Pretty Heady Stuff

Henry Adam Svec is an author, musician and an assistant professor of communication arts at the University of Waterloo. He’s produced two extraordinary albums (http://www.folksingularity.com/download.html). His album The CFL Sessions (http://www.thecflsessions.ca/songs.html) is perhaps most relevant to this conversation. This album, along with a series of live shows that Svec did to support it, forms the basis of his new novel, Life is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs (https://invisiblepublishing.com/product/life-is-like-canadian-football/). The book, in fact, builds out from the stage banter that brought The CFL Sessions to life as a performance. I related most to the ways that Svec’s book can both blithely shrug off and bitterly contest the normative constraints of academia. As it stands, Svec doesn’t feel as though his most recent writing should be required to present a unified theory of authenticity, it’s main object of analysis. It’s enough for the book to simply “offer ideas” about it. In this sense, I think Svec’s work in many ways models how we can inject more joy, satire and self-reflexivity into scholarly writing. (Just a quick note: you might notice that there are some keyboard and mouse noises [clicking and scrolling, not squeaking] throughout the episode. My apologies if this is distracting!)

Judith Butler is an internationally recognized feminist philosopher whose work is incredibly difficult to summarize. The author of more than twenty books of groundbreaking critical theory, she has indelibly shaped our ability to understand the body politic, the politics of the body, and the unbelievable complexity of our relationships to one another. Because it's so challenging to adequately capture the extent of Butler’s influence, we focus on her most recent writing, in part because she admits that her thinking has significantly changed over the years. So, while she has been concerned with the question of grieving, and in particular, of the politics of grievability, for almost two decades, her most recent work is differently centered on the problem of how life in the now deeply nihilistic stages of neoliberal capitalism might be safeguarded against increasingly normalized destruction. In our conversation, Butler explores the implications of Arundhati Roy’s plea for the coronavirus pandemic to be seen as a portal. She stresses that the outcomes of the virus, the effects that it will have on society, are not yet decided. The way she puts it is that “the pandemic is a disease of the interconnected world;” but, seen from this perspective, the virus exposes the profound inequalities that characterize and corrupt our interconnection and interdependence. Rather than creating more alienation and apathy, Butler hopes that this might serve as the potential basis for a radically global politics of equality, but explains that this will likely only become possible if we can learn to conceptualize our interconnection in new ways, to actually perceive the relationship between untimely death, inequality and structures of oppression. I was especially struck, in this interview, by Butler’s explanation of the meaning of outrage. For her, outrage means that we refuse the intolerable nature of our circumstances, but it also means that, when we’re faced with unending violence, there is an “unrealism” or utopian power that emerges, making a seemingly impossible politics of nonviolence conceivable. If it is true that, as a form of life, human beings are intrinsically prone to aggression, we are nonetheless not doomed to violence. Violence is a “practice, an action, a way of living,” as Butler puts it. What it manifests, in her view, is not only the destruction of life and of social bonds, but also the authorizing and unleashing of violence, even when the goal of violent action is to end violence. One gets the sense that Butler knows that this is a difficult proposition when we consider a situation like the one faced by Palestinians, who live daily with the specter of death and destruction. But Butler speaks explicitly here to the ways that Israel’s invocation of a “non-reciprocal right” to self-defense “legitimates in advance” any and all of its campaigns of bombardment, its wars on Palestinian life. Self-defense, in this context, constitutes what she calls a “tactical… instrumentalization of a right,” one that strategically ignores the fact that Palestine does not, in fact, have a national self that can be defended under the dictates of international law. Its people cannot claim an equal right to self-defense when attacked. This produces a situation in which Israel, it’s increasingly clear, seeks what she terms the “genocidal... liquidation” of the Palestinian population. And the only check on the Israeli’s state’s drift toward greater and greater genocidal violence is, in her estimation, a fairly weak international community. And yet, she notes, the Palestinian people persist, they persist through daily practices of resistance: through humor, a specific sort of steadfastness, and through militant grieving and community support. They persist in spite of the inability of the international news media and the international community to register in vivid ways the reality of Palestinian lifeworlds.

Andreas Malm works in The Department of Human Geography at Lund University. He’s a scholar of human ecology and environmental history and the author of The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, How to Blow Up A Pipeline (www.versobooks.com/books/3665-how-…w-up-a-pipeline) and most recently White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism (www.versobooks.com/books/3812-whit…skin-black-fuel), which he co-authored with the Zetkin Collective. In our interview, Malm addresses some of his claims about the use of political counterviolence and the ability of social movements to regulate it. Malm is making the case for thinking more deeply about the almost inevitable radicalization of generations of young people that are waking up in a world that has been more or less abandoned to the interests of fossil capital. Given that the globe’s richest 1% bears the greatest responsibility for the climate crisis--because elites invest too much in fossil fuels and burn way too much of them--it makes sense, Malm suggests, to guide anger in the political direction of undoing the extraction and extortion, the violence created through fossil capitalism.

