coe043_povinelli.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Welcome back, everyone, to the Cultures of Energy podcast, and we're so glad to have you here listening. We hope you're OK and we hope you're OK, and I'm doing my best not to sound defeated because my co-host said Do not sound defeated, so I'm bringing my best happy voice to keep everyone cheerful. But we are now just several hours out from a major political, I don't know, devastation, I guess for some of us. It's the morning after. Yes, the morning after the morning after. And somehow this hangover is going to last for a long, long time. So yesterday I called Doomsday. That is the possessive dooms day. And today, I don't know as doomsday, too. That's the that's the sequel, I guess. But anyhow, we are probably in for some very rough times, and I don't think I'm probably offending any of the listeners to this podcast, I don't think. But anyhow, solidarity and we have to hang in there. So we're glad that we're glad that you're here connecting and we're happy to have you out there in the world, even if we can't see your bright, shining faces or your glum and depressed faces in this setting. But glad to have you listening.

Speaker2: [00:01:49] Yes, very much. Glad to have you listening. Puffy eyes and all, and we were thinking of of recording this episode yesterday. But in in retrospect, I'm very glad we didn't because I don't think we were ready. We were talking a lot, but it was kind of for speech as we were trying to process trauma. Yeah, but I think I think today we, you know, even though maybe you feel a little emptier or more evacuated because you burned through so much adrenaline in the past 24 hours. I think you have a little bit more perspective, and I've stitched together a few points from some of the smart things I've been hearing people saying on Facebook and Twitter and things I've been reading as we've all been trying to come to terms with it. I thought I could run over some of those points and we could talk about them as just a way of of marking this. But I'd love to also, at the end, really bring it back to the question of energy and the environment and what what we all need to do in the next four years or in the six months until Trump is impeached, which is my like best case scenario.

Speaker1: [00:02:44] Yeah, that's.

Speaker2: [00:02:45] But even then, we've got we've got a vice president.

Speaker1: [00:02:48] I have worse ideas in mind for him. Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:02:52] You don't want to go on record.

Speaker1: [00:02:53] I think the minimum would be impeachment. No, I'm not going to say I'm not going to say anything. Like I said yesterday over

Speaker2: [00:02:58] Lunch or the evening of listening to the election returns was, yeah, was painful. So well, OK. So first of all, should we talk about who we're talking to first? Because there is like a silver lining, a big silver lining on this podcast episode? Yeah, and that is awesome. Interview to share. Yes. With Bethpage Vanilli, who is an amazing superhero anthropologist who has this amazing book JE ontologies that we're going to talk about.

Speaker1: [00:03:25] Yeah, well, God, thank the goddess for Beth. I mean, she's she's. Yes, you need her today. In fact, I'm going to listen to this part, this podcast again. Yeah, she's great just to get re-inspired, but I imagine she's pretty puffy on these days, too.

Speaker2: [00:03:42] Yeah, but she's also so, you know, smart and so has such an amazing analytic perspective. Yeah, everything that she does and that's happening in the world today, that any anyway, you will find her inspiring, even if you are as depressed as some of us in this room are today. But anyway, let's just run through this. I mean, these are just again a grab bag of thoughts and nothing probably that you haven't thought about before, but I think it's as part of the processing. It's kind of important to say, you know, what we know is that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.

Speaker1: [00:04:16] That's important to

Speaker2: [00:04:17] Remember, which is which is a good thing, but that she probably had several million Obama voters who didn't vote for her or switch sides. And probably, I would say, the majority of those people are likely people who just stayed home because they were so sickened by the whole drama.

Speaker1: [00:04:33] Yeah, inexcusable. Yes. Sorry. Yeah, no. Lazy s inexcusable lameness.

Speaker2: [00:04:39] Mm hmm. Ditto. Ditto. I will. I will second that. But there were definitely people who switched sides, which which raises more questions about what's happening. And I know everyone's trying to figure that out. There's a lot of finger pointing and blaming, but, you know, to try to look at this from our own perspective as anthropologists, I think a the number one thing is she was a woman in a misogynist political culture.

Speaker1: [00:05:00] Yeah, I mean, I don't know. That's an interesting question to raise like those people who switched from Obama, you know, in the last elections with Obama, if they voted for him and then haven't voted for her, is it because they're sick of the establishment or is it because the misogyny runs deeper than racism? I mean, I'm not saying you have to, you know, you don't have to compare them, but I think. That raises a question, I

Speaker2: [00:05:24] Think I think when it comes to political culture, it does actually in some ways.

Speaker1: [00:05:29] I think so

Speaker2: [00:05:29] Too. And so I think that's one of the takeaways is that, you know, there are people who were willing to vote for a man of color who won't vote for a woman period, basically including a lot of women. Because she lost white women, 53 percent to 47 percent was the last figure I saw. So, you know, women were not voting on gender grounds, which maybe that's something for the conversation feminism to talk about in feminist politics. Ok, point two. She was a bad choice for the political zeitgeist, insofar as I'm not sure that Bernie Sanders would have won, but there was a lot of organic interest. And one of the things that was keeping me up at night going into the last round was hearing all of the Bernie supporters on my Twitter feed continue to kind of talk about the email stuff and the WikiLeaks stuff. And it just even though I know that that isn't a huge percentage in most supporters of Sanders came out and voted for Clinton in the end or against Trump, however you want to put it, I still think there was a certain number of people who just found her, you know, as as a career long term, highly competent technocrat. They just found that completely uninspiring and out of touch with the

Speaker1: [00:06:42] Moment which Obama didn't have. No, he didn't bring. He didn't bring twenty five years of baggage. In fact, she only brought a few years of baggage. But the critique of him, of course, and when he was first elected was that he didn't have any experience. That's been the critique of Trump, too, although of course, Obama had more political experience than Donald Trump has had,

Speaker2: [00:06:59] And Obama ran as a change candidate, just like Trump did. I mean, for a different type of change, but he ran as a change change of the status quo. I'm not saying he he achieved that or delivered.

Speaker1: [00:07:09] Is there any campaign that doesn't run as a change campaign in some way? I mean, as you're transitioning power between, you know, from one administration to another, of course it's going to be changed to some degree. Yeah. Now we know that ideologically, in terms of policy, Clinton would have carried on more of the Obama legacy. And in fact, probably picked up some of the Bernie atmosphere at the same time because she was being pushed, she got pushed a little further to the left by the Bernie supporters, and that is an amazing and wonderful thing. Yeah. If she had gotten into office, it would have been great. But that's the would have been

Speaker2: [00:07:46] Because in the end, she absorbed maybe 80 or 90 percent of the Sanders platform. So she was running basically on the Sanders platform, but she was running not as Sanders or not as some other figure who had been positioned himself as as an outsider to dominate politics for years and years, crying in the wilderness and not crying. But, you know, crying out in the wilderness. And and, you know, so Clinton, Clinton was, you know, because of her experience. And I think that's a problem that the Democrats keep having. I mean, it reminds me of John Kerry, too. They run these highly competent people who just don't get anyone excited because no one's excited about competence. Yeah. Like there was an there was an yeah, it was, you know, John Kerry, you know, a man who's chaired many meetings. And that's kind of that's what it is.

Speaker1: [00:08:29] That's funny. Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:08:30] Well, so

Speaker1: [00:08:31] That relatively good position of power

Speaker2: [00:08:34] Now and no one and no one got and this goes back to point one. No one got excited about electing the first woman as president. That was just such not an issue, right election.

Speaker1: [00:08:43] I mean, in some ways, maybe you could argue that feminism has done a good job in that sense that people didn't see it as a radical kind of move. I mean, I think you could argue it in both directions. You could say that, you know, feminism or not, even feminism. Gender equality has, you know, has moved into the public sphere so thoroughly that no one saw it as a radical act to elect a woman. I'm more inclined to think that they didn't want to elect a woman because of misogyny and sexism. Yeah, but didn't want to put it in those terms. You know, but I don't I don't know if I'd like the term zeitgeist that makes it sound too positive as though it's an innovation. I think the election of Trump is just doubling down on racism and hatred. Really? Yeah, xenophobia. I mean, it's nothing new in a sense. No, I agree. And Bernie wouldn't have been, you know, a radical change candidate either in some ways because he's been part of the political system, if not the establishment, for what, 40 years or something. So I don't know, Dakota Zeitgeist makes it sound like there's, you know, exciting revolutionary ideas in play here. And they're not. I mean, this is just this is retrograde racist misogyny rearing its head and having a spokesperson for it.

Speaker2: [00:10:07] No, I agree with that entirely. In fact, I wrote about that in this in this collection crisis of liberalism that we we presciently published a few few weeks ago. I mean, it's a really gerontocracy election because, you know, you had three people, all of whom were around 70 years old. Were the real political figures here? One of them was was, you know, kind of offering the type of populist message that people have been offering since time immemorial to get angry, hurt people to vote by, you know?

