Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 190: The Art of Making Unfinished — with Leela Gandhi
Speakers: Kathy Feng, Am Johal, Leela Gandhi, Matt Hern
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Kathy Feng 0:04
Hello listeners! I’m Kathy Feng with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
On this episode of Below the Radar, our hosts, Am Johal and Matt Hern, two longtime friends, talk with Leela Gandhi, Director of Pembroke Centre at Brown University and Senior Fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. Today, Am, Matt, and Leela discuss human and non-human friendships in the contexts of democracy, post-colonialism, and climate change. We hope that you enjoy the episode.
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Am Johal 0:39
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar, delighted that you could join us this week. We have two special guests with us today: Leela Gandhi and Matt Hern. Really wonderful to have you both with us on Below the Radar, and wondering if we can start with you, Leela, introducing yourself a little bit.
Leela Gandhi 0:43
Well, I'm Leela Gandhi. I was born in India, and I have been educated in India and Britain and I've taught in various places around the world, currently, including India and Australia. And I've been in the US since 2007. And I, I work on notionally post-colonial theory, but fundamentally probably non-violence. I'm delighted to be in conversation with both of you.
Am Johal 1:38
Yeah, I guess you have a bit of a family history in non-violence?
Leela Gandhi 1:42
Well, it's it's a tricky... Yeah, I—let's say I have access to resources of thinking about non violence, but the family bit I always contest. Because Gandhi actually renounced his family, which was a very important thing to do in a culture of inherited community and, and I am very grateful for that renunciation. So that I, my claims are affective. Rather than genealogical.
Am Johal 2:20
Thank you for that. And we also have Matt Hern with us, my friend here in Vancouver. Or Richmond, to be more specific. Matthew, could you introduce yourself a little bit?
Matt Hern 2:31
Yeah. Hey, yeah. Awesome to have you. Leela. My name is Matt and I live in Musqueam territory on the middle arm of the lower Fraser River. And I co-direct a nonprofit in Surrey called Solid State Community Industries.
Am Johal 2:45
And Matt and I are collaborating on a writing project together on friendship and community and a number of other things. And that's where we came across your book Leela. So it's really wonderful to be in conversation with you. Wondering if you could first share a little bit about where that project started from.
Leela Gandhi 3:04
Right. Well, you know, I was teaching in Australia at the time and just finished a book called Postcolonial Theory. And I remember feeling dissatisfied by the idea of an impossible colonial divide. Though politically exigent, it seemed that sort of division between antagonists seemed unsatisfactory. And I started to, you know, I was working in various archives, and I came across this figure of friendship. Literally actually store—archives of friendship, archives of friendship, in the context of colonial antagonists. You know, so many such pairs, and each pair summoned a subculture. And I didn't know what to do with it. It wasn't enough just for the details to be biographical. So I started to wonder whether there was a way in which I could think about friendship as the... As the angel that appears, in contexts of existential division. So the angel that appears in context of existential division. I was helped, of course, because the people who were performing these friendships were thinking about it were very—as friends are, friends are very ruminative about friendship. And so that's, that's where it began.
Am Johal 4:45
Wonderful. Matt. We'll turn it over to you.
Matt Hern 4:48
Leela, I hope you don't mind me going off script already. [laughs] But one of the things we found in a lot of our conversations with people and a lot of our thinking is this sort of... It's an undercurrent of of a definitional problem. Many folks ask us, "What is friendship?" And this is, like, a long historical tradition for many different kinds of intellectual threads of trying to define friendship of what it is, is it like—How's it close to companionship, or solidarity, or family, or, or even enemy. Like, and other folks, we spoke to most prominently woman, have made a very interesting case the other day. You might know Julietta Singh?
Leela Gandhi 5:27
Yes, of course.
Matt Hern 5:28
Yeah. And she made a great thing about—like, a great argument about how we really should not be trying to define friendship. That it's this ineffable kind of malleable, permeable category. She uses this wonderful phrase I hadn't heard use it before. She said that: "Friendship is the name we give to all the relationships for which we have no other name."
Leela Gandhi 5:44
Right.
Matt Hern 5:45
And I love the way she spoke of it. But frankly, I wasn't convinced. And so wondering, like, how would you define friendship?
