Podcast
Failure Is Freedom
Hosted by https://www.martinessig.com · EN
I'm exploring why Generation X failed to get free, and how the concept of "authenticity" was turned into a sort of un-freedom.
26episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Out of Darkness: What Is Otherness?
May 2801:16:18Tap to summarizeWhat is Otherness? Out of Darkness 2022 directed by Andrew Cumming fits into a number of horror categories, but we've decided to do it on our nature horror series. When we were kids back in the 80s, there were two bizarro movies about early hominids, "Quest for Fire" and the "Clan of the Cave Bear." Both have proved to be quite incompatible with more recent paleo-anthropological findings. Many of those fallacies have been cleared up to great effect in Out of Darkness. The two most glaring of these mistakes were that Neanderthals weren't capable of the advanced symbolic behaviors of Homo Sapiens, and that there was no interbreeding between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals because they were too genetically different to reproduce. Since that time, archeological evidence has shown that Neanderthals did participate in symbolic activities such as art, language, and religious practices, and genetic markers have proved that they did interbreed with Homo Sapiens. Out of Darkness is a story about human immigration and confrontation with the Other, and in true horror fashion, it asks who is the monster when otherness is encountered? As different as Neanderthals were, they were human.https://youtu.be/AXgrppWd5Vshttps://www.buzzsprout.com/2509184/episodes/19245677https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.
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Warehouse Parties: Three Decades Later
May 2701:18:44Tap to summarizeIn this episode we explore the sort of house music that I and other deejays played at the warehouse parties of the 90s in Chicago. I recently mixed again with my original equipment from way back when in the 90s at a warehouse party for old people hosted by my friend "Chicago Tommy" at his company's warehouse. We painted, thanks to Tommy's homemade easels and canvases, and danced, and ate, thanks to everyone who brought a dish to share, and it was all over around 9PM because while our spirits are still youthful and in my case more free than when I was in my 20s in the 90s, we're old now.Thanks to James R for helping me to get this posted. He's been getting me acclimated to the world of modern technology for a couple of years now, and much to everyone's chagrin is the main reason that I have a website for my writing and podcasts and stuff like that.I redid the mix to be more to my liking from the party at which I was pretty rusty and didn't hold together some of the tracks as well as I would have liked. I don't have the modern mixing equipment that matches the beat for you, so I had to do it manually, as we did back in the day. This is a continuous mix, so there are no track breaks, but here is what I remember of what I mixed plus some other tracks as well:1. I love this first track so much, it's a remix of the Fleetwood Mac song "Sarah." I think it was done by this dude who calls himself "Doctor Soul." He ran it through all kinds of filters and effects to make Stevie Nicks extra dreamy, and then sped it up and gave it that "four on the floor" house beat that gives the body the universal signal to move.2. I heard this one really early in my warehouse party days because it was very popular in Chicago. It was a "French house filter track," as we used to say, by DJ. Gregory called "Sunshine People," I think the sample is from Chic. This version is from Darrio D Attis.3. This sample, which I always called "Street Life," because that's the name of the Crusaders song that it was taken from, was super popular in Chicago. I think that I first heard Derrick Carter playing the version by Cricco Castelli. Everyone used to go crazy when that organ stab started to play and loop in joyful circles. This version is from Purple Disco Machine who is this Turkish German guy, if I understand correctly.4. This song is called "Soul Power," by Full Intention. It's a good example of "Gospel house." The four on the floor beat of house music is from Gospel music. It's like when people start catching the Holy Ghost, and the organist is slamming all four bass pedals to the floor like she's banging out a bass rhythm, but there's a lot of disco elements in this song too, like the staccato string stabs and bubbly rhythm sounds. Full Intention have been around since the beginning.5. I just call this next track "chucking" because it sounds like the disco chucking on guitar that Nile Rodgers used to do. It's from another Turkish German guy who's been around forever called "Mousse T." 6. This one was called "Ron Hardy's Revenge" after a famous saying by Ron Hardy that house music was disco's revenge. This contains a now very popular sample that Ron Hardy used to play over tracks that he was spinning. It's a Disco