Speaker1: [00:10:36] Yeah, like like in Weimar, Germany, for example, I mean, not to make an obvious connection, but

Speaker2: [00:10:42] Maligning maligning neighbors is maligning people who look differently to explain, you know, the causes for people's distress and then trying to motivate them to exclude them or persecute them in some way. And that's that's ancient. And then we also had, you know, with Clinton, essentially the the the end run of a long tail of the 1990s sacrifice of leftist politics to neoliberalism and sort of, you know, globalist technocracy and all of those ideas, which have been around for 20, 25 years at least. Yeah. And then finally, with with Sanders, who you know, everyone on the left was saying was the most radical figure, but really was his principles were the progressive as principles of the 1960s, which is when he he cut his teeth. Rightly so, right? You're right,

Speaker1: [00:11:26] He just held on to some of those good values, which

Speaker2: [00:11:28] Was great. The striking thing is how how few new ideas there were and how we're just cycling back and forth between kind of liberalism, socialism and fascism, right?

Speaker1: [00:11:36] Right. And you know, that's that's probably the correct kind of unholy trinity, you know? But the fact is, is that we kind of got screwed with populism two ways, because on the one hand, we have this populism of, you know what, people are kind of white working class and rallying around these in these Rust Belt states rallying around Trump, making it so that he could win the presidency. On the other hand, we have the Electoral College, which actually prevents any true populism from having it say, like, you know, if we went with the actual voice of the people writ large in this entire country, Hillary would be president because she got more of the popular vote. So we have a paradox there where, you know, there's a claim to represent people, and yet we're kind of fucked over by the Electoral College. Now I know that every election cycle that people are unhappy about, which is just about everyone someone says, let's get rid of the Electoral College, but in this case, shit, we really should. We should have gotten

Speaker3: [00:12:41] Rid of it before

Speaker2: [00:12:42] It. It's an 18th century political technology that, you know, was adapted to the kind of Masonic idea of the republicanism we had back then and not at all to, you know, to 21st century mass mass mediated democracy. And so, yeah, it's out of touch. And in some ways, you know, we talk a lot. I think when people on the left here envy the situation in Europe where you have multiple parties, I mean, you have to remember that the whole political system was set up in the 20th century in most of those countries, so that they had the advantage of kind of trying to adapt their political institutions to where society was at, rather than trying to kind of maintain the purity of some 18th century vision when it agrarian society vision when it, you know, we're not living in a Jeffersonian system anymore, right? Jeffersonian society. So. Ok, let me move along because because I just. Ok, point number three. And this is courtesy of the analysis of a dear colleague, Kaushik Sun Rajan, who I'm not even sure now as we got this email. But but we got it. Part of his election prediction, which was quite prescient, where he points out that Clinton is somebody who had been subjected not to 25 weeks, but rather 25 years of swift boating the John Kerry model. Of course, on everything from Whitewater to Monica Lewinsky to Benghazi, to her use of a private email server, and here is something that I did not know.

Speaker1: [00:14:06] Yeah, this is the interesting point.

Speaker2: [00:14:08] I did not know. But he pointed out that actually, it has been the standard practice for all secretaries of state since email was invented. So that's Madeleine Albright, that's Colin Powell, that's Condoleezza Rice, but that all secretaries of state have used private email. It's just been standard practice only Hillary has been pilloried for it. But part of it is this this I know part of this is just been creating this reputation for her that she's a liar. And that actually came out in a lot of the exit poll analysis that I saw were people who switched from Obama to Clinton again. I mean, from Obama to Trump. Again, this is anecdotal, but would say things like, Well, she's a liar, and he and he may

Speaker1: [00:14:50] Be and shouting forever liar, liar pants on, but she's a crook.

Speaker2: [00:14:54] But the whole party has been calling the Republicans. I mean, the Clintons liars since the 1990s. So it's like twenty five years of that that she's got that it's hard to shake that.

Speaker1: [00:15:03] Yeah, she's been tarred with that for sure, for a quarter of a century.

Speaker2: [00:15:08] So anyway, so that's something and I thought that was interesting, but I think that's part of this. Then I wanted to mention as point four that our news industry, which I've written about elsewhere, really is a husk of itself because of. Over consolidation because of its reliance on fleeing advertising revenue. And it really has gone into a mode where it has to chase scandal in a way to sustain itself. And that's a much longer conversation, but I've written about it elsewhere. So if you're interested, I'm happy to share that with people.

Speaker1: [00:15:41] This is like the Dominic Bowyer promotion.

Speaker2: [00:15:43] Yeah, there you go. I wrote about those all

Speaker3: [00:15:46] My words over here.

Speaker2: [00:15:47] No, I didn't see it coming, folks. I was just as excited as everyone was.

Speaker1: [00:15:51] Well, here's a good conspiracy theory for you that I just thought of, OK? In fact, there were machinations of the mass media to ensure that Trump got elected. Why? Because they've had, you know, this wonderful bout of people actually clicking on their stories, getting more attention than fucking football games. And so the media has done really well through this horrifying, combative campaign right now that Trump is king. They get to have more of that action, you know, on the on the fox side of things will have, you know, glorification of his every act. And on the New York Times side of things, we'll have more and more shocking emails and exciting stories about how he's destroying the world, right? So in some ways, because you can already see the kind of grandiose headlines coming out of the New York Times, and I know that, you know, it's just a couple of days after the fact, but. I mean, I'm teasing like this is a conspiracy theory, but you could make that argument because the media is going to get not that they're going to get fat off of this, but they're going to continue to enjoy some exciting media times over at least over the next several months and maybe over the next four years. But. There's some logic to that, too. The other thing that has not been shared, I think enough is the impact of the echo chamber silos of social media and news media, and we've heard this a million times that people get most of their news through their social media feed. So you have kind of a doubling of the echo chamber or a quadrupling. And, you know, I think that's intensified in the last four years. Yeah, it was already happening during the Obama time, but it's intensified over the last four years, and I'd love for someone to look into that and really dig down into, you know what those qualities are. You'd have to get a sociology person to do it and maybe a

Speaker2: [00:17:58] Political, undoubtedly, and in the point has been made now quite a lot in the past day or so that, you know, it points out why when we tweet, when we post on Facebook, why we retweet whatever we're doing, we think of this as political action. But it's not because we're so hived off from one another. We're only reinforcing the knowledge and perspectives that we already have. And, you know, talk is not politics, right? And or, you know, social media is not politics, and this is an era in which the need for direct action is beckoning so strongly. But let me just. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:18:28] Well, OK, go

Speaker2: [00:18:30] Ahead something because this is for me, was a really poignant, like kind of master trope. Moment of this whole thing was a colleague, anthropologist, a poet who was doing canvassing in Pennsylvania and who found this woman who wouldn't let her wouldn't open the door to her was somebody who had voted for Obama and had switched to Trump. Wouldn't open the door to her, but also wanted to keep talking, wouldn't stop talking, wouldn't open the door. And so they had this conversation through a closed door, which I thought was like, again, you know, if you were looking for a poetic trope for where we're at is a society of hives, you know, ethical, right?

Speaker1: [00:19:03] But yeah, yeah. And it's also a paradigmatic of the scared white people in the world. But she won't

Speaker2: [00:19:08] Open, but she wanted to talk. And that is something where, you know, every time you can communicate, you have a chance for transformation, I think.

Speaker1: [00:19:16] Well, that's not. That's nice. But then how did it how did the conversation end? Because some people like to talk just to argue. Right? I mean, you know, I don't know how that conversation went. Did she know she voted for Trump in the end? So I'm glad I'm glad that that interaction happened, and maybe we do need to talk to people. But.

Speaker2: [00:19:34] So this brings up my point. Five.

Speaker1: [00:19:35] Yeah. Oh, you got another one.

Speaker2: [00:19:36] Just got another one. Well, listen, we're trying to share every whatever little pearls of wisdom we've got here, and this will be the last one, I promise. So this is really and this is people have been talking about and this is when you think about the Rust Belt and you think about that, you know, it wasn't the declining vote in California that through this election, it was specifically what happened in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa. And it wasn't

Speaker1: [00:20:00] It, I guess to some degree, because that could have, I don't know.

Speaker2: [00:20:03] Anyway, yeah, I mean, again, there's there's a lot of fingers you can point. But but I think the one that that we have also neglected at our peril is the what the journalist Sarah Kenzi or has been calling flyover country. Other people call it, too. But she actually predicted Trump's victory months ago and because of the

Speaker1: [00:20:23] Reason she's spending time

Speaker2: [00:20:24] There. Well, because she was based in St. Louis, and she understands, I think in some ways what working class white folks are up to. And I know that people have been saying, Oh, don't blame the poor, and this is not about blaming the poor. It's about saying that in certain certain communities, there were small shifts from the Democrats, the Republicans that were decisive. I mean, the the vote spread in Pennsylvania was only 12000 votes. It's not a huge number of people who had to shift to do it, but I think you know this. What Kinzinger writes about is this, you know, this combination of deindustrialization?

