00:04:07.800In contrast, your theory of situated knowledges revolves around a conscious acknowledgement that the production of knowledge, the institution of science, the academic canon, the so-called truth, and even this conversation always exist in relation to power structures and our unique embodied experience of the world.
00:04:30.460And in this time of so much widespread misinformation and gross misrepresentations of truth, why perhaps now more than ever do we need situated knowledges?
00:04:47.320There are a lot of ways to begin to think about the need for situated knowledges.
00:04:52.620My own writing and thinking and acting within that framework were in very strong, complex, long-term alliance with Sandra Harding and others who were developing feminist standpoint theory.
00:05:06.640Sandra, in particular, an approach to what she called strong objectivity, as opposed to the usual weak objectivity, which divided the world into, which kind of separated off the practices of scientific knowing from their historical moment, from historical conjuncture,
00:05:26.180and separated out the knowing practices from the complex historical embeddedness
00:05:37.660So with Sandra Harding, with Karen Barad, with Patricia Hill Collins, Nancy Hartsock, others,
00:05:44.140I worked through, I worked out a notion of situated knowledges
00:05:48.480to affirm strong truths, not weak truths, truths that you would live and die for,
00:05:55.120truths that are about who lives and who dies, and whether the planet will flourish or not,
00:06:02.500whether earthlings will land on earth, that kind of thing. So a kind of situated knowledges are
00:06:10.460about a profound relationality and historical conjuncture, but not about relativism. It's
00:06:17.880relationality not relativism not epistemological relativism so that strong truths are made but not
00:06:26.160made up so the organism or the cell or climate change or coral reef holobiome biology those
00:06:36.020things are made in historical conjunctures that karen barad theorized as a kind of
00:06:42.540working through a genteel realism, working through a kind of intra-activity of all of the players
00:06:50.660to make the world this way rather than some other. These are strong truth claims. And surely now,
00:06:58.780when a kind of twisting of the work that I and others were doing in feminist science studies,
00:07:06.060but also more broadly, on what I'll call the left, although the left is a strange term,
00:07:11.640Let me just use it as a collecting box for now, a large box that has many holes in it.
00:07:19.060The work that we were doing was very strongly and unfortunately very effectively turned against us as nothing but social construction, as relativism, as opening up the possibility of alternative realities, as opening up the kinds of Trumpian epistemological cynicism.
00:07:40.880And I think people like myself, who have been in this struggle, well, in my case, for more than 40 years, have learned, I think, a lot about being much more careful of our idioms, of our alliances, of our insistences on claims, on the kind of situating of the situating of from where and to whom we are acting.
00:08:06.600so as to foreclose a kind of cynical relativism, which is everywhere these days,
00:08:13.260and which disables, for example, the struggle for reproductive justice,
00:08:18.600among other things, by making outrageous racist and misogynist claims
00:08:23.220about the nature of human pregnancy and human caring for the next generation.
00:08:28.820Outrageous kinds of misstatements of medicine, of science,
00:08:33.540in the area of reproductive justice, certainly in the domain of climate justice.
00:08:39.180But there's also one more point I want to make before I let you ask another question.
00:08:43.400And that has to do with the way that situated knowledges insist on opening up and building
00:08:53.900complex contact zones with other ways of knowing the world, not so as to produce a kind of
00:09:01.420relativism, you know, to each her own little private culture or to each her own little
00:09:06.580part of the world. It's not to each her own diorama, but rather to open up contact zones
00:09:12.820for other ways of knowing, most certainly including indigenous ways of knowing,
00:09:18.240that put into interrelationship, intra-relationality in Karen Barad's sense,
00:09:25.160all of the ways of coming into materialist connection with the world so that everybody
00:09:32.600in the contact zone is transformed by the engagement so that one knowledge system does
00:09:38.820not dominate another and turn it into mere tradition or invading scientific knowledge
00:09:45.060or all of the different ways of turning situated ways of knowing the world into oppositional
00:09:51.760categories. It seems to me our job, if I can have this big box called we, is to build contact zones
00:09:59.080of complex entanglement where all of us are transformed by the engagement and in which
00:10:05.560scientific knowers do not presume in advance that they have the capital T truth, even while holding
00:10:12.600on to our very strong truth claims so it's it's a very um it's a risk-taking historical engagement
00:10:21.660with each other that i think we are that we must have in these times of tremendous urgency
00:10:29.000wow donna there is so much there in your response that i already cannot wait to listen back to sit
00:10:38.120with all that you were bringing into your response with that.
