Pretty Heady Stuff

Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University. He is co-author, with Antonio Negri, of the Empire trilogy and, most recently, Assembly. He is also the co-director of The Social Movements Lab. Toni Negri sadly died just recently, on December 16th, at the age of 90. He was a towering intellectual and political figure in modern Marxism and will be missed deeply for his radical philosophy and energy. In this conversation Michael talks about their collaboration on the Empire trilogy, what Toni meant to the process of learning together, and some of the spirited ways that they endeavoured to inform the conversation about the most effective and enduring ways to resist oppression. There’s no questioning the impact of the books Michael wrote with Negri, but for Hardt, it was all about learning. He recalls that Slavoj Zizek once said that this is the thing that most impressed him about each successive text: that the point was not to suggest that they had everything figured out in some airtight way, but to offer an invitation to rethink and rejuvenate democracy, and to wonder about why that term in particular seems to have this enduring power, despite so many efforts to inoculate its meaning and displace its place in politics. What I’ll take away from this discussion, maybe more than anything else, is the stuff I learned about how people learned. Listening again, I was struck by how crucial this part of movements is: the way we learn to be democratic subjects is through that transformative process of learning alongside others. It’s a process that can easily be corrupted and co-opted, but it is extremely important. The Subversive Seventies, Michael’s new book, was published in September by Oxford University Press. It’s the first book he’s written as a solo author in decades. For that reason, he says that he wanted it to be a different sort of exploration. There is much in it that is obviously historical, but it’s not historiographical. It’s about his own desires for insight into contemporary movements. We discuss, then, how the book communicates with the contemporary climate movement, what it might say about the struggle for survival and for freedom in Palestine. And the difference between the struggle for power and the struggle for liberation historically. Ultimately, this is in many ways a book that prioritizes participation over representation: universal participation in political decision-making rather than existing schemes of representation that leave power in the hands of the few. Hardt writes that, in this sense, “Liberation is not just emancipation— that is, releasing people from their chains in order to participate in the existing society. Liberation requires, in addition, a radical transformation of that society, overturning its structures of domination and creating new institutions that foster freedom.”

Mark Paul is an assistant professor and a member of the Climate Institute at Rutgers University. His research looks at the causes and effects of inequality, and tries to work through some of the material remedies for inequality in the context of neoliberal capitalism. He’s written a great deal on the climate crisis, focusing on economic pathways to crash decarbonization that also take into account the need for economic and environmental justice. His first book, The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights was published in May of this year. This is now a moment when the existential threat of climate change is felt really intensely across the world. The remaining carbon budget for a 50% likelihood to limit global warming to 1.5, 1.7, and 2C has dwindled in the years since the first COP in 1995. Assuming that our 2023 emission levels continue at their current record-setting rate – and the Global Carbon Project has said that total CO2 emissions in 2023 reached a disturbing 40.9 gigatons – we will burn through the budget for keeping global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels by 2030. In 15 years, the carbon budget for 1.7C will be gone too. In planetary terms, that’s a split second. We need crash decarbonization now because, as Paul has pointed out, “climate change is not a problem for future generations—it is a clear and present danger.” So much time has been intentionally wasted, and due to that deadly strategy of delay, Paul says that “we have four times the work to do to decarbonize the planet and dwindling time to do it in.” A lot of the work, within a capitalist economy, is going to take the form of fighting for the appropriate level of investment. It makes all kinds of economic sense to phase-out fossil fuels, and yet because the system has incubated and grown in the toxic stuff, we’re stuck in it. Mark argues that if we wait just one decade more to really make the disruptive changes that are needed to decarbonize the fossil economy, we “will drive up the costs associated with decarbonization by 40-70%, which amounts to well over $3 trillion in additional costs.” One of the questions I had to ask him, though, was why is this still such a hard sell? It often feels Sisyphean to try to communicate projected losses in a system that demands and yet resists change. How to frame it in a resonant sort of way? How do we dislodge the presentist attachment to the status quo? There are some answers in this interview, and obviously some real questions remaining. Some of it centres on the question of growth, which Mark seems to feel is often the wrong question. Shrinking the economy, he suggests, needs to be taken seriously from the perspective of its social costs. I’m sympathetic to that because there is the political problem of ensuring that a mass mobilization for climate action doesn’t leave people behind. So, for that reason, we also spend time talking about the divisive ways that putting a price on carbon has been tried, and some of the ways it could be done progressively. He says that “a simple carbon tax is, as a form of a consumption tax,” very regressive. It is going to unfairly hit low-income people harder when it should be a luxury tax that targets the wealthy specifically. On this, I would quote Alexis Shotwell’s book Against Purity, where she writes that the world must be shared, and with the non-human parts of this world maybe especially. She says that the world, in fact, “offers finite freedom, adequate abundance, modest meaning, and limited happiness. Partial, finite, adequate, modest, limited—and yet worth working on, with, and for.”

