35: How to Think the Global with Mark Jarzombek

In today's episode, we engage in a far-ranging and open-ended discussion on the question of the global with my longtime collaborator Mark Jarzombek. Circulating around the question of the larger agenda of the global, discussion topics include modernity and its critiques, the nation-state and its limits, autobiography and its pitfalls, and the ways in which global thinking (dis)connects with deconstruction.

““Isn’t this desire for objectivity a modernist sentiment?” -VP

”Where does one enter, and where does one exit out of the modern?” -MJ”

Timestamp Outline

2:31 Magdalenian culture and civilization: the caves. The Gravettians.
4:09 A Global History of Architecture textbook + GAHTC: what is this global project?
6:50 Modernism, Postmodernism, and the critical question of the “after the modern”
11:23 Modernism as dualism: the good and the bad in equal doses, continuously, vs a Hegelian dialectic (destruction at the end)
13:30 “How to develop a critique that doesn’t entrap you into being complicit in one side of the game or the other side of the game?” -MJ
“Isn’t this desire for objectivity a modernist sentiment?” -VP
14:26 “Where does one enter, and where does one exit out of the modern?” -MJ
17:43 Ethics, rights, powers, and personal agency
19:00 Give money to Greenpeace but not on the boat: individual agency and the social matrix
21:06 “Ethical in a particular way,” haunting to one’s subject-position  
22:26 The shadowy terror of monotheism
23:35 The ‘Global’ as an ethics-opening term
25:04 Parallels and intersections of global histories with the craziness emerging with quantum theory in astrophysics
27:24 Uncertainty, possibility, and knowing (Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad)
28:04 What the people in Lascaux and Chauvet knew
28:14 “This sounds a little Hindu-ish to me, a little Vishnu,” and the conflicted presence of singular Judaism
34:36 Modernism and a vortex of non-dualities
36:42 Derrida as a “renegade rabbi”: reading from the margins
37:38 Connection between new materialism, French poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Jewish philosophy and Buddhist thinking?
39:06 No singular global can apply to everything
39:13 Biography as entry? Significance of personal epistemologies in critical thinking of the world.
43:58 “Vishnu-Modernism”
45:35 the Post-Holocaust vs the Post-Colonial Global
1:00:20 Limitations of Derrida’s critiques: Western critique, ethics and Buddha’s ear to the ground [parallel discussion in Episode 5]
1:03:19 “Other oralities need to be known.”: this is the global history project
1:05:33 “Writing on writing. Writing on writing on writing.” Iterations
1:07:37 Writing corrodes oral-communicative structures