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.

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 35 minute mark.

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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]

There is no guest this week, but once again I return to the subject of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in preparation for the Diet Soap Philosophy Writer's Workshop this weekend. This time we cover Part IV: The Truth which Conscious Certainty of Self Realises by taking a look at Charlie Kaufman's first film Being John Malovich.

The Philosophy Writer's workshop has so far been a monthly online conversation done about Hegel's great book, and if you'd like to subscribe to the workshop you can find a link at dietsoap.podomatic.com. Subscribers to the workshop and donors to the podcast will receive a copy of my latest book while supplies last. Right now the book is the novella Wave of Mutilation (although copies of my radical memoir Pick Your Battle is also available.) Later this year my next novella, the Doom That Came to the LOLcats will be available, and who knows what will come after that. In any case I want to thank Reagan S and Tracy V for donating to the podcast in the last week and let you both know that your books are in envelopes and will be in the mail in tomorrow's mail.

For those of you who are going to join in next week for the philosophy writer's workshop, I look forward to discussing Hegel with you. And if you'd like to join in there is plenty of room in the workshop, so go ahead and subscribe before Sunday the 29th and I'll be sure to get in touch with you on how to participate.

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Excerpt from the Phenomenology:

With self-consciousness, then, we have now passed into the native land of truth, into that kingdom where it is at home. We have to see how the form or attitude of self-consciousness in the first instance appears. When we consider this new form and type of knowledge, the knowledge of self, in its relation to that which preceded, namely, the knowledge of an other, we find, indeed, that this latter has vanished, but that its moments have, at the same time, been preserved; and the loss consists in this, that those moments are here present as they are implicitly, as they are in themselves. The being which “meaning” dealt with, particularity and the universality of perception opposed to it, as also the empty, inner region of understanding – these are no longer present as substantial elements (Wesen), but as moments of self-consciousness, i.e. as abstractions or differences, which are, at the same time, of no account for consciousness itself, or are not differences at all, and are purely vanishing entities (Wesen).

The guest this week is Marxist youtube star and pianist Brendan Cooney and we discuss real abstractions, fetishes, the Greek economic crisis, Late Capitalism, and the superpowers of Karl Marx.

The podcast has been on a temporary hiatus as I've struggled to revise a novel as quickly as possible, but we return this week despite the fact that I haven't quite finished yet. I've been up to my eyeballs in dreams, Christopher Robin Milne, cats that turn into toys, and the strikes of May 1968, but the podcast continues.

I want to thank all of the subscribers to the podcast who are participating in the Diet Soap philosophy writers workshop and urge you to either subscribe or donate. I currently have 12 copies left of my book "Wave of Mutilation" and even more copies of my surrealist memoir on urban foraging entitled Pick Your Battle, and a subscribing or donating $6 or more entitles you to a copy of one of these books.

I should point out that this week marks the third year for the Diet Soap podcast. The very first episode was produced on April 16th, 2009. This is also the last week that Diet Soap will feature a Titanic Factoid. Sunday was the 100 year anniversary of the sinking and Miriam has decided to commemorate April 15th, 1912 with a sinking of the factoid. So, this week we say goodbye to the Titanic, but I look forward to seeing what Miriam comes up with next and she promises that she'll continue in some way or another.

My conversation with Brendan Cooney went on for a good while and wandered, so this may be a two parter. We'll see. I've currently got at least five weeks of interviews in the archive. So in coming weeks we'll hear conversations with Paul Shetler on surrealism, with KMO and Olga on Zombies, with Ross Wolfe on Taylorism or Fordism, with Jon Meade on the Production of Space, and with the bizarro writer Bradley Sands on why he's Sorry He Ruined Your Orgy.