00:13:08.120And that knowing something's origins, I can talk to you about the ways that certain kinds
00:13:14.020of capitalist development, certain kinds of Cold War conflict, practices in the communication
00:13:19.720sciences, in ergonomics. I can talk to you at length and in detail about where the cyborg came
00:13:26.080from, not just as a figure, but as an actual thing. A thing, of course, in the entertainment
00:13:32.400industry, but I mean a more complex, embedded, materialist being in the world, not just a figure,
00:13:40.080never merely a metaphor. For me, figures and materialist, fleshly things are, in a sense,
00:13:49.440imploded. They are profoundly entangled with each other. The figure or the representation is not
00:13:55.620separated from the thing itself. Rather, the cyborg, as I propose it, is more an implosion
00:14:01.900of the figures and of the things in the world. So cyborgs come into the world in particular
00:14:08.580historical conjunctions, and they make us who we are, but not evenly, not everywhere,
00:14:17.320Perhaps not everybody, though I think at this point of the more than seven and a half billion people on this planet, no one is untouched by cyborgs and their offspring in the ways worlding is made to work, including the extractions, the exterminations, the migrations, the medicines, the systems of governance, the systems of communication.
00:14:42.280I think truly no one on the earth, no human being, and I would really argue no organism, no living being on this earth, is untouched by what emerged from the mid-20th century and beyond that I called a kind of cyborg worlding.
00:14:58.300So it's ongoing, but doesn't remain the same. It's dynamic, it's protean, it's contestable. Knowing something's origins does not determine what happens next. And people like myself try to open the box, to drive in wedges, to increase the degrees of freedom, not in some kind of blissed out techno bunny, technophiliac nonsense, but in an engagement in these worldings, including in play.
00:15:28.300including opening up the capacities for pleasure and bonding and making kin in new and wonderful
00:15:35.820ways with both humans and non-humans, including technologies as well as critters, a kind of
00:15:41.800opening up of possibilities, not out of some ridiculous fantasy of infinite possibility,
00:15:49.040but rather more in the spirit of the Marxist critical theorists who said the established
00:15:55.080order is not necessary. It is possible and indeed necessary to open up the imagination and to open
00:16:03.540up the practices for a world which can yet be, but is not yet. And that's a collective task that
00:16:12.780can't be done just in the affect of work and critique and condemnation, but has to be done
00:16:19.600so as to give each other heart for a world which can still be, even in the grip of the kinds of extreme urgency that I think all of us are feeling very deeply.
00:16:37.240And I feel like I have been working with the urgency so much to not be driven by the urgency, but to also not look away from the urgency or the anxiety that it produces, but not live from that place.
00:16:54.120And it's a challenge every day with what we're going through.
00:17:00.040It seems to me that the psychoanalytic doctrines of mourning, as opposed to melancholia, are very helpful here.
00:17:09.620That in mourning, a subject is able to face loss and understand that loss is real and not reversible and is not the whole story.
00:17:22.480That loss can be incorporated into a subject that then becomes other than it was, but is in a vital way, not by forgetting, but by remembering vitally, so as to make something vital with each other still possible, but without forgetting our mortality.
00:17:43.500That mourning disowns the fantasy of transcendence or infinity or deathlessness, but it also
00:17:52.400disowns melancholia and despair and cynicism.
00:28:49.600but it isn't the same thing as being each other's enemy.
00:28:54.300I really feel that. I really feel that.
00:28:57.940You had mentioned at the beginning of the conversation about, I think, reproductive rights.
