Social Discipline

Is Berlin Over? In this conversation, Diederichsen offers clues for understanding the current developments of contemporary fascism and its attack on the bohemia and critical artistic expressions, and how this manifests specifically in Berlin and within the broader German context.
By exploring the period between 2005 and 2015, and the ways in which culture was mobilized as a form of soft power, we can trace how a limit was reached during that decade, particularly when decolonial critiques began to pose a threat to Germany’s Staatsräson, its unconditional support for the security of the State of Israel. We discuss the complex history of the Antideutsch movement and how, in recent years, it has gained access to institutions. We also examine the idea of “access to tools,” connecting the Whole Earth Catalog to communes and alternative lifestyles, Silicon Valley, and the convergence of cybernetics with Eastern religions, from the ambition to conquer outer space to the exploration of inner worlds, and their contemporary manifestations in digital technologies. Finally, we address the possible end(s) of contemporary art and forms of technological entropy generated by streaming platforms.

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.

What can LARP teach us about pedagogy, community, and collective world-making? artist, researcher, curator and mentor in Game Design, Carina Erdmann joins Miguel Prado & Mattin to talk games as art, hacking everyday platforms, the politics of play, and why we might need to train our social muscles for futures that don’t yet exist. This conversation moves through conspiracy as collective thinking, the limits of empathy, and the careful work of attunement in collaborative play. Along the way, we touch on opacity and prefigurative practices, communal living experiments like the ones exercised at PAF, and what it means to rehearse for a revolution in these bleak conditions.

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.

Mattin and Miguel Prado sit down with friend of the pod and fellow NRU member Inigo Wilkins to dive into Shitshow Theory — a work-in-progress text by Mattin and Inigo — and Miguel’s own take on what he calls Entropic Modernity.

Together we try to make sense of the neo-reactionary turn, Trump-era chaos, and the cultural meltdown we’re all living through. Theorising the shitshow, one glitch at a time.