I'm caught up in the last rewrite of my book "Billy Moon: 1968" which will be out from Tor Books next year, and did not get a chance to edit together an interview of my own, so this week Diet Soap has been replaced by a rerun from another program, the Science Fiction Interview show Hour 25. This is a conversation between Philip K. Dick and Mike Hodel which was recorded In 1977, just before the release of A Scanner Darkly. This interview is also available on youtube. For more information about Philip K. Dick check out

philipkdick.com

As to Hour 25, here's some information from Wikipedia:

Hour 25 was a radio program focusing on science fiction, fantasy, and science. It was broadcast on Pacifica radio station KPFK in Southern California from 1972 to 2000, and is now distributed over the Internet. It has featured numerous interviews with famous authors of science fiction and fantasy, in addition to luminaries of the scientific community. The program was originally hosted by Mike Hodel. Harlan Ellisonwas a regular host for a time in the mid-1980s, as well as J. Michael Straczynski. The show is now hosted by Warren James.
On the website, in addition to new programs, there is an extensive archive of older shows featuring interviews with popular authors, including Terry Pratchett, Larry Niven, Laurie R. King, Frank Kelly Freas, and Neil Gaiman.

This week instead of an interview on this or that facet of our Late Capitalist crisis you'll get the next lecture for the Diet Soap Philosophy Workshop on Hegel. This lecture takes the form of a conversation with my son Benjamin about Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as well as two films by the director David Fincher. We discuss "the Game" and "Fight Club" in an effort to understand SenseCertainty, Perception, and the force of the dialectic. Whether we arrive at self-consciousness by the end I can't say, however we do end up shooting ourselves in the face.

I want to thank all the current members of the Diet Soap Philosophy Writers Workshop as well as Terry Tapp who donated to the podcast. If you'd like to join next week's workshop, which so far is mostly just a two hour Talkshoe conversation on Hegel as well as membership to a secret Facebook Group, please become a subscriber. I have eight spaces open for paying members, and three spaces open if you feel you can't afford to pay but want to join in. Donations of $6 or more entitle you to a copy of my novella Wave of Mutilation (and I'll continue on reading that book on the podcast if anyone asks me to) and subscribers to the workshop will also receive a copy of that book while supplies last.

Next week I hope to be able to put together a podcast on Lefebvre and the Production of Space, however I am currently rewriting that novel for Tor that has been in the works since, hell, 1968 maybe? I promise to put something up next week, something other than another Rick Roderick lecture, and soon we'll be back to the regular flow.

This week's podcast is a ghostcast featuring Rick Roderick's 1990 lecture for the Teaching Company on Freud and Postmodern Culture. Rick Roderick was a philosophy professor who worked at Duke University and who came from Abilene, Texas. The son of a "con-man" and a beautician, Roderick was (according to Wikipedia) revered by many students for his socratic style of teaching combined with his brash and often humorous approach. He died too young in 2002.

From Roderick's Lecture:

Now, the only reason I am mentioning Freud at all in these last lectures is to remind us, and take us back for a moment to Kierkegaard and deepen that analysis, where I did mention despair, and used a kind of existential motif to turn it into a social one. Despair not as, sort of, an existential thing like a Bergman movie, “The Seventh Seal“, or something, but as a social malady that is not merely psychological. Many of you have had the experience, I am sure, of going to a therapist and hearing them describe the problems you have with your husband and how you should adjust, and you go “Geez, I don’t think it’s that, I think it’s really the whole situation, you know, the fact that he has all the money and my life is shit, and I think that’s the problem” – ah, we’ll cut that, anyway – “My life is a mess, and that’s the problem”. Well those objective problems were what I was trying to show despair to be, and not ones that can be fixed, as it were, by simply having someone say: “adjust”.
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Unrelated Blog Post from Tor.com

Time Travel in the Second Person: The Man Who Folded Himself

The most interesting and perhaps most overlooked move that David Gerrold makes in his fractal time travel book The Man Who Folded Himself is that he writes the whole story in the second person without alerting you, the reader, directly to this fact. You’re brought inside the book without really knowing it. The second most interesting fact about Gerrold’s 1971 Hugo nominated book is that the book has no protagonist. Instead of a protagonist, the reader is presented with a contradiction and asked—no, compelled—to identify with this empty place in the narrative. And the reader is coerced into position, made to stand in for the narrator and protagonist, with two simple sentences:

“In the box was a belt. And a manuscript.” — David Gerrold, The Man Who Folded Himself, p. 1

More at Tor.com

The guest this week is the Heterodox or Marxist Economist Alan Freeman. We talk about why gold is still relevant in this Late Capitalist moment even though we're off the gold standard. And we discuss gold's special relationship to money.