Leela Gandhi 5:50
I mean, there are many ways in which one can define it, if one wants to. When I was working on Affective Communities, I reached this problem myself, you know? Because I was trying to define something called the politics of friendship. And we now know that friendship is thing—in the, in the case of my inquiry, I was... It was very simple, you know. And, as I get older, it's, I feel, easier and easier to be simpler. But that I was, you know, simply in quest of something that was not antagonistic. And friendship was the figure for that. The relationship of non-antagonism, a friendly gesture. You can make a friendly gesture, but it wasn't satisfactory. It wasn't satisfactory. And some of the ideas that I had been thinking about, I took up again in the second volume of this—what I hope will be a friendship trilogy—where I came across another idea in the context of affective community, and that is the idea of imperfection. And it seemed to belong very much to the realm of affect. And it's only in the middle of this common cause book that I grasped that what I was calling imperfection, was better explained in terms of the grammatical idea of the imperfective. You know, meaning that which is unfinished, that which is unfinished. And I realized, then that certainly what I was trying to describe in friendship, is this commitment to making unfinished. Which is not to say that friendship is in itself undefinable, or friendship is in itself something vague, but it is a relationship, where you make a commitment to be unfinished. Why? Because it doesn't have any final form. Nor is it something that you inherit. So when you embark on friendship, when you embark on friendship you're saying, "Ah, in the middle of everything else that is given and structured and defined around me, I am giving time, and thought, and passion to the project of making unfinished. There's—it's not a professional relationship. It's not a conjugal relationship, it's not a reproductive relationship. Nothing will come of it. It is not productive temporally, it's not productive in an economic sense. It's just this commitment to making unfinished. To unfinished time, to unfinished conversations. You never need to see your friend again, when you leave them. There is no obligation. There is nothing contractual about it. So I want to endorse what Julietta Singh was saying, but to supplement the idea of the undefinable, with this notion of the imperfective. Again, it's something I can come back to more. So to say imperfective-ness is a corollary of friendship, as I understand it.
Am Johal 9:13
So since you've written Affective Communities, how's your thinking changed about friendship and community and you talk a little bit about these notions of border crossing solidarities that aren't fixed in advance. I'm wondering how you were thinking about these things today?
Leela Gandhi 9:32
I'm very interested methodologically in the way figures and conceits and events and practices constellate. You know, how they gather with other ideas, other figures, and other events. That, it's always an error to pursue this one figure to the end. Indeed, it's a kind of methodology of friendship and to look for constellation and in affective communities, I found that, the—right towards the end of that book—that of course, friendship was constellating with many ideas, many figures. One of them was democracy. So many of the actual thinkers I dealt with—Edward Carpenter, the homosexual radical, for example—wrote a book called Towards Democracy, in which some of his most substantive writing on friendship occurs. This is in the Western tradition, that book was very much about Western anti-colonialism. But I found that when the same thinkers who were thinking really excitingly about friendship started thinking about democracy, the most they could come up with is the notion of democracy as a, kind of, account of a form of life on Earth where the gates are open, you know? And that is to say, as a form of inclusivity. And, you know, that's the limit point of Western radicalism. Inclusivity. You stop there. [laughs] You open the gate, you know? Come on in. And you know, it's important, but I was like, "No, there has to be more!" You're thinking so amazingly about friendship, but when you start thinking of its constellate, democracy, this is... you can't go any further than inclusivity. And actually, E. M. Forster, who was, sort of, one of my great friends, if I may be so bold, was very skeptical of this—the possibilities of this idea of inclusivity. You know, and in A Passage to India he speaks about these Christian missionaries are talking about, you know, "In my Father's house, many rooms, and so-and-so can come in." And he starts saying in passage from there, but what about wasps? You know, can you include wasps? Where does inclusivity stop? So in the second book, The Common Cause, I returned to this idea. This corollary of friendship, this constellate of friendship, affective democracy. But I wanted to look at it from the side of—other side of the colonial divide, from the perspective of non-Western anti-colonialism. And I wanted very much to get a logics of Western anti-colonialism in the—in affective communities. So here, I was in quest of this logics, which is to say, you know, I'm fighting you because it's good for you. You know, that kind of—I am protesting the intolerability of colonialism for the good of the colonizer, this kind of logics. And then something else appeared in the context of affective democracy, which was, I started describing as the imperfect. You know, imperfect. And at first, the imperfect was just a way of saying, of the reduction of desire. You know, to be democratic with others, to be friendly with others, means I am willing to reduce myself, to cut myself down to size. To give up on certain desires—a form of renunciation. And, you know, if inclusivity is the limit point of Western radicalism, renunciation is the point of non-Western, certainly of Indic radicalism, you know? I'll give up on this, I'll give up on that. And then it's only later that I realized, "Ah, this imperfect means the art of making unfinished." And a politics of making unfinished, which is to say, I declare this law unfinished. I declare this settlement unfinished, you know? And it's, it's this... this mutation, this constellation, I think that is the direction in which we're thinking about friendship has evolved.
Am Johal 13:43
Matt, did you want to follow up?