Diva, maybe Loleatta Holloway or Evelyn King or Thelma Houston or Norma Jean Wright giving a speech about resilience in the face of adversity. I always forget who this is, and it's hard to figure out a good way to search for it, but Ron Hardy (RIP) definitely invented playing an inspirational a cappella track over a beat.7. I call this one "Jack Chicago," and I know very little about it. But it's full of fun, filter builds and horn stabs and a great sample of someone saying "jack Chicago," and "He's really the only one for me." It like a super badass, radio advertisement for Chicago house music.8. This one is super disco-y. The sample is people saying "Break down the door," I think, which sounds like some super awesome disco emergency in which you have to get into the club to "dance your ass off," as Sal Soul used to say.9. This one is Nick Holder, and it's called "Paradise." I really love the disco dance floor peaks and swells in this one. Holder takes us all to Paradise here, especially with those high pitched synth chirps that sound like the birds of paradise or angels calling us to a tropical heaven.10. I call this one "keep on trucking" because that was a popular saying in the 70s, and this track sounds like a disco trucker rolling down the highway, but then there are these awesome deep strings making it sound like that "Disco Fever" track that I remember from the double album from the movie soundtrack that my parents had, which was called something like "Journey to Disco Mountain." I used to beg my mother to play that disco mountain song because that was one disco peak I yearned to scale over and over again in 1978. Whatever else is going on in this song, it almost sounds kind of country too, like that "Devil Went Down to George" song, which I also begged my mother to play over and over again in 1978. Fiddle battles between the Oakridge Boys and the Devil were pretty epic.11. This is an Ian Pooley track, who is my favorite German producer and deejay. This one feels like a swirling, Latin rumba or something. I saw Ian once at the Detroit Movement festival a long time ago, and he seemed to raise his larger to me as I would lose my mind to each new groove that he mixed into. When Germans raise their steins to you, it means, "Respect, bro, thank you for acting like an out of control loser when play my tunes. It means a lot to me since I've come all the way here to Detroit from the far away land of the German people."12. I only know that this one has a Sister Sledge sample in it, and it might be called "Disco Tools." It's so fun, and what a great build to a tremendous disco eruption! 13. This one is Karizma, and it was a very popular gospel house track maybe a decade ago or so. The sample is from a classic gospel song, which I don't know the name of, but the lead singer and the choir are singing about having bills due and how God is going to "Work It Out." James Baldwin wrote in his classic "Go Tell It on the Mountain," that when the church music hits you, there is no question of doubt, you're just fully ensconced in belief. We all need a few moments of full on religious psychosis on a daily basis, especially when bills are due and there isn't much in the bank, because somebody's got to work that out.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.
Transcribe →Hermeneutic Circles: Annihilation
May 1401:31:29Tap to summarizeHere is another example of Hermeneutic circles in action. Annihilation, both the book and the movie, are like David Tracy's "Classics" to me because they provide an inexhaustible wealth of possible interpretations, especially because they both deal so strongly with the ambiguity of identity, including the ambiguity of the apparently determinate nature of our genetic inheritance. My partner Char and I have a horror podcast in which this episode first appeared that deals with ideas around the vertigo of irreducible ambiguity in the Horror genre. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2509184 My sister Andrea who works professionally as a scientist joins us for this episode's exploration of the slipperiness of the material reduction to "scientific facts." https://youtu.be/LVgJOT9PXxA and this is the YouTube link to the episode if you'd like a visual of us hashing out Annihilation.We get deep into the weird genetic refractions of Alex Garland's very loose take on Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation. Area X seems to be a place of infinite possibilities, except for the possibility of remaining untouched by the mysterious, churning flows of organic codes that produce mixed bodies of unknowable intention. What is the intention of this alien presence in what seems to be a swamp somewhere on the Florida coast of the Gulf of Mexico? Maybe, it doesn't have one. Join us as we think about the human proclivity for self-destruction, the ambiguity of identity, and how the intentions of organic bodies arise from the non-intention of inorganic processes.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.
