Pretty Heady Stuff

Melanie Yazzie is a political organizer, a vocally anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist thinker, and an Indigenous revolutionary. She currently works as an assistant professor in the Departments of Native American Studies and American Studies at the University of New Mexico (https://nas.unm.edu/people/faculty/me...) and also organizes with The Red Nation, an indigenous-led leftist organization committed to immediate and material decolonization (https://therednation.org/). She is the lead editor of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society and has co-written two incredibly important books, The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth and Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation. We talk about those texts here, and about some of Dr. Yazzie’s forthcoming book projects. Yazzie’s work decrypts and diagnoses the individualism that characterizes liberal politics. And she is, as she explains here, understandably frustrated about the lack of progress that has been made on dealing with the liberal takeover of radical politics, in part via the reassuring language of “reconciliation.” In relation to this problem, Yazzie talks about the palpable “confusion” and “alienation” that exists among white settlers who participate in solidarity protests alongside Indigenous peoples. What she says we tend to overlook, though, is that this alienation is a defining feature of capitalism, and that the desire to be close to and internalize the type of connection and feeling of interdependency that Indigenous peoples feel toward the land, even it comes from a sincere place, is a deeply messy, difficult and unsettling tendency. The rise in “settler extremism” is, in her words, a “direct response to the existential threat that” even a change in the “symbolic order” represents. And so, for this reason, she reflects on how, as an educator, she has seen a “full scale assault on education” and why it might make sense that "the realm of ideas and the realm of intellectual production is” a “battleground… right now politically.”

Dr. Rupa Marya and Raj Patel are the authors of a brilliant new book entitled Inflamed: Deep Medicine and The Anatomy of Injustice (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602529/inflamed). Dr. Rupa Marya is a specialist in internal medicine. Her research looks at the ways that social structures predispose certain groups to health or illness. And while Rupa is central to a number of revolutionary health initiatives, a few I want to make sure I mention are her work on the Justice Study–a national research effort to examine the links between police violence and health outcomes in black, brown and indigenous communities–and her work on the board of Seeding Sovereignty, an international group that promotes Indigenous autonomy in response to climate change. Raj Patel is an award-winning author and film-maker, and a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. He has worked for the World Bank and the WTO, and he’s also participated in global protests against both of these institutions. He’s served as a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and published on an extraordinary array of things in a variety of different fields. He’s written for The Guardian, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Times of India, among many others. His first book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, made a big impact on me when I was a doctoral researcher. His second, The Value of Nothing, was a New York Times and international best-seller. I speak with them about our current moment, as another year begins, as the Omicron variant of COVID-19 rips through beleaguered cities, as climate fires in Colorado destroy almost a thousand homes (despite there still being snow on the ground), and as we somehow still see new year’s resolutions being discussed, as they are every year without fail–even in spite of the pandemic. New year’s, though, as Antonio Gramsci wrote, is less about renewal and more about “turn[ing] life and [the] human spirit into a commercial concern,” a sort of gut-check moment that is imagined to matter as a means of cultivating well-being. But it’s a means of cultivating well-being where we end up thinking, as Gramsci put it, “that between one year and the next there is a break, that a new history is beginning.” But the notion of a new year’s resolution seems nonsensical if we take seriously Marya and Patel’s sense that health, in its truest sense, is an “emergent phenomenon of systems interacting well with other systems.” Inflamed is a book that can help us locate the roots of disease outside of the body, in an economic system that generates obscene levels of toxicity and risk. The body, they point out, is really just doing what it is so incredibly efficient at: achieving equilibrium with its environment – the problem is that the environment has been so thoroughly damaged that the work of equilibrium has become corrosive to our bodies. Marya and Patel describe Inflamed as a “call to advance health” through “vivid and radical experimentation.” Their intervention privileges anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist and anti-white-supremacist perspectives. It acknowledges how important self-care can be in a profoundly exhausting system, but reinforces this idea that self-care is still totally inadequate when the problems we face are so clearly collective. For this reason, their notion of deep medicine is all about decentring the individual, learning ways of being a “plural being,” reengaging with what Rupa describes as “old new ways of being, knowing and learning” that encourage life-preserving networks of care. What would it mean, here, to reimagine water and land protection as acts of “care,” as acts of “love toward future generations” that also, crucially, upend the logic of private property?

