Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 233: How to Live at the End of the World — with Travis Holloway
Speakers: Kathy Feng, Am Johal, Travis Holloway
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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 host Am Johal is joined by Travis Holloway: a poet, translator, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Farmingdale, and author of the book How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene. Together, they discuss patterns in art making during the climate crisis, translating the work of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, friendship with all living beings, and the process of publishing a book.
We hope you enjoy the episode!
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Am Johal 0:46
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us again this week. I have a special guest, Travis Holloway, with us, whose recently released a book How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art and Politics for the Anthropocene. Welcome, Travis.
Travis Holloway 1:04
Thank you. It's a pleasure to talk to you. Best part of my day.
Am Johal 1:09
Travis, why don't we start with you introducing yourself a little bit?
Travis Holloway 1:14
Sure. I'm a philosopher. I'm also trained as a poet. I translate, often from French to English. I did study in Germany, though, as well. And I'm an activist. In addition to my activism work, I also wrote a book on organizing at Occupy called Occupying Wall Street that we wrote as a collective text.
Am Johal 1:34
Oh, fantastic. You know, there's been so many things in the news the last few weeks from the fires in Maui, where I am in BC, the city of Kelowna had massive burning, it's all around us in terms of the urgency of the questions that are at stake. But I think it's also really important to think through philosophically or artistically the questions that are at stake in terms of, you know, getting to the broader questions of how we think through climate change amidst the urgencies. And you, you write in the book a passage that the Earth has entered into a period of instability for the first time in 11,500 years, and the recent terms the Anthropocene and many critiques of that term. And you also talk about a kind of worldlessness that's present today. And I'm wondering if you could sort of elaborate a little bit on that, and also about, sort of, where this project began for you. Why did you think it was important to write about this topic in particular?
Travis Holloway 2:41
I think I'll try to answer all of those interesting questions. But let me begin maybe by saying, I wasn't supposed to be writing about this. I had no intention of writing about climate change, dealing with this debate over the term Anthropocene. And there was increasingly a sense that it wasn't just facts anymore about climate change. It was a real phenomena that was being felt increasingly and experienced and discussed. And I think that became really urgent for me at a really specific moment. I was living in New York City. And in 2012, we had Hurricane Sandy. New York City is not supposed to get hurricanes, you know, they're not supposed to go up this far north. But because of climate change, and because of the warmer waters, we had a hurricane come in and take a direct hit. You know, into maybe, some might say the arguably the most impervious, or supposedly the most impervious, modernist, you know, city that is supposed to be walled off. Literally, by walled streets, you know, away from nature. So, something really changed for me after that. And I think something really changed in a lot of people living in New York City at that time. The artists I was talking to were making more and more art about nature. But it wasn't, like, a nature that you could go out and experience and love, you know, romantically. It was, like, a nature that was contaminated and intruding on our lives and into the city. It was like—sometimes they use this image, it was like a pendulum that we had swung as human beings. And then the pendulum was swinging back at us.
So I think I started to write about this right around that time, and I just felt like to not write about it would be to be out of step with my generation and my historical moment. I just had the feeling that if I didn't turn everything and write about this, that I wasn't... I was just an academic who didn't respond to what was happening, you know, in everyone's lives and especially what is coming. When we talk about, you know, the period of instability—we used to talk about me, I can't believe this was the major concern or 10 years ago, we were all talking about waters rising. As if the glaciers melting and the waters rising, we imagined cities inundated. But I work with climate scientists, atmospheric chemists here in New York, from Columbia and NYU, we collaborate on things. And they have data and modeling that is well ahead of the IPCC report. And the things that they're really concerned about, things that they, you know, that keep them up at night. The first thing is food security. They think that in the next two to three years, we will begin to see food insecurity as a result of drought and also monsoon, like what are sometimes called rain bombs, but precipitation events that totally wash out the crops. It was two summers ago, two years ago, and Pakistan was just underwater, like nobody had any food. And then elsewhere, right now in Iran, there's such water scarcity that they're not able to grow their rice, you know. So there are all these things, which are, we're now feeling and seeing, in a way that we didn't used to with just scientific facts. And we're also, remember, talking about it.
