00:02:48.440a publication co-edited with Adele Clark that addresses questions of human numbers,
00:02:55.240feminist, anti-racist, reproductive, and environmental justice, and multi-species flourishing.
00:03:11.600Oh my goodness, Donna, thank you so much for being with us on the show. And like I was telling
00:03:16.640you earlier, the whole cast of characters at For the Wild podcast are just in awe that we get to
00:03:23.360interview you. So we are so honored, all of us here. Well, thanks for inviting me. It's really
00:03:28.560my honor and it's a pleasure to be part of your gang for the time. Well, thank you. So I guess
00:03:36.460it feels fitting to begin today by grounding our conversation in what you called situated
00:03:41.960knowledges, and much of your extensive body of work is anchored in the commitment to disrupt
00:03:48.740the objectivity, essentialism, and neutrality assumed in Western tradition and so-called science
00:03:55.920and dominant culture. In contrast, your theory of situated knowledges revolves around a conscious
00:04:03.760acknowledgement that the production of knowledge, the institution of science, the academic canon,
00:04:09.400the so-called truth, and even this conversation always exist in relation to power structures
00:04:16.520and our unique embodied experience of the world. And in this time of so much widespread
00:04:23.520misinformation and gross misrepresentations of truth, why perhaps now more than ever
00:04:32.380do we need situated knowledges? There are a lot of ways to begin to think about the need for
00:04:40.740situated knowledges. My own writing and thinking and acting within that framework were in very
00:04:47.540strong, complex, long-term alliance with Sandra Harding and others who were developing feminist
00:04:54.960standpoint theory. Sandra, in particular, an approach to what she called strong objectivity
00:05:01.200as 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,
00:05:14.100from historical conjuncture, and separated out the knowing practices from the complex historical embeddedness of the things known and the knowers.
00:05:26.340So with Sandra Harding, with Karen Barad, with Patricia Hill Collins, Nancy Hartsock, others, I worked through, I worked out a notion of situated knowledges to affirm strong truths, not weak truths, truths that you would live and die for, truths that are about who lives and who dies and whether the planet will flourish or not, whether earthlings will land on earth, that kind of thing.
00:05:55.280as opposed to a kind of situated knowledges are about a profound relationality and historical
00:06:03.520conjuncture, but not about relativism. It's relationality, not relativism, not epistemological
00:06:10.800relativism. So that strong truths are made, but not made up. So the organism or the cell or climate
00:06:19.940change, or coral reef holobiome biology. Those things are made in historical conjunctures
00:06:28.220that Karen Barad theorized as a kind of working through a genteel realism, working through a
00:06:36.540kind of intra-activity of all of the players to make the world this way rather than some other.
00:06:43.060These are strong truth claims. And surely now, when a kind of twisting of the work that I and others were doing in feminist science studies, but also more broadly on what I'll call the left, although the left is a strange term.
00:07:01.020Let me just use it as a collecting box for now, a large box that has many holes in it.
00:07:08.400The 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.
00:07:30.280And 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.
00:07:56.000so as to foreclose a kind of cynical relativism, which is everywhere these days and which disables,
00:08:04.260for example, the struggle for reproductive justice, among other things, by making outrageous
00:08:09.960racist and misogynist claims about the nature of human pregnancy and human caring for the next
00:08:16.940generation. Outrageous kinds of misstatements of medicine, of science in the area of reproductive
00:08:24.640of justice, certainly in the domain of climate justice. But there's also one more point I want
00:08:30.560to make before I let you ask another question. And that has to do with the way that situated
00:08:38.720knowledges insist on opening up and building complex contact zones with other ways of knowing
00:08:47.520the world, not so as to produce a kind of relativism, you know, to each her own little
00:08:53.640private culture or to each your own little part of the world. It's not to each your own diorama,
00:08:59.440but rather to open up contact zones for other ways of knowing, most certainly including
00:09:05.400indigenous ways of knowing, that put into interrelationship, intra-relationality in
00:09:13.420Karen Barad's sense, all of the ways of coming into materialist connection with the world
00:09:20.620so that everybody in the contact zone is transformed by the engagement so that one knowledge system does not dominate another and turn it into mere tradition or invading scientific knowledge or all of the different ways of turning situated ways of knowing the world into oppositional categories.
00:09:41.780It seems to me our job, if I can have this big box called we, is to build contact zones of complex entanglement where all of us are transformed by the engagement and in which scientific knowers do not presume in advance that they have the capital T truth, even while holding on to our very strong truth claims.