Nora Loreto is an author and political organizer, and a vital voice in podcasting within Canadian politics especially. Sandy and Nora Talk Politics (https://sandyandnora.com/) features conversations with co-host Sandy Hudson on a broad cross-section of contemporary issues. She tells me, in this interview, that the podcast started by recording her conversations with Sandy -- as a consequence of their authentically friendly delivery, the podcast boasts a wildly diverse audience in this sprawling and diffuse country. We discuss the podcast’s unique sense of humour and when that sense of humour comes in handy as a means of dealing with really hard subjects, but also how that approach can sometimes alienate audiences that seem to assume that using the language of humour to express anger, to fight grief, to cope with the anxieties of the contemporary moment, is an inappropriate mode of communication. Nora says that she still plans to defiantly use humour because it’s a source of the joy that enjoins us to keep going. Last October she released a book with Fernwood Publishing called Take Back the Fight: Organizing Feminism for the Digital Age (https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/take-back-the-fight). She talks about the book here as a kind of guide to adopting a productive position of feminist self-scrutiny at a time when, she argues, feminist politics needs to be reimagined as a means of meeting the overwhelming threats to collective flourishing that we, to varying degrees, face in the current moment. Feminism should become, again, more threatening, more of a direct confrontation with the current organization of society, in part by focusing on who materially possesses power and how to undermine it. I value the ways that her book engages with the question of leadership, in particular. She talks about how no single leader can correct what she terms political “atrophy,” that our faith in this privatized notion of leadership is a symptom of an atmosphere in which revolutionary struggles are seen as a thing of the past, a vestige of a less professional or less practical time. Against this, she proposes that we need the spaces, on the left, to practice collective accountability, to learn how to bring people together, how to wield the power of mass communication and how to communicate collective demands to the public in ways that might produce the conditions for practical change. What we do not need, she makes clear, are the virtual platforms we’ve become woefully dependent upon, where we’re connected but apart, where we’re inclined toward competitive individualism and knee-jerk hostility, where learning from the other and discovering the capacity to change one’s mind is a struggle. These private spaces of digital belonging should be contested too, from her perspective, and contested from the position of what we can learn from political struggles of the past.

Natasha Lennard is a columnist for The Intercept. She has also written for The Nation, The Guardian, Bookforum and the New York Times, among other venues. She currently teaches critical journalism at the New School for Social Research in New York. Her books include Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life (https://www.versobooks.com/books/2949-being-numerous), and a co-written anthology of interviews on the question of violence entitled Violence: Humans in Dark Times (http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100350210). In our interview she addresses how she views the role of journalism and critical writing, stressing that communication is “necessary but deeply insufficient” as a means of creating radical structural change. I appreciate the ways that she interrogates the seductive concept of a “marketplace of ideas” and the seemingly unassailable notion of “Free Speech.” Instead, she’s invested in ideas of accountability and a public sphere in which we are forced to reckon with how speech acts can “call into being” fascist realities. Rather than calling it “censorship,” Lennard sees a culture of accountability as a matter of intervening to insist on “less oppressive spaces” and emphasizes that a just world would “pivot the center” (in Patricia Hill Collins’ words) so that those who are directly affected by hateful material could lead the project of deplatforming fascism. While she acknowledges that Twitter taking away the means of creating what she calls “fascistic lifeworlds” is a progressive step, she also makes it clear that we should not be required to wait for “Silicon Valley Leviathans” to regulate hate, to slowly cave to leftist organizing and resistance. Being Numerous argues for the power of using the term “fascism” to name the authoritarian desires that drive white supremacy; suggesting that it’s useful as a means of capturing the violent nature of the forces we oppose, and for calling into being an anti-fascist response. In general, her work is clear about the tensions between materialist politics and social constructivism, drawing from Donna Haraway’s notion that the world is made, but not made up. She argues that the struggle of our times is to figure out how to create opposition both “all at once” and slowly and reflectively, as challenging as that inherently is. Rather than offering a simplistically hopeful framing, Lennard asks us to actually engage with the impressively fast rebuilding of a robust left-wing politics after decades of “ideological decimation.”

Daniel Lombroso is a director and journalist (http://www.daniellombroso.com/). His debut feature film, White Noise (https://www.theatlantic.com/white-noise-movie/), based on his four years of reporting inside the alt-right, premiered last year and was met with high praise from film critics. The film has also garnered a large academic audience: scholars of communication, sociology and political science especially regard it as a singular first-hand account of the shape and scale of the current networked nature of white nationalism. In this interview we talk about avoiding the simplistic “hot take” so that we can pose more critical questions about how complex our current global society has become, and the challenges we face. Our discussion looks at the ways that White Noise exposes how broken and narcissistic those in the alt-right movement actually are. White Noise is a film that documents the venal desire for influence among many of the movement’s most prominent figures. It also suggests that there is a corruptible drive for community that makes many in the United States and elsewhere vulnerable to narratives of white victimization and displacement. His film studies the ways that white supremacist influencers hack the algorithms that fuel follow culture and seek to, as he puts it, “turbo-charge” their vile racist rhetoric. It also, in subtle ways, unpacks the causal links between racist rhetoric and violence. In light of this fact, we discuss what it would mean, today, to police and regulate online discourse, given the fact that banning Trump and other hateful figures from social media has radically reduced their ability to foment violence. Lombroso's work opens onto an important conversation about how, in the context of a fractured and fractious political moment, we can learn to narrate the possibilities of multiethnic democracy and inject a more ethical radicalism into our political discussions.