And if you really think about it, like the fact that we're discussing this and talking about it together. That neighbors in, you know, southern states, which are often conservative in the United States, or in other parts of the world, where there are, you know, movements that are against science or against, you know, and so on and so forth. People are now having these kinds of experiences, and they're talking about it. And I think when people begin to talk together about things, that's the basis for political action, this kind of storytelling. And that is what is happening right now. And it's very new. And I don't think we give ourselves enough credit, that a lot is happening. A lot is happening.
Am Johal 6:46
Amazing, in some sense, in the book, which is a fantastic book, by the way, and I really enjoyed reading it and I think you're getting at all of the right questions. You have some discussion around... You know, a number of thinkers have been talking about using the word planetary, and contrasting it with globalization. People like Dipesh Chakrabarty, Achille Mbembe—who I just took a seminar with last month at European Graduate School, really an amazing thinker from Cameroon originally based in South Africa, Wits University. But this idea of humans and the more than human, and that we have a shared future and a coexistence and how do we think through that in a different type of way than these sort of neoliberal globalization that came to be in the last 20, 30, 40 years. And at the same time, we have billionaires like Musk, Bezos, Richard Branson, attempting to commodify outerspace travel and talk about terraforming. So this idea of a kind of utopia functioning outside of the planetary sense and the sense of even what Mbembe calls the Last Utopia of Earth. And to kind of think that through and I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to the notion of the planetary as opposed to the more neoliberal forms of globalization that are... have oftentimes characterized discussions.
Travis Holloway 8:12
It's funny you mentioned that because I just interviewed Chakrabarty, and the title of my interview with him is called Philosophy in a Planetary Age. And I'm also translating a piece right now by Achille for an issue of Philosophy Today. That's exactly—you're getting at the heart of it. A lot of us grew up in traditions that were not only, you know, arguing against globalization—my own background did that with Nancy's work. He argued that there's a difference between, you know, kind of, worlding or worldedness and globalization. And, you know, certainly Chakrabarty and Mbembe did that too, they're decolonial thinkers. What interested me so much about the last two to three years is that you saw the people who most resisted grand narratives, you know, large planetary narratives, they were, they did not want to talk about it. They want to talk about narratives were like—think of Franz Fanon, the world is divided into two, into two, you know, species. Historically we have to talk about it, as you know, differentiated, we cannot talk about this notion of the planetary. And I think a lot, I think what we have to do there is to see that there is... The planetary does not wipe out those differentiations. It layers them and introduces the planetary into the conversation as something that is happening to all of those groups, and in fact, disproportionately affecting those groups all at once. And there's been a lot of misunderstanding about that. And a debate that I think often took place across purposes. But I think one of the things we have to do is pay attention to the sites where this story of the planetary is being told. It's not, you know, being told primarily by... I mean, the Anthropocene narrative was right scientist and global North kind of reframing what's happening geologically. But in terms of the theory of the humanities, social sciences, historians, etc. It was often the people who most resisted grand narratives, you know, who were returning to some kind of notion of— I mean in Chakrabarty's words—some kind of universal, that he said could not and did not subsume particularities. And that I think, is a really, really interesting thing to witness. There are times—I mean, I'm a queer person, I'm very working class, I'm a first generation college student. So it's not, it's not like I have all of the privilege, but I have a lot of it. And sometimes I feel like I can't make those points in a way that a decolonial thinker that has spent their lives, you know, arguing against Empire, and globalization can make. And I just, I just find it all really interesting. And the other thing you mentioned is, you know, this idea of neoliberalism and neoliberalization versus this kind of terrestrial or earthly community that is coming, this planetary community as a result of climate change. And I think that, that is what interests me most, and what I, what is really the thesis or core of my book. And so, you know, I'd be happy to talk about that more, if you want.
Am Johal 11:12
Yeah, I want to talk before we get there. You know, you mentioned being from a rural working class background, but also your background in philosophy and having an MFA. I'm wondering if you can sort of speak a little bit to how that background helped shape how you're coming into some of these questions.