00:10:05.020So it's a very, it's a risk-taking historical engagement with each other that I think we are, that we must have in these times of tremendous urgency.
00:10:18.360Wow, Donna, there is so much there in your response that I already cannot wait to listen back to sit with all that you were bringing into your response with that. So thank you so much. My head's spinning, but I also have so many other things that I want to get into. So maybe I'll pause on my responses to that question and come back to it when I have a little more time to think on it.
00:10:45.240because I really also want to return to your essay, A Cyborg Manifesto, which was first
00:10:51.880published in 1985. And in this piece, you inhabit the figure of the cyborg extending beyond its
00:10:59.660original use in the 1960s, space race and Cold War imperialism. And as you explain in the text
00:11:06.700that we are all and always have been cyborgs, complex fusions and unruly assemblages of animal
00:11:14.780machine, and human. And since it's publishing, the idea has so radically transformed how folks
00:11:21.540are thinking about human-machine and human-animal relationships across academic disciplines.
00:11:28.620So I wonder if you could expand on this idea and connect the dots for our listeners. How are you
00:11:36.720using cyborg imagery as a tool for destabilizing the boundaries we construct between the self,
00:11:43.420the other, nature culture, mind body, animal human. And why are these troubling dualisms
00:11:51.460so important to disrupt? First, let me go back to a tiny little
00:11:57.740word in your question, which is always been cyborgs. I don't think I ever said that. And in
00:12:06.620In fact, we, that is to say those people born into a world in which system sciences, digital apparatuses, coding, digital coding, the war, the electronic battlefield, the bell telephone system and other communications apparatuses,
00:12:28.180the biomedical transformation of the organism into a, not just a system of production and
00:12:36.840reproduction, which it was, and heat production, which it was in the 19th century, but an information
00:12:42.260system, which it became through knowledge practices in a very materialist form from the
00:12:47.920mid-20th century on, that we have become cyborgs in a particular historical conjuncture, and it's
00:12:54.520non-optional uh and that knowing something's origins i can talk to you about the the ways
00:13:02.480that certain kinds of capitalist development certain kinds of cold war conflict uh practices
00:13:08.220in the communication sciences in ergonomics i can talk to you at length and in detail
00:13:13.380about where the cyborg came from not just as a figure but as an actual thing a thing of course
00:13:21.120in the entertainment industry, but I mean a more complex embedded materialist being in the world,
00:13:27.760not just a figure, never merely a metaphor. For me, figures and materialist fleshly things
00:13:36.240are in a sense imploded. They are profoundly entangled with each other. The figure or the
00:13:43.480representation is not separated from the thing itself. Rather, the cyborg, as I propose it,
00:13:50.080is more an implosion of the figures and of the things in the world. So cyborgs come into the
00:13:56.940world in particular historical conjunctions, and they make us who we are, but not evenly,
00:14:05.860not everywhere, perhaps not everybody. Though I think at this point of the more than seven and a
00:14:12.200half billion people on this planet, no one is untouched by cyborgs and their offspring in the
00:14:19.520ways worlding is made to work, including the extractions, the exterminations, the migrations,
00:14:26.480the medicines, the systems of governance, the systems of communication. I think truly no one
00:14:33.500on the earth, no human being, and I would really argue no organism, no living being on this earth
00:14:39.600is untouched by what emerged from the mid-20th century and beyond that I called a kind of
00:14:46.560cyborg worlding. So it's ongoing, but doesn't remain the same. It's dynamic, it's protean,
00:14:53.100it's contestable. Knowing something's origins does not determine what happens next.
00:14:59.200And people like myself try to open the box, to drive in wedges, to increase the degrees of
00:15:05.780freedom, not in some kind of blissed out techno bunny, technophiliac nonsense, but in an engagement
00:15:13.480in these worldings, including in play, including opening up the capacities for pleasure and bonding
00:15:22.020and making kin in new and wonderful ways with both humans and non-humans, including technologies
00:15:29.060as well as critters, the kind of opening up of possibilities, not out of some ridiculous fantasy
00:15:36.460of infinite possibility, but rather more in the spirit of the Marxist critical theorists
00:15:42.620who said the established order is not necessary.
00:15:48.240It is possible and indeed necessary to open up the imagination
00:15:52.060and to open up the practices for a world which can yet be but is not yet.