Matt Hern 13:44
Yeah. The previous book that Am and I did was trying to think through global warming. We did a series of road trips up to the tar sands of northern Alberta. And a lot of this book, in many ways, is also a kind of a follow up. And I felt like that, that previous book that we did together was totally unfinished. Which I like to try to think of as a virtue, although our readers probably didn't so much, and to try to follow up some of those ideas. And a lot of them kept coming around to reconstituted or renovated relationships with the other-than-human. And we kept coming back—There's a variety of routes into this book, but we were wondering, do you think that friendship... Like is that even a political horizon worth pursuing around friendship with the other-than-human? Like, is that even—what would you, what would you say about that?
Leela Gandhi 14:34
Absolutely. I think if you simply stick to this idea of friendship, and you think, you know, you start doing exactly what friendship, in the way that we're thinking of it, sort of prohibits you from doing, which is to give it form, to give it shape, to find a model for it. To have it—when you start saying, "Can you define it?" You know, is it modular? Then you you can't go very—you defy its very constitution. You have to think of its, of the company it's keeping. You know, the company that friendship is keeping. And of it's gathering, the gathering of friendship. And once you start to do that, once you allow yourself to think of the discursive gathering of friendship, then it becomes possible to answer that question. You know, is just, it's not just me and a dog. Is it possible, you know, for me to be friends with my dog? You know, yeah, sure. Not that I have a dog, but me and a bird? Yes, yes. But to think of it in the way that we're thinking of it, then one has to expand that idea. And then, then how do we parse it out? And how do we parse it out to answer this very important question to which my first response then is, yes, yes. It is absolutely essential to imagine relations of friendship with the nonhuman. So how so, how so? And so if I may go back to Affective Communities. In that book, I was very taken with the notion of xenophilia, which is a friendship as a disposition toward strangers. Friendship was a disposition towards strangers. At the time, I was hugely enabled by post-structuralist thoughts, you know, and the kind of fetish of the other. And the fetish of alterity. So, of course, if you had asked me then, I would say, "Yes, of course! It is a—friendship is a disposition towards the other. So for the human, the non human is the other. So yes, under the norms of xenophilia. That is how this friendship with the nonhuman as possible." But since then, I feel dissatisfied with the philosophical resources of otherness. And I think it's better I think it's more productive to throw the notion of likeness in the mix with alterity. And to say that xenophilia is not just a disposition towards the other. But it's the principle of insisting on the likeness or equivalence of anomalies. Or the likeness or equivalence or juxtaposition of incongruous elements.
So here, I just want to give you a small context, which I hope will more directly engage your question. You know, in the late 19th, and early 20th century, many late European Orientalists and Indologists became very interested in, in Indic antiquity. And in the, in rituals of sacrifice. And they discovered—I think, this came out of sort of European sociology—they discovered a figure. Which occurs in many of the texts dealing with sacrifice, and this is... The term for it is bandhu, which it literally means friend. Friend. But it occurs when, at the site of sacrifice, you have to establish bandhu, or friendship, or equivalence between unlikely, unlikely elements, you know? Say, the sacrificer and the sacrifice animal. The matter in the sky, the burden of the spoon. So friendship, is the name for this establishing—Bandhu is the name for the establishing of this equivalence between unlikely elements. And what's the point of this? What's the point of establishing these equivalences? It is because only when these equivalences of anomalies are established, when bandhu are established, can the world be uninjurable. Those that have bandhu will not injure each other. So the idea of uninjurability occurs in the context of this establishing of relationship between unlikely events, unlikely figures. So that, to me, is a great resource for thinking about the inevitability and the necessity of friendship between the human and the nonhuman, between the sentient and the insentient. To place together, is really available to us in some of the most ancient resources that we have for thinking about friendship.
Am Johal 19:34
You know, Leela, in the, in the book, I love this Orwell quote that you use. It goes something like this, "One sometimes gets the impression that the mere word "Socialism" and "Communism" draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, "Nature Cure" quack, pacifist, and feminist in England." I'm wondering when we think about the climate emergency, you know what are the political possibilities of friendship inside of, you know, some of the present crises? Climate emergency being one, but is there some new ways we might think about these entanglements?
