Diet Soap Podcast #142: The Production of Space

The guest this week is the blogger, artist, philosopher and musician Jon Meade and we discuss how Henri Lefebvre’s book The Production of Space is significant reading in this Late Capitalist moment.

However, this episode is also an audio collage. It starts with a conversation with my son Benjamin about The Production of Space in video games, moves from there to a conversation with Ben, Simon and Noah (my three sons) about Jim Henson’s experimental television program The Cube, and only then does Jon Meade starts to pipe in as well. This episode is a mash up and you can find it here.

I want to thank Jason H and Daniel L for donating to the podcast and let you both know that copies of my book, Wave of Mutilation, will be in the mail very soon. Jason H has already been waiting for over a week. I welcome donations, and subscribing to the podcast will also make you a member of the Diet Soap Philosophy Workshop. Right now there are 16 members of the workshop, although attendance varies. I would certainly welcome four or even five more people aboard, and we’re not too far into the Phenomenology of Spirit yet so you could all probably catch up pretty quickly.

I should point out that I’ve started blogging over at my own website again, over at douglaslain.com, and that I’ll be blogging for Tor.com again in the weeks to come. You can find my Facebook page, I’m the douglaslain in Portland Oregon, follow me on twitter my handle is douglain (and that’s L A I N), find me on linked in, check out my dormant Google plus account, see one or two pictures I posted on Instagram, StumbleUpon me, or just send me an email to tell me what a Netlog is.

Again, the guest this week is Jon Meade, however along with Meade you’ll hear a clip of singer Eli Mattson performing his own unique cover version of the song My Favorite Things, that’s at the 38 minute mark.

Essay on Henri Lefebvre from Thought Catalog:

Henri Lefebvre’s 1974 book The Production of Space argues against the concept of empty or geometric space and in favor of social space. He was a committed Marxist and his idea that space is never truly empty but always filled in or mediated is perhaps just a philosophical refinement of the argument against neutrality or objectivity. Howard Zinn often commented that “one can never be neutral on a moving train” and by this he meant that he, as an historian, could never be objective but was always implicated in the struggle that is history. Lefebvre went a step beyond this observation by suggesting that reality or space itself was bound up in the same historical struggle. Lefebvre’s book argued against the objective world but did not posit a relative of subjective world in its place. What Lefebvre was seeking was a way to conceive of space itself as Howard Zinn.

The back cover blurb for his book explains his project this way:

The production of space is a search for a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live).

To get a firm grip on what Lefebvre was attempting is to risk depoliticizing his work. We have to consider his work from within the realm metaphysics and to consider his argument within this realm risks reestablishing the dominance of the very “mental space” that Lefebvre is attempting to transcend. Still, if we are to understand his ideas rather than hold to them in a vulgar act of politics then we must risk what might be considered a move toward idealism.

[Read More at Thought Catalog]

Diet Soap Podcast #134: Understanding the Stanley Parable

Diet Soap Podcast #134: Understanding The Stanley Parable

Totality as a Goal

Radiohead’s 1995 hit Fake Plastic Trees is a song about longing after a reality that has already disappeared.

She looks like the real thing
She tastes like the real thing
My fake plastic love
But I can’t help the feeling
I could blow through the ceiling
If I just turn and run

Now we live in a world where these lines about “the real thing” evoke an advertisement for a soda pop much more than they evoke thoughts about philosophy. In 1969 the Coca-Cola corporation replaced its “Things Go Better With Coke” campaign with the slogan “It’s the Real Thing,” and since then the real thing has been associated with soda pop. In a way reality was replaced by sugar water.

This is the dilemma that we have. How can we create a harmonic, balanced, and real society now that reality has disappeared and been replaced with Coke?

Maybe we should take a look at what we’re after. What is the real thing? I’d like to suggest that it is a Totality or the idea of a natural social world. Finding the real thing, our true selves, isn’t a matter of just looking, but also means doing some rearranging. To find the Totality we have to put everything in its right place including ourselves and each other. It’s a matter of shifting where we stand and how we act towards one another, because we ourselves are already merely the result of the social order. The philosopher Aristotle said something like this when he argued that the city-state is naturally prior to the individuals in it, because individuals cannot perform their natural functions apart from the city-state, since individuals are not self-sufficient.