00:15:59.460And that's a collective task that can't be done just in the affect of work
00:16:05.360and critique and condemnation but has to be done so as to give each other heart
00:16:11.080for a world which can still be, even in the grip of the kinds of extreme urgency that I think
00:16:20.600all of us are feeling very deeply. Yeah, absolutely, Donna. And I feel like I have been
00:16:29.180working with the urgency so much to not be driven by the urgency, but to also not look away from the
00:16:38.500urgency or the anxiety that it produces, but not live from that place. And it's a challenge every
00:16:45.040day with what we're going through. Or live also from that place. It seems to me that the
00:16:51.800psychoanalytic doctrines of mourning, as opposed to melancholia, are very helpful here. That in
00:16:59.440mourning, a subject is able to face loss and understand that loss is real and not reversible
00:17:09.160and is not the whole story, that loss can be incorporated into a subject that then becomes
00:17:17.820other than it was, but is in a vital way, not by forgetting, but by remembering vitally,
00:17:25.460so as to make something vital with each other still possible, but without forgetting our
00:17:32.260mortality. That mourning disowns the fantasy of transcendence or infinity or deathlessness,
00:17:41.160but it also disowns melancholia and despair and cynicism. And mourning recognizes real loss.
00:17:48.800My brother really died. We really have lost an extraordinary number of other living species and we'll lose more. And it is not reversible. Peoples really have lost their land and their livelihoods and are in forced homelessness across the earth.
00:18:07.880These things are real. And so it's not about not living within that. It's about refusing melancholia and insisting on mourning with others so as to find those ways of living well as earthlings in a thick present, but without the fantasy that denies wounding, that denies death, and denies our own complicity in it.
00:18:34.420So without denial, to live with heart, to live with a sense of opening to each other, human and non-human.
00:18:42.740That's what I think that psychoanalytic approach to melancholia can teach us now.0.96
00:18:49.240Because people, I mean, there was a woman here cleaning my house yesterday.1.00
00:19:58.540She has what I just described, a business she's proud of, children who are flourishing, a husband who is really putting his weight behind what they're doing together.
00:20:07.820On the personal level, this is not about sadness, but we were feeling a kind of worldly sadness, and that that required some kind of response.
00:20:21.200We have to find the ways to, as Anna Tsing puts it, healing on a damaged planet, the kind of partial healing that produces real vitality and flourishing otherwise, including ways that nobody ever imagined but turned out to be quite amazing.
00:20:39.880We have to remember the sky has not yet fallen, the kind of chicken little move, sky is falling, sky is falling, all true, but it's not down yet.
00:20:49.540mm-hmm yeah and i liked what you said as well that we can believe all these truths we don't
00:20:57.300have to be in denial but it's not the whole story yes we are losing 200 species plus a day yes there
00:21:03.600is insane atrocities happening all over the world and all that is true and it's not the full story
00:21:10.760we don't know what the full story is but we also know that we are losing and how to stay with the
00:21:16.780trouble how to stay with the truth of the matter but also being able to find that vitality in the
00:21:22.620truth and not finding vitality in false solutions not finding vitality in being sold some type of
00:21:30.160fantasy that isn't real but really being able to find the vitality while holding the immensity of
00:21:35.760what's happening i think i know for me is is a it's a daily practice and so everything that you
00:21:41.360just said, I felt so I'm over here kind of raw, raw, like completely feeling resonant with how
00:21:48.100you're understanding the weight of the world, because something that I can't stand is being
00:21:53.220sold fantasies, whether it's an environmental justice fantasy or something like that. I'm so
00:21:58.840tired of being sold and patronized and yeah, just sold this type of ecological fantasy that we are
00:22:04.500not in. But how to not be cynical within that is really a challenge. So I really appreciate your
00:22:10.820viewpoint. Now, I want to go back to the Cyborg Manifesto for a minute, and I'd really like to
00:22:16.480turn to your critiques of the, let's see, the Marxist, Western-centric white feminism that
00:22:22.660are outlined in your Cyborg Manifesto, and really woven, it seems like, throughout your work.
00:22:27.620And these feminist points of view, as you say, are rooted in problematic definitions of what it
00:22:34.060means to be a woman, a gender essentialism that further etches harmful dualisms into our cultural
00:22:41.420psyche and really erases people of color as well as our trans, gender non-conforming, and two-spirit
00:22:49.140allies. So if you could speak a bit more about this idea of cyborg feminism and how we might
00:22:56.060build strong intersectional movements and inclusive coalitions based on affinity
00:23:02.480and political kinship rather than just identity?
00:23:07.500Right. First of all, I think I work by addition and not subtraction. So I am positioned as white
00:23:17.900through perfectly describable historical and personal processes. I am a Marxist feminist.