Travis Holloway 11:37
Well, the... there's a second—central and really the core of the book, the first thing I wrote in the book, was a large section of the book that looked at works of art over the last 10 years, about strange weather. So it was all works of art that people were making all around me—but also, every time I would go to a show, go to the Armory Show, I'd go to, you know, Frieze. So I was seeing work from all over the world at these shows. And I would always pay attention to what was made in the last two years, what was made in the last three years, you know? Trying to get a sense of the conditions of our moment and how we were really responding to it or what we were saying about it. So I wrote this large section of the book, it was the first thing I wrote in the book. And it was about—the chapter, the section of the book is called "Art, from Postmodernism to the Anthropocene." And again, the Anthropocene is a contested term in the book, I don't, you know, follow it, or adopt it in that way that it's been criticized for. But what interested me so much is if you think about, for instance—this goes back to the question of grand narrative—if you think about Lyotard and his book, The Postmodern Condition. His point in the book was that postmodern—in postmodernity, we are no longer interested in grand narratives. And remember, it's an undecided idea. So like, on the one hand, neoliberalism is no longer interested in grand narratives. Like it's not interested in a state that works for the people. It's interested in the self-entrepreneurial person, individual. And on the other hand, you know, we're no longer interested in narratives because of totalitarianism, because of empire, because of you know—so it's an undecided term, and that word.
What interested me so much is that I was seeing all of these works of art that was about grand narratives again. And it was like we were telling epics again. We didn't use to tell you know, we weren't, we weren't used to telling epics in this way. In fact, we're, in many ways, we were returning to some of the oldest stories we have, which are about, you know, floods happening in the, oh, in the regions of the Middle East and Northern Africa, etc, these early stories we know. So I just started looking at this and then trying to describe... And I hope this doesn't come across in any way as immodest. But that specific chapter received an award from the Pratt Institute in Art and Design School. Because it was one of the earliest chapters to categorize or describe this transition and what people were doing. And I think part of it was just that I was able to look at a lot of works of art from around the world, not just... They weren't just New York artists, because I had access to it. There were shows, there were you know, a lot of things going on.
Am Johal 14:26
In the book you speak about Bruno Latour’s notion of the "parliament of things." And also Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of all the living, of the living together. And I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to those notions and how you take that up in the book.
Travis Holloway 14:44
Thank you for that question. Yeah, let me start with Nancy. And then I really want to say some things about Bruno Latour. I was just in Paris, and I was astounded by how much he was a gathering figure. You know, because of his recent death, but he's, he's taken on this kind of... I don't know what the right word would be, gathering force? People are talking about his work, like people from all different arenas in a way that I had not seen. The last time I was in Paris intellectual debates. Let me, let me come back to that in a moment. But I just want to begin again by talking about Jean-Luc Nancy. So, you know, every now and then in our lives, we encounter a figure, a person—maybe for some people, it's a, hopefully one day it's a politician or something. But somebody that we really feel like is pulling us in to true real questions, and really, you know, thinking about them. And when I met Nancy, I think this was in maybe 2006, or 2007 in New York City. It was almost like—you know, because he's a philosopher, we were studying, asking a lot of the same questions. It was almost like when you're swimming in the ocean, and you're being pulled out by an undertow out to sea. There was just a depth of questioning. And there was a feeling that I had, I had no possible, you know, possible way but but to go this way with him. And so I started thinking about how to work with Nancy and I ended up—this is a, maybe a funny story and helpful for some academics—I ended up applying for a Fulbright to Germany instead of France, because Sarkozy had become president, the funding got slashed in France. And then the funding got slashed in the US significantly, as a result of the Obama administration kind of caving, or needing to cave, to the Republican's budget cuts after he became president. So I was, how do I go work with Nancy? Okay, I'll apply for a Fulbright in Germany, I go to Freiburg, which many people will know as the seat of phenomenology. I was there.