Transcribe →Hermeneutic Circles: Jesus is Tested
May 1401:02:41Tap to summarizeI post this crossover episode as an example of the possibilities for hermeneutic circles as a religious practice. And as a reminder that our only freedom is the open and even playful interpretation of being. And I always love pointing out to people that if they want to follow Jesus, they would do well to adopt the curiosity about the meaning of being that led him out into the wilderness to have a conversation with Satan, and which led him to reinterpret scriptures according to his hermeneutic of love. It is often pointed out that Jesus would have be considered a poor interpreter of the bible in the light of modern Biblical scholarship, and that much to the chagrin of modern "Biblical Literalists," neither he nor any of his interlocutors held to such a limiting and deluded principle, except for maybe Satan, but that his open relation to his tradition allowed for him to understand himself and religious community in a new way. True followers of Christ seek to "make all things new."https://youtu.be/Fgjqb6bKJ_sMy Uncle Father Herb, my Dad Bob, and I discuss Jesus's testing in the desert. I chose the passage this time. It has always spoken to me about how we are left to interpret the Word of God for ourselves but as a community of interpreters. There will be no one "absolute" interpretation that excludes all the others. However, there will be interpretations that cannot withstand the practices of a hermeneutic circle of responsible interpreters. A hermeneutic circle tests possible interpretations against a set of criteria, which for our circle of Biblical interpreters includes: historical-critical techniques and scholarly information, the history of the theological interpretations of the Church, and our own experiences of trying to apply Biblical teachings and narratives to our lives. But the most important principle for the interpretive practices of those who seek the God of love is love, which is sometimes called the interpretive practice of "Christ the Key" in the Church's tradition of Biblical interpretation. Our faith is that the histories, mythologies and even the laws of the Bible must be interpreted, which means they are open, except for those interpretations that would close one off to hope or love. Unloving Biblical interpretation is without the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and is what proliferates most rampantly today. This is the consequence of both our fallenness and our freedom to interpret without love's lure. Love is revealed anew throughout ours lives as it has historically been reveled through out the lives of those who have sought it, but it is always a lure to love and never compulsory because love according to its nature must be freely chosen. Even when things seem dark or evil, it is our faith that God is still speaking as the lure to love. Jesus's test in the desert reveals His ministry and is character to Himself and to those that would follow Him. Satan's job as God's "prosecuting attorney," is to test and reveal. In the desert Jesus reinterprets the figure of the "Messiah" from his Jewish tradition and scripture according to the law of love, so that it becomes a figure not of power but of weakness as love does not overpower or control. Jesus passes His test by refusing to test, which is to choose the revelation of love over whatever revelation is given by tests of strength.If you want to check this episode out on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Fgjqb6bKJ_shttps://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.
Transcribe →Season 3: Making All Things New
May 501:09:18Tap to summarizeThis season will be focussed on how we can reinterpret our inheritance to make it new through the practice of interpretation. Nothing that is given to us from the past can be received without interpretation. The practice of interpretation is called "Hermeneutics" after the Greek messenger god Hermes. Interpretation can close, but only retroactively since the present is always open to a reinterpretation of the past, which means to change one's relation to the past, and thus, change the relations of the past. Closing on a particular interpretation is to determine or objectify, but every determination or realization of possibility actuates more open possibility. AN Whitehead explained that each "Actual Occasion," which was something like a spatiotemporal slice or droplet of experience was comprised of at least three essential elements: one, an intention for novel experience or for novel affect, which was often embodied in the body of the creature or "Superject" that chose what to ingress into an Actual Occasion; two, the "physical pole," which was the concrescences or concrete forms, whether material or conceptual, that were ingressed from the past; and three, the "mental pole," or open virtuality of actualized possibility that was yet to be fully realized, including the "Eternal Ideas" localized in the Actual Occasion as the transcendent yet imminent "Mind of God." Interpretation is possible because of the incomplete determination of the mental pole. This incomplete determination allowed the Superject access to actual possibility through the process of conceptualization, which might be thought of as making what has already beed determined or concresced less determinate, or as intervening in the causal chain by determining some of the incompletely determined causality. Determination is a retroactive closure that is always reopened in the present by the mental pole's access to virtuality and the Superject's intention for novel affect, concepts, and experience.https://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes, I mix the mixtapes that I post here.
Transcribe →Season 2 Final
Apr 1600:46:33Tap to summarizeWe have been working through the idea that the unresolved contradiction of binary oppositions is a structural description of how the world appears to us and, perhaps, is also how it is in-itself. Every possible reduction of experience to knowable identities or definitions cannot completely account for or make intentional all of what is given by our experience, which is the "too-much givenness" of phenomenology, to objective or whole phenomena or concepts. The classical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl attempted to eliminate the mediating concepts of perception via the "Eidetic Reduction," so that what appears might appear from its own initiative, or so that phenomena may appear in-themselves, as themselves, and from themselves, stripped of the obscuring mediation of concepts. But this return to some sort of primary naivete has proven elusive because the conceptual mediation of experience seems to be the ground of any possible experience, even though Kantian categories aren't really concepts but the internalization of the natural laws, which ground whatever appears. Raw or unmediated percepts have to be copulated with other percepts to be perceived, which means that at least the categories of relation and difference are necessary mediators of whatever appears as given. The primary relation, or category, of cause to effect is given by the relation of space-time to matter-energy according to the categories of the natural laws. But causes cannot be directly observed, as David Hume famously pointed out, and effects, especially those considered as what appears as the phenomena of the world, cannot be reduced in total to material causality as is demonstrated in the work of Jean-Luc Marion by his concept of "Saturated Phenomena." The too-much givenness of Saturated Phenomena leaves any possible reduction to physical causality or to conceptual reasons constitutively incomplete, and therefore, they produce the non-objects of "Counter-Experience," rather than the objects of the material reduction or to the phenomena of the Eidetic reduction. This incompleteness, which Marion describes as the mismatch between intuition and intention or between what is given as affective, or felt, phenomena and what can be reduced to causes, leaves room for the virtual space of the subjunctive Imaginary in which possibilities can be actuated and realized, but also in which these realizations actualize more open possibility, which Deleuze thought of as the difference given by a repetition without a concept and Meister Eckhart thought of as God's revealing by withdrawing deeper into His infinite depths. This is the infinitely open, constantly multiplying possibility that does not mean a hermeneutics of anything-goes, but rather of a dialectic with the creative processes of being's becoming other than itself in the relation of identity to difference or self to other or interior to exterior or the One to the many, and so on. Hermeneutics is then where we will turn to next in season three because it is how we participate in creation by making being eternally new.https://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes, I mix the mixtapes that I post here.
