Episode 33 - "Should I sit up straight?" Part 1

<p>Over the next two episodes, Steve and Christabel will serve up a mind-melting mixture of psychoanalysis, osteology, theory fiction, evolutionary biology, hypergeneology (and maybe even a little bit of philosophy) to answer whether we should sit up straight. The answer is a resounding NO: or at least, it is if you ask the hyperstitional entity Professor Daniel Charles Barker. Christabel spends this first instalment of this two-parter recounting the circumstances under which she fell down the rabbit hole that is Spinal Catastrophism, Thomas Moynihan’s tour de force of a treatise – or rather, a spoof of a treatise – about how orthograde posture is not only the human race’s greatest triumph, but also its terrible downfall; one that will eventually doom us all.</p><p>Christabel takes us on a whistle-stop tour through Nick Land’s accelerationism, Kant’s thoughts about orientation, Sadie Plant’s cyberfeminism, and Sándor Ferenczi’s work on the Freudian death drive. Steve explains parental brain depletion, ret-cons R2D2’s omniscience, and completely undermines the way our mothers taught us to tell right from left. Together, our hosts reveal buckets of arcane law spanning from the search for intelligent life, to football huddle tactics, to J.G. Ballard’s hypothesis that all beings harbour an innate desire to return to glorious radial symmetry.</p><p>Confused yet? Listeners, you don’t know that half of it!</p><p>Email us the impossible questions children ask you at philosophyplaydate@gmail.com</p><p>Find Steve at https://drstevecross.squarespace.com</p><p>Find Christabel at https://christabelcane.com/</p><p>Philosophy Playdate theme by Piers Cane</p>