coe186_zylinska.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Hey, there. I just heard the words rolling, and what that means is that the tape such as it is the tape like thing is rolling, which means you are here with the cultures of energy podcast. You are here with Simone. How that's me and Dominic Boyer. That's him over there. That's me. And we're co-hosting like always. And we're also in the midst of an overturning and up tuning of our entire reputational space.

Speaker2: [00:00:53] Yes, it's a little bit of a category.

Speaker1: [00:00:55] I realized it's really weird because we need to clear everything. Almost everything. Maybe everything out of the house in order to rent it out for the coming year to be gone on sabbatical. Woo-hoo. No complaints about the sabbatical. But moving everything out of your domicile is hard because you realize that everything's become sort of impacted and there's all kinds of little corners full of stuff that you'd forgotten about. And now you have to excavate and figure out what to keep and what to throw, and there's a lot to throw. But then the keeping stuff has to be put in boxes and bags and storage and all that.

Speaker2: [00:01:30] Yeah, things we won't do for our material objects.

Speaker1: [00:01:32] Oh, well, it's really it's actually very cathartic to purge a lot of these things, but it's it's melancholy at its melancholy, too. Like I have to admit, it's kind of sad in a way to to go through all these things, especially the child things. Oh yeah, right? Like precious stuff like we need to deselect a lot of her, her toys and almost all her clothes. But when you do that, you realize that that's an it's an age and it's a stage that pass that's past and we'll never come back, you know, like we can keep our clothes that we like and put them in storage. We come back and wear them for the next 10 years. But like, there are certain stages that children go through that they they outgrow the toy or the shoes or whatever, and it needs to go. It needs to be donated and moved on to another home. But it's still it's a little nostalgic and sad. Maybe not for you,

Speaker2: [00:02:27] But no, there's some emotion connected to obviously children's things, right? There's some emotional residue in all things that you spend time with. Probably the good news is that we still have the child, and that's the important.

Speaker1: [00:02:38] We do have the child.

Speaker2: [00:02:39] Yeah, that's and she's never going to leave. She's never going to leave us.

Speaker1: [00:02:43] But I mean, you know, there's some things I have no attachment to like this weird milk crate right here, like, I don't have any like I've spent probably 20 years with that thing, but I don't care about it.

Speaker2: [00:02:54] Oh, so many of my best memories. Oh, great. Oh my god. Look at how it's got, I mean, different sized milk crate.

Speaker1: [00:03:01] Oh, it's like just random shit. And I don't care, and I don't care about those two over there, either.

Speaker2: [00:03:07] What the heartlessness of this God.

Speaker1: [00:03:11] So it's like you can. It's certain material things you spend time with.

Speaker2: [00:03:14] Are we telling people to be present for their plastics? Isn't that one of the messages of this podcast?

Speaker1: [00:03:19] That's the thing is like throw the plastic away goes into landfill. So I feel even though it's hideous and whatever, it already exists in the world, so we might as well keep on utilizing it until it collapses and disintegrates, I guess.

Speaker2: [00:03:31] I read a news story this morning that Cambodia did a massive flex and just shipped back a huge amount of plastic waste to the U.S. and I think Canada wow this way just said, nope, that is you people take care of your stuff from now.

Speaker1: [00:03:42] Yeah, well, that's what China's been doing to there now. The when did they start a few years ago? I think they're like, We're not taking your recycling anymore because it's too dirty, it's too dirty and it's too much mess and we don't want to deal with it.

Speaker2: [00:03:54] Well, it's also the places that produce this waste should be faced with its consequences, not offshoring that to the rest of the world. I know we've talked about that several times in recent months, but again, it's a point worth making frequently. Yeah. So yeah, so we've got a lot of stuff going on on the whole gravitational overhaul front. And we also have an exciting couple of things happening this week. We just had the press release drop for our monument on a glacier. The UN Glacier Tour is coming up on August 18th, and if you go to the Not OK movie site and you're interested and you're going to be there and we'd love to join us on the march to leave a lasting memorial to Iceland's first glacier to fall victim to climate change, you can sign up there and let us know. And the other thing that happened this week is our books came out to do a graph the two volume ten years in the making study of wind power in southern Mexico, and there has been a little social media traffic about that. So many put out a blog post on the Duke University press site today. I'll put links to all of this stuff, including discount codes for those of you who are interested in buying physical versions of these books. For those of you who are comfortable with electronic versions and or don't have the money to spend, guess what? We've got you covered. We have open access, free electronic editions of these volumes coming out very shortly. We're just waiting for the final pipes and tubes to be connected in. The internet, and those should be probably out by next week, I think we'll be launching another blitz on that, so lots of good stuff happening.

Speaker1: [00:05:27] Yeah, that's really good. That's right. See, with all this overturning of material life worlds, I forgot about the books.

Speaker2: [00:05:34] Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:05:35] See, you're all worried about it, right? Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:05:37] The books are worried about what's happening in our backyard and how to get rid of our defunct grill

Speaker1: [00:05:43] And kind of overtakes your your head space.