Transcribe →Too Much Givenness
Mar 3101:00:15Tap to summarizeThe Hegelian dialectical, double negation does not resolve into a synthesis. There is always a remainder of irreducible ambiguity, so that all phenomena are saturated in Jean-Luc Marion's sense that too much has been given to intuition to reduce to the phenomenal and conceptual objects of the intention. Being is too excessive to be reduced to intentional phenomena and conceptualizations. No matter how many intentional percepts we may copulate with percepts, or percepts with concepts, or concepts with concepts, we will never reduce being to either the perceivable nor to the knowable because what being is becoming isn't determined. The indeterminacy of nonbeing cracks open being's becoming in being's procession into the entropic abyss of space-time, while concurrently, the abyss speaks "on" and "in" the matter of determinate being's energetic resistance to it as the binary opposition of the impermanent, material somethings, on the one hand, and the nothing of pure potential, on the other. The One becomes many in a glorious failure to contain itself, like Beckett's "incontinent void" or Paul Valéry's "blemish on the perfection of nonbeing." Perhaps, nonbeing's victory will eventually be absolute in its ultimate, self-defeating, heat death. But until then, the void will speak in the deformations and clumpy configurations wrought in matter's inconsistent dispersal into the abyss that birthed it. For now, being's excess coincides with its lack, which is its lack of oneness, or its inability to unify all of its multiplicity under a single intention. The One that "fails to be at one with itself" is being's intimacy with the nonbeing endemic to it. Let all things be made new in the continual baptism of the dialectic of love, in which the beautiful, sublime, and horrific erotically twist around each other in Blakesque songs of experience.https://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes, I mix the mixtapes that I post here.
Transcribe →What Is Seen as Unseeable
Mar 2700:55:03Tap to summarizeLacanian excessive enjoyment, or "jouissance," is enjoying what is unenjoyable. The excessive part of excessive enjoyment refers to the irreducibility of jouissace to mere enjoyment or pleasure. The ground of whatever there is, is contradiction. The contradiction of dialectical, binary opposition doesn't resolve into a third thing or object, but into a third non-object. Jean-Luc Marion wrote that the subject of "Counter-Experience" was the irresolvable ambiguity of the counter-object or of the non-object. The non-object is that which lacks objectification because of its excess, or because Saturated Phenomena produce too much intuition or affect to reduce to intentional objectification or conceptualization. The subject of jouissance is also the non-object, which is formed by the Lacanian "non-relation." Binary oppositions such as visible and invisible or darkness and light or enjoyable and unenjoyable constitute each other in a mystical co-arising from their ground in the absolute contradiction of binary opposition, which is the absolute resistance of the Lacanian Real to representation. It is the irresolvablity of this primordial double negation that produces the excess of lack inherent to jouissance.https://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes, I mix the mixtapes that I post here.
Transcribe →What Withdraws from Identity?
