On the Possibility of a Pop (or Pulp) Philosophy

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane unclear approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  Thanks very much for inviting me. It's my first time in Melbourne. I've been aware for many years that Melbourne is a hotbed of continental philosophy and especially Badiouanism or Badiouzianism or whatever it's called. I've had the occasion to experience the Australian style of philosophy a couple of times when…

• 00:14:30

  And I did, I was a programmer, I made websites, I did technology research. And eventually, after like seven years, I realised the real world was shit. And I thought, well, I'm going to have a go at doing philosophy again. So I applied for a PhD, I was lucky enough to get funding, I arrived in a university…

• 00:28:10

  It is actually, um, the whole thing, the process of making is actually something that I'm dedicated to. And throughout my whole life, in fact, I've done this. So, um, at school I made newsletters. Uh, when I was doing, um, A-levels at, like, 16 and 17, I produced a philosophy comic, which I distributed to everyone…

• 00:41:34

  It creates a new constituency. And that, in turn, brings new people who want to contribute. And that, I believe, is the key to it, uh, continuing to be something that, that people are interested in, um, is that it's actually created a new, a new audience. Um, additionally, I guess I would say about Collapse that there…

• 00:56:36

  And there's a brilliant blog by a guy called John Hilgart who talks about the four-colour process. He says it very well. Whereas contemporary reproductions of mid-century comic art are truly closed and flat, old comic books are visually leaky and deep. Four-colour dots perforate the flat surface of the universe…

• 01:10:30

  The factitious or artificial must be pushed to the point of the simulacrum, as Warhol does. The moment of Pop Art, he says. Then, Pop then reappears, when Deleuze, now entering into the assemblage with Guattari, announces in their Kafka book an escape for language, for music, for writing. What we call Pop, Pop Music…

• 01:24:29

  It may sometimes fall short of the judgments of the people who have been there and of rigour and of reason, but I think it has its own dynamic that doesn't need to bow to any of those things. And that's all. Ladies and gentlemen, I just want to make a brief and irritating comment about the announcement while Robin…

• 01:40:34

  which you you can't help but be on his side and be like yeah the idiocy is has this kind of pure positivity to it that's hard to refuse and it's hard to be on the side of the critic he's saying you know shut all this down and let's think about this sensibly you know um so i think this is sort of the same with that…