00:29:02.300And I know I have been thinking so much about the politics of reproduction in the body,
00:29:08.280particularly in the past few weeks, as states across the country are passing some of the most
00:29:13.680restrictive abortion legislation in decades. Just earlier this month,
00:29:19.600Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed a fetal heartbeat bill, HB 481, and that effectively
00:29:26.960outlaws abortion after six weeks, subjecting people who seek illegal abortions or terminate
00:29:33.400their own pregnancies to life imprisonment and the death penalty. I mean, I have chills just
00:29:39.680thinking about that. And these horrifying bills are but one piece of this country's
00:29:44.020long history and honestly ongoing legacy of asserting domination and control over people's
00:29:50.840bodies, particularly those already marginalized. So in light of these complex and of course very
00:29:57.760sensitive issues, how are you thinking about the politics of reproduction, particularly as it
00:30:05.000relates to our environmental crisis? And I guess another part to that is how does your invocation
00:30:12.180make kin, not babies, relate to a reproductive justice framework, which includes both the right
00:30:18.640to parent, you know, to raise children in a safe, healthy environment, as well as the right to not
00:30:24.100parent, access to safe abortions, etc. Right, right. So much in that question. First, a couple
00:30:31.320of really critical affirmations. The only person who could possibly make a decision about the
00:30:38.460intimacy of pregnancy and the outcome of carrying a new life is the woman in whose body it is0.97
00:30:44.500happening. She is the only imaginable person who could possibly be entrusted with that decision.0.98
00:30:51.380I may not agree with her decision. I may have a lot of things to say about it, but it doesn't
00:30:57.480matter. At the end of the day, the only person who could possibly be entrusted with that crucial
00:31:04.360decision is the pregnant woman herself, not pregnant person in the abstract, the actually
00:31:10.340existing pregnant woman. And anyone who gets in the way of that, that trust, that responsibility,
00:31:16.740notice I am avoiding the word right. It's not that I don't think it's a right in the context
00:31:21.700of our legal system is that I think the more profound issue is that there is nobody else
00:31:26.940in the intimacy of the situation who could possibly be entrusted, make the decision.
00:31:32.980So I think that's a reproductive trust position more than a reproductive rights position. It's crucial to reproductive justice, but it's radically insufficient. A reproductive justice position is about the capacity to bring future generations into the world in health and safety and joy and flourishing and all that that takes.
00:31:56.920in immigration policy, in housing, in agriculture, in medicine, in contraceptive technology that
00:32:05.520actually existing people actually want to use as opposed to long-acting imposables that have a
00:32:12.720quite different political register to them. The ongoing investment in new kinds of contraceptive
00:32:19.900technologies that are really what people want, a kind of comprehensive politics, practice, science,
00:32:29.080alliance building for making generations, which I would in a shorthand call a pro-child world,
00:32:36.740but a non-natalist world. It's not anti-natalist. It doesn't say that anyone who gets pregnant and
00:32:42.600has a baby is somehow doing a terrible thing. I don't think that for a minute. And I think people
00:32:47.340are situated quite differently than I think human babies smell almost as good as puppies
00:32:52.080in other words I think what I'm saying is I think I understand a little bit
00:32:58.060of the incredible sensuality of the um of bringing a baby into presence including the anger and the
00:33:06.580horror and the depression and you know all of the affects that are involved in that
00:33:10.360bringing a new person into the world, all of it. I think that every born one requires all of our
00:33:17.440support. And human persons, namely women, who are bringing these beings into the world simply must0.99
00:33:24.920be trusted, whether I think it's a good idea or not. They simply must be trusted. And the whole0.95
00:33:31.380apparatus of making kin with much less natalism and much more making kin non-natally is, in my
00:33:40.420view, urgent. I think that we now are about 7.6 billion human beings alive on the planet today.
00:33:48.240The rich fractions of that population are using up the resources of this planet
00:33:53.200at an extraordinarily rapid rate with extreme injustice to the more marginalized members of
00:34:01.040this population who may be having babies at a higher rate, but frankly, poor people are not
00:34:07.920having babies at a much higher rate than rich people, oftentimes actually a lower rate.
00:34:12.560Those populations still having babies at a fairly high rate are the most marginalized,
00:34:17.620the most subject to permanent war and extraction and exterminationism, that the great majority
00:34:23.440of groupings of people on this planet are having babies at a quite low rate.
00:34:29.120But the already existing young women who have not yet had even a single baby guarantee that the population will continue to grow through the end of the current century to about 11.2 billion people.
00:34:45.200And it will only be that small if reproductive rates continue to fall.
00:34:50.420If they remain stable or grow, that 11.2 billion is radically too small a number.
00:34:56.500So I think it's really, really, really, really important for people who think of themselves as part of reproductive justice work, part of progressive work broadly, part of creative ecologies, to really think about human numbers and our impacts and the differentiated quality of those impacts, questions of justice and capitalism and distribution.
00:35:18.560But not to talk about human numbering feels to me a kind of denialism.