Speaker2: [00:05:45] It'll do

Speaker1: [00:05:46] That. Yeah, you know, but we're also going to do a two upcoming podcasts on the books. Yes. So we're going to focus back on those projects because it was it was an amazing project. And I think that the books that came out of the project itself are quite different and quite interesting in their different ways and worth reading together or separate or parts of or back and forth or however you want to do it. So we'll come back and talk more about those at some point.

Speaker2: [00:06:13] But today, because we know you all are as eager as we are to hear our main interview. We have a wonderful guest, Joanna Zelinsky, coming to us from Goldsmiths College. She is a theorist and artist, a curator. And we are talking about this book with a terrific title The End of Man. A Feminist Counter Apocalypse. Yes, it was a counter apocalypse,

Speaker1: [00:06:36] Counter apocalypse,

Speaker2: [00:06:37] Counter

Speaker1: [00:06:37] Apocalypse. Yeah. And this comes out with the University of Minnesota. I think it's called frontrunner's. It's the kind of we've done it. We've done a couple of COVID, like our conversation with Katherine Yussuff and we did a conversation with John Hartigan, who had it in the same series. It's a really cool little series because it allows you to publish kind of more rapidly and get get these brilliant ideas out.

Speaker2: [00:06:58] There are just checking, yes, it's a feminist counterpart. I don't know. Is it counter apocalypse? That seems weird.

Speaker1: [00:07:04] Well, you're trying to make up a neologism, I guess endlessly.

Speaker2: [00:07:08] Even with other people's book titles, you can't stop.

Speaker1: [00:07:11] So we have a really good conversation with her about the book, and we talk also about this filmic companion that goes with the book, which is also very cool, which is called Exit Man, a short piece that would be great for teaching, but also just watching, but would be great for teaching.

Speaker2: [00:07:27] We'll put the link in the show notes for that so that I think it's a great project and it does interleave with some other things we've been talking about recently, particularly the need to get past the finalist thinking and fatalist thinking that surrounds the Anthropocene debate.

Speaker1: [00:07:46] Yeah, but also to embrace precarity, embracing precarity.

Speaker2: [00:07:50] But she's careful to say not in the way that neutralizes inequity, but rather to understand really the relational city that's at the core of our being. And that too often the Anthropocene discussion falls into the grooves of that kind of finalist apocalyptic

Speaker1: [00:08:07] Thinking and a techno Celia. Yeah. Well, that's that's kind of the origin origin story out of Silicon Valley, but also elsewhere, right?

Speaker2: [00:08:16] Right? No, it kind of it kind of

Speaker1: [00:08:18] Saved by A.I.

Speaker2: [00:08:20] Motif. Right, exactly. But what's really cool about this project is not only does she critique the saved by A.I. techno Ofelia, she also critiques its relationship to the populist big, strong man. You know, so you put Elon Musk and Trump kind of in the same alignment. You're like, this is the same phenomenon, not two different phenomena.

Speaker1: [00:08:39] I have to say that somehow seeing like Trump's visage like gives me a little barfi turn in my stomach in a way that Elon Musk doesn't. Quite at least not yet.

Speaker2: [00:08:49] Yeah, if you have to pick between the two, yeah, there's an obvious choice. But the point is like there's a structural similarity between these two types of masculine isolationism that, you know, is something that we should be very suspicious of. And so the feminist counter apocalypse is one that is coming from a different perspective, as you said, suggesting that we accept precarity as our condition of origin and not as something that's to be evaded through false promises of security, stability, et cetera, et cetera. Exactly. Futurity, there you go. So take us out, Simone, how does I know you're eager to get back to your? You're bagging in your boxing and you're digging?

Speaker1: [00:09:30] Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:09:31] Well, and you're howling.

Speaker1: [00:09:33] I'm like, I'm like a contractor now.

Speaker2: [00:09:35] Like, pretty much you dress like a contractor right

Speaker3: [00:09:38] Now, and I'm

Speaker1: [00:09:39] Like, I'm like a foreman and a contractor all at once. Like, I'm managing so much right now. Yeah, but it was a wonderful conversation with Joanna, and she's doing brilliant work and a brilliant person. So smart, so articulate that what I would like to say yes. Go Joanna. Hello, there are cultures of energy listeners we're so thrilled to have on the line Joanna Zelinsky. Hi, Joanna, we're really thrilled to have you here with us.

Speaker3: [00:10:25] Hi, hello. I'm very happy to be here.

Speaker1: [00:10:27] Yeah, and we have just finished reading your wonderful book that came out with Minnesota in 2018. The End of Man, a feminist counter apocalypse. And looking forward to talking to you about that and about ethics and the Anthropocene and media your areas of expertise, as well as perhaps a little bit on a film that we were able to screen as well. Oh yeah. So my lovely co-host Dominic Boyer, that's going to start us off.

Speaker2: [00:10:53] Thank you. Thank you. So, Joanna, you had us at the title. I mean, it's a wonderful title. It's arresting. Yeah, it's very provocative. But as we read into it, I think you had us in a number of other ways too, because I think the argument here is so interesting and so fresh and so part of what we need to be talking about this highly contested term Anthropocene with all its warts and everything. And yet we still can't give it up somehow. What I love about this book is how you make sense of, I think, two things that might seem to be independent of one another at a glance. But I think you make a very compelling argument that they're deeply interwoven with one another. And that is, of course, the Silicon Valley techno system. And you know, we're either going to solve it through technology here or by goodness. We're going to blast off into space and, you know, take our problems with us to the rest of the universe. And on the other hand, you know what's been called the alt right white supremacist populism that is all the rage now, not just in this country, obviously. And you find a way to bring these two themes together in a way that I think is very compelling and convincing. And I just wanted to ask you how that insight originated for you. How did you kind of bridge that gap with your thinking?