00:23:25.100I have worked out of that heritage with others. I have inherited a great deal from what got named
00:23:32.460radical feminism or cultural feminism or lesbian feminism or feminism, et cetera, et cetera,
00:23:38.800et cetera, all these various names, which are often turned into insults in political practice
00:23:44.220so as to name one's better position vis-a-vis someone else's less good position. I have been
00:23:51.140undone and redone by women of color feminisms. I have been undone and redone by indigenous people's1.00
00:23:59.120struggles, which sometimes, but very carefully, use the term feminism, but more often are going
00:24:04.540to use other idioms for talking about the care of each other, the making of kin, the care of the
00:24:09.980earth, including the practices of women and two-spirit people in generations are going to
00:24:17.100use the word feminism, if at all, with great care, but with whom alliances can be very deep and very
00:24:25.200profound. And various speakers will, depending on the strategic location in a struggle,
00:24:33.080adopt and foreground different idioms, not in bad faith, but because of the complexity of these
00:24:38.720multi-sided struggles. So the cyborg, I think, does not subtract and throw away identity feminisms
00:24:48.580of various kinds, nor does it ever claim that Marxist feminism worked with the same kind of
00:24:53.740essentialism that I think certain kinds of radical feminists were accused of doing,
00:24:59.480which I often think they did not do. And I think the word essentialist is often used as an insult
00:25:04.680as opposed to a description. And it misdescribes what people might have meant by a kind of
00:25:10.740essential identity or the importance of being a woman. I am a woman born, for example, an
00:25:17.880Audrey and Rich. Wouldn't it be a fool to say that was some kind of reductive essentialism?0.93
00:25:23.400So I tried really hard not to work by subtraction, but to work by addition, which is an
00:25:32.000intersectionality, particularly as it was taught through the struggle of legal and other practices
00:25:37.820by U.S. women of color feminists, and then expanded and was translated and recomposed
00:25:44.260in lots of ways by various figures around the world, both of color and not.
00:25:51.400Anyway, intersectionality certainly was one of the ways in which one is decomposed and
00:25:56.580But I was throwing out a notion of cyborg feminism as a kind of interrogative, using
00:26:03.400the networking and potentialities for alliance and entanglement as a, are we a we?
00:26:10.940What kind of we can be built that also includes these systems apparatuses, these digital apparatuses, these cyborg and these cyborg worldings?
00:26:22.260What kinds of entanglements already exist and can be made stronger and which need to be made weaker?
00:26:29.500So, yes, I don't disavow my Marxist feminism or a bunch of other things.
00:26:35.360Rather, they get recomposed as other kinds of attachment sites get built in the working.
00:26:44.080So I think a corollary of what I'm saying is that to do this kind of work over time, this kind of work and play with each other, really means you show up.
00:27:04.220You read the pamphlets, you help write the propaganda, you become informed about struggles that are not necessarily your own, but which you're in alliance with, even sometimes from a great distance, that showing up in practice, which takes time, actually showing up is kind of the sine qua non of staying with the trouble.
00:27:27.040yeah I really like this thought process of adding and not subtracting and I think it's also
00:27:38.860a really wonderful way to not be so divisive especially in movement spaces so instead of
00:27:44.740yeah throwing somebody's theory in their face or saying it's not good enough but rather taking
00:27:50.000bits and pieces from them all and I love how you're saying I think you were saying being done
00:27:54.860and undone or uh over and over again and i love that being able to be so open to these different
00:28:00.800ways of knowing and belonging and understanding and instead of throwing it out uh like throwing
00:28:07.880the baby out with the bath water so to speak when we get mad at one group or another but instead
00:28:11.940really understand what are the pieces that we need to be holding and be adding to our own
00:28:17.540understanding of these very complex situations so i i really love that and i i've been and we can
00:28:24.080hold on to anger without turning someone into the enemy. I'm not saying never be angry or never
00:28:33.780realize others are angry at you. Hold that. Don't walk away from it too fast. But it isn't the same
00:28:40.780thing as being each other's enemy. I really feel that. I really feel that. You had mentioned at
00:28:48.620the beginning of the conversation about, I think, reproductive rights. And I know I have been
00:28:53.040thinking so much about the politics of reproduction in the body, particularly in the past few
00:28:59.440weeks as states across the country are passing some of the most restrictive abortion legislation
00:29:05.940in decades. Just earlier this month, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed a fetal heartbeat
00:29:12.980bill, HB 481, and that effectively outlaws abortion after six weeks, subjecting people
00:29:19.820who seek illegal abortions or terminate their own pregnancies to life imprisonment and the
00:29:26.360death penalty. I mean, I have chills just thinking about that. And these horrifying bills are but
00:29:31.820one piece of this country's long history and honestly ongoing legacy of asserting domination
00:29:38.860and control over people's bodies, particularly those already marginalized. So in light of these
00:29:45.180complex and, of course, very sensitive issues, how are you thinking about the politics of
00:29:52.320reproduction, particularly as it relates to our environmental crisis? And I guess another part
00:29:58.600to that is, how does your invocation make kin, not babies, relate to a reproductive justice
00:30:05.900framework, which includes both the right to parent, you know, to raise children in a safe,
00:30:10.720healthy environment, as well as the right to not parent, access to safe abortions, etc.
