Outsider Theory is an interview-based podcast exploring the mutations of theories outside of the authorized spaces of intellectual life as well as theories of that ever-alluring figure, the outsider, and related subjects.
Site
RSS
Apple
Recent rankings
Latest chart positions across Apple Podcasts and Spotify rankings.
Shared links between episodes and podcasts
Links found in episode descriptions and other podcasts that share them.
Lockdown diaries became a literary fad in 2020, but few if any were memorable. What if the real literature of lockdown was written over a century ago? This is the hypothesis behind "The Machine Book of Weird," an anthology of fiction from the late 19th and early 20th century that explores isolation, domestic confinement, and the uncanniness of home. Publisher Tim Abrahams joins me to discuss this project, plus Freud, Mark Fisher, and more.
You can donate to the project's Kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mbow/machine-book-of-weird
Disabling Medicine: Daniel Hadas with Medical Nemesis
Friday, April 14, 2023 β’ Duration 01:20:46
In this special episode, guest host Daniel Hadas interviews Medical Nemesis on covid, Illich, industrialized medicine and thought, and more.
https://twitter.com/DanielHadas2
https://twitter.com/Medical_Nemesis
https://medicalnemesis.substack.com/
Theorizing the Culture War with Michael Cuenco
Monday, April 25, 2022 β’ Duration 01:50:56
Writer and policy researcher Michael Cuenco joins me to discuss his recent American Affairs essay "'Victory is not Possible': a Theory of the Culture War," and two related essays on post-material politics and post-literate epistemology:
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/02/victory-is-not-possible-a-theory-of-the-culture-war/
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/05/immigration-and-citizenship-the-canadian-model-and-the-american-dream/
https://palladiummag.com/2021/04/17/americas-new-post-literate-epistemology/
Subversive Mobility vs Academic Orthodoxy with Jacob Shell
Monday, April 4, 2022 β’ Duration 02:19:29
Jacob Shell is Associate Professor of Geography at Temple University and the author of Giants of the Monsoon Forest: Living and Working with Elephants (2019) and Transportation and Revolt: Pigeons, Mules, Canals, and the Vanishing Geographies of Subversive Mobility (2015). He joins me to share his insights into the Canadian trucker convoy, the congealment of radical theories into stale academic orthodoxies and establishment aplogias, the blind spots of environmentalism, plus Ivan Illich, de-growth, elephants, and more.
https://liberalarts.temple.edu/academics/faculty/shell-jacob
https://twitter.com/JacobAShell
A Critique of "The Dawn of Everything" with Sam Biagetti
Monday, March 21, 2022 β’ Duration 03:03:55
Sam Biagetti of Historiansplaining podcast joins me to discuss what's good, what's bad, and what's ugly in David Graber and David Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything." We begin with an appreciative account of their dismantling of deterministic accounts of human social evolution, and then turn to a critical assessment of their theoretical assumption, their peculiar revisionist account of the Enlightenment, and their undervaluing of myth, ritual, and transcendence.
The Dawn of Everything: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything
Listen to and support Historiansplaining here: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5530632
Sam's cross-post of this episode has a useful list of other sources discussed: https://www.patreon.com/posts/dissecting-dawn-63996926
The Invention of Symbology; or, Dan Brown, Part 2 (Angels and Demons & The Da Vinci Code) with Pseud Dionysius MPH
Monday, February 28, 2022 β’ Duration 03:06:14
With the 2001 publication of Angels and Demons, Dan Brown shifted away from his early focus on the US security state and its post-Cold War identity crisis and introduced a new protagonist: Harvard professor of "Religious Symbology" Robert Langdon. This improbable hero's first two adventures transport him to the Old World and entangle him with a secretive institution far more ancient than the American deep state: the Roman Catholic Church. Curiously, the rise of Langdon signals Brown's turn away from the national security preoccupations of his early writingΒ just as the 9/11 era brought the challenges facing the US state to the center of most people's attention. Despite its apparently obscure subject matter, 2003's The Da Vinci Code became a sensational hit β one of the bestselling novels of all time β and turned Brown's fictional avatar Langdon into a household name worldwide. Pseud Dionysius MPH joins me once again to try to make sense of Brown's success at forging a new, global anti-postmodern mythology just as the "end of history" consensus of the 1990s was beginning to fracture.