I want to thank Jen L for signing up for the Diet Soap Philosophy workshop this week, and her copy of my novella "Wave of Mutilation" will on its way in Thursdays mail. There are now nine slots still open for people who want to subscribe to Diet Soap Podcast philosophy workshop. And yes, we're reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, but it's not that bad. There are five more slots open for people who want to participate in the workshop but don't feel they are able to subscribe. One time donations to the podcast are also welcome and this is also a way to get a copy of my latest book.

I should also remind everyone to find me on Facebook, follow my tweets (my twitter handle is douglain), to look for my personal blog at douglaslain.com, and to read my blog posts and Tor.com, Symptomatic Redness, and at Thought Catalog. You can also email me through my personal website or send e-mail douglain at gmail dot com.

The music and sounds in this podcast included a clip from the original BBC miniseries the HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Neil Young's Heart of Gold, and Yello performing their 1986 hit Goldrush as well as Miriam with another Titanic factoid.
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And here's an unrelated blog post.

Althusser is known to be an anti-Hegelian, but what I suspect is that when Althusser rejects Hegel’s idealism he is also abandoning his own anti-humanism. That is, Althusser’s embrace of Lenin’s materialism and his rejection of Hegel’s Absolute spirit inadvertently resuscitates the very human subject Althusser wants to bury.

Here is what I think of as a revealing quote from Althusser’s 1971 essay Lenin before Hegel. Althusser points out:

Nature itself is not, in Hegel’s eyes, its own origin; it is itself the result of a process of alienation which does not begin with it: i.e. of a process whose origin is elsewhere – in Logic.
This is where the question becomes really fascinating. For it is clear that Lenin swept aside in one sentence the absurd idea that Nature was a product of the alienation of Logic, and yet he says that the Chapter on the Absolute Idea is quasi-materialist. Surprising.

What Althusser wants to deny Hegel, what he enlists Lenin’s help to deny here, is the human subject as a fixed essence. What Althusser wants to suggest instead is that human nature is materially determined by nature and that this nature can be known.
Lenin applies his materialist reading to this double thesis of Hegel’s. And that is why he is so fascinated by the Absolute Idea. He thus lays bare and refines this notion, too, retaining the Absolute, but rejecting the Idea.

This move to reject the idea in favor of the objective is perhaps the definitive mistake in Lenin and, by extension, in Althusser. What is at stake here is not the notion of a Spiritual substance but rather the very lack, the gap, that is required for self-consciousness. Althusser thinks that he can erase the human subject by denying this subject any substantial existence, but this move paradoxically gives the subject a substance back but denies it consciousness.

The fact is that only by accepting the Cartesian subject not as a coherent substantial subject but as a gap or determinative lack, can we retain both materialism and the historical subject.

The guest this week is professor David Blacker who returns for a second episode and we return to our discussion of debt servitude and his essay The Illegitimacy of Student Debt which is due out in the journal CULTURAL LOGIC. The essay will appear in their special issue on Marxism and Education this spring.

I want to thank Kurt O for donating and let him know that his copy of my novella Wave of Mutilation will be jetting his way in the next few days. There are now another ten slots still open for people who want to subscribe to Diet Soap Philosophy workshop. We're reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit but I promise it's fun. There are five additional slots open for people who want to participate in the workshop but don't feel they are able to subscribe. Donating or subscribing to the podcast is also a way to get a copy of my latest book.

I've got a lot in the Diet Soap Archive at the moment, including an old conversation with Jon Meade about the concept of the production of Space, the Marxist economist Alan Freeman, and a conversation with the anarchist Paul Shetler. I'm not sure just what I'll choose to run with next week, but I'm sure it will be interesting. Maybe I'll just bring Ben on and we'll talk about a painting.

