Pretty Heady Stuff

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.

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.”