Mar 2300:56:13Tap to summarizeAn identity is a type of interpretation. An interpretation is a type of closer. Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous obsession with the duck / rabbit figure was how he demonstrated that there was no solid ground from which to render a final judgment about what something was because any possible ground for a judgement was itself incomplete, which Lacan put as "There is no metalanguage," and Leotard put as "There is no meta-narrative." For Deleuze, any interpretive closure, like a phenomenological objectification or an intentional conceptualization, contained the illusion of wholeness given by the appearance of a repetition, which was the illusion of "resemblance," but there was no true repetition because resemblance was the imposition of a transcendent identity onto what was ultimately immanent difference, which for Deleuze was the differential background that underlay all reality and any possible foregrounding of an objective unification. Lacan saw the projection of the virtual object, which he called "Objet-Petit-a" in a similar manner, as a fantasy projection of wholeness onto what was essentially incomplete, disunified, and ambiguous, like Deleuze's differential background from which any temporary repetition emerged, which Deleuze called, "Difference-in-itself." Lacan's phenomenology can be said to be that of object-small-a because it was a fantasy projection that unified a multiplicity or positivized a lack of oneness as if a one, which was the oneness imagined in Lacan's register of the Imaginary. Badiou, referring to the work of Meillassoux, called this projection of oneness the "take-as-one" function of Set Theory, in which oneness is imposed by defining what belongs in the set and what doesn't. The outside definition of a set, or its externally given intention, functions as a classical substance because it defines what it contains like a substance used to contain its attributes. In Kant's phenomenology, the subjective intention "synthesizes" objective phenomena via intuitive categories, and then projects these objectifications as what appears as the objective, exterior world. This intuitive synthesis accords with the general structure of the take-as-one unification because it synthesizes a one from perceptual difference, as in Whitehead's definition of a perception or a conceptualization as at least two percepts joined together according to a rule. However, this synthesis isn't complete as Hegel showed in his dialectical double negation, which didn't resolve into a synthesis but was always left with an irresolvable remainder, which could be called "irreducible ambiguity." Irreducible ambiguity might be thought of as a contradiction that cannot be resolved into a synthesis, but a nonetheless, productive irresolution. If irreducible ambiguity is what withdraws from any interpretation, then, perhaps, it is a productive withdrawal, just as the Lacanian Real is what resists symbolic identification but is also the ground of the Symbolic, or as the void is the negation whose inability to negate itself produces whatever appears as the world.https://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes, I mix the mixtapes that I post here.
Transcribe →Do We have Essences?
Mar 1900:56:37Tap to summarizeGraham Harmon has helpfully outlined the problems with both what AN Whitehead called "substance ontology" and the lack of substances in Whiteheadian Process Philosophy and Saussarean Structuralism. In most contemporary philosophy there are no essences or "natural kinds" as there once were in classical philosophy, but substances are hard to get rid of entirely, probably because the "natural stance" of our subjective experience categorizes the world, or divides it up into discreet objects, which seem to reflect "real" divisions of types of things. However, these "clear" borders between types are growing confused as the intrusions of the Lacanian "Real" cause the identities of things to fail. It is hard to ignore how traditional categories no longer work, as the particularly predominate example of gender shows. In the US a nostalgic longing for the return of easily identifiable types has played no small part in the return of authoritarian populism. The desire for the "Big Other" to tell us what we are is strong here, which is the desire for repression and control that is imagined as the return of the lost Eden of a once great America.But this Eden in which "men were men and women and minorities knew there place," like all other fantasy, lost objects never really was. There has never been a time when the categories of the "Big Other" didn't encounter their failure in the Real. It is just that the repression of this failure has been more or less successful, and with the distance of time, it becomes easier to imagine through the lens of nostalgia that there was a halcyon time when the world knew what it was. But what about the a priori categories that Kant taught were necessary to have even our most basic perceptions? Do those internalizations of the natural laws also fail? Harmon shows that something is lost in what he calls the "overmining" of Structuralism and Process Philosophy, which is for him the withdrawal of the "thing-in-itself" from the relations of symbolic difference so essential for language users to make a world through the copulation of the signifiers and concepts of the Symbolic with percepts. The thing-in-itself also famously withdrew from the pre-conceptual, or intuitive, perceptions of Kant's phenomenal representation in the subjective intention, which he saw as the synthesis of the things that appear to us from the intuitive relations of the categories and the noumenal things-in-themselves. This "withdrawal" at the level of the natural laws had been the focus of much of Zizek's recent work on Quantum indeterminacy in which the causal categories of perception fail to determine the things-in-themselves. This failure at the level of the internalized natural laws is mostly due to the unavoidability of the most basic category of cause and effect and its basis in space-time for perception, which is sometimes described as the "observer effect." Quantum fields do not seem to be determined by causes in the same way that the macro level of reality is, which means that they do not seem to be in space-time in the same way either. How can observers totally dependent on causality to either perceive or conceive, know anything about a thing-in-itself that withdraws beyond the a priori categories of quantity, quality, mode, and relation? Let's get into it.https://www.martinessig.comBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes, I mix the mixtapes that I post here.
Transcribe →