The music and sounds in this podcast include a clip from the classic 1991 film by Richard Linklater "Slacker," the Statler Brothers 1969 hit Flowers on the Wall, a commercial from ITT Technical Institute circa 1986, Camille Saint-Saens Piano Concerto No. 2, a lecture on Lacan by professor Adrian Johnston, Slavoj Zizek talking about the reality of the virtual, and a commercial for the TED conference that tries to sell inventive Capitalism as revolution, but which I hope I managed to turn around on itself. Also Jacqueline Du Pre performing Saint-Saens Allegro Appassionato and Miriam with another Titanic factoid.
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The beginning of unrelated essay:

Understanding Hegel with Philip K. Dick on the Thirteenth Floor

Critics and academics often employ theories and philosophers in order to help them understand and dissect movies and books. If you’ve ever picked up a copy of an academic journal like Jump Cut what you undoubtedly found were essays written about movies like The Social Network or Avatar that approached these flicks as if these were deep mysteries that required the use of theories to unravel. I think the exact opposite is true. While I’m interested in philosophy, I find all the different theories out there somewhat difficult to get a firm grip on. Movies and novels, on the other hand, are easy to understand. So what I like to do is use pop cultural ephemera of all kinds as tools to help me try to understand philosophy. For example, I recently reread Philip K. Dick’s short story “The Electric Ant” and watched the movie The Thirteenth Floor with the hope that these could help me understand Hegel’s Introduction to his Phenomenology of Spirit.

I wasn’t disappointed.

Read More at Tor.com

The guest this week, David Blacker (the Author of Dying to Teach and Democratic Education stretched thin) discusses student loans and debt servitude as a symptom of Late Capitalism. David Blacker is a listener to the podcast, a participant in the Diet Soap Philosophy workshop, and a professional philosopher out of the University of Delaware, and I was glad to talk to him even though I'm a little intimidated to have him evaluating my performance as I tackle the project of trying to explain Hegel to myself (and everyone else involved).

I want to thank Kim H for joining the Philosophy Workshop and subscribing as a regular donor. I'm a bit behind in sending out copies of my book Wave of Mutilation. In fact I think Kim H, Jason C, Christian A, and John L are all still due copies. My apologies for the delay. Those are going out tomorrow. Also, I hope that this confession of a delay won't stop others from donating or, even better, signing up to participate in the Philosophy workshop by subscribing. And there are still a few slots open for people who would like to participate but can't afford to subscribe as well. In fact, in order to entice more people to subscribe I'm going to post a transcript of the lecture I gave for the first Philosopher Writer's Workshop in this week's show notes, and future workshop lectures will be presented here as well. (probably as audio collages)

The music in the episode includes Theodor Adorno's Works for a String Quartet, the Bee Gee's Staying Alive and Pink Floyd's the wall (edited together by the youtube star Wax Audio) the Boards of Canada Roygiv with Andrew Kliman, and a commercial for the Game of Life by Milton Bradley circa 1985 or so.

And here is an unrelated essay/lecture:

Philosophy Workshop Lecture: Hegel’s Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Bishop Berkeley, and Philip K. Dick’s Electric Ant

“The problem which Hegel sought to answer is the problem of man’s destiny, the problem of the meaning of his existence. It is a problem arising from the disintegration of Christian faith, as manifested in the French Revolution,” -Carl J. Friedrich, The Philosophy of Hegel

I recently wrote a blog post entitled “Star Trek and the Death of God” for a science fiction website and received word that the essay was too hot to handle and had to be rejected. The editor told me that “grand sweeping statements about religion that don’t apply across the board” weren’t really welcome at the website, and while I understood the logic I also was struck by the irony. It seemed to me that the editor was confirming my thesis, the idea that God was dead, by rejecting the writing in the way that she did. Only somebody who believes that God is dead would argue against my claim that God is dead based on an appeal to pluralism. That is, if the truth about God can’t be universalized then God is, ipso facto, dead. If God was alive then perhaps I ought to have been published and then burned at the stake?

I like to think that this observation that her rejection refuted itself isn’t merely a reflection of my own pettiness, but that maybe this it is a Hegelian observation. Hegel’s method seems to involve pointing to self-contradictions that are tucked away in arguments, and in his introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit he spends some time exposing the philosophers that preceded him (Descarte, Locke, Berkeley and Kant for instance) to what is unintended in their philosophy.

Hegel is notorious for addressing many different philosophers in his writings. His Phenomenology of Spirit is often spoken of as a kind of history of philosophy. Hegel encapsulates one philosophical position after another (without explicitly saying so) and then knocks each one aside, but what I want to do in my reading of Hegel is pretend that Hegel was talking to Philip K. Dick, or if not PKD then maybe Bishop Berkeley. I like these two philosophers because nobody takes them seriously. Berkeley, who really was a philosopher, concluded that the world outside the senses doesn’t exist and that everything is in God’s mind. How ridiculous is that? My hope is that by starting with the ridiculous I might free myself up to engage more fully with the ideas in Hegel.