Speaker1: [00:20:58] Yeah, which which happened under the last major populist president known as Ronald Reagan.

Speaker2: [00:21:04] Exactly. That's when it started.

Speaker1: [00:21:05] He has become lionized since then. Canonized practically.

Speaker2: [00:21:10] So there's that there's automation, which tends to take jobs away from working class people more than it takes jobs away from folks like us, right?

Speaker1: [00:21:18] And everyone loves her social media and their smartphones. Everyone loves that technology, but no one loves the technology that doesn't continue to provide them with a blue collar job, I guess.

Speaker2: [00:21:29] And the last part of it, which no one is talking about, is addiction. I haven't heard anyone talking about the way that methamphetamines and opioids may have influenced this, but you pointed out Trump. There's something about Trump ism that seems to have fueled.

Speaker1: [00:21:41] Well, yeah, no, that was my thought this morning. And you know, I don't mean to sort of demean addiction or the issue of drugs. I I understand it's a it's a real catastrophe. But at the same time, I can't help but wonder, like how many of Trump's supporters and then people who went to vote for him were tweaking, you know, because having done methamphetamines? It is. It makes you what I would call aggro. Yeah. You know, it's it's a really agitating kind of disposition income that comes with that kind of. But, you know, the flip side of it is like all of the rest of us should pick up a heroin habit, I think because that maybe it will sort of knock us unconscious for the next four years.

Speaker2: [00:22:23] Disagree, defeatism, defeatism. Do it. But listen, the other thing and this is a shout out to my mom, who I thought I would counsel her. I was going to comfort her yesterday, but she ended up comforting me because she's my mom. She pointed out the importance of bad public education in this, too.

Speaker1: [00:22:40] That's good. That's a great thing.

Speaker2: [00:22:41] That's another part of it, because it's much easier to sway people with populist rhetoric and swagger if they don't have, you know, other interpretive resources to work with. So and that's something that since many of us are educators on this podcast, that's something where we can't help, whether it's in the college context or beyond it. Yeah, I

Speaker1: [00:23:01] Don't know, probably beyond know how much like an elite private university like rice, but I understand that there are other faculty out there who are doing other stuff. But yes, and

Speaker2: [00:23:10] Well, listen, the point is

Speaker1: [00:23:11] Touching, touching upon that.

Speaker2: [00:23:12] Yeah, the point is, if we want to change it, we're going to have to get outside of our comfort zone one way or another. And I think that's the important thing to bring back. Maybe to bring it around to the podcast. Thematics again, is this is going to be terrible for energy and climate issues this presidency. It's obvious that

Speaker1: [00:23:29] He's going to put into power.

Speaker2: [00:23:30] The EPA will probably be severely weakened, right? And he's going to, you know, he's all about pipelines and fossil fuel infrastructure and also, you know, coal, clean coal and fracking. And so it's all coming back again.

Speaker1: [00:23:43] Didn't you hear he's going to start up the steel industry again to really revive that? It's going to go back. We're going to go back to the 1950s and, well, the heyday of, oh yeah, it is, and that's the fantasy he's sold.

Speaker2: [00:23:56] It's people are buying it. At least some people are buying it, not the majority of the population, but some,

Speaker1: [00:24:01] Some people and not the majority of these swing

Speaker2: [00:24:03] States are buying it. So I think that this is why, you know, we still have a protest at against the Dakota Access Pipeline and that type of direct action is something that all of us should be supporting and doing because I think that we, in the sense, are representational liberal democratic system has failed us on the climate issue, and it's more important than ever to to get directly.

Speaker3: [00:24:28] Well, it

Speaker1: [00:24:29] Was. It was getting better. And, you know, now Trump says that he's going to quote unquote cancel the Paris Agreement. I mean, I know legally he cannot do that, but he can also refuse to follow the guidelines and the expectations there were.

Speaker2: [00:24:43] There were so little binding in that anyway.

Speaker1: [00:24:45] Was almost at least there were targets.

Speaker2: [00:24:47] It was an honor code, of

Speaker1: [00:24:48] Course, and he can just say it's all the honor system and he won't do anything.

Speaker2: [00:24:53] So that's where we're at, folks. Anyway, we're going to keep doing what we're doing. We are going to keep talking, not at this length. We promise about political issues, but I do think that environmental energy issues are going to have to become something we're talking more about because we no longer can assume that our technocracy is going to be gently nudging us in the right direction, in fact. I really think that, you know, this is the era of direct action on climate now.

Speaker1: [00:25:18] Yeah, because there's going to be major rollbacks at every level of government now. Right. So yeah, probably direct action is going to be the only way to make a difference and hopefully that will make a difference.

Speaker2: [00:25:32] So thanks. Thanks. Thanks, folks, for listening. Keep listening. Because the best part of the podcast is coming with Beth in a second. Meanwhile, hug your people, be kind to them. I think we're all struggling with this. So.

Speaker1: [00:25:47] On autism now, I don't know. I guess, yeah, I would say we're all struggling, I mean, I know that you want to be a positive and and have an uplifting message, but it's it's pretty dismal and I think people feel a lot of people feel like in a place of affective ruin.

Speaker2: [00:26:06] And you coined that term yesterday, I think.

Speaker1: [00:26:09] Well, I don't know. That's what it feels like. That's what it feels like out on the streets here. And I'm telling you, like as a white person walking around in Texas, I want to wear a T-shirt every fucking day that says I did not vote for him. Yeah, I feel like I have to, you know, because I have so many people of color that I come into contact with every day here in Houston. And I, I want to convey to them that this was not my agenda. And yet? It's out there.

Speaker2: [00:26:40] All right, anyhow, well, that's honest, and that's what we're trying to do is share some honest thoughts this morning. So but with that, can we at least say,

Speaker1: [00:26:47] Oh, go bath? That's we're so very, very happy to have you here on the podcast, and we want to welcome you to our world here and cultures of energy and really thrilled to have you here speaking with us. So welcome.

Speaker3: [00:27:18] Yeah, thank you. Yeah, great to be with you all.

Speaker1: [00:27:21] Yay. So we ran out and got the copy of a copy of your new book, the second that the email came through from Duke. And so we're super excited, right? I mean, it was like it was sort of the perfect like. If Duke ever wondered whether those emails worked, this is proof that it did, because I immediately I clicked over, went online and there we were.

Speaker3: [00:27:41] Go, Duke. Yeah, yeah, Duke. Listen in,

Speaker1: [00:27:45] Can do you hear us anyway? That's OK. That's a shout out for him. He'll appreciate that. So the new book as many of our listeners will know is called G Ontologies. Is that how we want to pronounce it?

Speaker3: [00:27:57] That's how we want

Speaker1: [00:27:58] To pronounce it. Ok, cool. I was hemming and hawing about how to go about

Speaker3: [00:28:03] The ontologies and then John Power John

Speaker1: [00:28:06] Topiwala. Lovely. So G Ontologies, a requiem to late liberalism. And it just came out. So without further ado, maybe we should just dig in and say, What are Scientology ontologies? What is Giolito power? Where are we going with with these ideas?

Speaker3: [00:28:24] Well, a lot of people have very, very nicely and generously looked at early conversations I was having about the concept of Scientology and the concept of giant power, which are really just to cinemas on YouTube videos and in particular, a talk that I gave at the Huckabee many years ago during the opening of the Anthropocene project there. Mm hmm. Ok, since yeah, since first laying out what I was thinking John Ontologies referred to, it's obviously evolved in some ways in the book. What I mean by John Technology and John Power is a formation of power that involves epistemology, involves aspect and involves social governance that operates through the division of life and non-life rather than life and death. And so in the book I, I begin by situating us in the long conversation of bio power and how even within Flacco's work in which we think there's a separation between, say, sovereign power disciplinary, well, sovereign power on the one hand, disciplinary and bio political power, on the other hand, that in fact, bio politics sovereign power. All operate within a more general imaginary of that, divides things that have life, have potentiality in a very particular way and things that come into existence without that potential reality, that is things that come into existence, supposedly inert. And that would be nonlife. So, so that's the general framework. A couple of things are important for me, one that giant power or gerontology isn't a new formation of power. That is, it's not something that's emerging now in the wake of anthropogenic climate change or anthropogenic toxicity, but rather a form of power that's been operating in the open in settler colonies and settler colonialism, but now is revealing itself more globally is circulating more globally as an explicit formation of power in the wake of the West, the North's understanding of anthropogenic climate change and toxicity.