But I was going on the train over to see Nancy and to talk with him about various things. There was—I translated now three of Nancy's books, but there was one thing in particular that Nancy wrote that—there's an essay that always stood out to me. And it talks about this notion of all the living together. The essay was around, came out in France, I think, around 2011? I have to check that source. It's in a book that I translated, called What's These Worlds Coming To? It's a very difficult translation—dans quels mondes vivons-nous? It's a idiomatic expression. And so I translated it phonetically, instead of literally. Instead of "what kind of worlds are we living in? What kind of world is this? You know, what's happened?" I translated it phonetically. I was working with [Julia] Kristeva at the time, so dans quels mondes vivons-nous? What’s these worlds coming to? You can hear that expression. And you can kind of hear the outrage when you say it like that. And that mattered to me very much. And there's an essay in there that Nancy writes, called Obstruction. And he argues that we have left deconstruction, and we have entered into a period of something called struction. And it's exactly what you're talking about. It's the turn from trying to splinter everything and differentiate it, to now, "Okay, how do we amass, or build?" He uses this word, how do we heap? How do we put into a heap all of these differentiated things without having them assemble with unity or universality—or you know, it still allows for differentiation? And it's in that essay where he says, the separation between human beings and nature no longer makes any sense. I mean, this is an early claim, right? This I mean, it's almost as though he's reading Chakrabarty's 2007 essay on this. And he says, at that point, we must, you know, think about communities, communities of all the living. So, um, that was, I guess, my, my encounter with Nancy and his work, but maybe a little bit about Latour, if I may, or did you want to say anything more about Latour?
Am Johal 18:52
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Please go ahead.
Travis Holloway 18:56
I was not the kind of person to read the early work of Latour. You know, I again, I had no reason to read Latour. In that way, but we weren't, I wasn't asking the same questions in his, in some of the early works. I mean, I agreed with a lot of what he was writing, in principle, but it just wasn't—it didn't have the same resonance that, with the questions I was asking, than Nancy, or Kristeva, or Foucault, or you know, there are a number of contemporary philosophers around the world, Chakrabarty, etc, that I was working with. So, then, I think it was, I had been pulled into this and I picked up a book that I think a lot of people picked up. Which is Latour's book, Down to Earth. It's Où atterrir?, so literally, like, "where to land," like a plane is circling, and it's like, "where do we land?" I think that... I think that that book really made me realize that in my profession, we're not paying enough attention to this... I mean, he's not just a philosopher, he speaks to so many different people. But this figure who had emerged and, you know, I'm—I don't like to talk about figures, I like talking about collective so. But I'm saying, this scholar who had emerged who was speaking a very forward looking way, and a lot of people were gathering around it as a site of community. And I think that when I read Facing Gaia, you know, he was just ahead of all these questions.
So when Latour died, you know, there were, there was a gathering. I was just in Paris with—meeting with Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, who is a curator at the Centre Pompidou. And he was telling me that when, you know, Latour died—if you've ever been to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the museum, you see this large, almost gathering space in the center of the museum. And they just said, you know, obviously, Latour's died, we're going to have this event to honour him. And there were so many people who came, you know, that they had to put refused people because it was just so, so crowded. Which is a huge space. And it was very emotional. And people spoke, all different kinds of people, to the resonance of that work had for them. And basically the question I'm asking in the book, like, how do we live at the end of the world? You know, how do we face this moment? How do we really—that's his question, how do we face up to it? He says, how do we assemble the various peoples of the earth? How do we... One of the questions came to mind that I wanted to mention, but I've lost it for the moment. Yeah. So I think that we... I think a lot of us should be reading more and more of Latour, yeah, as well.
Am Johal 21:29
Yeah, it's interesting that you, you mentioned Nancy, he, of course, taught also at the European Graduate School for many years, and my collaborator, Matt Hern, and I had a chance to interview him about the project that we're working on, on friendship and community back in May of 2021. So it was about four months before he passed away, but just a very generous person in terms of his time to get into these questions. And amazing that the questions that he was raising in the '70s or so were still the questions he was still preoccupied with, right up to his passing. It's really a remarkable body of work and set of questions, and particularly in how we bring them into the ecological as well.
Travis Holloway 22:17
So can I respond to that, actually?
Am Johal 22:19
Yeah, please do.