Speaker3: [00:12:00] Well, thank you, and thank you for framing the book so generously for me as well and for opening it up with so many kind of provocative questions. Let me let me think about that connection between the Anthropocene on the one hand and the kind of artificial intelligence with all the tech pros who are promising us all sorts of solutions on the other. And that connection for me kind of goes back a long time to my earlier work when I was trying to explore ways of engaging with the crisis, narratives of our times, one of them being the narrative of the Anthropocene. So coming from kind of the arts and humanities, I was obviously less interested and less capable of determining whether we are really living in a new geological era or epoch and more in kind of figuring out what it means that a new geological epoch is being postulated. So it's kind of trying to figure out how we as a scholars, as kind of living, breathing humans, but also as artists, as visual people, as people live with and through media can respond to that narrative and that kind of huge message about the change to our kind of conditions of life conditions of our planet in a way. In a way with a message that sticks. It doesn't just put people off. Doesn't just get as depressed as an immobilizer because the narrative is so huge. So that was one ambition. But the other one was also looking at the role of technology and trying to go beyond the kind of techno phobia that would evolve some kind of fantasy notion of nature and garden to which we should all return. And it was far away on that that I would rather be a goddess then.

Speaker3: [00:13:44] And no, not the good is I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. And so I mean, washing machines, I suppose good when you take the kind of feminist agenda on board and stop thinking about the implications of different forms of technological development for all sorts of liberatory practices and forms of life, you can think that the Anthropocene, with its kind of technological setup, also open certain things up for certain groups of people, some of them being, for example, women at a particular moment in history. So that was one aspect of trying to think about technology as not just a practice that pollutes the planet spoils this kind of sense of natural unity, but rather something that evokes a way of, well, it was the was a technology also becoming an imperative to think about our kind of way of becoming in the world. And I'm slightly concerned. I'm very much concerned, actually, that today's technological discourse has been dominated so much by the Silicon Valley, by the kind of the kind of Big Tech was the celestial promises of liberation tied in to kind of big capital. So the book is an attempt as well to trace that relationship between, on the one hand, the difficult relationship that we find ourselves in relation to our planet, the planet itself being in a precarious, perilous state. On the other hand, with technology being co-opted as a practice of liberation via capital and through all sorts of techno solutions like geo engineering or shutting cars into space, US or relocating to Mars. Although tech pros are relocating to New Zealand, so those kind of concerns I was trying to map out. Uh-huh.

Speaker1: [00:15:38] Well, one of the other things that you do, in addition to kind of observing this what you call the upgrade of humans or this sort of aspiration for the upgrade of humans to the status of gods that happens through AI, potentially, right? That's the kind of aspirational dream of the tech. Bros. Is a kind of move to reclaim a divine position for a particular form of white Christian masculinity and manhood, cis gendered, et cetera. And I think that's really important because throughout the book, you do make these connections to religious or theological forms of apocalypse that pre-existed our current moment, right? And invite us to recall that apocalyptic schism and the apocalyptic narrative are are things that are deeply entrenched and we can find them in these pre-modern religious texts like the epic of Gilgamesh, The Book of Daniel, the Book of Revelation, which you remind us is also known as the apocalypse of Saint John. So I'm curious, too, as to how you find these sort of thematic tropes, religious theological patterns emerging now in the apocalyptic system that we see surrounding the Anthropocene. What are the sort of genealogies between these time periods that share a kinship with a certain kind of apocalypse?

Speaker3: [00:17:01] Well, I was I was very intrigued by how the tropes of the apocalypse are being mobilized in kind of today's culture and kind of social and political level to bring in some very conservative claims and conservative assumptions about how the world should be. We know from from popular culture, from different forms of religious articulations that the apocalypse has been with us for a long time. Apocalypse is extremely seductive. I mean, Hollywood, as well as kind of TV now have been very good at repurposing Apocalypse as popular entertainment. And Apocalypse also becomes a way of containing horror and making it bearable because it becomes this thing on a screen that lasts usually two hours or 10 hours in a row with the TV series. But it's something that is containable that we can cognitively appreciate, even if we are effectively scared or shaken by it. So but they're also the language and the duality of the apocalypse carries with it in today's articulations. Often there are many very conservative kind of political articulations with regard to, for example, immigration with regard to so-called kind of pollution, the other who's coming and taking over and the form of the alien, the alien from sci fi, the alien arriving is the kind of riders of the apocalypse coming in the form of those to whom we don't remain open. So that kind of sense of the mobilization of the white Christian man is the key subject of history and especially the elevation of a particular kind of politician who wants to hear see himself as this kind of upgraded male, but is really almost the last gasp of this very particular overreaching form of masculinity. And we can talk here about, you know, about Trump, but also about Boris Johnson. Although in Britain, we've got a whole kind of.