00:30:16.740Right, right. So much in that question. First, a couple of really critical affirmations.
00:30:23.160The only person who could possibly make a decision about the intimacy of pregnancy and0.97
00:30:29.160the outcome of carrying a new life is the woman in whose body it is happening. She is the only0.99
00:30:35.320imaginable person who could possibly be entrusted with that decision. I may not agree with her
00:30:41.880decision. I may have a lot of things to say about it, but it doesn't matter. At the end of the day,
00:30:48.780the only person who could possibly be entrusted with that crucial decision is the pregnant woman
00:30:55.920herself, not pregnant person in the abstract, the actually existing pregnant woman. And anyone who
00:31:02.200gets in the way of that trust, that responsibility. Notice I am avoiding the word right. It's not that
00:31:08.760I don't think it's a right in the context of our legal system. It's that I think the more profound
00:31:13.560issue is that there is nobody else in the intimacy of the situation who could possibly be entrusted,
00:31:21.620make the decision. So I think that's a reproductive trust position more than a reproductive rights
00:31:27.840position. It's crucial to reproductive justice, but it's radically insufficient. A reproductive
00:31:34.660justice position is about the capacity to bring future generations into the world in health and
00:31:41.680safety and joy and flourishing and all that that takes in immigration policy, in housing,
00:31:48.840in agriculture, in medicine, in contraceptive technology that actually existing people
00:31:56.360actually want to use as opposed to long-acting imposables that have a quite different political
00:32:03.500register to them. The ongoing investment in new kinds of contraceptive technologies that are
00:32:10.460really what people want, a kind of comprehensive politics, practice, science, alliance building0.76
00:32:19.580for making generations, which I would in a shorthand call a pro-child world, but a non-natalist
00:32:27.600world. It's not anti-natalist. It doesn't say that anyone who gets pregnant and has a baby is
00:32:32.820somehow doing a terrible thing. I don't think that for a minute. And I think people are situated
00:32:37.220quite differently than I think human babies smell almost as good as puppies. In other words,0.59
00:32:44.440I think what I'm saying is I think I understand a little bit of the incredible sensuality of bringing a baby into presence, including the anger and the horror and the depression and all of the affects that are involved in that, bringing a new person into the world, all of it.
00:33:02.680I think that every born one requires all of our support. And human persons, namely women, who are bringing these beings into the world simply must be trusted, whether I think it's a good idea or not. They simply must be trusted.0.81
00:33:19.100And the whole apparatus of making kin with much less natalism and much more making kin non-natally is, in my view, urgent.
00:33:30.920I think that we now are about 7.6 billion human beings alive on the planet today.
00:33:37.720The rich fractions of that population are using up the resources of this planet at an extraordinarily rapid rate with extreme injustice to the more marginalized members of this population who may be having babies at a higher rate.
00:33:54.820But frankly, poor people are not having babies at a much higher rate than rich people, oftentimes actually a lower rate.
00:34:01.940Those populations still having babies at a fairly high rate are the most marginalized, the most subject of permanent war and extraction and exterminationism.
00:34:11.480That the great majority of groupings of people on this planet are having babies at a quite low rate.
00:34:18.500But 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.
00:34:34.580And it will only be that small if reproductive rates continue to fall.
00:34:39.800If they remain stable or grow, that 11.2 billion is radically too small a number.
00:34:45.900So 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.
00:35:07.960But not to talk about human numbering feels to me a kind of denialism.