Seth Klein is a public policy researcher and writer based in Vancouver, BC. He’s the Director of Strategy with the Climate Emergency Unit and the author of A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, which is the basis of a lot of the questions that I ask in this interview. He talks about how the focus of the book was not always the sorts of lessons we can take from the Second World War. He was looking for reminders that we have done this before, mobilized to address a real existential threat. So, as COP28 concludes, we are confronted with a “Global Stocktake” that shows we are not on track to limit catastrophic climate change. Barbara Creecy and Dan Joergensen made this clear recently in their presentation to delegates there. They also emphasized, importantly, that equity is not the opposite of ambition when it comes to the radical action necessary to fight climate change. In fact, they argued that, because we can’t negotiate with nature and the laws of physics, we are going to have to negotiate with and within the laws and policies that determine the scope of climate action. That means we have to negotiate with each other. And there are some reasonable concerns about whether COP is a place where people can meet and actually figure out ways to navigate the planet into a livable future. But was it worth it? Did this clearly very compromised COP28 achieve anything tangible to offset all of these serious issues? One of the biggest risks is that the army of oil and gas lobbyists that have descended on COP28 will succeed in extending their careers and the lifespan of toxic fuels by adjusting the language of any deals, any regulations that are established. Emissions reduction is what we need, and energy producers want, instead, to go in a senselessly destructive direction. All of this distraction and delay is part of what Seth Klein calls the “new climate denialism,” a technique of obstruction that doesn’t care in the least about the health of our environment, about human life, or about what we used to call “sustainability,” but now increasingly should be described as “survivability.” One of the “curses,” Seth explains, about climate action is that we don’t actually feel the emergency for a period that is long enough to warrant the kind of radical action we have witnessed during wars or pandemics. The disaster is diffuse, spread out, and somewhat sporadic, so it doesn’t “galvanize us all at once.” And just as troubling is the fact that our “memories” of these traumatic events “tend to recede fairly quickly,” until they occur again. This speaks to the fact that, as Klein puts it, phase-out of fossil fuels and the post-carbon revolution is “not largely a technical problem,” it is a problem of a lack of political will. In this context, he says that we simply “don’t know the answer” to the question of whether we have people who can collectively rise to the challenge, hold extractive regimes accountable, and lead us out of the path to disaster.

Margaret Galvan, an Assistant Professor of visual rhetoric, delves into the intersection of art, memory, and activism within feminist and queer movements. She discusses how artists like Nan Goldin harnessed their work to confront the stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS during its devastating emergence. Galvan emphasizes the crucial role of archiving in preserving these narratives and highlights the challenges of maintaining queer histories in a politically charged environment. Her insights reveal how art fosters a deeper understanding of identity, collective memory, and survival.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and scholar with a focus on queer ecologies and decolonial theory and praxis. She is author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (2017) and Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (2018), among several other texts. She is working on a new book, At the Sea’s Edge that reflects on the space between land and sea, as well as other creative writing projects. In this conversation she talks about solidarity. Solidarity in and among the Global South, against empire and extraction, and for a world to come. There’s a great deal of hope in this interview, but it’s the kind of hope that resonates with me because it says that, in Gómez-Barris’ words, “Knowledge production can also be solidarity” if it is “multivocal” and focused on exposing dispossession. Looking for this kind of solidarity, she finds something generative in the “third space of shadow terms between above and below.” For her, this is generative because it moves away from the “binarized language forms we typically use” and returns to things that have been largely submerged by oppressive forces. I think the focus on multiplicity and plurality is potentially helpful for those that are locked in different sorts of colonial spaces where it’s typically seen as sort of unrealistic or unimportant. Gomez-Barris says, instead, it’s actually this sort of experimentation that is going to liberate the globe. We devote time at the end of our conversation to the question of Gaza. Gómez-Barris makes clear that there is a proliferating resistance to that escalating settler colonial violence that demands to be reckoned with. People who are already aware of Gomez-Barris’ writing will know that she is really precise about the world-ending force of extractivism. What she says is that “the extractive zone” ultimately reduces “life to capitalist resource conversion” and trains us to “reduce life to systems.” That is not a thing that is natural, and it’s not a thing we need to accept.