Speaker2: [00:31:18] Right. So is it is it fair to say because you're pretty clear that this isn't you're not what you're trying not to do is to provide a new metaphysics of power. But but is it fair to say that there's something about the Anthropocene condition that is actually helping to bring to light these giant political formations that might have been easier to submerge? I mean, part of it is like the Hegelian question of why we see it now, you know?

Speaker3: [00:31:44] Yeah, and I would make two initial comments on that. Without being flippant about why we see it now. The question of both the visibility of this formation of power and a new form of. Of ideological to speak loosely ideological mystification of this power is really important, so many, many people saw this power. And have seen it for a very long time, so if you're indigenous in Australia, if you're indigenous in North America or the South Americas, it it it wasn't hard to see it was it operated within your lives very explicitly in ways that I try and present in the book. So the the way in which settler imaginary word, whether in the beginning, in terms of a kind of primitive artist rejectionism or in the middle of the century as a multicultural embrace was to divide indigenous people on the basis of their inability to be to properly. That's my little fingers are waving properly, differentiate between things that had life and thus had certain forms of agency and messy potentiality and things that lacked in life. So like rocks, right? So it was always explicitly working, and it worked to govern spaces and people and their analytics of the relationship between forms of existence, people, forms of existence and other forms of existence as coexisting and other forms of existence, like Western epistemology and et cetera.

Speaker3: [00:33:44] So, so, so in some ways, they answer to a question is yes, absolutely the condition of anthropogenic climate change and toxicity. Have forced a dominant metaphysics, what I call Scientology bios ontology to lose its explanatory and cultural power so it doesn't work anymore in a simple way doesn't work by ontology that divides existence on the planet in this way through life and nonlife doesn't work as effectively. It doesn't make as much sense. It's not working in the natural sciences or the social sciences or the arts or the humanistic sciences. And in that sense, the conditions of anthropogenic climate change and toxicity are making this form of power more visible more globally. But it's also as many people are talking about also trying, absorbing it into this older metaphysics in which suddenly there is a condition, right? And it's a new condition it's in. I can see what will happen. We're in giant power, we're in gerontological power, we're in the Anthropocene. And what the book is also trying to do is to say we we can't rush to the same. A level of abstraction that a certain metaphysics, a certain older form of ontology always urges us to do, and instead we have to really try and think of the the the territories and distributions of this concept.

Speaker2: [00:35:38] Yeah. I mean, and this is it's a really it's a really exciting book, and I think it may be your best book and that's saying something because you've written a lot of great books.

Speaker3: [00:35:46] I actually honestly, really like this little book.

Speaker2: [00:35:50] Yeah, no, it's great.

Speaker3: [00:35:51] And I, you don't have to include that part. No, no, we're going to.

Speaker2: [00:35:55] We're going to glued all our fanboy and fangirl in here, too. But yeah, but listen, you know, before we I mean, there was a lot in what you just said, and I want to pursue some of those threads, but I also kind of want to lay out a bit more of the of the key terms and analytics here. And you talk about, you know, John Powers as a mode of liberal governance. And then you talk about three particular tools symptoms figures of of that mode of governance the desert, the animist and the virus. And I just wanted to see if you could say a little bit about those three figures before we move on.

Speaker3: [00:36:27] Yeah. And this is always the way I end up explaining things that I take a diversion and then come back, so I apologize to listeners and to you for the way I think it's just it's a hopeless, it's hopeless. My mind is hopeless, but in order to. Explain the function of those figures, strategies and concepts, the virus, sorry, the desert, the animus and the virus. It's important for me at least to begin by saying by referring to a diagram that's in the ontologies and was also in economies of abandonment. Although the the diagram has been added to in JOHN ontologies, and that's the symphony of late liberalism, right?

Speaker2: [00:37:24] Yeah, it's beautiful.

Speaker3: [00:37:25] Yeah. And the reason, well, you know, it's really great. I'm a total shout out to Vivian Zuru, who's a brilliant curator based in Brisbane and in Amsterdam, who's been curating a show called Frontier Imaginaries Grid was just in Jerusalem. And she she really just generously took that symphony, blew it up and has put it on the walls of the exhibit in Brisbane and then the exhibit in Jerusalem. And I agreed to it as long as it included annotations local annotations to it because the symphony doesn't mean to lock down a truth about events in the world, but rather to say if you're standing somewhere, the events that matter, the discourses that matter, the techniques of governance that matter. Are these and these local events, discourses, figures, strategies that matter, then project a certain form of more global governance. And so in the symphonies, there's the bottom stanza in the top stanza. And my idea was, and I say this in the anthologies was that. These aren't fixed stances, if you put another stands at the bottom, the top stands is going to look different. Mm hmm. This is important in relation to the three figures of Scientology that that you were referring to the desert, the animist and the virus because the book Scientology starts with fuko. It's a rhetorical pivot. Rhetorically. On the one hand, rhetorically, I thought it would be powerful to say, rather than those four figures that were diagnostic and symptomatic of bio politics, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, the hysterical woman and the perverse adult.

Speaker3: [00:39:50] Um, that we're seeing three other figures, tactics and strategies emerging as John Power comes to have a global visibility. Ok. And those three are the desert, the animist and the virus. Why those three figures and what's their status within the way I think about Scientology is not as a global homogeneous power, but rather as a set of tactics, strategies and figures that are layered in dissolve, get layered again, dissolve shift, accumulate strategies from other places, et cetera that is function like that symphony. The reason these three figures. As opposed to any other is that if you're standing where I'm standing and with whom I'm standing and working in Australia, then those three figures are the dominant form that giant power takes their. So if John, to power is governance through. The division between life and non-life, then each of these figures, each of these strategies tactics evidence, a different way of dealing with the crumbling of that division. Right. So, yeah, so the desert or all the discourses and figures and tactics. They don't have to announce themselves as desert, but everything that says, look, there is a division here, it's real, it's important. And if we don't figure out a way of keeping nonlife from extending itself ever more because of anthropogenic climate change and toxicity, then the preciousness of life, which is a, you know, if not a universe precious event.

Speaker3: [00:42:03] Definitely an earth precious event. Definitely a galaxy. Well, what are we in the Solar System, precious event, et cetera, will be lost? So it's all the tactics that says we have to keep ourselves from being extinguished by non life, the animist are all these discourses that we're seeing in philosophy and critical theory art all around which say, Hey, you know what? Don't worry about the division, because in fact, everything, if not alive, everything is animate. Everything is vibrant. Everything is has all the qualities that we always assign to life. So it's not an issue because rocks have that and everything has that in assemblages have that. And so everything that we've really held precious and unique to ourselves is actually now the general condition of everything, right? The reason someone like me would be very suspicious of this, although, you know, I get in and it's interesting. Someone like me who wrote the Cunningham recognition, lo, those many years ago is that that is the same strategy we see in liberal recognition that is, ah, sorry, we excluded you now we see that you're the same as us. And thus, nothing that I hope precious has to change. At all, because rather than being disturbed what from whatever is not within this division and not on my side of the division, I simply allow you in unless you have to conform to what I am, right?

Speaker2: [00:43:42] That's that's the thing. That's the recognition, right? You get to come in, but only on our terms,

Speaker3: [00:43:48] Only on our terms and a lot of the book. Most of the chapters in the book really probed that figure and tactic of recognition. Both that one and, well, all three. But that is the animus is really the central figure that's probed. But all through the book, there's the underlining motif of the desert as what allows capital to function most effectively, but also the virus in the in the figure of the CODEPINK film collective that I'm a part of. And the virus is the virus. You know, honestly, the virus is something that I and a lot of critical theorists and art art folks, you know, would tend to go toward like if you had to choose one, would you want to be in the discourse of the desert, the animist or the virus? And a lot of us say the virus because the virus seems most radical. But what the book tries to say is, look, what's what is the virus do to this division? If the desert says the division is real, we have to stop nonlife from encroaching on us. If the animals say, don't worry about it because everything's basically on the side of life or has a qualities that we've assigned to avoid, the virus says. Look, I'm not definable by either one of those sides, but I'm going to use each one of them tactically to extend myself.

Speaker3: [00:45:19] And so we think what someone like me think that's great, I like that that's what I choose. But what the book also tries to argue is that to be the virus is to be under assault in such a way that your likelihood of continuing is not great. So, you know, and I try and say, seriously, the virus is Ebola. The virus is what's the what's the sorry, the head shrinking one? Yeah. And I apologize for that one out of my head Zika. That is the virus is something nobody actually wants. That's a real delusion event. It's not something that you recognize, it's not something that will allow you to stay in the same condition you're in, it's something that radically alter your condition and we don't take that seriously enough. So either to be the viruses, to be Zika in which everyone is like, no, we will mobilize every form of governance and epistemology and metaphysics to inoculate ourselves from you, or it's to be in the position of saying, Oh, no, that's not the virus I was talking about, which is not to take the virus seriously.

Speaker1: [00:46:42] Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, again, many things to kind of riff off.