So, let’s start with a little story that illustrates how Berkeley’s argument against matter might be more pervasive today than we think it is. A childhood friend of mine, a man named Gerald White who works as a film professor at the University of Alberta, made a mistake when he was first starting out teaching. He told his class that the only way we can know the world is empirically, and when one of his students objected he cut them short. One of his students tried to object by pointing out that there were two ways to know something. That we had both empirical knowledge and a priori knowledge, but at the time Jerry was having none of this. It was only later on, well after the class, that he called me up and asked me if he might’ve made a mistake.

Berkeley argued against this second kind of knowledge, against a priori knowledge, as something that could be taken as a real kind of knowledge.

But what is this a priori knowledge? It is often a tautology. An example would be the word Bachelor. A bachelor is an unmarried man and we don’t have to go out in the world to confirm this with our senses because being an unmarried man is simply what it means to be a bachelor. With the word bachelor we simply let X=X.

But what Berkeley points out is that there is no such thing as a bachelor as bachelor in the world. That is, we can never find a bachelor that isn’t contingently a bachelor. There is nothing intrinsic to any given bachelor that makes him a bachelor. He doesn’t partake of any formal substance that makes him a bachelor, but rather he just happens to meet the definition. We speak of him as such a thing. Berkeley says the same thing about apples. There is no apple that is what it is to be an apple, but just objects that appear as apples by exhibiting certain qualities: (redness, roundness, sweetness, etc…)

This is the set-up to Berkeley’s argument for immaterialism. Matter is another tautological a priori category, but with matter we have we have a special case.

Matter is the substance in every object–there is, in fact, an infinite number of qualities that can be attached to matter, and strangely also none of the qualities that we associate with matter really stick to it. For example, if we say matter is solid then we are denying the material nature of steam. Matter, according to Berkeley, is an empty concept. If never appears to us, it’s an abstraction that doesn’t do any work for us. It is an empty concept.

Now, when my friend Jerry said to his student that there was only one true knowledge and that the only true knowledge was empirical knowledge he was opening up a can of worms, maggots maybe, that will slowly eating away at the corpse of the material world. My friend didn’t know what he was saying. Berkeley, on the other hand, saw full well what the implications of his immaterialism were, and so he had to find something to prop up the half eaten corpse. In a world without matter it simply couldn’t be the case that God was dead. Bishop Berkeley ended up grasping after God (another empty or meaningless word) to fill the void that his argument against matter had created.

Hegel’s Introduction walks the circle that emerges from this argument from Berkley.
In the introduction we start by doubting sense certainty–we turn to the question of how it is that we come to know the world. That is, Hegel starts us off turning away from the objects of perception and to perception itself because we want to know what the best way to know something might be before we start making claims about what is.

“There might be various kinds of knowledge, among which one might be better adapted for the attainment of our purpose –the wrong choice is possible.”

Or so it seems. However, we quickly see that this attainment of the right way of knowing is impossible. Hegel has us think of knowledge as an instrument first and then as a medium, and neither approach helps us. If knowledge is an instrument it will act upon the object of knowledge and change it, and if it is a medium then we are always looking at knowledge rather than the actual thing in itself.

In Hegel’s introduction we arrive at Berkeley’s position right at the start.

Berkeley quote–”When you conceive knowledge of real qualities you do withal conceive something which you cannot conceive?” Translation: “When you think of the real qualities you’ve experienced do you also think of something that you can’t experience?”

In Berkeley’s dialogue when Philonous asks Hylas the above question he asks it rhetorically. He’s pointing to the absurdity of the materialist position. However, Hegel might answer Berkeley’s question in the affirmative, and Hegel would do this because he takes knowledge as its own object. What he is pointing out, or one simple way to understand what he is pointing out, is how knowledge itself appears to require an ontological ground if it is to be taken as the truth. Berkeley has to turn to God to ground his theory of immaterialism. Perception is the ground, and in order to avoid solipsism and the incoherence that would come along with it Berkeley had to suggest that these perceptions aren’t ours but belong to God. But why is this a necessary?