00:41:52.900when um we are researching for this episode i came across this term forced life coined by eric
00:42:01.440stanley in an interview with you and sarah franklin in 2017 and there's a quote that i'd
00:42:07.660like to read forced life is not the organization of the forces of life and death for flourishing
00:42:14.800but rather for extractive profit it's about ecological obliteration through turning all
00:42:20.340of the earth into nothing but a resource for keeping human beings alive and growing end quote
00:42:24.980and i think this is such an important point an alternative way to so good yeah to just circle
00:42:31.980around the larger questions of life and death and disposability um in these critical times
00:42:38.640and that we really must consider not only who is made to die under systems of oppression but also
00:42:45.660who is forced to live in cruel, exploitative, and unethical ways. And so I'm just, you know,
00:42:53.640I'm wondering, where do you see examples or moments of forced life in our societies today?
00:42:58.060For me, I think so many things, but one of which I think about the biotech industry and Monsanto,
00:43:03.900which spends millions of dollars a year trying to sell an empty vision of survival and planetary
00:43:10.840future that is completely devoid of biodiversity, a kind of forced life that extinguishes the human
00:43:18.620spirit and violates our sacred connection to the earth. So yeah. Not to mention. Yeah.
00:43:26.420Yeah. And they're also trying to, well, I also think about Monsanto and interviewing, you know,
00:43:32.320people who have known people who work there and they actually think that they are supporting life.
00:43:37.140so again it's this forced life this imprisonment of of life itself it's um yeah so many thoughts
00:43:45.040around that but i'd love to open this up to you and hear what you think about it yeah well life
00:43:50.580is such an abstraction but people who work at monsanto often in good faith really are promoting
00:43:56.920systems of raising food that they think of as essential to feeding the numbers of human beings
00:44:02.460alive on this planet. And I think they really do understand this takes radically simplified
00:44:07.140ecological systems that displace risks in a way that they think is tolerable. I don't think
00:44:14.720they're fools. And I don't think they're necessarily, depending on how an engagement
00:44:20.080occurs on an individual level, they're certainly not necessarily enemies. I think the corporate
00:44:25.040capitalism of monsanto i think is an enemy but i think we would be in error uh to dismiss all of
00:44:32.760the people working for monsanto as enemies but let me go back to eric stanley who's a just a
00:44:39.000wonderful beautiful human being he was um he was writing a dissertation with me at the time that he
00:44:44.440taught me about forced life forced death was much on the critical theory agenda at the time
00:44:50.140And Eric, who was profoundly involved in prison politics, in prison abolition and prison alternatives to prison politics, human prison politics, and the forced life of prisoners, there's capital punishment, but perhaps much worse, or in any case in relationship with capital punishment, is the forced life of captivity, the forced life of slavery and the forced life of prisons.
00:45:18.400Not the same thing, but certain kinds of historical continuities.
00:45:22.520And always, Eric has been, he was part of animal rights activism, animal, radical animal rights activism, legal and less than legal.
00:45:35.540Anyway, people that he was living with were vulnerable to arrest and other, and raids and many other kinds of things.
00:45:43.120activist radical politics around other living beings, animals in captivity in the agribusiness
00:45:50.880food complex in particular. The research animal issue was, Eric thought of as somewhat more
00:45:57.400complicated, but he was pretty radical on that too. Eric really taught me that I had to pay
00:46:04.080attention to forced life in order to kill. So if we think of the many billions of chickens
00:46:09.940forcibly made to live each year in order to market their flesh for profit, but also in order to
00:46:17.940produce protein for protein-deficient populations, and also in order to produce meat for a growing
00:46:24.800global middle class. Same could be said with pigs and cattle and other quote-unquote meat
00:46:31.880animals, the working meat animals, the agro-industrial meat complex. Eric was the one who
00:46:38.160forced me to pay attention to the way capitalist forced life worked and the abstraction life so
00:46:44.960that the actual living being ends up having no place similarly with pro-life politics the actual
00:46:52.160living pregnant woman or not yet pregnant woman the actual woman play the actual living person
00:46:59.660is not present in a notion of pro-life life is a radically destructive abstraction
00:47:06.200And 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.
00:47:17.280So 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.0.97
00:47:39.980African 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.0.90
00:47:59.580Captives can't run away because they have no kin nearby, that kind of thing.
00:48:04.160The way the plantation is seen transformed the earth and became the model for capitalism,
00:48:11.400including to this day the palm plantations, the monocropping systems,
00:48:15.800the forced vulnerable migrant labor systems in the Central Valley of California,
00:48:20.840who drink dirty water even while the plants get all the clean water.
00:48:24.560uh you know the good water is directed toward the agribusiness crops for for global marketing
00:48:30.160the actual communities legal and illegal living in the salinas and central valley
00:48:34.900are drinking heavily polluted water if there isn't a more materialist proof of the uh ongoing
00:48:43.500nature of the plantation i don't know you know what would be so um i'm not a pro-life activist
00:48:52.320anywhere, including in my relationship to other living beings. And I think killing is a complex
00:49:00.460matter. I do, in fact, buy and eat meat because I feel an obligation that all of the working
00:49:09.080food and fiber animals in the world not become nothing but museum pieces or heritage animals.