What we are after is a harmonic totality, a way to be in the right place, but we’ve got a problem.

Totality as a Problem

How do we know that we’re not already in the right Totality, or, to put it another way, that Coke isn’t the real thing? After all, Coke is a commodity and in our society social relations are determined by relationships between commodities. How is it, if people or individuals really are created by their social relationships, that we might object to the commodity form or any other kind of social relationship? One answer is that maybe we don’t really object to the system or the Totality at all? That it really is impossible to object. After all, if we are only the result of our social relationships then any objections we find ourselves making would actually just be a part of the social Totality.

Another way of putting this is that we are, ourselves, just expressions of the social Totality. We’re like characters in a movie or a video game. We are the Fake Plastic Trees in the Radiohead song.

Diet Soap Podcast #129: How to Understand Portal 2

There is no guest this week, but rather this week’s episode is a sound collage that aims at understanding the video game Portal 2. After talking with my son Ben, after I tried to convince him that Portal 2 is best understood as a Symptom of the Late Capitalist crisis we’re in, I edited this together. Here I make the case that the video game was best understood if seen through the lens of the Lacanian philosophy of Slavoj Zizek.

It’s Wednesday, December 28th, 2011, and this will be the last Diet Soap podcast before the new year. I want to thank everyone who has been contacting me about the podcast through Facebook, and I want to mention that somebody asked me a very good question about the difference between social democracy and state socialism, but I lost track of the Facebook message. Could you resend that? Also I want to encourage everyone to get ahold of my novella “Wave of Mutilation” through Amazon, and also point that you’ll hear an audio clip from that book at the end of this episode.

I also want to mention that a new collection of essays is up on Thought Catalog on the subject of Enjoyment. In fact Thought Catalog published letters I wrote to the Rhetor and playful philosopher Daniel Coffeen, and Mister Coffeen will be the first guest in the New Year. And Diet Soap will be back to a regular weekly schedule in 2012.

Diet Soap Podcast #129: How to Understand Portal 2

Diet Soap Podcast #128: An Unidentified Reality?

This is a conversation with the mystic, film critic, and existential detective Jason Horsley on the subject of UFOs. Horsley and I had been unfruitfully arguing on an abstract level for about twenty minutes when I decided to shift ground and talk in concrete terms about the phenomena. So the conversation you’ll hear in this episode starts with this shift to the concrete or mundane, and I want to point out that I am a skeptic of the UFO phenomena. That is, I don’t believe any of the literature or explanations for the phenomena. That said I find the subject endlessly fascinating. As a science fiction nerd, a surrealist wannabe, and a the kind of oddball who likes to puzzle over the metaphysical and ontological riddles that seem so prominent in this Late Capitalist age, the UFO subject is pleasing to me.

By the way, it’s Friday, December 9th, 2011, and I’m Douglas Lain the host of this podcast. You might have noticed that podcast has slipped into an irregular schedule. I’ve been working two jobs for the past two months and have found keeping up with interviews and editing to be pretty much impossible. However, starting next week I’ll only be working one job (as the seasonal job ends) and I should be able to get back on schedule. I have some big plans for 2012, which as you all know will be the last year of history, and the podcast is a big part of those plans.

I also want to point out that my latest short story “Erasing the Concept of Sex from the Photobooth” is available in this month’s Interzone magazine. Interzone is England’s leading science fiction magazine and I’m glad to have my work appear there again. So if you’re in the UK you might look for the current issue at your local Newsstand, and I’ll provide an online link in the show notes for this episode. Also, everyone should consider purchasing my novella Wave of Mutilation. I’ll pick up providing audio excerpts to that in the next week probably, and I hope to start making the rounds on various podcasts and maybe even radio to promote the book. I’m proud of it and I want a lot of people to read it.

Diet Soap Podcast #128: An Unidentified Reality?