Hegel answers this question when he talks about science coming on the scene.
“Science cannot simply reject a form of knowledge which is not true, and treat this as a common view of things, and then assure us that it itself is an entirely different kind of knowledge. It would declare its force and value to lie in its bare existence, but untrue knowledge appeals likewise to the fact that it is, and assures us that to it science is nothing.”

If we have no recourse to the thing in itself then any damned illusion (a dream, optical trick, religious story, or plain lie) would have the same claim to truth as science. Berkeley needs God if he’s going to hold onto truth, or so it seems, but Hegel goes on–and this is the tricky part. In fact, I’ll step away from Hegel and talk about PKD’s story the Electric Ant.

In PKD’s story an android comes to know that he is not a real boy and attempts to free himself from his programming. He consults his computer and asks for instructions on tracking down the control mechanism inside him and the computer instructs him to open his chest and look for a punch card reader located above his artificial heart.

“This is BBB-307DR recontacting you in response to your query. The punch tape roll above your heart mechanism is not a programming turret, but is in fact a reality supply construct,” the computer tells the robot, and so the protagonist in PKD’s story is able to look at what it is that gives him reality or knowing, and he’s devastated by this because he realizes that everything he thinks he sees is really an image stored on a punch card.

“He thought, ‘If I control that, I control reality. My subjective reality…but that’s all there is. Objective reality is a synthetic construct, dealing with a hypothetical universalization of multitude of subjective realities.’” -PKD, the Electric Ant

We’ll see how this applies to Hegel and Berkeley. At this point in the Philip K Dick story we’ve arrived at Berkeley’s immaterialism and we think its solipsistic, after all those other subjectivities are synthetic and hypothetical, but, then we realize that the subjectivity of the robot is no more real than any of the others.

At the end of this PKD story, when the robot cuts the tape, the universe winks out. It’s a story told in the third person, so not just the robot’s subjective universe but the “true universe” beyond his perception evaporates…

Why should this be? Why should there be a third person perspective in a solipsistic story? Either there is a real world out there beyond our perception or the world is just perception
But Hegel says maybe not. In this introduction he doesn’t really say what is, he doesn’t claim that knowledge or perception is the basis of what is, nor does he explain how we might perceive the thing out there beyond knowledge. He just points out what happens when we take knowledge as its own object. We start to notice that this relationship between a subject and an object is built into the subject. Knowledge seems to require this split.

Hegel calls this realization despair. He also calls it a determinate nothing.
That is, on one side we have the magnetic tape (perception) and on the other side we have the world it produces. And the void, the nothingness, is create by this relationship. It is not that there is magnetic tape only because, after all, the magnetic tape appears in the subjective experience of the robot. And its not that there is no magnetic tape because, well there it is inside him.

Addendum on the Subject of The Thirteenth Floor:

Not a great film, but if watched against itself it is actually revealing. The movie provides a hint at the political implications of all Hegel’s consciousness stuff. It tells the story of a scientist who builds a reality simulation and then discovers that he is already in a reality simulation. He falls in love with a woman from the third level (the real). There are all sorts of interesting political metaphors in the movie. For instance, when the woman from the 3rd reality enters his simulation she takes over the consciousness of a checkout girl at the supermarket. Once she has a real consciousness she becomes rich and can stay in 4 stars hotels and play politics with major corporations.

The point is that the movie falls down when it reaches the 3rd level. Once the film reaches the real it fails. And I think the filmmakers ought to have read Hegel because if they had then they would’ve populated the third level with simulations who know that they are unreal rather than with yet another false paradise, or another beach beneath the street.

The guest this week is a regular. Dennis Perrin, author of Savage Mules and Mister Mike, returns to look back on the Late Capitalist moment of 2011, Walking like an Egyptian, and Occupy.

I want to thank Kwame A, and Christopher M for signing up to be regular subscriber/donors to the podcast and for signing up for the Diet Soap Philosophy Workshop. Next weekend at 130pm on Saturday the 25th I'll be hosting the first online workshop/lecture on Hegel's introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Right now there are eleven people subscribed to the workshop and it would be great to add a few more. People who sign up for the workshop will also receive a copy of my book Wave of Mutilation, and donors of 6 dollars in the US, or 15 out of country are also eligible for copies of that book of Pick Your Battle. Again, thanks to Kwame and Christopher and thanks to everyone who is listening.