Matt Wolf is a filmmaker from New York whose critically acclaimed documentary films have been shown across the globe. (https://www.criterionchannel.com/directed-by-matt-wolf) Wild Combination does a deep dive into the life and music of Arthur Russell, Teenage is a study of early youth culture and the birth of the very idea of teenagers, Recorder is an invaluable portrait of the activist and archivist Marion Stokes, who secretly recorded broadcast television continuously,24 hours a day, for 30 years. Spaceship Earth is a film about Biosphere 2, the experiment from the early 90s where 8 people lived inside a fully contained biome cut off, or seemingly cut off, from the rest of the world. He also recently worked on an incredible film called The Stroll as a producer; that film explores the history of New York’s Meatpacking District from the perspective of the transgender sex workers who lived and worked there. Wolf has a way of effortlessly expanding the parameters of documentary. I say “effortlessly,” but if you listen to this conversation you can tell that there is a great deal of effort put into making sure that viewers of Matt’s films feel an emotional connection to what they’re watching, while also being presented with a set of subtle questions about art, the biosphere, the ways that media manufacture social reality, and many other subjects. More and more, though, he’s looking for ways to work creatively within the conventions of documentary filmmaking, rather than working to “explode” those defining characteristics. All of this comes through on the screen. There are a few threads in this conversation that are worth underlining. Wolf is deeply interested in exploring the lives of people who take enormous risks with what they are attempting to create, risks that might not pay off in the long run or that influence their capacity to relate to the rest of the world. The way he puts it is that his films are concerned with subjects that weren’t entirely able “to translate the full scope of what they were doing to others.” That makes their work difficult and rewarding, and deserving of “reappraisal.” For example, Wolf made his documentary Wild Combination, on the life and work and impact of the cult cellist and disco producer Arthur Russell, at age 25. This is particularly surprising when you actually sit down with the film; you’d assume that this is a director at the top of his game; but, in reality, Matt says that, at the time, he was studying this artist, Arthur Russell, as a way of actually learning how to be an artist himself. I really appreciated how open Matt was in this conversation about his attachment to the specific “texture of the past,” as he put it, and his desire to tell stories in a way that doesn’t intrude on the viewer’s interpretation of the material. He explains how Spaceship Earth, his brilliant study of the Biosphere 2 project, was described by some as being a somewhat uncritical film. That lack of critical scrutiny, though, is kind of what makes the film so captivating: Wolf sits back and engages with the folks in his films generously, or, in a sense, unassumingly. I think that generosity pays off in certain ways. It makes the films he creates into acts of reappraisal that encourage connection.

Sara Ahmed, a leading voice in feminist theory and author of influential works like 'The Feminist Killjoy Handbook,' dives into the radical potential of the feminist killjoy. She explores the complexities of language in activism, the intersection of personal narratives and broader societal issues, and the troubling rise of anti-trans legislation. Ahmed emphasizes the importance of solidarity among marginalized groups and challenges the simplistic views of cancel culture, advocating for deeper accountability in cultural conversations.

Kyla Tienhaara is an Assistant Professor in the School of Environmental Studies and the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University, Canada and a Visiting Fellow at the School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University. She’s the author of Green Keynesianism and the Global Financial Crisis and the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook on the Green New Deal, which is a book that I find absolutely essential for thinking about the potential social benefits of decarbonizing the economy and rethinking growth in our time of climate breakdown. She’s also one of the few researchers looking closely at the function of Investor State Dispute Settlement as an international legal apparatus that largely protects investors from the pushback they might receive from states. There’s no way I could quickly summarize what this work deciphers, in terms of this obscure global legal structure, which not a lot of people I’ve spoken with have any knowledge about. They might understand in the abstract that there is a system of global capitalism that is protected by the codification of laws that largely protect profits and private investment over the safety or autonomy of communities, but this is the actual system that serves that. And Kyla is uniquely insightful about how it works and what it is set up to prevent. I wanted to underscore, at the top here, that we engage, in this conversation, with the concepts of utopianism and pragmatism in climate action. That’s no a disclaimer so much as an invitation to ask yourself where you sit in relation to this idea that abolishing fossil energy is utopian. Or to kind of request that you sit with the question of whether it is too much to ask that the economy be democratized or energy be regarded as a source of social wealth rather than a source of capital. It’s maybe worth thinking, too, about why it is the case that there is legally-binding international law that protects fossil fuel companies from reprisal, but no binding law to protect the planet from the forces that are exacerbating our mounting climate emergency. What history precedes this moment where it is primarily rich countries that benefit from existing laws and international treaties, while poor countries get poorer? And what mechanisms or modes of resistance exist so that we can funnel our collective outrage at these legally sanctioned systems of upholding inequality into something real?

Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School. His research, writing, and teaching focus on climate risks and climate policy. Gernot writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate and has written four books, including Geoengineering: the Gamble and Climate Shock. Before joining Columbia and serving as faculty director of the Climate Knowledge Initiative, Gernot taught at NYU and Harvard. In this conversation I kept coming back to this hope that climate action could be, in some ways, uncomplicated. If the primary goal is to stop greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible in order to deal with this as a genuine emergency, it should be simple. But, within the existing system of global capitalism that we have, though, how is that going to happen? Can it happen? I’ve been trying to think about this by having conversations with people like Gernot, people like Kyla Tienhaara, Seth Klein, Mark Paul and others to try to get to the bottom of it. It’s tough, but these interviews, which I’ll release in the coming weeks, have been helpful. We’re at a point where, according to economists like Robert Pollin, at least 1-2 per cent of global GDP will need to be spent pretty much immediately on investments in renewable infrastructure to radically reduce emissions. Global GDP is about $80 trillion. How does that amount of globally coordinated investment happen under capitalism? It’s a huge shift in the nature of the whole economy. One of the reasons I wanted to return to Wagner’s writing is that I’ve been helped a lot by his explanation of the social cost of carbon, and especially by the way he writes about considerations of equity and justice in determining the social cost of carbon. It radically increases the social costs, or damages created, by emissions if we factor in issues of equity. The number skyrockets, validating any and all investments in climate mitigation and adaptation. How could that sort of information become more central to decision-making and policy-making? We definitely get into the weeds here. I’m still processing the discussion we have about “green growth” vs. the “Green New Deal” vs. degrowth. I still can’t say where I land on the question of whether decarbonization needs to happen in a textbook degrowth way. It’s hard to balance expediency and strategy here, and yet, increasingly, the debate about economic transformation to fight climate change hinges on our receptivity to growth or degrowth. What I like is that there is room here for the debate. We need to rapidly phase-out fossil fuels. That much is certain. In fact, we need to fully ban fossil fuels. How that decision gets made and what form action takes—at what speed and with what consequences—is still an open question.

Casey Williams is a Lecturer in the Center for Environmental Studies at Rice University. His research examines the social and cultural dimensions of climate change and energy transition, especially the problem of “climate impasse” and the concept and possibility of a “just transition.” His writing on climate, energy and labor has appeared in The New York Times, The LA Review of Books, Radical Philosophy, Jacobin, Dissent, and elsewhere. Rhys Williams is a Lecturer at University of Glasgow who works on the intersection between fantasy, narrative and energy. His work also looks to get a better grasp on the relationship between ecology and infrastructure. He’s a member of the Petrocultures Research Group and the After Oil Collective. He also organizes the Energy and Ecology Group in Glasgow. Right now a lot of his focus is on energy, infrastructure, food, and water. You can read some of that work in Open Library of Humanities and South Atlantic Quarterly.  I think one of the most important takeaways for me in this conversation was this idea that we need to leave more space for real deliberation in our politics, and that this actually means that we need to accept the fact of friction. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but what we call, in this conversation, “frictionful engagements” aren’t really the norm in political communication. What we tend to get is a situation where frictionlessness is tacitly preferred, and so, in Casey’s words, “Capital quietly takes the reins” and we’re left with mechanisms that are meant to do all the heavy lifting in political decision-making. Rhys and Casey see ways that these mechanisms, especially financial mechanisms in the climate debate, really function like a narrative technique – it’s the mechanism that has the agency, not us, and this is the narrative we’ve been largely sold: a kind of politics-without-politics. One of the other big things that I’d underline is Casey’s challenge to those that engage with the climate crisis and who are worried about communicating the risks: he says that there is actually a real political risk involved in treating specific disasters as “metonymic representatives of the climate crisis as a whole.” When we bundle a highly localized disaster into an accumulation of disasters that tell us a story about the agglomeration of impacts and the climate emergency as a whole, Casey says we risk effacing the specificity of the struggles occurring at the local level: struggles not just against the impacts of a transforming climate, but also struggles for social and economic autonomy against global capitalism. I hadn’t thought about it that way before and that sense of being responsible to the specificity of place is something I’ve definitely taken with me from this conversation. There’s a few other things I’d mention: we talk about the “degrowth imaginary” and questions of the scale at which infrastructure ceases to be life-giving. We talk a lot about technology as a thing that gets privileged in science fiction and in popular discourse as a “driver of historical change.” There’s quite a bit of discussion here about the social layers that get subsumed under technology as it gets fetishized in this way. Overall, too, there’s a concern here with how we have been slowly abstracted from nature as such. How we’ve sealed ourselves off from it by instrumentalizing all the life around us, or as much of it as we can control and colonize and commodify. So, in the face of the real need to address the crisis of a destabilized climate system, they talk about what we should include in the discussion that too quickly gets displaced.