Speaker2: [00:18:57] There are a lot of them out there,

Speaker3: [00:18:58] Unfortunately, who would do that. But we can talk about Bolsonaro in Brazil. We could talk about Putin. I mean, there is a whole kind of line of particular kind of politicians that are also speaking in apocalyptic terms because they can also then promise salvation. And there are different social groups that open remain open because of the precarity of lives, because of the withdrawal of funding from many state institutions. So the kind of social set up and social welfare is being replaced or in some places being completely withdrawn and are being replaced with a particular form of rhetoric. The rhetoric of the apocalypse, but also with the promise that things will get better. Things will get better as long as we prop up this very particular form of of the kind of male savior, the hero. And in some sense, it's that figure is emerging at a time when we are experiencing the opening up of gender politics, when the notion of kind of sexuality is being challenged, when people are talking and remaining much more open to understanding gender as not just cultural, but also. A non-binary when there is a more recognition of cultural of sexual politics in their different IDs so that those kinds of issues that many of us and cultural theory and feminist movement in LGBTQ plus movement have seen as promissory as being forms of some forms of progressivism. And I'm using that term kind of loosely because I don't have this version of history that just progresses, but at the same time, politically, we're seeing them as progressive. There is obviously groups of people who are saying the very same developments and articulations as threatening. And worryingly, then they still ask this last gasp of a particular form of of domination.

Speaker3: [00:20:57] They are evoking that language of threat, the language of peril, but also the language of extinction and extinction is also something that combines all these different levels of fear. On the one hand, the Anthropocene tells us that different species are becoming extinct from a kind of large kind of mammals through to through to bees, through to plants or coral reefs. On the other hand, there is the language of extinction of particular values that the populist right is picking up on and is talking about the extinction of a particular so-called Western lifestyle or Christianity. That is a very kind of European mode of thinking espoused, for example, by in Hungary, by Orban and Poland, by Kaczynski and the Law and Justice Party. So that mode of extinction of the Christian values. And then there is a broader issue around extinction, which is the very extinction of the human. When you take a geological worldview, you kind of realize the the lack of necessity of the human as a perennial species. So suddenly, the anxiety about the passing of things I think is shared by different groups, by different groups, different social strata, different political orientations. And what worries me is not the extinction in the human of the human in the long run, because in some sense, scientifically, I probably see that as a certain historical inevitability if we are talking about kind of deep time cosmic history, if you like, but much more. I am interested how that fear is brought forward to here and now and is pinned onto a particular form of the human. And that and then that kind of worries me. What kind of language that produces.

Speaker1: [00:22:49] I mean, I can't help but think about the conversation that's been happening just over the last 24 hours about this very racist tweet that our President Donald Trump emitted from his Twittersphere, telling these young, fresh person congresswomen to go back to the places that they came from a really racist, xenophobic commentary. And Nancy Pelosi, while she has, you know, her limitations to actually said publicly that Trump's Make America Great Again was always Make America white again, that no one, no one is fooled by that, that kind of capture of the phrase great and the kind of racist colonial history that underpins it.

Speaker3: [00:23:33] So absolutely.

Speaker1: [00:23:35] So I wanted to just, yeah. So I just wanted to recognize that in the book and in your other work as well. I mean, you're talking about welcoming the end of man in a certain way, that kind of man that's predicated on desert monotheistic quote unquote values, right? And that we need to rewrite the prophecy of the end of man in a different way. And you say, to embrace precarity? And so I wanted to ask you about embracing precarity, what that looks like, what it feels like, perhaps how how we go about doing that, what does how do we kind of literally get our hands around precarity as a form of subjectivity that we can become invested in?

Speaker3: [00:24:20] Mm hmm. Yes, absolutely. So I realize that the statement about embracing precarity can itself sound quite conservative or even potentially dangerous. It might sound like I'm advocating some kind of retreat or getting coming to terms with a difficult situation that we all suffer. You know, we're all suffering. There is nothing we can do. And it's definitely not about that. So my embracing of precarity has to do with partly with the recognition that already the majority of people in the majority of places in the world are living in precarious conditions. So this is a certain form of pragmatism, which is tied in precisely to this end of man, the concept that only ever referred to a very narrow group of humans on the planet, even though it was made to stand. For the universal human. So in this sense that for me, that end of man is seen as a promise, as a sudden opening, so it's basically repopulating the so-called family of man that you know, we know from our great humanists was a much more kind of convoluted and messy family in which their kind of kinship relationships are not always human. So opening up gender as we talked about sexuality, forms of relations, family structure, but also seeing us as in relation to microbes, in relation to animals, in relation to others. So that group and in relation to precarity, then realizing that the majority of people, even in so-called developed economies, being in the United States or Great Britain, economies that are doing relatively well with their indices that have developed kind of technologically that have highly kind of production that have developed infrastructure, so to speak, although they are starting to suffer more and more through lack of investment.