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Here's an unrelated short essay:

Marxism and Gnosis

One problem for Marxism is knowledge and it is a problem that arises around any body of thought, description, or systemic critique of the world. In political terms the problem of knowledge can be expressed by the question "Who gets to be the one who knows?" Who gets to claim the possession of knowledge and what power is legitimated by the possession of this thing. If the knowledge isn't common knowledge the it can be used to justify the power of a few over the many. On the other hand, if only common knowledge is legitimate then critique must emerge spontaneously and all at once or not at all.

Zizek rejects Gnosis which he defines as a doctrine of the body rather than as a kind of real knowledge-- i.e the knowledge of the abstract.

"The most concise definition of Gnosticism is precisely that it is a kind of spiritualized materialism: its topic is not directly the higher, purely notional, reality, but a "higher" BODILY reality, a proto-reality of shadowy ghosts and undead entities…One is Tempted to Risk the hypothesis that it is precisely the psychoanalytic theory which was the first to touch on this key question: is not the Freudian eroticized body precisely the non-animalistic, non-biological body? Is not THIS (and not the animalistic) body the proper object of psychoanalysis? -Zizek, On Belief, pg 54-55

This is highly confusing unless one is willing to allow the confusion itself to stand in for the abstract, or the "Freudian eroticized body." And this is move to let confusion stand in for knowledge is obviously a mystification. Or, perhaps, the obviousness of the error is the mystification.

However, the ultimate lesson of cyberspace is an even more radical one: not only do we lose our immediate material body, but we learn that there never was such a body--our bodily self-experience was always already that of an imaginary constituted entity.- Ibid.

Again there is no guest this week, but this week instead of an interview I've edited together a conversation with my son Benjamin about a video game that illustrates our Late Capitalist dilemma. The game is called the Stanley Parable and the concept the game may illustrate is that of a Totality.

[Benjamin and I have been slogging our way through Karl Marx's bestseller Capital (Volume One) and this conversation seemed like a good way to supplement our reading.]

I didn't receive any donations or subscriptions to the Diet Soap Philosophy Workshop this week, but I have been reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in preparation for the first Workshop which will occur on Talkshoe on February 25th. I'm hoping that five more people will sign up between now and then, and there are currently three free slots open for people who can't afford to subscribe as well. Again, the Philosophy Workshop is a way to inspire yourself to write (and I'll critique submitted works) and it's the best way to support this podcast. Subscribers to the workshop will also receive a paperback copy of my novella Wave of Mutilation or, if you prefer, a copy of Pick Your Battle. Listeners who make one time donations of $6 domestic or $15 if you're overseas are also entitled to pick a book.

In preparation for producing this episode I wrote the following blog post/essay which I'll be cross-posting at the new blog Symptomatic Redness.

How to Understand a Totality?

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 fizzy sugar water?

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.

This week's podcast is a ghostcast featuring Rick Roderick's 1993 lecture for the Teaching Company on Jean Baudrillard's book "Fatal Strategies. For the Diet Soap podcast this represents a departure, because while Baudrillard and Guy Debord came out of the same milieu (both were influenced by Henri Lefebvre for example) Baudrillard came to believe that Late Capitalism had defeated history while Debord did not.

Thanks to Jason C, Benjamin B, Christian A, and David B for becoming regular subscribers to the Diet Soap podcast and signing up for the Diet Soap Philosophy Workshop. Using Talkshoe to host a monthly international conversation, the Diet Soap Philosophy workshop will include one 45 minute presentation/lecture monthly as well as a discussion wherein the lecture and submitted writings will be discussed.

Rick Roderick was a philosophy professor who worked at Duke University and who came from Abilene, Texas. The son of a "con-man" and a beautician, Roderick was (according to Wikipedia) revered by many students for a socratic style of teaching combined with a brash and often humorous approach. He died too young in 2002.

From Roderick's Lecture:

In the world of Baudrillard social relations have begun to disappear between humans because humans have begun to disappear. In fact Baudrillard thinks that reality itself is in the process of disappearing; what has been learned and understood under the name of “the real”...The self under siege in modernity has always presumed that there was a self to be under siege, but in the view of Baudrillard society has reached a point at which it has literally been overcome by its technology and the new and important issues aren’t about things like the non-believer or the non-offender, but about the non-person.