00:36:40.100Yeah, or a substitute, or a kind of even failed femininity or motherhood. You know, this nuclear0.99
00:36:45.760family in particular is such a dominant framework in the American mythic imagination. So I'm
00:36:54.040wondering how can we recover a sense of wholeness, of deep relationality and belonging with our
00:37:01.380non-natal or non-genealogical kin? Well, two ways. One is in the mode of historical memory and
00:37:09.220critique, which is really getting it, that the white heteronormative nuclear family is an
00:37:15.160historical invention. It's fairly recent. Its post-World War II instantiation was absolutely
00:37:20.880part of the spread of U.S. imperialism and its models, including its population control models,
00:37:27.360that the white heteronormative nuclear family is an instrument and not human nature. A kind of
00:37:34.180constant refining of that critique, I think, is important. And then the other is recognizing how
00:37:42.460much non-natalist kin we already are engaged in. By the way, I'm not for a minute not talking
00:37:49.840about loving my brothers and, you know, I'm not talking about disowning in some sense one's
00:37:55.460natal family or bringing a baby into the world with another person who's also a parent isn't
00:38:00.640part of that. But these are foreground background and addition operations, not substitute. I actually
00:38:08.020think a fairly small number of women really really seriously want or need to have a baby
00:38:12.700and most of us neither want to nor need to in circumstances in which living with generations
00:38:19.500living with the old and the young and with each other affirming the financial wherewithal to do
00:38:26.480that affirming adoption affirming making financial arrangements to take care of friends
00:38:32.500not just in the heteronormative gay marriage model, which I agree is a civil right, but I
00:38:40.880also think was in many ways a profound loss in our thinking about sexual liberation, that
00:38:46.520the kind of what do we need in architecture? What do we need in legal instruments? What do we need
00:38:52.680in law, legal instruments? What do we need in mortgage, financial instruments? What do we need
00:38:58.480in celebrations national festivals for adoption including adults adopting other adults what would
00:39:05.660it actually take to have a national festival or local festivals where communities that are in
00:39:12.360place adopt in all seriousness and for a period of at least two generations an immigrant family
00:39:18.940or group what what would it take actually to create the conditions that don't just depend
00:39:24.700on individual goodwill, where people can actually rely on each other for affective help, for
00:39:32.520material help, for celebrating each other's kin? What would it take to match, say, immigrant
00:39:39.540families with resident families over two generations to promise that to each other?0.94
00:39:45.100And what kinds of tax structures would make that possible so it doesn't depend on goodwill and
00:39:50.980philanthropy. If we really thought about what it would take to make kin in the mode of addition,
00:40:00.160non-natally, non-natalistically, which is an ugly word, making kin that gives genealogical
00:40:07.400continuity, because I think, you know, Marshall Salins and others who theorize kinship, David
00:40:12.540Schneider, others, Marilyn Strathairn, if you have a cousin, a cousin has you. If you have a dog,
00:40:19.540A dog has you. If you have a kin, a kin has you. If you have a relative, a relative has you.
00:40:26.700Kinship is reciprocal and it's non-optional and it goes on into the future. It reaches into the
00:40:33.100past. It reaches into the future. It's generational. Kinship has to loop through time. So what kind of
00:40:39.680kinship invention, as well as inheritance, are we talking about? And many groupings of people on
00:40:46.180this planet. Kim TallBear writes about it eloquently when she talks about beyond settler
00:40:51.200sexualities and talks about some of the inherited practices of kin making and generational care that
00:40:57.980she both experienced and proposes to strengthen the Lakota families that she grew up with.
00:41:03.660There's plenty on the earth already that offers teachings in actual practice, as well as in our
00:41:12.520own lives. Many of us have lived in communes. My first husband was gay and I was part of a
00:41:17.480non-heteronormative gay world in a way that was, it was really kind of an amazing time of my life.
00:41:24.600You know, there are children that I inherited from those groupings that are my lifetime, Kim.
00:41:30.480You know, I'm the godmother to a boy who was adopted from Guatemala by a close colleague
00:41:35.580and friend. All of the complexities of international adoption are surely built into that.
00:41:40.620We inherit the complexities, all of them, including the histories of U.S. imperialism.
00:41:46.720We don't, these are not innocent acts, but they make kin, emphasizing that making kin does not require making babies, and that we need many fewer babies who are much better taken care of.
00:42:00.720Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, I absolutely agree with you.