Speaker3: [00:26:17] But those very places, the very success of a small group of people is premised precisely on the precarious lives of many and that those forms of precarity are kind of revealed through issues to do with the health service in the United States. We see with the expense that is attached to the idea of healing or protection of life in the sense of of health care and and the cost associated with it, but also with issues such as education, who has the access to so-called good education, how primary school, secondary school universities are organized, the kind of fantasy of meritocracy which is really premised on housing, on the fact where chances are limited through ways of being and that then also how historically different genders had access. Some genders had to be more precarious so that others could thrive in workplaces and institutions. So that kind of sense of precarity recognition that life is precarious and it's a sociopolitical statement rather than some kind of universal metaphysical one. And I'm also drawing here on the work of, among others and at seeing who in her book about the matter at the end of the world is looking at mushrooms to Typekit mushroom pickers in the forests of Oregon, different socio cultural and ethnic groups who, through the kind of fight or sociopolitical conditions, have found themselves living at the edge of capitalism literally and kind of having this life in the forest, but also being involved in a global network economy of kind of collecting that expensive product this mushroom is and selling it abroad to Japan, to Russia, and then taking it as a metaphor and thinking, what would it mean that we are all potentially at the edge of the forest and the forest itself? As we know through the kind of Anthropocene research is not what it used to be, but also that we are also very close to abandoning the structures and the privileges that come with different forms of urban living that we take for granted.

Speaker3: [00:28:26] And this could happen again. Even the Facebook and Google was building their headquarters in the Bay Area. On the one hand, they investing so much in artificial intelligence research. And yet that seems a limited intelligence because it doesn't take into account when the sea level rise. All that research will basically become flooded and especially the face. I mean, Google still has some kind of protection through their geographical location, but Facebook is very close to to the rise of that. So that sense of precarity, which is also another realization that the research scientific research coming around the Anthropocene has brought to our realization. So the question is not just how precarious or not, because I think as a species at this particular moment in time, as well as people in different socioeconomic groups, we are but also to to then this realization becoming an imperative of how do we come to terms with this precarity? And also how do we recognize precarity differentials? And how do those who can still do something about it can actually go and act?

Speaker2: [00:29:30] Absolutely, yeah. And I wanted to ask you about two figures who I think in addition to sing, I think have been influential in terms of your thinking both about our need to break with finalist thinking. Of course, I'm thinking of your use of Kathryn Keller's work and breaking the apocalypse habit. And then also Isabel Tangiers concept of Gaia, which you say could be a concept or a model for thinking about living in this world in a different way. So I just want to ask you if you would tell us a little bit about those two thinkers and how they've influenced your work?

Speaker3: [00:30:02] Yes, absolutely. So Catherine Keller, the kind of feminist theologian who is conducting this very serious yet somewhat tongue in cheek analysis. Is of the fascination of with or even fetish for apocalyptic tropes in our culture. So I borrowed from her precisely that kind of interrogation of what it means today to live with the tropes of collapsing cities, the repeated almost imagination or imaginary of things falling apart and to think about why does the apocalypse return in particular moments in history? What does it mean, but also to develop? And this is from her that I borrow the phrase counter apocalypse. What does it mean to develop a counter apocalypse? So for me, in that kind of feminist spirit, a counter apocalypse would engage. You could also say in a kind of harrowing, ironic spirit, was that certain pomposity, theoretical pomposity of the discourse of the apocalypse, especially in its secular guises, that tries to frighten the populations into submission. And you also think it's as well breaking through a certain form of mobilization while also taking power away from all those kind of great saviors will at first frighten us and then offer us promises of salvation as long as we follow what they've got to offer. So that's so from Kelly. That notion of the of the counter apocalypse working a little bit on the ground, looking around, you could call it kind of almost a form of kind of poaching from here and there. Theoretically, conceptually, but also materially so it's it's both a form of intellectual interrogation conducted in a spirit, in a different philosophical spirit from the kind of top down narrative of be it, you know, a right wing populist or a Left-Wing philosopher who still knows and reveals the truth to you.

Speaker3: [00:32:01] So that's kind of a certain desire to maybe think differently. And I'm not making an equivalence here between Right-Wing populist and Left-Wing philosophers. I would still rather play with that with the latter. But also when it comes to the idea of Gaia, some people were kind of poking slightly nervous when both Roger and Latour turned to Gaia and was thinking that they were embracing some kind of spiritual flow of the universe. And I think they were both very clear, especially was that this is just a concept that was adopted by many kind of drawing on cybernetics, repurposing as a certain metaphor. But that metaphor has a very clear purchase on what, for example, stratigraphy or kind of ideology more broadly understands this kind of Earth systems. We're looking at the biosphere jail sphere, looking at the exchange of different phenomena and bringing that kind of Gaia framework as a way to look in a more relational, connected way at things. So that concept is kind of quite quite interesting, quite important. But even though it is looking at things all at the same time, it is not some form of metaphysical holism. Again, because a place with a lot of other serious feminists who are quite comfortable at cutting to size this big pronouncements about how the world is organized. So that's almost recognizing that we find ourselves in the middle of things, and it seems like a very banal statement. But that suddenly becomes a different point for theory making for philosophy making, but also for organizing, for realizing, well, we can kind of develop our narratives from.

Speaker1: [00:33:43] Mm hmm. Yes. And you know, I always wondered, too, if the kind of worry that was expressed around the adoption of Gaia by Stagiaires and Latour was really a sort of cover for rejecting the the care and the kind of feminine, gendered, motherly sort of impulses that surround Gaia as a kind of way of rejecting that rather than being so worried about its spiritual domains.