The Road to Wigan Pier with Angela Nagle
Monday, February 14, 2022 β’ Duration 01:45:30
George Orwell's "The Road to Wigan Pier" begins as a report on life in the depressed coal and industrial region of Northern England and expands into an ambivalent critique of socialism and progress. It's a book that belongs to its era β which saw the Great Depression, the peak of industrialism in the capitalist core countries, the rise of both communist and fascist challenges to the interwar liberal order βΒ but also speaks in interesting ways to ours. Angela Nagle returns to Outsider Theory for an appreciative discussion of Orwell's book and its relationship to her longstanding interests.
Follow Angela's Substack: https://angelanagle.substack.com/
HR-Karenism and its Enemies with Malcolm Kyeyune
Sunday, February 6, 2022 β’ Duration 02:31:16
Malcolm Kyeyune (@tinkzorg) joins me to map out the contours of class conflict today. Beginning with a discussion of the Canadian trucker convoy and other recent challenges to biomedical authoritarianism, we explore the managerial class's demand for ever-expanding intermediation (diversity consultants, localized public health bureaucracy, etc) in response to the spectral threats it confronts, from "fascism" to "misinformation." We also examine elite overproduction theory, the crisis of meritocratic ideology, the questionable prospects of the populist right, and much more.
Romancing the Deep State; or, Dan Brown, Part 1 (Origins) with Pseud Dionysius MPH
Tuesday, January 18, 2022 β’ Duration 02:14:00
Dan Brown is one of the best selling authors of all time; just fifteen years ago, "The Da Vinci Code" was a ubiquitous document of global popular culture. Yet Brown, now immensely wealthy from his novelistic success, is oddly neglected today. Pseud Dionysius MPH returns to the show to investigate the unlikely rise of Brown, his protagonist, Harvard Professor Robert Langdon, and the fictional discipline of "symbology" out of the demise of the cold war techno-thriller and the new threats of the information age. We explore Brown's two lesser known pre-Langdon novels, Digital Fortress and Deception Point, which despite being "bad" by most standards, are surprisingly prescient works that anticipate everything from Wikileaks to privatized space travel. We consider Brown's personal origins as a failson of the New England WASP elite who ultimately cashed in on his insider status as a popularizing mythologist of American power. His two early novels, we argue, clue us into the concerns underlying all of his fiction: the transformation of the "Cathedral" institutions of elite education and the Deep State in response to the post-Cold War dispensation of globalized and digitalized capitalism and feminized labor and the emergent risks of information warfare, extremism, and terrorism.
This is the first in a multi-part series that will examine the arc of Dan Brown's career and its implications.
Hubbard, Burroughs, Foucault with Dr Benway
Friday, January 7, 2022 β’ Duration 01:41:48
Dr Benway returns to the show to discuss his extensive research on the vast oeuvre of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, as well as William S. Burroughs's prolonged engagement with Hubbard's doctrines and practices and their odd resonances with post-structuralist thought. We examine both the genealogical and analogical relations between Hubbard's thinking and ideas developed in more respectable realms of 20th century ideological life, including psychoanalysis and Foucauldian theories of technologies of the self and technologies of power.
David Wills's "Scientologist!": https://www.google.com/books/edition/Scientologist/k9JtnQEACAAJ?hl=en
https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/scientology-psychiatry
https://nonsite.org/the-first-privilege-walk/
Related Shows Based on Content Similarities
Discover shows related to Outsider Theory, based on actual content similarities. Explore podcasts with similar topics, themes, and formats, backed by real data.