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/147/ The Past Doesn't Go Away ft. Benjamin Moser (Patreon)

Published:
2020-09-15 06:00:02
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

On modernism and its end. 

We're joined by 2020 Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin Moser to discuss the tensions between hating your national culture and wanting to leave it behind, and the effacement of national culture by postmodern homogenisation.

We talk about his biography of Susan Sontag, plus a range of other questions: Brazil, USA, literature, architecture, sex, imperialism, Freud, the image and representation, and contemporary wokeness.

Moser's Books:

Sontag: Her Life and Work

Autoimperialismo

Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

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Comments

Sam

I think “social media” - that is the democratization of media production - might one day be considered a profoundly dangerous and misguided idea, similar to how we currently think about eugenics. The problem is that by democratizing media, we’ve inadvertently begun to democratize reality. Fragmented realities are being constructed and maintained through the images and information consumed through social media platforms. The George Floyd protests were the first of what I suspect will be a series of increasingly destabilizing “movements” fueled by social media. It took WWII for the world to repudiate eugenics, and I think it’s possible that a social media-fomented conflict might one day result in a similar repudiation of democratized media.

Daniel L

Excellent on Brazil. 2 things: Moser was definitely right about Brazil having a popular culture that few countries can boast. I disagreed re Brasilia though, it seems to me it was set up with quite utopian social justice ideals: the housing blocks mentioned were originally planned to house cleaners, public servants, shop keepers etc all in the same block. (See James Houston's book on Brasilia, The Modernist City).