Pretty Heady Stuff

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.

Cara Daggett is an assistant professor of political science at Virginia Tech and the author of The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-birth-of-energy), a book that explores the histories of energy from the perspective of feminist political ecology. In this conversation, Daggett makes it clear that the system of global capitalism has not captured all of our relationships and that other models of collective flourishing exist. That, in spite of the many indications that the late Anthropocene is accelerating past a crucial tipping point, we can still model a means of communicating against powerlessness. In pursuit of this, Daggett offers a timely and historical reevaluation of the drive for dynamism since the 19th century, a drive to put the world to work which she exposes as the heart of so much suffering. Her work takes aim at the anthropocentric and often misogynistic roots of violence and outlines some ways that we can demand a healthier future with less work, more pleasure and adequate abundance.

Derf Backderf is the creator of several acclaimed graphic novels: Punk Rock & Trailer Parks, My Friend Dahmer, Trashed, and most recently Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio. We discuss his distinctive art style, the joys and challenges of accepting the adaptation of one’s work into film, comics as both an established and emergent art form, and the ethics of representing violence. Backderf's work is best understood as a kind of interrogation: he is looking for answers, probing the historical record, and taking artistic risks that pay off in unexpected ways. Check out his work at http://www.derfcity.com/.

Alexis Shotwell, is a social theorist and professor of sociology and anthropology at Carleton University who has a rare gift for addressing and expressing the unbelievable complexity of our current system. Her book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (2016) was released at a moment where it had become impossible to ignore the overlapping emergencies that we now face. How do we explain why the political reaction to these disastrous effects doesn’t translate into more mass dissent and a greater sense of shared vulnerability? Shotwell says that a doctrine of “purism” or “purity politics” turns us against each other: cultivating and asserting one’s own individual purity against these unsettling feelings of contamination. If we aren’t sure of how to implicate the system effectively, it is because available practices of self-purification, clean eating and detoxing only give us the comfortable feeling of being innocent, ourselves.

Max Taylor is a young communicator and mayoral candidate here in Halifax. His campaign is not built to win; instead, it's designed to produce a scarce resource in political communication locally and globally: engagement. In this conversation I talk to him about the kind of courage he’s needed to run for mayor, why people who see it as a transparent attempt to gain followers don’t get it, and why he cares about setting a precedent for more direct participation in politics, especially among young people. Check out Max's TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@maxemersontaylor?lang=en (You'll find a link to his campaign site through the page.)

Jesse David Fox, senior editor at Vulture and host of the fascinating Good One podcast, discusses his divisive theory of “post-comedy” (or forms of humour that don't fit the traditional rubric of "laughs-per-minute"), how the rhythm of comedy has changed in the context of our coronavirus-induced isolation, and how the notion of booms and busts in comedy doesn’t really match up with the historical fact that, as he puts it, “comedy is a renewable resource.”