Leela Gandhi 20:13
Yeah, that's a good question. You know, and I'm, I'm always wary about taking up to earnestly the invitation to think about the climate emergency because I don't have the solution. But I think we have in this company I've kept with friendship, some ways of thinking about it. Of thinking about the terrible place in which we find ourselves. So I keep in mind more than ever before this uninjurability has become... As they say, nowadays, ontological. Uninjurability has become ontological, we are injuring our conditions of life. You know, actually, we are constantly injurious. So what do we do about it? And if you'll allow me to go back to this ancient idea of, of bandhu, which precedes the idea of philia, in a way... It also, this word, bandhu, always occurs along with another phrase. Which is "to not injure." Ah, spoon and grass are bandhu, they will not injure each other. So why will they not injure each other? Is because when they are in this friendship relation, when they are in this relation of equivalence, they, kind of... They give each other cover, quite literally. If I say I'm in a relation of equivalence with this tree, then I'm giving the tree cover, I'm allowing it to hide itself. I'm allowing it to conceal itself. And, you know, in European thought, you know, even in the 20th century, this... The way in which the world concealed itself was, became intolerable. You know, the philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote that one of the most intolerable things about nature is that it loves to hide. And so I think, part of the climate crisis is because we have forced nature—we have forced ourselves to come out of hiding and to become... Our instrumentality to become constantly visible, you know? What is this, what can we make of this? What can we do with this? How can we grasp it? How can we maximize it? So, if friendship helps us think about the climate emergency, I think it is by restoring the imperative of allowing the planet to once again go into hiding. And how do we do that? How do we allow this state of hiding to reemerge? Well, I think the discourse of rewilding is profound, because it is really about allowing things to, once again, exceed or elude capture. To become fugitive. So this is merely to say, if you are inviting me to think about how the philosophical resources of friendship may help us think about the crisis of constant injurability that we now face, it is by giving us the resources to let everything go back into hiding. You know, to conceal itself from our grasp.
Matt Hern 23:44
I guess there's a question to inherently about... Friendship is so often exclusively located as an individual relationship between two people. Occasionally, between, you know, more than two. Do you think it's possible for a collective friendship? For a group of people or a group of entities to be friends with another group of folks?
Leela Gandhi 24:05
Well, yes. I mean, there are friendship groups. You know, Friends are a network. You know, Matt, I don't think that friendship is... See, in its sociological form. It's a complex thing. Actually, to answer your question, I have to go back to my own childhood and to adulthood. It is as capable of causing annoyance and jealousy and feelings of exclusion, and bullying as any other relationship. So it is not, in its sociological form, intrinsically any better or any worse than any other relationship. So, if you have friends, that doesn't make you intrinsically either X or Y. It's merely to say that there are possibilities in friendship, you know, a way of thinking about friendship, which is is not just a way of thinking about friendship, not just a way of thinking about a relationship between X and Y, or X and Y and A and B and C and D and F, but a commitment to a way of life, you know? A commitment to a way of life, where—I keep going back to this, I think, where you are saying what interests me, even before friendship is unsettling, making inorganic what exists, you know? Insofar as we think of the organic as a kind of unity, say, the unity of a nation. Or the unity of a tribe, or the unity of an idea. So if you say, I think the important idea is, "Ah, there is a way of life that is more interested in the inorganic." It doesn't go anywhere, it doesn't come from anywhere, it's interested in things that don't fit. It has no end, it has no end. Which is very difficult politically speaking. Or rather, it's not that it has an end, it appears whenever ends are too clear, as in revolutionary projects, you know? Friendship is one of the names for this disposition. So that disposition, that disposition is certainly without boundaries. Indeed, boundaries are anathema to it, you know? Anything that achieves form is anathema to it. Now, this is a limited project, sometimes you need form, sometimes you need results, you need rights, you need laws. But this is something that goes alongside all of those projects, you know? Which is really about saying, my work is to break this down. Is to break this down, to make it not fit.
Am Johal 26:48
Thank you. Leela, I'm wondering if you could share with us what writing and thinking you're doing now.
Leela Gandhi 26:54
So I am, you know, I'm sort of trying to work on the, kind of, third part, the final book of this trilogy. Which is... It's on non-violence and concealment. Concealment being, you know, what follows from imperfection, which follows from friendship. And it's a multimedia—you know, it's a multimedia work. I'm very interested in... You know, as a post-colonial scholar, I find it really... It helps me, it's enabling to sometimes break up the form of existing academic language. So it's, got a... it's, I'm calling it a "croem," so it's a critical poem on these things. It's a poetic meditation on non-violence.
Am Johal 27:23
Sounds wonderful. Leela, it's been so wonderful to speak with you. I'm wondering if there's anything you'd like to add?
Leela Gandhi 27:43
I think not. I think I've been very prolix. But, I thank you. I thank you for this conversation with friendship openings.
Am Johal 27:54
Yeah, it's—I think this is a conversation that doesn't actually end. It kind of goes on. So wonderful to begin this conversation with you. And Matt, thank you so much for also joining us on Below the Radar.
Leela Gandhi 28:07
Indeed. Thank you both.
Matt Hern 28:10
Thanks so much Leela, really appreciate it.
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Kathy Feng 28:15
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with Leela Gandhi! Head to the show notes to learn more about the resources mentioned in the show. We release episodes every Tuesday, so make sure to subscribe to Below the Radar on your podcasting app of choice to make sure you never miss an episode. Thanks again for tuning in!
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