Speaker3: [00:46:48] Yeah, sorry. Am I talking? No, it's

Speaker1: [00:46:49] Good. It's good. It's it's rich stuff. And it's it's complex and sophisticated and wonderful in that way.

Speaker2: [00:46:55] So even our best people are actually listening to hear you. Not us.

Speaker3: [00:46:58] Yeah, that's right.

Speaker1: [00:47:00] So we'll just try and parse some questions.

Speaker2: [00:47:03] So the more of you that's in

Speaker1: [00:47:05] This article, we're just trying to get you to read, Well, you know, I kind of wanted to go back to Dominic's question of a few minutes ago, and that's where he he posed the Hegelian question of, you know, why are we sort of seeing junta power g ontologies now? And I kind of like to flip that on its head in a way and pose it in a more ethnographic.

Speaker3: [00:47:24] Yeah, that's fine. I just I, Dominic, I'm just not a Hegelian. Oh yeah, you're not. I'm not a content, right? And if anything, I you know, but but to be a real Hegelian, you have to. I mean, the purification of the positions assumes a certain kind of object. The potential for an object integrity that is part of what my newer stuff is trying to get us to think beyond.

Speaker2: [00:47:56] I'm a I'm a really bad Hegelian,

Speaker3: [00:47:57] By the way. That's and then then I'm on your side.

Speaker1: [00:48:00] He's he's just a wanted. He's a wannabe Hegelian.

Speaker2: [00:48:03] No, I just I just like talking about the dialectic sometimes.

Speaker3: [00:48:06] Yeah, that's that's cool.

Speaker1: [00:48:08] So Hegelian or not? I mean, you don't have to wear the t shirt or even the baseball cap, but it's you know, I wonder too, though, like, that's

Speaker3: [00:48:16] One way I just bought it,

Speaker1: [00:48:19] Right?

Speaker3: [00:48:20] Matching colors and

Speaker1: [00:48:21] In neon orange, I'm sure.

Speaker3: [00:48:23] Oh, I was about to say that.

Speaker1: [00:48:27] Right? So but you know, it's like, I mean, that's one way of posing the question. Are we sort of seeing this emergence now? Are you seeing this emergence now because of a condition called the Anthropocene? Or are you able to see and surface and talk about JNTO power because of the ethnographic experience, because of these many decades? You know, I just I wonder, like, is there something specific and you do a wonderful job in the book of tracing these parallels between the logics that you see and how how you're kind of coal-burning, you know, with the people, with the folks you've been working with for so long? But I wonder, you know, could you have wood of wood giant power have ever sort of appeared to you if it hadn't been for all of that time? I mean, it's a really it's a specific, rich experience that sort of brings you to these to these theories, these ideas.

Speaker3: [00:49:18] Yeah, the answer, the answer is no. And I try and be very, very clear about that in the book. And again, that long riff on the symphony. It was meant to be an answer to that. No, I would only have this book is from a place those concepts are from a place if doesn't work where you are. Ditch him, right? I think it because there is a globalization that can be intervened in from here, that the concepts will be helpful to many people. But the short answer is is is no. I would not have had John apology if I had not been in long conversation with. Generations of people who live in Belgium and around Belgian who became caught being. It might help to talk about the first time I even that I came to know the term Anthropocene.

Speaker1: [00:50:39] Yeah, that'd be cool.

Speaker3: [00:50:40] Yeah. Ok, so. I'm trying to remember how I should have brought up the old resume to see the only way I can remember anything when anything happened, but. I think that this order is right. There was a comment, and I'm really lucky I get invited to really interesting things and get invited to things that I would never think to invite myself to, let alone be invited to speak at. So I received an invitation to speak at a conference in Canberra, Canberra, on climate change and the I think it was the earliest mid ish. 2000s and it was a meeting of a global meeting of humanity centers. And, you know, and I actually wrote back and said, I'm I'm pretty arrogant, like I'm a pretty much of an asshole and I'm pretty much a dork. Go and talk about anything, anywhere, right? Especially if I haven't been there before, which can get me in trouble. But anyways, yeah, yeah. So let's not go there. But but wow, climate change. No, I'm not. There are other people who are super qualified to talk about this. I wouldn't even know how to talk about it. And and the inventor said, No, no, no, no, no.

Speaker3: [00:52:13] It's about the Anthropocene. It's not what you think. Just here, go, look at this. And they sent me a link and I got it and I thought, Oh, I know why you want me to come talk about this because of talks I've been given giving about this. The the the the way in which governance is working, which is not bio power because I started thinking about that and. And so from that conference on through the Anthropocene project, through the Extinction Slam at Serpentine, I was slowly learning about what. The science, the geological science that was giving us the Anthropocene, how it was thinking. My own background in biology, certainly my own background in critical theory through fuko, but it was that slow layering of how these fields of discourse and epistemology but the natural sciences are critical theory were reacting to this concept in relation to the problem of governance that I had been in through this long conversation with folks in codebases and at Bellevue, and that formed the concept of Scientology or Jonathon Power. So hopefully that's answering what you're asking.

Speaker1: [00:53:55] Yeah, definitely. And, you know, it kind of brings up another question, too.

Speaker3: [00:54:00] It's also I mean, yeah, and I should say it also and that's why when Dominic asked, you say in the book, very definitively, you're not trying to establish a new ontology of objects, you're not trying to establish a new metaphysics, you're not even trying to establish a new global condition that's homogeneous and applicable to everything everywhere. Or you don't presuppose it. That's why that that for me, that statement's really important. It's the same statement I make about late liberalism. From here, liberalism looks like this. I think it has extension at least into these settler colonial liberal spaces. I think it could also rewrite how we think about North European self understandings of their own governance. But we have to write our critiques of, in this case, John Power or liberalism from where we're standing. Understanding that from where we're standing, of course, is within a circulation, but within a circulation that drops that articulates differently in different places and then extends more or less powerfully elsewhere.

Speaker1: [00:55:16] Well, you know, Beth, since you brought up the award and by that, I mean Anthropocene, but also, I guess Alice Hall, since you

Speaker3: [00:55:22] Mention that to which I love, but we're definitely a PG

Speaker1: [00:55:28] Production. Oh no, no, we're not. We're always looking to deepen our explicit value here. So please, you know, curse away, get out, get out your sailor mouth if you want to totally follow.

Speaker3: [00:55:38] Oh, you know, other a lot of my colleagues in Qatar being a lot of us swear and then a lot of us say, we swear too much.

Speaker1: [00:55:45] So I swear I swear too much.

Speaker3: [00:55:47] Yeah, I swear too much. I'm going to be good today. Yes, go ahead.

Speaker1: [00:55:52] So, but so the Anthropocene. So what would you say to those folks who might be out there and maybe their doubters and maybe their critics? Or maybe they're just fucking haters who would say, you know, gee, ontology or giant power is just another word for the Anthropocene. It's just another way of thinking about the Anthropocene. And so, you know, maybe goes comes to occupy the space of Anthropocene. And, you know, maybe ontology is functioning and the place of the scene or the epoch, right? And you know, and again, of course, I'm thinking about this long standing, ongoing conversation in anthropology about ontology, you know, sort of standing in as a marker for culture about which, dear listeners, you can hear. You can read a great set of materials on the cultural anthropology website FOIA. But yeah, what would you want to shout out to our own selves?

Speaker3: [00:56:43] Totally.

Speaker1: [00:56:44] But so what would you say? I mean, what? What are the juxtapositions or the parallels between Anthropocene, the concept and onto power G Ontology

Speaker3: [00:56:53] As a concept? Well, I heard three, which was Anthropocene, Ontology and Ontology the ontological term.

Speaker1: [00:57:01] Right, right. So whichever direction, whatever flight you want to take works.

Speaker3: [00:57:06] Cool. Ok, so again, in the book, I try and pivot the concept of JNTO Power G Ontology against the Anthropocene. And a very specific way, so. Whereas the Anthropocene. Constitutes a global condition. That impacts in the best of that. There's some there's you know, there's, let's say in the Anthropocene conversation, there's there's crappy ands that you just think, Oh, forget it. And then there are really more exciting ends in which you think, OK, not the way I think about it, but I'm not going to drive this person off my planet. Right, right, right. Ok, so there's the crappy end in which it's it's now a global condition. And oh my god, oh my God, we're all going to be affected. Right. And the reason I say that's crappy is that it doesn't. Obviously, I'm not saying anything anyone doesn't know, it doesn't really take on board the differential effects of that being affected over time. So yeah, at the end of time, we're all going to be affected. But for a long time and now ongoing time, obviously it's differential effects, right? And that's where the concept of the capital is seen comes in or Donna Hathaway's way of phrasing it. That is, it's not a condition of man, it's a condition of a certain social arrangement of. Humans, right, of differentially organized humans in that sense, Marx Hegel, right? Which totally right, good, et cetera.