00:42:03.520when um we were researching for this episode i came across this term forced life coined by eric
00:42:12.040stanley in an interview with you and sarah franklin in 2017 and there's a quote that i'd
00:42:18.280like to read forced life is not the organization of the forces of life and death for flourishing
00:42:25.420but rather for extractive profit it's about ecological obliteration through turning all
00:42:30.960of the earth into nothing but a resource for keeping human beings alive and growing end quote
00:42:35.600and i think this is such an important point an alternative way to so good yeah to just circle
00:42:42.600around the larger questions of life and death and disposability um in these critical times
00:42:49.240and that we really must consider not only who is made to die under systems of oppression but also
00:42:56.280who is forced to live in cruel exploitative and unethical ways and and so i i'm just you know i'm
00:43:04.400wondering where do you see examples or moments of forced life in our societies today for me i think
00:43:09.500so many things but one of which i think about the biotech industry and monsanto which spends
00:43:15.100millions of dollars a year trying to sell an empty vision of survival and planetary future
00:43:22.060that is completely devoid of biodiversity, a kind of forced life that extinguishes the human spirit
00:43:29.720and violates our sacred connection to the earth. So yeah. Not to mention. Yeah. Yeah. And they're
00:43:38.160also trying to, well, I also think about Monsanto and interviewing, you know, people who have known
00:43:44.060people who work there and they actually think that they are supporting life. So again, it's this
00:43:49.880forced life this imprisonment of of life itself it's um yeah so many thoughts around that but
00:43:56.140i'd love to open this up to you and hear what you think about it yeah well life is such an
00:44:01.700abstraction but people who work at monsanto often in good faith really are promoting systems of
00:44:08.400raising food that they think of as essential to feeding the numbers of human beings alive on this
00:44:13.760planet and i think they really do understand this takes radically simplified ecological systems
00:44:19.000that displace risks in a way that they think is tolerable.
00:44:24.480I don't think they're fools, and I don't think they're necessarily,
00:44:28.460depending on how an engagement occurs on an individual level,
00:44:33.020they're certainly not necessarily enemies.
00:44:34.680I think the corporate capitalism of Monsanto, I think, is an enemy,
00:44:38.980but I think we would be in error to dismiss all of the people
00:44:45.500but let me go back to eric stanley who's a just a wonderful beautiful human being he was um he was
00:44:52.760writing a dissertation with me at the time that he taught me about forced life forced death was
00:44:58.180much on the critical theory agenda at the time and eric who was uh profoundly involved um in prison
00:45:06.120politics in prison prison abolition and prison um alternatives to prison politics human prison
00:45:12.340politics and the forced life of prisoners there's capital punishment but much perhaps much worse
00:45:19.020or in any case in in relationship with capital punishment is the forced life of captivity the
00:45:26.400forced life of slavery and the forced life of prisons not the same thing but certain kinds of
00:45:31.100historical continuities and always eric has been um he was a part of animal rights activism animal
00:45:40.200radical animal rights activism uh legal and less than legal anyway uh people that he was living
00:45:48.520with were vulnerable to arrest and other and raids and many other kinds of things um activist
00:45:55.420radical politics around other living beings animals uh in captivity in the agribusiness food complex
00:46:02.360um in particular the research animal issue was eric thought of as somewhat more complicated but
00:46:08.760he was pretty radical on that too. Eric really taught me that I had to pay attention to forced
00:46:15.800life in order to kill. So if we think of the many billions of chickens forcibly made to live each
00:46:22.800year in order to market their flesh for profit, but also in order to produce protein for protein
00:46:30.160deficient populations, and also in order to produce meat for a growing global middle class,
00:46:36.840Same could be said with pigs and cattle and other quote-unquote meat animals, the working meat animals, the agro-industrial meat complex.
00:46:47.580Eric was the one who forced me to pay attention to the way capitalist forced life worked and the abstraction life so that the actual living being ends up having no place.
00:46:59.560Similarly, with pro-life politics, the actual living pregnant woman, or not yet pregnant woman, the actual woman, the actual living person is not present in a notion of pro-life.
00:47:13.720Life is a radically destructive abstraction.
00:47:17.960And I think that substituting living being, living person, living plant, living animal, every chance we get, and then ask who lives and who dies in these assemblages.
00:47:27.880So Anna Tsing and I have been working on a notion of plantationocene in interesting connection with Anthropocene and Capitalocene and my Thulucene at the time of the earthly ones, namely paying attention to the 500-year history approximately of radical ecological simplification, forced labor systems.0.96
00:47:50.600African slavery is the crucial case that transforms the world. Radical ecological simplification, radical forced labor, substitution of the existing living beings in a place with other living beings brought from elsewhere such that they have no refuge.0.83
00:48:10.200Captives can't run away because they have no kin nearby, that kind of thing.