Imre Szeman is University Research Chair of Environmental Communication and Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. He’s also co-founder of the Petrocultures Research Group, a member of the International Panel on Behavior Change, and a fellow of the Canadian International Council. Over the years, his writing has made an enormous impact on my thinking, so I was thrilled to hear that Imre had decided to enter politics in this year’s snap election. He explains in this interview that he made the decision to embrace the challenge of campaigning because he was offered a rare opportunity: to serve as the Green Party of Canada's senior Climate Critic and write radical, innovative climate policy, to test the “translatability” of political and ecological theory in ways that he hadn’t had a chance to before. I ask him about his sense that any radical plan for energy transition has to have a Plan B, a game plan that doesn’t just dismantle, but rebuilds by attending to the needs of communities. This is different from what Szeman calls the “trope of hope,” a tendency that actually, he feels, ignores the “reality on the ground.” And part of that reality, crucially, is the fact of communication itself, and Imre notes that it hasn’t gotten any easier to “communicate about the environment” in a way that “encourages action.” And while he admits he doesn’t have any easy answers, he really stresses that we need to ask questions about “what generates effective communication.” Like, for example, is referencing the colossal, hard-to-cognize problem of the environment a better bet than trying to appeal to small local collectivities? What does technology, or what Szeman calls “technologically-inflected revolutionary politics,” communicate, if anything, about action and the need for “revolutionary social change”? Does technology in any way actually convey the way we move politically into a post-fossil-fuel future? And if it doesn’t, is that a fatal flaw of technologically-inflected revolutionary politics? We spend a lot of time considering the questions, but we also talk about the thought experiments in Kim Stanley Robinson’s sprawling opus of a climate fiction novel The Ministry for the Future. Imre expresses his admiration for how Robinson deals directly with the messiness of the political, rather than moving past the conflicts and contradictions toward a too-convenient conclusion that replaces our chaotic system with a better one. While the mess “can be dispiriting to look at,” Szeman insists that this is what he wants to understand. And he’s not alone: as he notes, there has never been a moment where the impacts of colonialism were “more visible.” The environment is, in a sense, being invoked as a “new political actor,” or an active agent in “revolutionary politics.” This fact of a rising consciousness of a “larger network” or “system” that exceeds capitalism, that totally transcends human desires, means that it has never been clearer that the world is inescapably interconnected.

Jeff Diamanti is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities (Cultural Analysis & Philosophy) at the University of Amsterdam. At the beginning of this podcast’s run, I recorded an interview with him where I asked some very broad questions about the relationship between humanity and our natural environment. Here, I had the chance to sit down with his new book Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum (www.bloomsbury.com/ca/climate-and-…-9781350191839/) and ask more pointed questions about not only the claims of that book, but about the pivotal moment we are currently in, where, as he notes, we are still continually “inundated with stuff drawn from the earth but not encountered as such;” we still, especially in the affluent parts of the world, experience the luxury of that sort of comforting disconnection of commodity from supply chain. But we also now face the mounting pressure of environmental collapse and the knowledge that collapse will be the consequence of this disconnection, where even “postindustrial” or digital capitalism is “coded in a language of intangibility” but still relies wholly upon “dead matter” to drive the system. The pandemic has forced many more of us to attend to the material conditions that allow life to flourish. It matters that, in an instant, what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism” can be “punctured,” in Diamanti’s terms, and the possibility of system-wide change can feel within reach. Yet, at the same time, DIamanti admits that some important methods of engagement don’t automatically translate, for him, into a politics; yet, these modes of thinking and feeling are vital pedagogically for encouraging a connection to what he calls the “elemental alterity of the earth.” Part of this is based on an ethic of being a theorist who is also in and of the world, who makes a deliberate effort to “slow down” and experience the overwhelming forces around you. Who works to ensure that we’re allowing these encounters to inform our concepts, not the other way around. Anna Tsing’s “arts of noticing” are quite a bit different from the language of a “world to win” and are still potentially quite powerful, I think, for environmental communication (a problem I’ll take up in more detail in my conversation next week with Imre Szeman). The hope, nonetheless, is to devise stronger questions and to work beyond the “expected conclusions” provided by readymade frameworks that basically induce a sort of “epistemological illegibiilty” when it comes to energy markets and energy futures, which inevitably leads to the continuation of our current impasse: the paradox of knowing we are cooking the planet for future generations of people are nonhuman beings, but can’t imagine real ways of correcting our course. In this context of profound blockage, Jeff likes to believe an engagement with the elemental alterity of the earth can open things up, these “massive and beautiful forces” can provides a grounds for revolutionary imaginings that don’t prefigure the social or psychological configurations of an energy transition.

Matt Bors (https://thenib.com/author/matt-bors/) started drawing editorial cartoons for his student newspaper while attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. His work has since appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Village Voice, and The Daily Beast, among others. His first graphic novel War Is Boring was a collaboration with journalist David Axe. It came out in 2010 from New American Library. More recently, his hysterical and pointed collection of comics entitled We Should Improve Society Somewhat (https://cloverpress.us/products/we-should-improve-society-somewhat) came out in June 2020 from Clover Press. We talk about both books at length here; we also discuss Matt’s current and upcoming projects, his decision to leave editorial cartooning, and why he’s pursuing different artistic goals in the wake of the nightmare of Trump’s authoritarian populism. Incredibly, he is embarking on these projects while doing all of the labour required to keep The Nib (https://thenib.com/) going. The Nib is an online daily comics publication and a crucial space for comic strip interventions on contemporary issues; it features political cartoons, graphic journalism, essays and memoir. We cover a lot of ground in this conversation. Matt expands on what it meant to enter publishing at what he calls the “tail end of print,” only to find that while social media seemed to be a new frontier for publication, it was basically impossible to make a living by “being online.” Now, though, of course, using a hybrid method, The Nib is showing how comics can thrive and find new audiences. Matt, perhaps more than most cartoonists, has had to deal with the volatile nature of contemporary political discourse. He’s also witnessed first-hand the sort of state violence that organized protest can provoke. He describes the horrifying experience of being in Portland in 2020 and witnessing the realization of Trump’s fascist rhetoric in the form of police and federal agents “warring” with protestors, as he puts it. But the interview ends on a positive note--perhaps somewhat unusual for this podcast--Matt feels that, as a public, we have reached a level of “political education” where far more “understand the problems now” and routinely engage with the reality of a “hell world.” The challenge now would seem to be redirecting the “frustration” and “resignation” people feel at not being able to act quickly or collectively into meaningful mass movements.