Speaker3: [00:59:12] That would be fine. But the Anthropocene, I think in one end of the conversation and this is one end still is very solidly situated in the natural sciences as they emerge through this giant illogical division. Biology, geology, the Anthropocene comes out of geology. Yes, it comes out of a way of organizing planetary time, according to the very divisions that Scientology is saying are discursive, tactical, et cetera. Specific so on the one hand, gerontology says. The Anthropocene as a concept can't work because at the centre of it is is giant of. Right. So, so so even if we take on board that this planetary condition is differentially distributed, we haven't touched. The the the formation of power in which this distribution. Occurs. Right, yeah. Now, in terms of ontologies, this new ontology debate. There are a couple of reasons why Gene Ontology John took power is explicitly not situated within the ontological turn. So let me just. Yes, please, yes. Ok. I just referred to you and the book I actually riff and I expect it, but I whoops. Here's my Hi Renato. Hi, he's hiding back here. This is my beloved dog walker. Oh, OK, great. Yeah, I know. No, I live here, you know, but I'm never here.

Speaker1: [01:01:26] Sorry, we haven't. We have a Multi Species podcast, so if you want to put your pooch on, you can do.

Speaker3: [01:01:34] He's like, he is definitely a multi species. I don't know what he is. He's a he's a passenger, which is already part cat and part dog, and I don't know what part alien from another planet. Ok, the ontology, right? The ontology thing

Speaker2: [01:01:51] And why you're not part of the ontological turn is

Speaker3: [01:01:53] Where we not part of the ontological. What I don't consider myself, what I'm doing to be a further elaboration of the ontology thing. Sorry, I have to get my. My other mind back in order. Ok. For a couple of reasons, first of all, yes. Scientology, ontology, ontology. Doesn't that just suggest that I'm elevating the the subordinate element in the opposition to this, the the dominant position that yeah. And the first thing I need to say and again, I say it in the book is that I started using this term ontology and then I started using John to power. And then I started thinking, Oh, wow, it's going to sound like I'm trying to propose a new ontological condition, which I'm not. So maybe I should switch from John to power and ontology to g existent.

Speaker1: [01:03:04] Hmm. That's a mouthful. But yeah,

Speaker3: [01:03:07] Yeah, I thought about that. I say this in the in the introduction. Like G. However, you still exist in G and however you spell existence. But honestly, by the time I got to G Existent or G existence, G Ontology had already been flying all over the wherever the interweb. And I thought, OK, people do really focus on nouns and they mistake a noun for the concept that the noun is taking holding a place for. So rather than substitute a noun for another noun and then you wind up in another problem and endless cycles of problems. Why don't I just make clear why I chose John to power in the first place? G Ontology. And this is because I wanted to. Expose or heighten the tension within Ontology. Oh, sorry, I wanted to reveal that ontology is itself by ontology. That is all are not all but metaphysics, and unfortunately, I'm trained in philosophy, but our metaphysics of being including Heidegger, who went from Lisbon to Dassin but conserved the properties of life in his dasan, our ontology of our by ontologies. It's a it's an understanding of being on the basis of our love affair with the concept of life and its difference from non life. Right. So the Geo's the the the illuminating of Jesus onto Ontology was supposed to, in my mind, at least become a monstrous kind of term. You can have ontology because ontology. It is is a way of thinking and being in relation to being that is in love with life and its singularity and its exceptionalism. So that's one reason and I am not in love with life and its singularity and exceptionalism. The second reason that I'm not on the ontology planet is that a lot of at least an object ontology, object oriented ontology.

Speaker3: [01:05:46] There's a at least an Harmon, Harman, Harman. Wow, yeah. Yeah, yeah, great, Harman and a lot of the other folks is that two things? One, either they really believe that there are objects, and although they might be hyper objects and they but they're although we can, we can't know what they are in and of themselves. We can know that they are. The whole point of the book is to say that this object, ontology is it's self reliant on a biological imaginary that is the imaginary of skin as that which separates one form of existence from another. And especially what that allows life to separate itself out. That is the epidermal imaginary. And and it's it's that imaginary of these close self-referential object subjects that that that that needs to, I think, be done away with right. And and we also see this in the way in which Dallas's assemblage is being deployed in some of the literature, an assemblage which is is only paradoxically something like you can use the noun assemblage and then you think noun, object thing, border it versus that right? The assemblage in Dallas wasn't object like it was only a paradoxically there. It was only there ish. It was only that ish, right? And yet we're using assemblage as if an assemblage is a thing. And that's what John Tokaji is also trying to push against the thing genius of ontology. And the the characteristics of objects in ontology as qualified, by the way, we think about life. They have a skin, they have potential they can be or not, B, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker2: [01:08:02] Right. And you do. I mean, that's that's I think one of the really exciting and kind of provocative parts of the book is where you you set up a kind of critical juxtaposition between, if you will, the kind of latest trends in continental philosophy and many of which are very impactful in our own field of anthropology these days. And then also what you're calling, grabbing analytics. And I think that's, you know what you describe as a dirty manifesto, which is great at the end of your introduction. I think that's really interesting. And I wanted to give you maybe a chance to talk a little bit about those analytics because I think that I can imagine some people might want to reabsorb those into a kind of into the figure of the animist, you know, the the kind of the Earth being logic and like. And I think you're you're walking a very fine, you know, line, but it's an important one between allowing those to be absorbed into a certain settler liberal fantasy of indigenous knowledge and being able to deploy them as in fact, you know, an alternative to this kind of by ontological settlement that we have. Is that right? I mean.

Speaker3: [01:09:11] Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And you're right. It's it will always be until there's if there's an after this formation of power, that's all you can do. You can only kind of delicately may push something a little here ish and say kind of like that ish. So it's it. It's very absorbable. And that's one of the words on the on the issue of analytics. It comes back to the question of ontology and culture. So there's a very there's a reason I say analytics versus culture, and it's analytic because for some of and some of because everybody's different types has different qualities and potentials like anything but anyways cut that part, but never. But well, you know, it's just that how much generalizing how does that work? I can't say that word. Yeah, marginalize anything that really. Anyways, it's analytic. It's probative. It's it's given what we know we test. Whether this way of knowing. Works and reveals, and that's what I mean by a code of being analytic. Ok. It's not a set of beliefs. It's it's one of the reasons why I think I tend toward pragmatism. It's a set of it's not a set of not beliefs, but it's a it's a testing, it's an analytic. It's a testing of of the world based on your. Accumulated knowledge of the world, right?

Speaker1: [01:11:10] It has a kind of empirical value, almost as it's not a matter of faith, but a rather of encounter and experience.

Speaker3: [01:11:17] Yeah, yeah. And testing so so it's not experience without metal frames, it's like, OK. Experiences built up this these sets of presuppositions. Let's test if it's if it works here, if it still works, if it can work, if, if, if it has to be reworked like that. So that's an analytics and and especially in American anthropology, I think it's really important to shift both from ontology and culture to really if it's if it's true with whom you're living and thinking and working with. And we have to say it's an analytics, it's not a culture because that just takes us into belief in people's heads, right? Ok. Yeah. And that's that's we all know the destructive work of that in terms of governance, in terms of the dirty analytics, the the reabsorption of the analytics into the figure of the economist is something that the animus, the desert or the virus, which I'm very careful to say are not exits from Scientology or JNTO power, but rather are both symptom and diagnostic right of it and of it in particular places. So the way in which the virus shows up there, the way in which the animus shows up there, the way in which the desert shows up there, right, or diagnostic in and symptomatic? So, so the analytic. The kind of dirty manifesto is, is, well, I guess we should say what it is, what they are. So we say what they are. Yeah, yeah. I mean, people just go read it. Go read it yourself.

Speaker2: [01:13:09] Yeah, right? We're not going to make it too easy on you.

Speaker1: [01:13:12] Quit being so lazy trying to listen to this book.

Speaker2: [01:13:15] This isn't CliffsNotes here. This is this is. We're trying to have a conversation, people.

Speaker3: [01:13:20] Yeah.

Speaker2: [01:13:21] But let me just say the one thing, though, that you know is, is a.

