Summary: The guest this week is the cultural critic Mark Dery whose book I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts is currently out from the University of Minnesota Press and according to publisher's weekly the book demonstrates that Dery has a keen eye for absurdity, tragedy, and everything in between. This was a hour and half conversation about Late Capitalist Cultural Criticism and so this week we'll just hear Dery explain what it means to be a cultural critic and what it means specifically to be such a critic in the internet age. I want to than Jonathan Y for donating to the podcast. His copy of my novella Wave of Mutilation will be in the mail very soon, along with a few other copies that I still need to send. I also want to thank everyone who has been regularly donating to the podcast as subscribers. Subscribers to the podcast can also participate in the Diet Soap Philosophy Workshop, although one can subscribe and choose not to join the workshop, and a few do just that. If you'd like to contribute you'll find the donate and subscribe buttons at dietsoap.podomatic.com or at douglaslain.com. Donors and subscribers are entitled to a copy of my latest book Wave of Mutilation or my surrealist memoir Pick Your Battle. Right now there are seven copies left of the novella. As always you can connect with me through my website, send an email to douglain at gmail, find me on Facebook, follow me on twitter, plus me on google, link to me through LinkedIn, or just shout my name from the rooftops. The music in and sound clips in this episode includes Ensign in Red singing Catch the Enterprise, the Vitamin String Quartet's cover of Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, and Marcel Duchamp's pointing to the difference between aesthetics and taste. Right now you're listening to the Sleeping Bear String quartet covering Sweet Dreams are Made of This by the Eurythmics. --- Unrelated Essay: Star Trek as The Sign It is tempting to set about deconstructing the series, to take it apart and examine each piece of it using various theoretical critical tools that we might have at our disposal (for instance we might turn to Freud or Marx and apply their thought to any given episode or film in the franchise) the better approach is a more passive or receptive approach. Rather than impose various ideas onto Kirk or Picard, rather than place a grid over the Enterprise or on Vulcan in order to dissect the program, we should instead turn to the program itself and simply observe what we find there without the hope that any true understanding will be immediately revealed, but rather just so that we can see what the phenomena of Star Trek is and what happens on the show. Yesterday I suggested that we could be assured that it was Star Trek and not Doctor Who that was the true television show. I said that Star Trek unfolded through history and ultimately divulged real understanding, but I gave no real basis for this assertion other than a circular argument about how Spock never had to borrow Doctor Who’s TARDIS and could time travel on his own. The truth is, however, is that Star Trek is merely another television show like all the others. It came onto the scene, appearing on our TV sets for the first time on September 8th, 1966. Still, this observation is significant in itself and maybe gets us closer to Understanding. If Star Trek was a television show, that means it was made up of images and sounds that presented themselves to a television audience. It appeared as a television spectacle in a culture wherein these spectacles were common. Star Trek appeared, as the philosopher Rick Roderick once said, inside a culture based on spectacle and images. “And a culture based on spectacle and images has a peculiar non-systematic character. It’s like the Fall TV schedule. All you really know about it, right, is that it is going to appear on a kind of grid. But culture in general, we are not even sure about the grid let alone, you know, which dumb (continued)