00:49:14.520But that is a very difficult, and I'm not sure that's the right decision.
00:49:19.780I am compelled by my vegan colleagues to think that's a really iffy decision to make.
00:49:27.620I'm still making it, still proposing it.0.95
00:49:30.680I'm living in the difficulties of complex decisions, but opposing the agro-industrial forced life complex that Eric Stanley was talking about.0.99
00:49:41.560Surely that's easy, or at least easy as a decision, if not always easy to know what to do.0.99
00:49:46.240Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So you had mentioned the Thule scene, which you write about in your book,
00:49:52.780Staying with the Trouble, making kin in the Thule scene. And you also just mentioned the
00:49:59.100capitalisto scene. And of course, many of the listeners are really familiar with the Anthropocene
00:50:04.600and all the scenes. But I would really love for you to unpack these words because you give so
00:50:11.500much care to terminology and the linguistic origin of the words and their historic and
00:50:17.300literary context. So yeah, if you could unpack a few of these terms, the Thulecine particularly,
00:50:23.860and then just the multiplicity of meanings that they carry and why they're really important tools.
00:50:30.360So I'm not in favor of just multiplying words for the playful pleasure of it all,
00:50:35.340though one might take 10 minutes in a day to do that and then stop it.
00:50:38.320I want words that actually do some work, you know, that help collect us up in order to live and die better with each other.
00:50:48.680So, anthropocene, scene, the suffix scene, kynos, it means a time.
00:50:59.220It is the time of the recent, the time of now.
00:51:03.160So, the suffix scene doesn't mean a visual scene.
00:51:06.760it's rather a temporal term it's about a thickness of now so the anthropocene was proposed for the
00:51:14.680thickness of the now in which human beings become a planetary transformative force of a
00:51:21.700of a dominant kind and i i and many others did not like the term because i think it mistakenly
00:51:30.800ascribed to human beings as a species, what I think are the actions, the systemic actions of
00:51:37.640historically located people over about a 500 year period, which might be better named the capital
00:51:44.460of saying the time of the emergence of capitalism. And then as I just described the plantation of
00:51:49.720saying the beginning of all of this really was in the invention of the plantation and its slave
00:51:57.300labor systems and all that followed from that. But all of that's well and good, both as critique
00:52:03.340and as making us foreground very important historical processes, foreground what continues
00:52:10.420and what doesn't, foreground what kinds of actions might need to be taken and what is already being
00:52:16.040done. But I proposed the Thulu scene also, not instead of, but also, because I wanted to emphasize
00:52:25.220the time of the earthly ones, the time of the phonic ones, of the tentacular and muddy
00:52:31.680and living and dying ones of the earth, the time of earthlings, not captured in all of
00:52:38.080these other formations, cotemporary with them, both old and now and yet to come, and
00:52:46.060that play, and that are deeply in play in the world, and not innocent, not necessarily
00:52:52.520nice. The notion that the Thulucine is the time of the happy, phonic earthlings is nonsense,
00:53:01.420because the earth itself, Bruno Latour and Isabel Stengers in different ways talk about this. The
00:53:07.520earth itself is in revolt. The earth itself is rising against its destroyers. In his new book,
00:53:16.220Down to Earth, Bruno Latour talks about the geosocial classes of the earth and the off-world
00:53:22.960classes of the destroyers, and that those of us who are in and of the earth and are at stake to
00:53:30.980the forces of destruction must rise up with the earth against the destroyers. It's a very
00:53:37.340interesting political fiction that he's developing in his little book, Down to Earth.
00:53:42.140So the thuleucine developed for me from the word phonic or the Greek root of the earthly ones, not just necessarily under the waters, but those of the earth, all of us with each other in these coterminous, in these cotemporalities.
00:54:05.880I think I made an oral mistake, a mistake of the ear, by calling it Thulucine instead of Thanosine, because I hadn't yet read Lovecraft. Actually, I confess that I still haven't. But obviously, his Cthulhu was in my head, because I am a reader of science fiction. Of course, it's in the air I breathe.