Speaker3: [01:13:26] Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Speaker2: [01:13:27] I was just going to say a couple of the points. I mean that that this idea that the Earth isn't dying, but it may be turning away from certain kinds of existence, I think is fascinating and also the need to dramatize human life and ask what kinds of or what formations of life and nonlife are worth keeping and which of them are worth extinguishing. I think are really powerful moves

Speaker3: [01:13:49] Against Dominic could be really. Sometimes I get so fact checking. It's like, fact check. No, it's all right. So one never likes it when someone checks them, to be honest. But anyways, but when you're doing the fact checking, you're always like very self-righteous letter. So, so it's not which forms of life or non life, it's which which organizations of existence. You're right, and it's somewhat important because both in my own language, but the the the the terminology that continually reanimate John to power is really deep and hard to escape. So we, you know, life, life, non life, life, life, non life, it's really hard in existence. I mean, even when we say that there's there's an integrity to the existent that we have to be not giving credence to. But anyway, so. But yeah, so the first one is that that the first point about the Earth's not dying, but the Earth may be turning away from certain forms of existence. That's that's the third in The Dirty Manifesto. And and that's directly related to the dramatization. And the if we think about life as a, you know, one form of existence that that is is its self, not one thing. And this goes way back to the structuralist debates. That is, you can only get the human by abstracting and I don't mean abstracting out all of those social relations and conditions that to. But I mean materially like my brain versus your brain versus, you know, I was to an hour really going PJ. I was born like, there's a lot of sorry about this, but there was a lot of interbreeding in the village that my paternal. The line is from and my mom's, you know, I'm sure this is not true. I'm sure there were invaders in her village up in the Alps, but you know the way we kind of quip. My mother was the first new blood in five hundred years and as a result, like, OK, you know, you get some really genetically interesting special misses. Let's call them back.

Speaker1: [01:16:27] Well, Beth, you're making a pretty good case for incest. I hate to tell you. Oh, yeah, but let me I don't know if that was your intention, but.

Speaker3: [01:16:34] Well, things have to be clipped off just to keep you looking like you're on the same plane as other forms of humans. But but I don't really mean that, especially as you know, as you know, as what we often call anthropogenic toxicity spreads. What we are becoming, we already are. We just don't know it yet. Right. So in a lot of the a lot of the early, this is the diversion, but a lot of the early Anthropocene conferences, all these big conferences that were like Titan stumping across the institutional spaces of the Earth in the West, right? Every one of the things you initially heard is that we need a new kind of human for the coming planet, right? And I was, you know, I would get up and I'd say, we already have that human. It's already here. We just either don't want it or we don't see it. And when I say we don't want it, it's it's the forms of neurological condition, of reproductive condition, of all the PKKP stuff, it's the virus. We don't, but it's already here. Ok, so that's what I when I say, turning from a human form of existence in some parts, some place it's already turned from that and is creating another kind of existence. Right? And but with Carter being, it's like the the the if you if you go mine in a wetlands area or Estrin area, the the wetlands don't cease to be. They turn away from what has kept you in place in the form that you've had and turn you into a different form as it turns into a different form. So so there's this alteration of forms because each the the Cadabby Analytics say, each one of our forms is internal to these other forms, their estimate in the Lithuanian sense, but materially so.

Speaker3: [01:18:50] And if you start with this estiment understanding of forms of existence rather than a, say, an object oriented ontological understanding of forms of existence, one forms transformation by necessity, transforms the other. And and the way in which sort of being think about it is they give each other their backbone. They turn away from each other backbone. Did you? And that's true. I mean, it can be said when I say when I borrow from Lauren, Lauren Berlant was always, you know, her dramatize. That's her vocabulary. So but it was a vocabulary that was also very long in Qatar being. It's like like white people can't tell. They can't tell a couple of things. They can't tell when a scratch is just a scratch and when it's going to kill them because they just dramatize any, anything that has to do with the tight integrity of their body because they think they are inside their body. And they also dramatize their own death as the end of the most important part of the world. Instead of seeing their form of existence as tied up with the form of existence of other things that are in to be changed. Because the coexistence you're in changes can be horrifyingly sad is the wrong word, but it can be devastating. It's emotionally devastated. Like you don't want to lose that. Yeah, but it's not. That emotional devastation comes with the knowledge that that form is still in that place. It's in another form so that it's still there. You want it to be in the form it had, but it's still there. And somehow, by dramatizing your exceptionalism, you're more likely to keep it in existence. The thing keeping you in existence? Which is a really long answer.

Speaker2: [01:21:09] No, no, but I mean, it's, you know, and I think that what's what's so wonderful about this and I think the car being analytics is one of the is one of the real highlights of the work is that, you know, you don't you don't really allow it to be absorbed back into kind of our ontology debates, which I really like. It's not like an alternative ontology that you're talking about. It's something it's something different and as you said, more probative, but also in some ways in incredibly important to be thinking about and with and also showing that if we're, you know, if we're looking for the again, you know, we're always already late liberal subjects, as you've said many times before. So it's not like there's an exit strategy that's clear here. But if we're looking for, you know what, what forms of knowledge and awareness might lie beyond that, you know, we're better to look than the people who have been in critical existential engagement with those for

Speaker3: [01:22:02] Four years, like people at Bellevue in. Right, right. Well, for hundreds of years. Hundreds of years know hundreds of years. I mean, they might not be a hundred, but that probative knowledge that they learned from their parents and grandparents and then is, which is retested, has been there for a very long time. I should also just say one thing about the books engagement with critical theory. I'm actually I'm trying to engage critical theoretical traditions, which are very dear to me. There's one chapter in which the critical theoretical or philosophical tradition is not dear to me, and that's speculative realism of the type that Quentin Melissa Yes, has articulated. These models are dear to me, and yet we have to honestly probe them for how they themselves depend on this formation of governance and don't provide the exit, but create the incapacity to know what concept we really need.

Speaker2: [01:23:25] Yeah, and that's, you know, I think that that is is a is a brilliant critique and one that's very resonant. And in that way, I would say, you know, despite you identifying yourself as somebody with philosophical background, I think this is like a truly anthropological move in the best spirit of what anthropology can do.

Speaker3: [01:23:40] Oh, no, no, no. When I said that, sorry. Yeah, and I didn't mean I am a philosopher. I mean, I have that as background. But but I'm not a philosopher because philosophy, you know, because of its disciplinary nature, or at least some of it, it's contemporary disciplinary nature. Doesn't start from somewhere here in the world, although if you're, you know, if you know how dope, you know, Piers head does work, it once did. But the discipline of philosophy doesn't and and thinks it can or still solves problems by creating abstractions that have universal applicability. That's not what I do

Speaker2: [01:24:34] Know, and it's this idea of the universal that's generated by some people.

Speaker1: [01:24:38] Right? Yeah. Well, can we go? Can we go back to the critical theory question too? Because I mean, we've been sort of touching upon this also, I mean, one of the engagements that you're you're following in this book is creating this critique of the triple oh right. The object oriented oncologists like Harmon, but also sort of calling to task in many ways, the new materialists or the new neo delusions. Maybe I'll call them like like Jane Bennett, for example, not to pick on Jane, but to kind of, you know, because I so like one of her arguments is that, you know, minerals become us, right? There's a certain liveliness to their incorporation. And so, you know, throughout the book, you're you're critiquing this kind of what I would call doubling down on life that we're seeing right here, right? And posing the question to that. And, you know, reading it from the outside, this whole conversation about this reinvestment and liveliness and vitality and these new vital isms. You know, I want to read that as a reaction to, you know, the great extinction that's occurring right now. And, you know, I'll talk about other species. You could even put humans into that category. I think too, you know, and as I've been reading your book, I'm also reading Donna Hathaway's new book, The Staying With the Trouble where she's, you know, living in or wants to live in the Khulu Thulasi and I think is how you now you say that word.

Speaker3: [01:26:00] I actually that was I was waiting for you to say it.

Speaker1: [01:26:03] Yeah, I know. I don't even know someone said it like that. And so I'm just copying what they did. But you know, in the

Speaker3: [01:26:10] Khulu what I'm saying, what you said. Yeah, because

Speaker1: [01:26:14] You know, she that is like packed full of life, right? It's all about life. It's, you know, getting in touch and, you know, communing with our gooey others and our multi species and our companions and our viruses and our everything like it's it's chock full of life. So, you know, that's one direction. And that's, you know, that's not what you're doing. But here's the question is there a danger in these times of anthropogenic harm to other species and maybe even to rocks themselves? Is there a danger in sort of casting the bright light, the interrogation, the interrogation light upon our obsession, our fetish, our ratification of life that you're seeing throughout this entire philosophical tradition going all the way back to Aristotle? Is there anything risky about what I'm doing? Kind of, yeah. About calling life out on its shit. Is there anything risky about that?

Speaker3: [01:27:12] Well, I'm not saying. I'm not saying screw life. Who gives a fuck? I like rocks. Mm hmm. Although I was at Bam in the Canadian Rockies a couple of summers ago, I think it was a couple of summers ago and I was because I come from the Alps. Any time I see a mountain, I'm like, I always say, I'm like a goose. Like, you guys ever plucked goose.

Speaker1: [01:27:38] Oh God, oh god.

