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 #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 #127: Jung and Lost
The guest this week is the professor and philosopher Ted Friedman, and Ted and I discussed the television program Lost and the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Friedman recently wrote an essay called Jung and Lost for the online journal Flow, and I was glad to discuss the strange network of relations that constituted JJ Abrams hit television program.
Speaking of being Lost, things are looking pretty grim in this Late Capitalist moment. I think we can finally put the idea that some sort of economic recovery is in the offing to bed now. Instead we should buckle our seat belts and prepare for another dip. Chinese manufacturing is slowing down and Germany’s bonds are apparently losing their value. Europe is teetering. It may have already fallen and just not hit the ground yet. China, the lender of choice, may be finding that its pockets are empty. The only question is this: Now or later? Shall we have our full fledged crisis now, or later?
Forces working for a new economy, a new society, while not exactly strong are at least present. The Egyptian and Tunisian revolution has come to the West and gone back to Egypt again. In Cairo people are in the streets and facing military repression: the people face down tear gas attacks, rubber bullets, billy clubs, and blood runs in the streets. Still the people of Egypt keep going back to the streets, now matter what. While in Lisbon Portugal the workers or on strike today, and the occupations, protests, marches, and other forms of resistance keep on plodding on all around the world.
It’s a scary moment. An exciting moment. We live in interesting times.
I want to thank everyone for listening to this podcast and communicating with me on Facebook, on twitter, and through my blog that’s douglaslain.com. Also I want to encourage everyone who is listening to grab a copy of my newest book “Wave of Mutilation.” I’m still very proud of this little novella and I think it has something to offer people right now. The book speaks to what it means to see the world fall apart, and how decomposition and destruction can serve the very story or system that we’re struggling to transcend. It’s also a fun little jape. A recent critic at SfSite.com said of the book: “Those who like to be at the forefront of what’s truly unique about the field of science fiction writing will want to grab this book.”