Travis Holloway 22:21
I just wanted to, because I translated one of the last things that he wrote, with Maria-Eve Morin, who's actually at the University of Alberta, Canada, so not too far from you. And the, the essay was called something like Outrageous Death, or, you know, the Scandal of Death. Scandalous Death. And in that essay, I realized that as futurists, as forward-looking as Nancy always was, remember that he was a student of Derrida, of "l'avenir," of the "to come." He still was a philosopher of an era that I think we are now past. Because when he has spoke about his death, he spoke about it, as you know, he refers to Socrates, he refers to, I think, Hamacher, Derrida, you know, all the ways basically that we read death and those existential contexts. The incident of my death, like the way I at—the end of the world is my death, right? It's that moment. And what I'm interested in terms of where we are now, is that we are not talking about death in this personal individualistic being towards death, you know, way. We are, we are talking about it as something collective, you know? We're, we are really actually thinking about this, this disaster or catastrophe, or mass famine, or climate refugees, or being hit by some sort of extreme weather event, we're all of us really—or fires, you know. And I just realized when I translated that this is one of the last chapters of that era, you know, that Nancy was a part of, and we are now in a new era.
Am Johal 23:55
Absolutely. In the book towards the end, you talk about friendship, interestingly. Of course, I was hooked by that because of the work I'm currently working on and wondering if you can speak a little bit to that term and the implications of friendship to the political, how you approach it?
Travis Holloway 24:16
Well, gets at the heart of it, right? Let's do a little bit of Greek work, if you don't mind. And not that that needs to be any origin point at all. We can also think about friendship in a lot of different ways. There's a long tradition of thinking about friendship and politics going together. There's also [Donna] Haraway's notion of kin, we need to be making kin, or being friends with nonhumans. But in that particular passage where I talk about friendship a lot, I was really thinking about the way Aristotle, who was not a thinker we might read in a lot of these contexts because he makes such a hierarchy, you know, of beings and ontology—it's absolutely not flat. But he says that friendship is just at the very root of it. It is feeling together, it is sumpathēs. And I began to think about this kind of feeling together with all of living things. If friendship is, you know, feeling together, sharing out—you know, as Nancy would say it's a, it's a partage, it's a, it's something that we share, but we have partition in. And if it's feeling together, I think that's what's happening. And I think that we need to expand that notion of friendship to other living beings, all of living beings itself. Like, can we feel what is happening right now? With, you know, plant life, plankton, with microbes with all of the—Dipesh just called this, the other day, we were talking about the mansion of life. And it's as if human beings are living on the top floor, and we've forgotten about all of them. And, you know, it's as if we have to go back and you know, find a flat ontology that allows us to live with all the living. And so the final call of the book is now's the time to assemble with all the living. And to do that, I think that, to build a politics of all the living, you know, to build a... I say that democracy—I'm working with a radical concept of democracy—that democracy, you know, remember it has in its name demos. So it's a, it's a, it's a rule, the power or rule of, or sovereignty of the people. You know, that is what we do need democracy, we, it has to be won in order to get out of this because we're subsidizing fossil fuels without public knowledge. But, so we have to win the battle of democracy, but it has to be extended towards something bigger.
And so I invent this new logicism called zoocracy. And so it literally it would be the rule of all the living. And I'm trying to think about ways in which we can extend, you know, we have to win democracy, but it has to be extended towards nonhuman beings. And, and the plane of the book is that whether we could do that or not, is really not up to us. As you just mentioned at the start, fires will begin to intrude on our, you know, lives. On our political institutions, on our public spaces. Increasingly, storms will, you know, go into those areas where they will intrude. Think about all the houses of parliament or government buildings that are directly by bodies of water, or prone to all various forms of natural events, or catastrophes like this is going to happen. And so we just have to figure out whether we are going to listen—in fact, it already is happening, we have to figure out whether we're going to listen or not.
Am Johal 27:32
Now, in the process of writing a work, a book, you go away, you do all this reading, you go through the process of editing and putting it out in the world. And I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to the process of writing a work, but also, once you put it out in the world, it's... In a way, it's no longer yours, it starts to circulate in its own ways. And what has the reception been in terms of what you've heard back from people that have read it?