00:48:14.780The way the plantation is seen transformed the earth and became the model for capitalism,
00:48:22.020including to this day the palm plantations, the monocropping systems,
00:48:26.420the forced vulnerable migrant labor systems in the Central Valley of California,
00:48:31.460who drink dirty water even while the plants get all the clean water.
00:48:35.180uh you know the good water is directed toward the agribusiness crops for for global marketing
00:48:40.780the actual communities legal and illegal living in the salinas and central valley
00:48:45.520are drinking heavily polluted water if there isn't a more materialist proof of the uh ongoing
00:48:54.120nature of the plantation i'm saying i don't know you know what would be so um i'm not a pro-life
00:49:02.180activist anywhere including in my um relationship to other living beings and i and i think killing
00:49:10.340is a complex matter i do in fact buy and eat meat um because i i feel an obligation that all of the
00:49:19.280working food and fiber animals of the world not become nothing but museum pieces or heritage
00:49:24.560animals. But that is a very difficult, and I'm not sure that's the right decision.
00:49:31.220I am compelled by my vegan colleagues to think that's a really iffy decision to make. I'm still
00:49:38.600making it, still proposing it. I'm living in the difficulties of complex decisions,
00:49:46.020but opposing the agro-industrial forced life complex that Eric Stanley was talking about.0.97
00:49:51.680surely that's easy or at least easy as a decision if not always easy to know what to do
00:49:56.900so you had mentioned the thula scene which you write about in your book staying with the trouble
00:50:04.260making kin in the thula scene and i you you also just mentioned the capitalist so scene and
00:50:11.120of course many of the listeners are really familiar with the anthropocene
00:50:15.220and all these, all the scenes, but I would really love for you to unpack these words because you
00:50:21.640give so much care to terminology and the linguistic origin of the words and their historic and literary
00:50:28.260context. So yeah, if you could unpack a few of these terms, the Thule scene particularly,
00:50:34.200and then just the multiplicity of meanings that they carry and why they're really important tools.
00:50:39.440so i'm not in favor of just multiplying words for the playful pleasure of it all
00:50:45.620that one might take 10 minutes in a day to do that and then stop it i want words that actually
00:50:51.100do some work you know that help collect us up in order to live live and die better with each other
00:50:59.320So anthropocene, scene, the suffix scene, kynos, it means a time.
00:51:22.260So the anthropocene was proposed for the thickness of the now in which human beings
00:51:28.340become a planetary transformative force of a dominant kind.
00:51:35.520And I and many others did not like the term because I think it mistakenly ascribed to
00:51:42.220human beings as a species what I think are the actions, the systemic actions of historically
00:51:48.820located people over about a 500-year period, which might be better named the capitalocene,
00:51:55.540the time of the emergence of capitalism.
00:51:58.320And then, as I just described, the Plantation Oceania,
00:52:01.060the beginning of all of this really was in the invention of the plantation
00:52:06.860and its slave labor systems and all that followed from that.
00:52:11.000But all of that's well and good, both as critique
00:52:13.960and as making us foreground very important historical processes,
00:52:19.720foreground what continues and what doesn't,
00:52:22.260foreground what kinds of actions might need to be taken
00:52:25.460and what is already being done, but I proposed the Thulu scene also, not instead of, but
00:52:32.680also, because I wanted to emphasize the time of the earthly ones, the time of the phonic
00:52:39.320ones, of the tentacular and muddy and living and dying ones of the earth, the time of earthlings,
00:52:46.960not captured in all of these other formations, cotemporary with them, both old and now and
00:52:54.380yet to come, and that play, and that are deeply in play in the world, and not innocent, not
00:53:02.580necessarily nice. The notion that the Thulucine is the time of the happy, phonic earthlings is
00:53:11.180nonsense, because the earth itself, Bruno Latour and Isabel Stengers in different ways talk about
00:53:17.680this, the Earth itself is in revolt. The Earth itself is rising against its destroyers.
00:53:25.000In his new book, Down to Earth, Bruno Latour talks about the geosocial classes of the Earth
00:53:31.720and the off-world classes of the destroyers, and that those of us who are in and of the Earth
00:53:38.700and are at stake to the forces of destruction must rise up with the Earth against the destroyers.
00:53:47.340It's a very interesting political fiction that he's developing in his little book, Down to Earth.