Speaker3: [00:34:12] Yeah, I think you're right, because that's really, you know, when you think about the metaphor, I don't know. Let's take Zeus. You know, the kind of big Greek gods represented a kind of muscular and quite again, top down way of organization of the world or any representations of or be it kind of visual rhetorical of kind of the Judeo-Christian identifications of God. So if any of that stands for for a particular form of dominating organizing the world, so suddenly you're bringing a different mode, a mode that is more fluid if you like, and that we know also from feminist writing, I'm thinking here about the nineteen seventies writing of Alan, 62, and the Lamorde in Kresteva. What that relationship was, the body was the other was the surrounding environment is much more entangled, much more fluid. So yes, so that's also coming up with a different, different figuration.

Speaker1: [00:35:11] Probably, I wanted to think with you, to Joanna, about the question of scale and scalar thinking within your work and within your projects. And I'm drawn to something that you write in the book where you say that in response to the apocalyptic tenor of the dominant discourses of the Anthropocene, you want to outline an alternative microvision and then you go on to talk about the feminist counter apocalypse that we've been discussing. But I was drawn to this idea of the micro vision as a particular form of scale that has an intimacy to it that is very distinct and perhaps in opposition to the kind of macro philosophical scientist's vision that we see in all these sort of techno phallic responses to the Anthropocene. And I wonder if you'd like to talk a bit about the importance of micro vision or the importance of the micro in general in terms of your own philosophy and theorizing through these Anthropocene conditions?

Speaker3: [00:36:15] Mm-hmm. I've been, I mean, for a while now, I've been trying to think about how we can continue philosophizing, thinking in a way that is still kind of cognitively and effectively viable. And that doesn't make us as serious as philosophers look in the mirror and think, What am I doing? And I suppose I come from fairly traditional humanities training, from literature and philosophy. But what I find most exciting about my training was my coming of age as a as a serious came at the time when you know, I can post post factionalism was quite important. And the question of the critique of systemic philosophy. I mean, for me, that was quite mind blowing in the sense that I could still continue with a sinking project. But the opening up of certain set of assumptions around the philosophy as a system, as an enclosed mode of the organization of thought in not just in terms of particular philosophers talking to one another because they all living down the same corridor in Cambridge or in Oxford, but also in terms of looking at concepts such as truth, transcendence, the soul or spirit logos, whatever it is that really organizes, I was thinking, universe. Surprisingly worryingly, the very same set of systemic philosophies has now returned in the research into artificial intelligence. So on the one hand and one part of the forest, people have gone through the critique of systemic philosophy and realize that kind of compromised position, and they truncated position that such a model, if you like, carries with it.

Speaker3: [00:37:54] On the other hand, in other parts, scientists, philosophers, thinkers still have carried on as if nothing had happened and they still are. So for me, that sense of the minimal sense of scale, sense of kind of cutting to size, not just all those kind of pompous pronounces and promises of salvation, but also my own rhetorical excesses and desires to theorize and reinvent wells has to do precisely with a certain realization that we can only save very little. And what does it mean to develop a mode of thinking that is a little bit more humble? Not in a kind of Christian way, but more in a pragmatic way, if you like about its own ambitions about what it wants to achieve. And I did that for the first time was that little book called Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene that I wrote and published in 2014, and there was an attempt to write in a different way. So it wasn't just that the book itself was short, although it was was like an extended essay. The chapters were short. The language was trying to experiment with How can I say the least I can, and yet still be able to say something. But it was also trying to think about an ethics that wouldn't be an overarching proposition for the whole universe, because that would be crazy and unworkable, although hasn't stopped others for trying to do that, but rather because I think the desire and a certain commitment was to try and think about the massive issues such as the Anthropocene, climate change, deforestation, humans role and all of these humans self-identification and all of this and try and reprogram if you like our language, our cognitive apparatus, our modes of address and our modes of address to ourselves.

Speaker3: [00:39:44] So it was really a desire of cutting the human to size, recognizing what we talked about earlier that we are Gaia, but also the way of the Anthropocene. So that's where the minimal comes from. And I think that carried through with it in that the end of my book maybe was that ambition of catching the human to size expressed much more bluntly. And that second book, I think, is less philosophical in the sense. That deals less with the debates, such as ethics, although I would like to believe it carries a certain philosophical commitment, but it engages much more with popular discourses. The stuff that is around us, but that commitment towards the form, the format and the the importance of kind of looking at things from in a bottom up way, looking around is still there.

Speaker2: [00:40:36] I wanted to ask you how you feel about play. I detect, I think in your approach and in your ethics, a certain playfulness. And it's in contrast often to how we think and talk about the Anthropocene, where usually the dominant affects are fear and mourning and grief and concern. And you know, it's hard, I think, to to cut across those ethics because they're so powerful and maybe justifiable in some ways. And yet, you know, when you talk about your engagement of some of these impressive theorists and philosophers, you talk about playing with them. And I feel as though in your approach in this book especially, you make rich use of irony and other ways of both, you know, lightening the situation at the same time that you are also enlightening us in terms of understanding these dominant dynamics that are surrounding it. I'm just curious about, you know, whether you think there's a place for laughter in the counter apocalypse.

