) Sonia de Jager meet Diana Walsh Pasulka: professor of philosophy and religion at UNCW and author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, and Technology. We discuss what do we mean by agnostic when we want to be challenged by new knowledge, the UFO phenomena as a new form of religion, recent congress' public hearing into "unidentified aerial phenomena'', how ancient aliens could have handed technology to humanity and much more! Cover image by NonayahBiz https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/w92937/i_told_ai_starryai_to_show_me_the_moment_ancient/

Crypto collapse! Simply HODL and stay with us while we talk with Wassim Z. Alsindi: veteran of the timechain, founder and host of the 0x Salon, conducting experiments in post-disciplinary collective knowledge practices. Wassim specialises in conceptual design and philosophy of peer-to-peer systems. Today he guides us through the speculative hellscape. Some resources: (blockchain-time) Reminiscences of a Clock Operator https://0xsalon.pubpub.org/pub/jmysxacr/ (nfts/digital art) The Revolution Will Not Be Tokenised https://0xsalon.pubpub.org/pub/nl45krtx/ (bitcoin indeterminacy) Bitcointingency https://weirdeconomies.com/contributions/bitcointingency (on memes) https://spectrumstore.com/en/memetic-counterculture-starter-pack (on daos) DAOcolonisation 0x Salon Audio Report https://0xsalon.pubpub.org/pub/fbeqr4q3/release/1?readingCollection=a777270b Music by essential abstractions

We had the great pleasure of being joined by Matana Roberts, multidisciplinary artist, saxophonist, composer, and sound adventurer. We talked about the unequal mental health toll of the pandemic, the healing power of live music, their Coin Coin work and many other things!

We are back with Pan Dajing. We talk her work(that we love!), about solitude, crypticism, intimate "connection at a distance" and many other digressions into the emotional core of our "spiritual fluid".