Text of the Matter is back with episode 3.3, “Work in the Time of Cholera”. We dig into Marx’s analysis of the workday and the history of exploitation that surrounds it as a concept, as well as the altogether new forms of cooperation and social organization that are born out of industrial work and the combination of human with machine. From the exp…

In this episode of Text of the Matter we continue through Capital Vol I, Book 2, going into detail on how Marx conceives Capital as a thing different from money, commodities, and their circulation. Through human labor, technology, materials, spaced, etc. are transformed into some sellable; just as human labor itself becomes the proletariats only me…

Today we divert from Capital to set the stage for what was to come. The Communist Manifesto, unlike Marx's later work, was a polemic that contains many seeds of method that Marx would use later in his life. Coinciding with European revolution across the continent, we give a bit of historical context to expand the reasons that led to the writing of …

We begin our dive into Karl Marx's masterwork Capital I. In this episode we analyze his concepts of labor, commodities, fetishism, circulation, and hoarding as we work toward his central concept of Capital itself. Alongside our past work on dialectics, we may now elaborate and demonstrate what Marx means by dialectical materialism and how it is a u…

We begin our dive into Karl Marx's masterwork Capital I. In this episode we analyze his concepts of labor, commodities, fetishism, circulation, and hoarding as we work toward his central concept of Capital itself. Alongside our past work on dialectics, we may now elaborate and demonstrate what Marx means by dialectical materialism and how it is a u…

Today we continue our conversation on how the idealist dialectic transitions from a form of idealist rationalism to a materialist theory of history and economy. To understand Marx, it is important to grasp the important tool that generated his form of thinking, on contradiction, on labor, and on alienation. While this own't be the last you hear abo…

Today we begin a transition, from the deeply philosophical and idealist dialectics of W.F.Hegel to the historical, economic, and materialist dialectics of Karl Marx. To begin this transition, we must in someway produce a closure of our analysis of Hegel, however difficult that may be. To do so we will move through multiple concepts at the heart of …

When reading Hegel, we find points of both complex logical reasoning and a mad production of language and concepts. This dynamism between points of strange speculation and orgiastic representations of culture as a whole, creates two Hegels that are often difficult to reconcile. The work of Robert Brandom attempts to remove the wild layer of idealiz…

Text of the Matter begins a series explaining and investigating the concept of problematics and what it means in relation to politics, aesthetics, and thinking. This series will closely follow Misha's writings in his papers "One or Several Materialisms" and "Problematic Matters".

In a new series for Text of the Matter, Egon takes a look at Hegel's philosophy through the writings of "philosophical entertainer" Alan Watts, analyzing how the two strangely overlap and using Watt's thinking on nonduality to expand our thinking about the dialectic.

We return to Hegel confronting Hegel's unique perspective on freedom and its entanglement with processes of recognition and self-consciousness. We not only review his famous section on Lordship and Bondage (the master-slave dialectic), but also contextualize it in terms of his reading of the form of consciousness contemporary to him (modernity). In…

This week we confront the master of dialectics, Hegel, through one of his seminal works, Phenomenology of the Spirit. We begin with his famous prologue, which upends the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena for the concept of a human subject and culture in constant movement and transformation. What is the mechanism of this transformati…

In our last episode on Kant we engage with a critical question, in what way does Kant's philosophy precipitate the State? Through this question we are able to engage two of the most untimely (become timely) philosophers of the 20th century, Gilles Deleuze and Theodor Adorno. We engage with the nature of doubling that still confounds thinkers to thi…

Virtual Matter is A New Brand's second podcast series. Where Text of the Matter will look at written works, philosophical concepts, and how they function within society; Virtual Matter will take up media in all its forms--Sports, Film, Literature, Music, and today Video Games. In our first episode we interview an incisive editorialist of contempora…

In our second episode of the 'Dialectics Reader' Egon and Misha dive into the German revival of the dialectic, from its Aristotelian and Scholastic (via Islamic) interpretation. We begin with the major concepts and works of the thinkers that follow Kant's Transcendental Dialectic--Fichte and his idea of Absolute Ego, Schelling and his naturalist cr…

Have you ever wondered what the hell is a dialectic? We have and we study this crap. So often we see it used as a label but with no attempt at engaging with the actual transformative process it represents. Join us to learn a bit about where the word comes from, how cultures throughout the globe and history have utilized its basic premise, and final…

Critical Conversations is an exercise in applied philosophy, hosts Misha Duluoz and Egon Schiele tackle crypto currencies, their political ramifications, and a broader inspection of how we ascribe value and what worth this value actually brings. NFTs, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the Doge all get dissected under our microscope.…

In episode 2 of Text of the Matter, Egon and Misha (and Doug the star of Doug) get into the Transcendental Analytic, Kant's system for describing the rules, behaviors, and functions of the categories and judgments we covered in episode 1.1. Follow us into some of the most exciting and complex concepts within Critique of Pure Reason, such as his not…

Did Immanuel Kant create his table of categories just because he thought his book would sell better with pictures? And what does it all mean anyway? A supplemental episode discussing Kant's categories and how they function in his epistemology, we answer these questions and more.

WE GOT DIAMOND HANDS! 💎🙌From time to time, we'll deviate from our curriculum to address current topics that deal in Critical Theory or practical philosophy. Today, we wanted to discuss what's going on with the GameStop stock and how it can unite capitalists, Occupy Wall Street, and how to make sense of that praxis. (It's complicated). Let's talk ST…

For our first episode, we're digging in to Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The first of four part series, we introduce Kant and his epistemology; dealing with a priori synthetic knowledge (and if it is possible) and the importance of the faculty of imagination.