Travis Holloway 28:00
I think the first thing as I was writing it... First of all, you know, it's never your book, it's always something that has everybody else's voices in it that you've ever talked to, and I love that about writing. But the other thing is, when I was writing it, I was asking people, like, to read a little bit of this, to read a little bit, just short sections. I would be invited to write about this by somebody, and they would tell me. And I always got the same comment that people were really interested in this specific claim that I work with in the book, where climate change is forcing us out of neoliberalism. Because it's forcing us out of an individualistic, even capitalistic, you know, mode of existence. Like we now know that, you know, capitalism is on a death spiral. There, you know, there is no, no way to not see that if you think about this crisis, and how it developed and how it is fossil capitalism. I mean that is the title of that book, but that really is. And there is this kind of, I think, coming collective. It's, it is collectivizing as climate change. It is historicizing us after the so-called end of history. You know, and it is politicizing people who may never been political before. Like, "why is this happening?" You know, what, why are these kinds of things happening? Okay, 15 years ago, I was told by, you know, some leader that climate change would happen maybe in 200, 300 years, and it might be really mild, you know, I mean, this kind of thing. So, I think that's been the process.
Another other thing I wanted to say is just—that might be interesting to people is about publishing. So I've worked, you know, I've done a few books, and I was thinking that what I really wanted was a short book, that would be very inexpensive. And... For a few reasons. More than anything else I'm a working class kid from a rural place, like people work really hard and they don't have a lot of time to read. And so I wanted the language in the in the book and the length and, kind of, common to the book, to not be some tone that you know, the average person feels like is labour after they have laboured in ways. So, you know, if you're thinking like a poet, you're thinking, "Okay, what are the what are the ways in which you can compress this?" You know? What are the ways in which you can invite other people to read a little bit? And then one of my teachers, Charles Simic, who just passed away recently, it was like, you know, nobody is scared of a short poem, because they don't—when they see it, they don't, they don't immediately say, "oh, it's gonna take me, like, you know, all weekend or something like that." Like, it's, there's something there that is inviting, and doesn't just steamroll or try to indoctrinate or, you know, the reader. And the other aspect of that, that I really wanted was—by the way, I would just say, if you think about that, you can also think about the tradition of the fragment in scholarly work, like, how do people, why do people want to work with a fragment? Why do they still do? But the other thing I really wanted was, because I was working with on climate issues, I wanted a press that could put a book out very fast. And you know, still do the serious academic review. But once the reviews were in, to put it out very quickly. And fortunately, we have now presses that are—academic presses that are doing more and more of that. And so I went with Stanford because their editor there was both in philosophy and had also worked with Haraway and others, and they did this quickly. And the price point of the book was $14 initially. It's now $8.80, if you get it directly from Stanford. And that's a book that many people in my community could feel okay about buying.
Am Johal 31:32
Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. Wondering what you're working on now? Like what—now that the book is completed and out there, do you have other projects on the go?
Travis Holloway 31:42
Oh, yeah. So I mentioned this, I think but I'm currently editing a special issue of Philosophy Today, which is a philosophical journal that many people were initially translated in, into... appeared for continental, so-called continental philosophy. So if you don't mind, I could talk a little bit about that issue, I've been working on all summer. So the issue will begin with an interview that I did with Dispesh Chakrabarty. Because I don't think—I mean, Chakrabarty is being read more and more in the context of philosophy and theory. And I don't think that he has been read enough in that context, in ways that he has had significant and deep engagements with the history of philosophy. So I asked him about all these questions about philosophy, he talks about phenomenology in his 2007 essay. Where he says, you know, the problem with climate change is we can have no phenomenology of it, because it's everything all at once, everywhere. We can have a personal experience, but we can't have an experience of 8 billion, 9 billion people at once. You know, we can't have an experience of all of the ocean currents slowing or something like, all of it together, you know. And he also talks a lot about the history of philosophy. He mentions Collingwood, Benjamin Foucault, you know, all of these ways in which the history of philosophy or debates about how we tell history have to be rewritten in light of climate history, what he calls climate history. Other essays in there will be by decolonial thinkers, talking about Indigenous relationship to the land and looking back, I think as much as we're looking forward.