00:53:53.240So the Thulu scene developed for me from the word phonic or the Greek root of the earthly ones, not just necessarily under the earth, under the waters, but those of the earth, all of us with each other in these other, in these coterminous, in these cotemporalities.
00:54:39.940It was way too late before I realized that my Thulu scene was going to evoke his Cthulhu wrongly, because his tentacular patriarchal monster of the deep, Cthulhu, is not related to my Thulu.
00:54:56.520So by a pronunciation trick emphasizing the soft thonic, I hope to differentiate it.
00:55:03.240But it was really a mistake on my part not to call it the Thano scene.
00:55:07.020i love where your mind weaves with these words and i think they are really important and
00:55:15.380another one that i have felt really connected to is the arima scene uh what some people call
00:55:20.660the age of loneliness and i feel that yeah that really resonates with me and how i feel on
00:55:26.280the daily um but i i want to circle back to our conversation around technology that we
00:55:34.060are having at the beginning and you know technology just it encircles us every day it lives inside us
00:55:42.080among our bodies it really even co-creates life itself and you write quote the machine is not
00:55:50.460an it to be animated worshipped and dominated the machine is us our processes an aspect of
00:55:58.820our embodiment we can be responsible for machines they do not dominate or threaten us we are
00:56:05.000responsible for boundaries we are they end quote and there is no doubt in my mind that we are bound
00:56:13.380up in and among technology you know from the medicine we put in our bodies to the networks
00:56:18.920of telecommunication bringing you this podcast today and and i guess at the same time i can't
00:56:25.020help but envision the potential catastrophic and exploitative endings of further technological
00:56:33.160development and growth, you know, let alone the mining of rare earth minerals and toxic byproducts.
00:56:38.480So I guess what I'm wondering is how you make sense of these bioethical dilemmas,
00:56:48.020you know, wade through the complexities of this field and bend technology towards radical
00:57:20.980That produces some kind of fantastic, paralyzing notion of capital T technology, and that is not technology.
00:57:30.160Technological practices, technologies, many of them are in the service of extraction and exterminism.
00:57:37.740Many of the financial agglomerations that are practicing these things, including through financialization and abstraction from all kinds of material forms,
00:57:49.680as well as those kinds of technologies that produce guns for hire, science for hire,
00:57:55.880to deny, let's say, the known medical effects of tobacco or the known planetary effects of global,
00:58:05.220of climate warming, of climate change, the kind of science for hire that goes on.
00:58:11.120All of these things are happening, and they're quite powerful.
00:58:14.460And I know a whole lot of scientists, and I am a scientist myself,
00:58:19.220And my partner is a software program designer. And I know a whole lot of people who practice on a daily basis the skills of system design and all the rest of it who enlist these practices for care and justice, who enlist these practices for kin making nonnatally, who are serious about the kinds of contraception that would really be useful, which might very well also be biomolecular.
00:58:49.220The kinds of communications devices that perhaps have a lower carbon footprint than physical travel.
00:58:58.560Does the cloud that houses our program right now actually have a lower carbon footprint than my, you know, coming somewhere in person for an interview?
00:59:08.520Well, we should measure these very things.
00:59:11.640So I think I'm saying at least three things.
00:59:14.280One is to remember we're not starting from scratch.
00:59:17.380to refuse the deification of technology, refuse making it an abstraction capital T0.70
00:59:23.600and giving it a, you know, barely secularized Christian zoom out to the apocalypse
00:59:30.120to remember all of the people who are working very effectively and join with them.
00:59:35.280And then also a kind of jouissance, a kind of reveling in the profound material opening up of possibilities to understand how an electron transport system works, to see a picture of a black hole,
00:59:57.900to understand some of the ways that canine and human cognitive practices are both similar and
01:00:05.140different, to know something about how to analyze the semiotics of chemical tropisms or of human
01:00:11.720language, to take up the technical capacities that have been made available to us in the last
01:00:19.040many decades and to celebrate them as opposed to demonize them and think of them as always
01:00:24.480leading toward destruction. I think that the more we are not literate in some abstract sense,
01:00:30.100but literate in the sense of understanding the opening up of worlds, so as to engage in those
01:00:36.400worlds for care and justice, the more powerful players we will be for science for the people,
01:00:42.820or for water defenders, or for uncommoning the commons so that indigenous ways of knowing
01:00:50.280and scientific ways of knowing can actually form contact zones.