The guest this week is the Novelist and Playwright, Ken La Salle. La Salle's plays have been seen in theaters across the U.S., but in this episode we discuss a nonfiction book called "Climbing Maya." Ken's book is one of those strange philosophical memoirs, a genre I'm quite fond of, and in it Ken explores the question "What is success?" A particularly appropriate question in this Late Capitalist era.

When this interview was recorded Ken was shopping the book through his agent, but in the meantime he has found a publisher, and the book is due out from a house called Solstice Publishing. That seems like a success to me, but you have to be careful about these things.

I want to thank Andrew M, Jacob L, Trent W, Steven E, Ishmael B, and Chris A for becoming subscribers to the podcast and the new Diet Soap Philosophy workshop. That leaves 15 slots open for other people who might want to subscribe, and there are still 4 positions open for people who would like to join in but can't afford the monthly charge. Again, the new philosophy workshop will include a monthly Talkshoe conversation wherein I talk about my latest philosophical obsession as well as critiques of submitted writings.

Also, I want to thank Sarah C and John L who both made one time donations to the podcast in order to receive a copy of my novella Wave of Mutilation. Actually both subscribers and one time contributors to the podcast can take their pick between my novella Wave of Mutilation or my surrealist memoir Pick Your Battle, and copies of those books will be going out to this week's contributors in tomorrow's mail.

The music this week includes an instrumental version of Bobby McFerrin's Don't Worry Be Happy, and Louis Armstrong's Stardust. The voices talking over the music belonged to Woody Allen from his film Stardust Memories (the music and voiceover together were lifted wholesale from Allen's film) and the excerpt from an audio book on Aristotle and the Golden Mean, by Will Durant. Also included is another excerpt from my novella, Wave of Mutilation, and I'll repeat that signed editions of that book are available through the podcast.

The guest this week is C Derick Varn who returns to discuss his outsider's interest in the occult and the Platypus Affiliated Society. Varn is returning for the second half of what started out as a conversation about the difference between ontology and epistemology, and if you haven't heard that first half yet I do recommend checking it out. That was in episode 131.

I want to thank Andrew M for signing up to be a regular donor to the podcast. I've finally started the Philosophy Workshop and the first 20 people who subscribe by signing up to donate $10 or more on a monthly basis will be signed up for this combination between a philosophy lecture series and a writer's workshop. Using Talkshoe to host a monthly international conversation, the Diet Soap Philosophy workshop will include one 45 minute presentation/lecture monthly as well as a discussion wherein the lecture and monthly writings will be discussed. Subscribers who contribute writing will receive criticism and suggestions toward publication as well as a monthly one on one meeting with me so that we can discuss the submitted work. For the moment I'm limiting the workshop to 25 people. That is, there will be 20 spots for paid subscribers and 5 spots left open for those who want to participate but can't afford to donate regularly.

The music in this episode includes Bird Girl as performed by the band Circus Contraption, Etta James signature tune At Last and Elvis Costello's Stalin Malone. The voices you heard belonged to the postmodern Christian Peter Rollins, the synchromystic Jake Kotze, and Chris Mansour of the Platypus Society.

The guest this week is C Derick Varn. He is a blogger, a Facebook/social media leader, a poet, a university lecturer, and an American expatriate in South Korea. Our conversation lasted for over an hour and a half and touched on many subjects, and this is part one. This week we'll discuss ontology and epistemology and Zizek. The title of the episode is "How Not Is Can't Be."

Just to clarify at the outset: Ontology, according to Wikipedia is: "the philosophical study of the nature of being,existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences."

While Wikipedia says Epistemology is: "The branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge.[1][2] It addresses the questions:
▪ What is knowledge?
▪ How is knowledge acquired?
▪ To what extent is it possible for a given subject or entity to be known?
▪ How do we know what we know?"

Things are so confused in this Late Capitalist moment that I feel it's necessary to hash out these basic categories again, and again. And, apparently, I'm not alone. Be sure to listen for a clip of Louis CK explaining philosophy to his young daughter, and check out Varn's writings on his new blog Symptomatic Redness and his Facebook Group, which I like to call Marxoid Wank.

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