Speaker3: [01:27:40] Maybe in another lifetime. So anyways, you know, it's good season and goose come and you have to pluck them and goose have these things called goose wise and goose wise, unlike human lice of various sorts. Don't bite you. They don't actually make a home on you. But what they do instead is they wherever they get on you, they run up to the highest part of your body, which is usually at the top of your head unless you're standing on your head. And then it's your feet and they just run around. I don't know why they go to the top. I have no idea, but that's where they go. And so then you put your head fingers on the top of your head and you kind of wiggle them and then they go onto your fingers. If your fingers are above your head and then you can get them on your fingers and you can smoosh them, OK, I'm like that in relation to mountains, which is probably too much information. So anyway, so I was in the the the Canadian Rockies, and I saw that. And so I went up, up, up, up up until you get above the tree line. And you know, it's one of these. I mean, it's just like a parody of a content moment and which is so fucking sublime, and it's just that sheer granite immensity.

Speaker3: [01:28:59] Against the sky, and I get weird. Fair enough, but you just I mean, it's not true what I'm about to say, but you just hear it going, What have I extruded this stuff below me as a, I don't know, I was bored one day, so I had the I nonlife had the capacity to extrude it and to reabsorb it. That's and when I'm bored with it, you know, so I'm just riffing thinking, wow, about that's that's psychologically interesting. And then I go back down the mountain. So, so the first thing that's a long diversion to say, I'm not saying life doesn't matter. I'm not saying humans don't matter. I'm definitely not saying the people who really compose my most long standing, my most intimate and my, you know, most complex relation to which are people in carbon. Don't matter. You know, on the contrary, they they matter the most to me. Instead, what I'm saying is unless we do two things at the same time that which you hold dear is not going to be the two things we have to do at the same time is not understand all forms of existence as if they exist in the way we imagine ourselves to exist through that long metaphysics that governs.

Speaker3: [01:30:40] So that's the first point. The second point is that which is sorry, which is what I see happening in the a lot of the new vital ism. Now again, Jane Bennett is very clear that she says she's not talking about life, but talking about something that's not life, that's fatalism. And what I try and show in the book is that that's a that's a splitting of a hair that doesn't make a difference when you're looking at the division in this way. Mm hmm. Right. The second thing that we have to do is to if we're coming out of the delusion tradition which you were making reference to is we have to then be quite honest, we have to at least pay attention to the delusion Ecuadorian texts, which if you look at their major metaphors, are not vital lists in the way in which this vital ism is being described and created for one thing, and very obviously the the metaphors that he's using are not life metaphors. They're geological. They're Marciniak, they're they're almost everything. But there is a body body. But the body without organs is not composed of anything life that that lies on the side of life.

Speaker3: [01:32:25] So all the things that don't. And the second thing we have to do is stop making these assemblages. The attainments within assemblages, the the the the qualities of these assemblages stop re-creating them as if they were compatible with our imaginary of. A body, a clothes body, and one of the things I talk about in the first chapter of the book is that the the the in the natural sciences as well as philosophical sciences from Aristotle, there's the way in which the distinction between life, live things, life. Look, that's life. Look, that's not life is based on this epidermal imaginary. And that's what I fear is being done to assemblage. Ok. So it's again, I wouldn't drive Jane off my planet. I definitely wouldn't drive down off my planet. They're good people. Yeah, yeah. I just I just really are trying to say, What are we doing? How are we participating in a much older when we think about this in relation to liberal governance, what we call a pernicious strategy, which is to turn everything into that which we hold dear, that which we dramatize as without this nothing. How is that actually part of the conditions in which that something that you're dramatizing is going to be done away with?

Speaker2: [01:34:20] Beth, you know, we're we are acutely aware of how much of your your precious time we've taken already and you've taught us a lot. And this is incredibly interesting. I think as we're wrapping up a work on our own engagements sort of with the Anthropocene, this I think this intervention is a lot. A lot. Maybe. Yeah. And I want to have a whole nother conversation about giant power versus an air power. But we'll save that maybe for a day for a different to two attempts not to write a metaphysics of power.

Speaker3: [01:34:49] You guys are the the the publications, the podcasts that cultural anthropology has been doing on toxicity on the Anthropocene, on climate change have been really amazing and some of the the best conversations and publications that that I've seen being published anywhere. So. So really, Bravo.

Speaker2: [01:35:16] And we're going. We're going to get you involved. You and the car being team involved in the sound and vision project to which, yeah, which is debuting next month. Yeah, yeah. But I actually went one last question on your book, and this is a great way to end it because it's it's about Requiem and Toronto. And I just wanted to ask me if you wanted to say a little bit, in what sense is this a requiem to late liberalism? Is this by any means? Are you suggesting by any means that it may be a requiem to your critical engagement with late liberalism? Is it done? Have you said everything you have to say about it? Is it or and you're laughing? So I'm going to say that's probably no.

Speaker3: [01:35:56] But I would like it to be so. But then of course, what happens is then you think, Oh, but wait, what about that? Yeah, what about that? Exactly? What about

Speaker2: [01:36:04] That? But no more?

Speaker3: [01:36:05] Seriously, I mean, is it seriously the requiem? I mean, I say it was it was a it was a term that was suggested to me by my poet friend Thomas Lay, who I was talking about when I was working. And he said, it sounds like a requiem. And I said, But I'm talking about a belated fact, not something that comes at the end. And he said Bethel Requiem is a beautiful thing because it captures that the sound of almost pompous sound of something that is not yet dead. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. Right. And one of the one of the one of the things I say in the book. Rather than what I argue or claim, but one of the things. Well, it's a clean one of the things I claim in the book is that there are millions and billions of exits from the problem. The problem is not that there aren't possible solutions and exits. The problem is that. We're not going to take him, and this is comes back to something that. Fred Jamison is said to have said, which is and I'm sure people have said it on your podcast before, it's easier to think about the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Yeah, right. And it's easier to think of the end of the world than to. To allow. All the other options which we will necessarily experience as the virus. To make its way into the world and become dominant in the world, right?

Speaker1: [01:37:58] Yeah, well, next time we're going to do a eulogy for capitalism, how about that one?

Speaker3: [01:38:03] And maybe we could end on a happier note.

Speaker2: [01:38:05] Yeah, well, I was going to say like, that's why that's that reason is exactly why so many of these apparent exits, you know, turned out to be like in a Scooby-Doo, you know,

Speaker3: [01:38:14] Scooby

Speaker2: [01:38:14] Doo doo. They they like they all lead back to the monster again. You know, the doors that open up and they all lead back to the monster. That's true. So Dominic,

Speaker3: [01:38:22] You have just dated. Well, maybe not. Maybe Scooby Doo is the thing that all that has there been a recent Scooby Doo Scooby Doo doo?

Speaker2: [01:38:30] Is it? He's a transcendental subject.

Speaker1: [01:38:32] He's eternal.

Speaker3: [01:38:35] I thought Gilligan's Island was eternal. I think the other day and I started singing Sit right back and you hear a tale. And they all looked at me like I had just truly finally actually lost my mind. Well, they had no idea about, you know, do do you guys now sit right back? Well, oh, of course.

Speaker1: [01:38:54] Did you grow up on Gilligan? Yeah. Now what did you love the professor or what was your name, ginger? That redheaded babe,

Speaker3: [01:39:02] The

Speaker1: [01:39:02] Ranger? Who did you love more?

Speaker3: [01:39:04] I kind of like you wanted to be the professor,

Speaker2: [01:39:08] And she did in the end.

Speaker1: [01:39:10] And she did.

Speaker2: [01:39:11] Yeah, I got one for you. Green Acres is the place.

Speaker3: [01:39:16] Yeah.

Speaker1: [01:39:19] There's a there's technicolor spilling out of his mouth right now. It's kind of disturbing.

Speaker2: [01:39:26] Well, I do just adore a penthouse view. That's true.

Speaker3: [01:39:29] That's true. Yeah. Well, we might have a penthouse view soon. You have orange hat or red?

Speaker2: [01:39:36] That's right. Yeah, that's right. We should give you five minutes of

Speaker3: [01:39:40] A hat

Speaker2: [01:39:40] Political rant at the end. But best seriously, it's so much fun to talk with you. I think you should have your own podcast and probably your own stand special too, right? Because I think among the major theorists of our generation of our, you know, lifetime, you are by far the funniest and the most.

Speaker3: [01:39:56] You are by far the sweetest interviewer yet.

Speaker1: [01:39:59] And also, you know, I mean, you already were a rock star. But now I think you definitely you definitely

Speaker3: [01:40:06] Have some serious, some serious like, I will have to start swearing,

Speaker1: [01:40:11] Well, I'm going to get you the

Speaker3: [01:40:14] T-shirt.

Speaker1: [01:40:15] You're going to you're going to get the T-shirt. That's not just like rock star, but rock star.

Speaker2: [01:40:20] Oh yeah, rock star. There you

Speaker3: [01:40:22] Go. Yeah, that's OK. That's just let's do some digging now we can end. All right. We'll end right there. All right. Thank you, Beth. We'll see you soon. Thank you.