Speaker3: [00:41:30] Yes, I think absolutely. And and the reason for there are multiple reasons for it. Partly, I think playfulness and a desire to play is also a certain is linked to a certain commitment to like not giving up. So playfulness is affirmative in the sense that although its outcomes can still be scary, it can be shattering, can be, can shake you up. It's also a certain bringing in a certain kind of recognition of located ness in the here and now, and the realization that that's maybe some of the more serious and more depressing discourses haven't quite worked. I'm thinking here of Nicole Seymour's recent book Bad Environmentalism, which is proposing and her bad and bad in environmentalism is actually quite good because what she suggests, we move beyond those the whole kind of affective apparatus of horror, depression, seriousness, and partly because just because they don't work as such, we can think of here as well about recent performance kind of Extinction Rebellion, the kind of multinational movement although accused already for being too white, too middle class to kind of privileged people in the streets. And that I think that all has to be mentioned. At the same time, there is that kind of irreverence, irreverence of the performance of the horror that is brought into it as a kind of certain disruptive gesture occurring in urban spaces, but occurring also through scientific discourse is quite important. Art would be another area. I mean, there is a lot of terrible art being committed now in the end in the name of the Anthropocene.

Speaker3: [00:43:08] Almost, it seems like the whole generation of artists has been waiting for another apocalypse to happen, provided a lot of food for thought and for for four kind of redevelopment development, if you like. And maybe you're being unfair because obviously it's understandable that many artists would want to engage with such a big, important issue. Having said that, there is also a lot of really exciting, interesting projects. Some were between art performance media, where people are bringing in precisely that spirit of not just irreverence, but also of not knowing of not knowing what to do, not knowing what to say. So the very gesture of engaging in art and arts with a kind of form of of playful being a form of playfulness performing that uncertainty, maybe already a way of of engaging with the crisis was already doing something. And maybe that is what that kind of attractiveness is revealed for me. Also, another thing I'm thinking about is that an artist friend of mine who is a stage designer as well as working with that figure of the clown fish, and I think the clownfish could become a very interesting, important figure for us to inhabit those spaces of the Anthropocene as that kind of species companion that could offer something a different gaze, a different vantage point to the kind of human top-down look at the situation.

Speaker1: [00:44:36] So Joanna, I also wanted to think through some of what you've written and been thinking about in terms of visual acuity, and I was struck by the notion that the Anthropocene because of its scale, in part because of its sort of the duration of its existence, you know, beginning with the steam engine or perhaps with agriculture, you know, depending on how you want to kind of place it in geological time, that it cannot be comprehended by human beings, or at least not very well, that we are only able to kind of represent it. Visually, but that much of the Anthropocene, visual city and maybe it's in the arts and it's in pop culture as well, has a kind of mollifying effect, a way of sort of discounting our ability to respond, if you will. So I wonder if you could talk through some of the ways in which you see that mollifying effect occurring in the kinds of representational forms that the Anthropocene has taken on or the way it's being displayed, if you will?

Speaker3: [00:45:41] Yes, I mean, I'm borrowing here and these thoughts from Nicholas Morozov, who's conducted a very kind of thorough study of the limitations or even impossibilities of truly representing the Anthropocene precisely because of its scale, because of its hyper object viral nature, if you like. So even if we draw from popular culture and look at things like a polar bear on a bit of ice or the forest burning or the whole Edward burtynsky kind of top down, beautifully disintegrating landscape, what it actually does is creates a sense of kind of sublime, but that is a sublime that at the end of the day provides comfort. So we see an image usually rectangular, still a moving. We process it. And even though we can see the sense of scale, we don't see the sense of scale. We see an image and which has the beginning or to the end, and it ends at a certain horror. The sudden catastrophe, but also represents it, imagines a in a way, and at the end of the day is the answer as the sublime. And we know that through philosophy through Canton, Burke and others is a form of pacifying us, telling us, Look, it's OK, you can hold the crisis in your hand or on screen. It's manageable. It's framed actually for us. So the whole sheer horror of the Anthropocene also having to do with its futuristic aspects, it's coming. We don't know when, even though there are singular phenomena, single, singular, multiple phenomena that are happening as part of it in different parts of the globe.

Speaker3: [00:47:15] But at the same time, to have this kind of one global picture of it, one that would span between now and the future is impossible. So but for me to realize this is not to say that we shouldn't then work with pictures, we should work with images just that. Maybe we should try and think of working with better pictures while also asking questions about what can visually do. Is it just a matter of representation? Is it a matter of using images differently? So that's basically what I've been trying to do, and that's what partly the book also has a film as part of it, and it's a it's a mini book and a mini film. So the seven minutes long. But it comes from what I've been building for many years the so-called Museum of the Anthropocene. And that museum ended up becoming the seven minute video essay consisting mainly of black and white photographs, which the goal of which isn't to show us the Anthropocene, but rather to show us our attempts to see the Anthropocene. So it's again at one remove. You can call this ironic. And yet obviously, that irony also is tinged with a sociopolitical commitment to try and see better to try and think better.