Neil Cohn is an American cognitive scientist and comics theorist (http://www.visuallanguagelab.com/) who works at Tilburg University (https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/staff/n-cohn). In this interview, he works through how his research on the acquisition of visual languages in comics literacy relates to the broader acquisition of all the cognitive structures that allow us to make sense of the world. I gravitated to Cohn’s newest book Who Understands Comics? (https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/who-understands-comics-9781350156043/) to some extent because of the acclaim it had received, but mostly because I am a devotee of the medium. (Although, we talk about whether it should even be regarded as a discrete medium.) Who Understands Comics is, in Cohn’s words, his “psychology” book. He explains that the questions he wanted to ask about the ways that we comprehend comics dictated that he use more quantitative methods. That said, his work is still deeply interdisciplinary; and he talks about how working across different fields of thought provides a way to avoid the issue of running into disciplinary constraints in your research that can sometimes shut down conversations, collaborations and critiques before they occur. He also relates how the hybrid approach he was using to understand how comics work, when he was a graduate researcher, meant that “nobody knew what to do with him.” These moments of blockage forced him to find new routes for doing justice to the power of graphic storytelling. To devise a way to conduct experiments that would then inform theory, and theoretical frameworks that could be shaped and revised on the basis of experimentation. While acknowledging the comforts of familiarity, Cohn says he’s committed to creating space for contesting key heuristic assumptions about how readers of graphic texts do the work of supposedly “filling in the gaps” within and between the panels. That particular assumption--that readers are responsible for manufacturing “missing information” that the cartoonist doesn’t provide and that readers just somehow automatically know how to supply--just doesn’t stand up to empirical research, he says. Especially if we do that research across multiple different cultural contexts and traditions. Cohn stresses that there’s just not enough awareness of the importance of cultural differences in comics theory. But these are crucial for thinking through the evolution of distinct systems of visual language. So, we may have a cursory sense of the differences between the libraries of comic storytelling in Japan, France, the U.S. and Canada, but a cursory understanding tends to move us into totalizing about all comics, as though all comic storytellers follow the same patterns when they write, which they don’t.

Carlyn Zwarenstein (https://carlynzwarenstein.com/) is a writer and journalist based in Toronto. Her second book On Opium was just published by Goose Lane Editions (https://gooselane.com/products/on-opium). I speak with her about her push within that work to question narratives around whose lives are “enabled” and “destroyed” by opioids, and about how, for her, drug use became a tool for writing, and one that forced her to “look outside” herself and engage with the “overlapping issues” that constitute the overdose crisis. She argues that, at a certain point, it becomes necessary to stop worrying about making a convincing case to have one’s cause recognized and just begin acting to insist on that cause. She talks about the role of direct action in producing supervised injection sites, and the Drug User Liberation Front’s rallying cry: “Death is not our destiny,” which she says is a “perfect and beautiful” slogan that acts as an antitoxin against the rhetorical power of this “downward spiral” trope within mainstream discourses on drug use. She points out that framing the issue through the downward spiral metaphor fails to generate the required urgency, reinforcing criminalization and an entrenched fatalism when it comes to the use of opioids. She says, fundamentally, dismantling “prohibition,” getting rid of the violence of the drug trade and the dangerous ways that people obtain drugs, and the dangers that are inherent in illicit drugs, is the only effective policy measure left. If we want to reduce harm and even “see overall drug use lowered,” we must, she stresses, dismantle the system of prohibition and move past policies that do not “prevent death” or “enable life.”

Francesca Ekwuyasi (https://www.ekwuyasi.com/) is a writer you read with the windows open. Her work embodies what it means to be attentive to life, in spite of the fact that, as she admits in this interview, “paying attention is overwhelming.” Francesca’s novel Butter Honey Pig Bread was one of the most critically acclaimed works of fiction in 2020. It’s a book that shows the deep love that motivates Ekwuyasi’s art, life, activism and writing. She expands on why she feels drawn to stories about pleasure, joy and reconciliation, and also why she’s driven to write stories that show us how to “love properly” and heal, even as the world is constantly ending. She talks about the lengthy, improvisational process of putting her staggering book together, how the book became so much more immersive through this process, and how she writes with the hope of understanding, or with the faith that the reader will work to understand. She talks about intimately knowing sisterhoods and wanting to write women’s experiences in the world, using the conventions of fiction to move, as she puts it, toward a ‘merging’ that is also an unraveling...

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.