Oct 19 2023
The revelation to me in doing the research for this book was how important football was to ideas and ideals about masculinity: the football player as the ideal male. The violence of football, the collisions of football were important to that. You proved that you deserved to be considered a man by being able to take it. You could absorb punishment and not give up and not cry, just keep coming back for more. You could take it. That was the measure of a man.
Professor Emeritus and pro footballer Michael Oriard joins us to discuss his new book from University of North Carolina Press, Sanctioned Savagery: A History of Violence in American Football. "The Moment of Truth" with Jeff Dorchen follows the interview.
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Episode 1649
Greatest Hits: Feminism's Promise Is Not a Place Within Capitalism, It's a Place Beyond It
Oct 4 2023
Episode 1648
Greatest Hits: Indigenous Feminism + Buying & Selling Feminism / Sarah Manning & Andi Zeisler
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Oct 2 2023
Episode 1646
Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times / Samuel Moyn
Sep 29 2023
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Don’t believe anything? Why would you? You’re a cyborg. Donna Haraway, described at times as a feminist primatologist, now Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz, wrote a famous article about how our identities need no longer be slaves to history or past myth, rendering us freer than the old human species: cyborgs.
Although the idea offered a great deal of empowerment in the early-to-middle decades of postmodernity, she was obviously a premature ahistorian, as was the sloppy Francis Fukuyama. The difference with FF was that his declaration was triumphalist rather than empowering. It was meant to disempower the collapsed communist bloc through gloating, so that their betters might dictate the terms of their next incarnation. The gloating was unwarranted at best, at worst willfully ignorant.
There’s a lyric from the Beatles’ Abbey Road album, from a track about a scientist who is victimized by a serial killer: “Joan was quizzical, studied ‘pataphysical science in the home.” ‘Pataphysics, for those unaware, is the science of imaginary solutions. It was created by a unique artist, writer, and cycling enthusiast working in the late 19th Century, Alfred Jarry. The aesthetic descendant of Russian absurdists and pre-cursor to the DADAists and Surrealists, his most famous character is Pere Ubu, which inspired the name of the David Thomas post-punk band. His most famous play, Ubu Roi (King Ubu), sets the Ubu character’s grotesquely omnivorous id to navigating the palace intrigue and battlefield horror of a chaotic history play ending with Pere and Mere Ubu escaping in a ship that happens to pass near the kingdom where Prince Hamlet met his fate.
If any character from literature embodies the myriad flaws of the United States 45th and most impeached and indicted President, it is Pere Ubu. DADA and MAGA were sired by the same type of father: a bloviating, voluminous, avaricious, and rapacious thing never meant by the Heavens to reproduce, let alone breathe life into a movement.
If ‘pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, MAGAphysics is the cult of imaginary problems. This raises an obvious question: if DADA, operating according to ‘pataphysical laws, and MAGA, slobbering and spasming under the force of MAGAphysics, were to have a fight, who would win?
The first round begins as a... read more