Speaker1: [00:48:27] I'm glad that you brought up the video companion to the book because I wanted to ask you about that as well. It's titled Exit Man, and we'll put a link to it in the liner notes of the show so that people can go click over onto it because it's an amazing, wonderful piece of work. Why was it important to you as a thinker, as an author, as an artist to create a video companion that would live alongside the words that you've written?

Speaker3: [00:48:52] I suppose it has to do with some of the things we've been talking about today, and it kind of, as in myself, as a thinker, as a scholar looking for ways of doing scholarship differently, looking for ways of doing, thinking differently, if you could say so. So as part, you know, we're talking about crises today, be environmental, existential, but it's part of my own kind of midlife crisis. I went to art school when I was already working as a professor at Goldsmiths, so I went to University of Westminster when I did a master's in photography as an area that I've always been interested. But it was mainly I was mainly being prompted by a desire and search for different modes of articulation. Again, less representational but more kind of known coming. Not coming in that kind of linear way. The way language, especially kind of discursive language, philosophical language requires us to to to rely on if we are to communicate with one another. So that was an attempt to maybe also play, maybe also play with myself as a philosopher, as a theorist and try and do something different. And now I kind of carry that spirit, I suppose. So that film the video is a companion is also an attempt. To show the same set of concerns in a slightly different register, it's an experiment of of the book has a, you know, the project has two trajectories one more, more kind of language based, one more image based, although they are intertwined because the video itself has a voiceover, was bits from the book seeping into it the other way around. When I write philosophy, I think images very often I think was pictures. I think with concepts in my work is often even ideas arrange themselves for me, a little bit like images. So I suppose it was a desire to open up a different register to try to play in a serious way and to think, could we do a philosophy? Could we do theory with other media?

Speaker2: [00:50:57] Well, I think that's very much the spirit that got us interested in podcasting, too.

Speaker3: [00:51:02] The first is

Speaker2: [00:51:03] Just the need to break outside the conventional media of scholarship, especially if we're interested in creating new kinds of relations and connections among among ourselves and maybe reaching wider publics along the way too. I wanted to ask you to join it, maybe as a way to to wrap up the discussion. Just, you know, whether you still having now written two very, very important books about the Anthropocene. Is it still an active muse for you or are your interests beginning to turn elsewhere? Even though I'm sure you know, we know that we will all be stuck in the Anthropocene for the foreseeable future,

Speaker3: [00:51:38] I can't see it being kind of sorted in the next few. I suppose my interest more and more kind of picking up on that other apocalyptic narrative, which is the I and I, as you know, artificial intelligence, which I am also reading as the Anthropocene narrative. So the project I've been working on recently and that kind of returns to what we were talking at the very beginning of our conversation today is about the link between Anthropocene stupidity and artificial intelligence. And obviously, that kind of different forms of of promise around the human, how the human can reboot himself. And it's usually him sort of the power of imagination through the kind of philosophies, theories we have. So I think I'm still going to be circling around a lot of the issues concerning the Anthropocene, especially those concerning the extractive mentality which manifests itself both in fossil fuels and in ideas being poached from some parts of the world or from certain groups, from more vulnerable people, bodies and pinned onto others. I'm also going to be interested in the extinction threatened extinction of different species, including the human and thinking about what does it tell us about us here and now I'm thinking about the changes to the kind of different forms of organism and organization of life on the planet as a result of climate change, but also kind of robotics or politicization.

Speaker3: [00:53:11] So these issues are becoming more and more intertwined. I'm also thinking of taking a step back and returning to a more philosophical interrogation of some of the assumptions that go into the research and technological funding of technology behind some of the AI kind of stuff. And some of it, for me, is a displacement activity from dealing with the Anthropocene and towards dealing with something kind of much cooler that burrows would have a kind of much better time addressing. So that's my my kind of ambition at the moment. Look at the philosophical assumptions. Even though they are not presented as philosophies, they are presented as kind of either common sense or they glossed over the ideas around human intelligence, around creativity, around consciousness and how they feed into our understanding of ourselves as humans, but also of our planet.

Speaker2: [00:54:08] Well, I, for one, I'm very encouraged and happy to hear that you are going to keep your eyes, your sharp feminist eyes on the brothers and their activity in your next project.

Speaker1: [00:54:17] Yeah, they needed some oversight. They do. Yeah, and it actually it strikes me just hearing you talk about artificial intelligence. I'm kind of reading it or understanding it a different way that there is something quite artificial about that intelligence, right? It's questionable. It's questionable whether we can call it an authentic kind of intelligence at all.

Speaker3: [00:54:37] Right? Well, listen, we can't sense, given that scientists haven't actually quite agreed on the definition of intelligence yet, and most most people are using either some descriptors or kind of trying to hedge their bets, saying, maybe it's this, maybe it's that. So obviously it's almost like a massive blind spot of the newly rejuvenated field, which in itself is interesting.

Speaker1: [00:54:58] Yeah, now really? Well, put. Thank you, Joanna, for such a wonderful, lively conversation. This has been really provocative. Reading the book was a wonderful experience to the end of man a feminine. Counter Apocalypse.

Speaker3: [00:55:11] Well, thank you so much. Thank you.