WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 59:14 — 43.4MB)
Tim Brennan joined me in the WFHB studio when he was in Bloomington to deliver the lecture “Biopolitics: The Limits of the Liberal Imagination” as a guest of the Contemporary Africa Seminar Speaker Series.
The conversation ranged from the aforementioned biopolitics to seeing the state as a precious and necessary form of human freedom even as we challenge its current form as the handmaiden to corporate power. This state need not be the state.
Brennan says the vital Left of the early 20th century left the political field of play; perhaps driven away by the anti-communism of the US, but in retreat finding a new safe space in the academy. This allowed the Right to demonize the university and the humanities AND actually making use of the discourses of the Left which sprang out of Critical and Literary Theory.
This has led to a Left which undermines its own traditions by promoting a post-humanism that supports authoritarian structures and limiting critique through the project of digital humanities which sets aside human intellection in favor of computing power…with algorithms directing research in the place of the analogizing mind, confirming Freud’s insight in Civilization and Its Discontents, written in 1929:
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. … we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his God-like character. (trs, Peter Gay)
Our opening song is “Historicity” by jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer off the album Historicity, recorded in 2008. Iyer accompanies us throughout.
Our GUEST today is Timothy Brennan, Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities at the University of Minnesota and a professor in the departments of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, and English. He’s the author several books, among these are At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Harvard UP) and Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (Columbia UP). His most recent book is Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel and the Colonies, vol. 1 (Stanford UP). And he has just completed writing an intellectual biography of Edward Said.
RELATED
“The Digital-Humanities Bust” by Timothy Brennan (paywall)
“Left, Right, and Muddle” by Timothy Brennan (paywall)
“Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities” by Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, David Golumbia
Selling Democracy (Interchange with Guest Wendy Brown)
MUSIC – Vijay Iyer
“Historicity” (Historicity)
“Revolutions” (Reimagining)
“Telematic” (Simulated Progress – Fieldwork)
“Forgotten System” (Raw Materials – Iyer and Rudresh Mahanthappa)
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Wes Martin
Photo: Still from the 1927 movie Metropolis