01:01:45.100It matters what matters we use to think other matters with.
01:01:49.820It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with.
01:01:55.120It matters what knots, not knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe
01:02:01.460descriptions, what tie, what ties, tie ties.
01:02:06.540It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories, end quote.
01:02:12.580Oh my gosh, I've read this quote so many times and I love the emphasis in this text
01:02:17.100on the importance not only of weaving new stories for just and abundant futures, but also the
01:02:23.200process itself. You know, how we tell stories, who spins new narratives, what is being centered
01:02:31.200and given breath for new life. So I'd love if you could say more about storytelling as a working
01:02:37.540practice, storytelling as thinking, doing Cat's Cradle. Yeah. One really obvious example of It
01:02:46.780matters what story story stories or what thoughts think thoughts or what cognitive apparatuses you
01:02:52.400know think cognitive what sciences you know do science with sciences one way of illustrating
01:02:58.300that is using what my colleague Susan Harding and my godson Marco Harding gave to me through
01:03:04.440their engagement with the Inuit of Nunavut and with the circumpolar north around the notion of
01:03:11.600Sila, translated by Anglophone southerners often as weather, but for Inuktitut speakers is a much more multivalent, complex term of the gathering up the airs and the waters and the processes of the land and the waters and the airs that make the people human and non-human.
01:10:11.120I felt that in the last few years, especially trying to become an activist and being more engaged and realizing there's times that I'm going to make mistakes.
01:10:22.360There's times I'm going to embarrass myself.
01:10:24.220There's times that I'm not always going to be right.
01:10:27.740But the commitment and the dedication to continue to show up time and time again and the showing up, I think, is so much of the work and also the beauty of doing it.
01:10:39.880And how to really create bonds, trust, allyship, continue to show up, continue to show up, not never make a mistake, not always be perfect.
01:10:48.900But I think a lot of what can happen to people is there's so much care, there's so much love, there might be anxiety, fear, sadness, mourning, grief, they show up to something, and maybe something turns them off, they make a mistake, and then they're too afraid to go back.
01:11:04.840or they think that, you know, for whatever reason, whether unworthiness or fear,
01:11:10.320it stops them from being engaged and how to get over that hump to say, no, I'm going to keep
01:11:15.560being engaged. And it's going to be uncomfortable at times. And that's okay. It's okay to be in
01:11:22.420that discomfort and to stretch and to bend and to be embarrassed at times. Like we can get back on
01:11:28.200the horse so to speak and um yeah that's such and we can forgive someone else we can give people we
01:11:35.520can get it that if we're really going to build movements that endure that have the complexity
01:11:41.500they've got to have um we can we can name our own and other people's total screw-ups
01:11:49.640we can call each other to account in fact we really have to learn how to do that
01:11:54.040with that kind of capacity to forgive each other,
01:12:00.300to actually go on with each other in recognition of normal imperfection.
01:12:09.240I think that a lot of times we screw each other up by a fantasy of innocence or perfection.
01:12:16.380And people can make really terribly serious mistakes,
01:12:19.740including ones that they're not about to recognize as mistakes,
01:12:23.720but I may think they were a mistake. Find the point of union and build on it because very,
01:12:30.720I think very few of us are really each other's enemies and our real enemies deserve our full
01:12:36.720energy. I absolutely agree with you. I've thought so many times about the infighting in the movement
01:12:45.400spaces, like, oh my gosh, we're spending so much time demonizing each other, yet the fight is out
01:12:52.500of the room and then we can be so exhausted and so emotionally wounded by the people who we're
01:12:57.340trying to work with against you know the goliath so to speak of what we're up against um and then
01:13:02.700yeah we're we're drained by the time we get to the big fight because we have such a hard time
01:13:08.120uh working together and i oh my gosh donna this is so challenging to end this conversation because
01:13:16.240i feel like i just want to keep talking to you for hours and hours and every wormhole
01:13:20.000opens up and then I want to dive in with you and go into this this crack in that corner and and
01:13:26.780just you are uh I don't think I've ever had a conversation with anyone on the show who has
01:13:35.100who has brought to the table what you've brought with so much thank you beauty and complexity and
01:13:42.020interwoven connections and I've taken away so much from this conversation I honestly have taken
01:13:49.340And I have taken a bit of forgiveness for, yeah, I do feel a bit of forgiveness.
01:13:55.580I feel also, I don't know what the word would be.