00:54:27.420I was unconscious. It was way too late before I realized that my Thulu scene was going to evoke
00:54:34.780his Cthulhu wrongly, because his tentacular patriarchal monster of the deep, Cthulhu,
00:54:42.300is not related to my Thulu. So by a pronunciation trick emphasizing the soft
00:54:49.320phonic, I hope to differentiate it. But it was really a mistake on my part not to call it the
00:54:55.820I love where your mind weaves with these words. And I think they are really important. And another
00:55:05.360one that I have felt really connected to is the Arama scene, what some people call the age of
00:55:10.520loneliness. And I feel that that really resonates with me and how I feel on the daily. But I want
00:55:18.840to circle back to our conversation around technology that we were having at the beginning.
00:55:24.360And, you know, technology just, it encircles us every day.
00:58:12.000And 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.
00:58:38.500The kinds of communications devices that perhaps have a lower carbon footprint than physical travel.
00:58:47.920Does 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?
00:58:57.880Well, we should measure these very things.
00:59:01.020So I think I'm saying at least three things.
00:59:03.600One is to remember we're not starting from scratch.
00:59:06.760to refuse the deification of technology, refuse making it an abstraction, capital T,0.63
00:59:13.620and giving it a, you know, barely secularized Christian zoom out to the apocalypse,
00:59:20.040to remember all of the people who are working very effectively and join with them.
00:59:24.660And 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,
00:59:47.280to understand some of the ways that canine and human cognitive practices are both similar and
00:59:54.520different, to know something about how to analyze the semiotics of chemical tropisms or of human
01:00:01.100language, to take up the technical capacities that have been made available to us in the last
01:00:08.420many decades and to celebrate them as opposed to demonize them and think of them as always
01:00:13.880leading toward destruction. I think that the more we are not literate in some abstract sense,
01:00:19.500but literate in the sense of understanding the opening up of worlds, so as to engage in those
01:00:25.780worlds for care and justice, the more powerful players we will be for science for the people,
01:00:32.220or for water defenders, or for uncommoning the commons so that indigenous ways of knowing
01:00:39.680and scientific ways of knowing can actually form contact zones.
01:04:15.800So shared urgency, two really important ways of knowing and acting and being and engaging with urgency, how to do that in a way that doesn't reproduce colonial science.
01:04:31.140That seems to me a real question on the ground right now with real people.
01:04:36.580And it's an example of which stories, stories, stories, both stories, stories, stories, and another story emerges if we're really lucky.
01:04:44.420So it was Marilyn Strathair and the anthropologist who had been working with Highland Papua New Guinea people in all sorts of ways, and also in English people, particularly in the ways they did kinship relationalities, also the way they did money and business and how wealth grows and who grows wealth and how it's transferred, these kinds of things.
01:05:06.920she was the one who taught me basically that it matters which thoughts think thoughts
01:05:13.340and if you think English systems with a Hagener systems not Papua New Guinea as some sort of
01:05:21.000abstract whole but with a if you think a certain region of English kinship systems with a certain
01:05:27.860region of Papua New Guinea kinship systems and actual thinking practices such as you see things
01:05:34.060in each thinking practice you could not have seen if you made one normalize the other.
01:05:41.280So you don't let the thinking practices, you don't let one normalize the other. Usually the
01:05:45.600more dominant normalizes the more subordinate. Keep them both abnormal, if you will. Keep them
01:05:51.740both questioning each other. Then something happens that you couldn't think, that nobody
01:05:57.600could think otherwise. And it seems to me that's what we need to learn to do more of
01:10:00.500I 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.
01:10:11.740There's times I'm going to embarrass myself.
01:10:13.600There's times that I'm not always going to be right.
01:10:17.140But 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.
01:10:29.260and how to really create bonds, trust, allyship, continue to show up, continue to show up,
01:10:34.600not never make a mistake, not always be perfect. But I think a lot of what can happen to people is
01:10:42.200there's so much care, there's so much love, there might be anxiety, fear, sadness, mourning, grief,
01:10:48.080they show up to something, and maybe something turns them off, they make a mistake, and then
01:10:53.000they're too afraid to go back, or they think that, you know, for whatever reason, whether
01:10:57.860unworthiness or fear. It stops them from being engaged and how to get over that hump to say,
01:11:03.780no, I'm going to keep being engaged. And it's going to be uncomfortable at times. And that's
01:11:10.060okay. It's okay to be in that discomfort and to stretch and to bend and to be embarrassed at
01:11:16.120times. We can get back on the horse, so to speak. And I think that's such...
01:11:20.520And we can forgive someone else. We can give people, we can get it that if we're really
01:11:27.080going to build movements that endure, that have the complexity they've got to have.
01:11:33.660We can name our own and other people's total screw-ups.