Caroline Monnet is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist whose work experiments with many languages, art forms and genres to search out and dwell with the dualities, grey areas, and forms of hybridity that resonate with her own personal experience of inhabiting a self that exists across multiple languages and competing and conflicting cultural histories. Currently based in Montreal, she has exhibited across Canada and across the globe. Caroline's short film Mobilize (https://www.nfb.ca/film/mobilize/) takes you on a feverish, exhilarating journey from the Far North to the urban south, and her more recent video installation “Transatlantic” (https://www.schirn.de/en/magazine/context/2021/caroline_monnet/caroline_monnet_transatlantic/) takes us on an immersive and disruptive trip across the colonial route of the Atlantic ocean. She is currently in post-production on her first feature-length narrative film Bootlegger (https://microclimatfilms.com/en/films/bootlegger/) which won best screenplay at Cannes’ Cinefondation in 2017 and has just been picked up by an international distributor. The film is a community-oriented engagement with ideas of self-determination, finding a cohesive sense of self in a world of borders, and the sort of individual and collective resilience required to endure through trauma. In this interview she talks about how the pandemic has influenced the way she thinks about producing art and how returning to her original, more improvisational approach to creating allows her to produce with the greatest amount of self-assurance and freedom.

Anna Tsing is a professor of Anthropology at the University of California: Santa Cruz and the author of books that show us how a multitude of different forms of life are bound together in a web of complex and fragile interdependence. Her books include Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, The Mushroom at the End of the World and Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. In this episode, we discuss her most recent project--Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene--an online platform that is available at feralatlas.org. The site is intended as an interactive showcase for research into what Tsing and her co-editors Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou call “feral species and feral dynamics,” but it also uses multimedia techniques to tell “stories of environmental injustice, radical diversity and scientific surprise.” Released through the Digital Repository at Stanford University Press, Feral Atlas contains a dizzying array of multidisciplinary engagements with the disturbing realities of the Anthropocene. And despite including more than one hundred essays, analyses, and artworks by leading scientists and artists, it has not yet received the level of attention that it deserves, as a text that maps the enduring social and ecological effects of Invasion, Empire, Capital, and Acceleration. We discuss the risks and pleasures that come with using a digital medium to experiment with modes of storytelling that are capable of inspiring both the hope and the fear necessary to convince people how urgently we need to protect and nurture the last remaining spaces of interspecies flourishing, as we attempt to dismantle, in Tsing’s words, “the most harmful anthropogenic kinds of infrastructural effects.”

Holly Jean Buck has released two books on the subject of geoengineering. After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration(https://www.versobooks.com/books/3091-after-geoengineering) focuses on the overwhelming questions that humanity now has to face as we begin, finally, to confront the reality of the climate crisis. Has It Come to This?, co-edited with J.P. Sapinski and Andreas Malm, (https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/bucknell/has-it-come-to-this/9781978809352/) looks at the “promise and perils of geoengineering” from a wide array of theoretical perspectives. In this conversation we talk about some of the complex social effects of climate solutions, how to develop a better language for phasing out fossil fuels, how we need to combine emotional methods for moving people with rigorous and ambitious system-wide planning for a future in which we are dedicated, long-term, to drawing down carbon, and what it means to resign ourselves to the scientific certainty that we need to take seriously solutions that seemed, to this point, completely utopian so that we can make space for futures where collective survival is possible.

Kathi Weeks is an Associate Professor in the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Program at Duke University. Her book Constituting Feminist Subjects was reissued by Verso in 2018 (https://www.versobooks.com/books/2696-constituting-feminist-subjects); it looks again at feminist standpoint theory and tries to remove some of the imaginary blockages that have stymied the development of a socialist feminism. Her important book The Problem with Work (https://trinity.duke.edu/problem-work-feminism-marxism-antiwork-politics-and-postwork-imaginaries) is a panoramic study of the ways that we tend to think about and value work as a foundation not only for our livelihoods but also our lives. She advocates for a structural shift in the way we think about, commodify and relate to our labour. We talk in this conversation about the pragmatic value of utopian thinking--how it has become, in the years since The Problem With Work was published in 2011, notably less “embarrassing” to be utopian. Her goal is, in many ways, to engage with, as she puts it, the “confining structures” that police us in our homes and on the job, in our relationships to others. It is also her hope that we will be more open to the ways that even seemingly small, incremental changes can create the space necessary to sustain enduring social movements.