There's going to be an essay in there, a new essay by Achille Mbembe. And I'm also translating a book in it that's by a philosopher who was educated at [University] Paris 8, so the famous, you know, tradition of Paris 8 in France. But has not received—or has not, to my knowledge been translated in into English, or at least not translated many of her major works. The philosopher is Joëlle Zask, Z-A-S-K. And the book is Quand la forêt brûle, like When the fire burns. And it's about wildfires and mega wildfires. It won a lot of awards in France, and I first met Zask at the French Embassy here in New York. And I was totally blown away. I just felt like she had written this book that had spoken to—as a philosopher, had spoken to the kind of phenomena or like lived experience that we were really facing. And so it's those kinds of things. I'm also writing two new books at the same time. The first is on democracy. And the second is on zoocracy, or how to assemble with all the living.
Am Johal 34:28
Yeah, fantastic. Oh my god, you're writing two books simultaneously. That's difficult. (laughs)
Travis Holloway 34:33
It's like… (laughs) The work of democracy is something I've been working on for, like 15, 20 years.
Am Johal 34:40
Yeah.
Travis Holloway 34:41
And I should have finished it up. But I think the hurricane happened and my generation started happening. And I mean, one thing I could say is, like, every—there were so many people around me that were all of a sudden doing the same thing. Ben Lerner and Andrew Durbin, I knew both of them as writers in New York. They both wrote novels around the same time about a hurricane hitting a major city. And there were poets I knew. There was two poets I know, Alina Gregorian and Tim Donnelly both wrote books of poems about clouds. Then there was a play that I talk a lot about in the book by an esteemed playwright, like somebody that a lot of people are now very, very interested in, Anne Washburn. And Anne Washburn's very—the play that many people cherish is called Mr. Burns. And it's about a Simpsons episode. But really, it's about the reinvention of epic, because it's about Homer. And in the play—I saw this right after Hurricane Sandy—in the play, she talks about how there has been this, this end of the world event. We don't know what it is, this is very common in the literature that we're seeing right now. But for whatever, you know, for—the nuclear reactors, for a while, after this event, were able to continue running because they had generators. But then all of a sudden, the generators failed. And the nuclear reactors began to, you know, go down, incinerate. And then nuclear radiation began to, you know, be emitted into the air. And I think that one of the most interesting lines in that play that just stayed with me was "Whether we're safe depends on the weather, on the wind." The weather, or the wind blowing the radiation, will it blow towards us, or would it blow it away from us? And that the people in that the narrative try to go out to a forest and Massachusetts—in Springfield, of course, it's a Simpsons episode—they go to Springfield, and they sit around a fire and start telling stories again, together. And the only story that they happen to know is a story about Homer. It's a Simpsons episode.
It's so... it was just really, really extraordinary the kinds of things I was seeing, I was at a dinner party one night, and I remember somebody, you know, just all of a sudden said, "If such and such country gets air conditioning, like, we're absolutely fucked, you know, it's over." Because they're... the kinds of chemicals in those cheap air conditioning, it will destroy all, you know, efforts so far. And there was a convention, you know, to try to limit those types of air conditioners. And so many of those countries, you know, that really need air conditioning, like really need air conditioning, are also ones that, you know... This is Dipesh's point, like, how do we talk to these places where they're just trying to raise their quality of life and get air conditioning, from these privileged perspectives? You know, and then his other point is, as an Indian, how do we account for the fact that it is not only—this is, you know, his point, which some people criticize him a little bit for—but, it is not only those countries in the Global North or the wealthy, but it's also developing and industrializing countries that are contributing the most growth to the problem of climate change. And he can say that, obviously, in a way that I can't, and so I, he has such credibility on it. And he's worked his whole life on those issues as a philosopher and thinker from Calcutta.
Am Johal 38:24
Yeah, Travis, I'm wondering if there's anything you'd like to add?
Travis Holloway 38:29
Well, I think that.. I was just preparing this morning, my class this semester is called Politics of Climate Change. And I think it's really important to always not just have an analysis or talk about these things, but also to try to direct that analysis, you know, harness or direct it. Find a way to think about a plan of action. So we're really good at synthesizing, you know, these points, but I don't think we've been good enough about doing that link between philosophy or theory or, you know, scholarship, and then what would be the plan of action? What would need to be coordinated in order for this to take place? So I think that whatever I've said today, I think we also need to think about the political movements that we can get, you know, beside, in addition to, you know, refining our analysis with one another. What are the ways in which we are, you know, people are doing? How do we tell those stories? How do we raise the weaker stories—this is Haraway's point, how we raise the weaker stories up to where the strongest stories are right now? And build movements around those? Because, when I'm often talking with people, the first question that they ask me is, what can I do? I mean, right, it's... And how should I spend my time? And I think that's a question that a lot of people are asking today at this particular moment in globalization capitalism. But I think that there's a reason to feel galvanized, and it's the fact that climate change, whether we want it to or not, is intruding on those systems of government, those economic ways of being and ways of life in ways that it has not before. It's causing people to talk to one another. And they're feeling it increasingly. So there is a moment, a historical moment that is shared. And it gives us a new reason, I think politically to say, I think we better get involved, I think we better, you know, talk to our neighbors and our friends. Like we better find different ways of, you know, responding to the systems of power.
Now, I would say, as a last thing, that I am trained as a political philosopher. That was my original, you know, training with Nancy, who had originally set up the Center for Political Philosophy in Strasbourg, with Lacoue-Labarthe. And I follow a lot of contemporary political philosophy. And there are different ways that we can respond, you know, politically. And there's been a very interesting debate, especially in Italian political philosophy over the last maybe decade, about, if you don't mind me saying, like three very different ways to respond, you know, to the current—If we're largely in a technocratic modes of government that are mostly for purposes of privatization and private profit. Initially, after the lot of different movements that were so-called movements of the squares. So this was around the time of 2010—2009, maybe to 2012? Into 2012? We saw like Puerta Del Sol, saw movements in Latin America, there was Occupy. All of these attempts to withdraw from the state, destitute it, and to perform the kind of politics that we would want. So all these movements were what certain people like Agamben has called destituent power. It's a power that tries to withdraw and destitute and reform. And that's the only way in which it can, you know, find each other basically and find its politics. That's one way.
A second way, is a way that we thought about, you know, for a long, long time. Antonio Negri's, you know, book on constituent power. It was, let's get all of these people together, let's, you know, really form these direct democratic movements. Let's be as insurrectionary, you know, as possible in order to get these things done. I was just in Germany, there were really attempts to have direct action that even went so far as violence. Not violence towards people but you know, violence, that was part of the plan. And, you know, that is Andreas Malm, right, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, or in the Ende Gelände movement in Germany.
And then there is this last form that I don't think we can overlook, which is the thinking of Roberto Esposito. Which is a kind of political action that says—okay, this is very new, very new thought. I think Esposito was just translated to English a couple of years ago, this book called Institutional Power or something like that, institutional. But the idea there is that you, you can, in a neoliberal state, or in a technocratic state, or in an authoritarian state, you try to—and many people are critical of this—but you try to go and work with or for the institution. You try to get as many people as you can, you know, of your persuasion to go and work for the institution. And then you try to produce a conflict within that institution that gradually causes the institution to flip or switch. So I do have, you know, friend, friends, who are thinking, okay, how do I get... This is Kyle Whyte, who's going to be in the issue, and he's working on, I think, on some kind of Biden climate justice program, you know. And it's like, okay, how do I—I don't necessarily agree with a lot of these things, but how do I go in and work on this panel, on this, you know, and maybe produce a conflict within that with other like minded people that then kind of begins to switch or flip, because then you have the entire resources there. It is a reformist position, obviously, like, it's not... You know, people that I know, a lot of them don't like it.
But those are kind of three different insurrection. It's... let's perform some other politics elsewhere and otherwise. Let's be, you know, join the Zapatistas or something like that, like, or let's go to work for the institutions, but let's, you know, be the most radical person. We just have to know that that doesn't take place by just complaining as an individual. We have to think strategically how to organize and coordinate within that institution, so that we produce a flip or a switch or conflict within that then leads to some other outcome.
Am Johal 44:43
Travis, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar. It's been wonderful to read your book and look forward to having it out there in the world, building on the conversations that you outline. Thank you so much for joining us.
Travis Holloway 44:57
Thank you so much for having me.
Kathy Feng 45:04
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with Travis Holloway. You can learn more about his work in the show notes below. Don’t forget to subscribe to Below the Radar on your podcast listening app of choice, and follow us on social media at @sfu_voce to keep up to date with latest episode releases.
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