Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 235: Radical Futurisms — with T.J. Demos
Speakers: Kathy Feng, Am Johal, T.J. Demos
[theme music]
Kathy Feng 0:02
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 T.J. Demos, Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. Together, they chat about T.J.’s book, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come. They also discuss the question of climate justice in visual culture, green capitalism and fossil fascism. Enjoy the episode!
Am Johal 0:46
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us again. This week we have a special guest, T.J. Demos is joining us. welcome, T.J.
T.J. Demos 0:56
Hey, thanks for inviting me. Glad to be here.
Am Johal 0:58
Yeah, T.J., I'm wondering if we can begin with you introducing yourself a little bit.
T.J. Demos 1:05
Sure. I'm a professor within the Department of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. On land that has been long claimed by the Ohlone people, the Awaswas-speaking Ohlone people. Whose descendants the Amah Mutsun are currently struggling for sovereignty and land back, and against extractive projects in the area. My training is in art history. And I also have brought a strong political focus to my work. So I'll also have some background as an activist and organizer. Specifically with DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America. So, in some ways, you know, my, my practice is multifaceted. It's as a teacher or a professor or researcher, but also as someone who engages in politics on the ground.
Am Johal 1:59
So T.J., as an art historian, cultural critic, political organizer, when did you first start thinking and writing about ecology?
T.J. Demos 2:12
That was around 2007, or 2008. And I was living in London at the time—I lived and worked there for 10 years, between 2005 and '15. And I was, you know, like many people becoming increasingly aware of the climate crisis that was developed in all sorts of ways. I had moved to London soon after Hurricane Katrina had happened in New Orleans. And as many of us know who followed that, this was a major environmental disaster that also had strong social and political and racial components to it in terms of how it unfolded, specifically, and particularly in relationship to the African American community that was hugely impacted by the hurricane at the time. So I was, you know, thinking about this, without it being a focus of my research for a while, when I was invited to write something about it for an exhibition that was happening in London at the Barbican Gallery. And that became the essay that I wrote on The Politics of Sustainability, in relation to art and ecology, where I was interested in seizing that opportunity and, and thinking about this term "sustainability," which was, in my perspective, subject to all manner of greenwashing. Where sustainability ultimately meant—what I found in my research—economic sustainability more than anything else, for instance, ecological sustainability. So that was really the beginning of what became a long term and ongoing research project for me. And engagement with political ecology, and thinking about how to push back ultimately on what I would call maybe like liberal green ecology and the dominance of green capitalism, that we're still struggling with these days.
Am Johal 4:09
Yeah, so wondering if you can start with Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, and a little bit about the background and the project and what you were thinking through at the time?
T.J. Demos 4:22
Decolonizing Nature came out of that essay, The Politics of Sustainability, in some ways, and there's a revised version of that essay in the book. But you know, in that essay, I trace—I offer a genealogy of this term, and how it's developed and changed over the last few decades. Both in ways that are conservative and liberal, in their conceptual and practical frameworks, and also ways that they've been radicalized in artistic and activist practices. And I wanted to develop that more. And I did so in that book, in part by grappling with other aspects of the environmental and climate crisis, in terms of, for instance, relating it to the larger project of capitalism, and its blowback, ecologically, as well as connecting it to different kinds of conflicts and contradictions within society and politics more broadly. For instance, migration or climate refugee conditions, extractivism within different areas from India to Latin America. And other ways of conceiving of ecology within emerging discursive practices, specifically within New materialism and speculative realism, and these sorts of developments, which I wanted to think about again, putting some political pressure on these terms. To contest ultimately the formation—the growing formation of ecology within a green capitalist framework. So that was, you know, that was a big part of the book as well as expanding beyond the Euro-American focus of much environmentalism, especially as it entered into the contemporary art world. Or at least that was my perspective at the time. It was, you know, beginning, ecology was beginning to trend in many ways in contemporary art, it still is. And was largely focused within European context, within particularly exhibitions, biennials, as, you know, thematic focuses of major shows, and more broadly within curatorial projects. As well as in the States, but not much attention had been granted or given to developments theoretically, and also artistically, and politically within areas outside of that context. So I was... Decolonizing Nature offered a container to—for me—to read, to do some research in different areas of the world and try to think about broader conditions of radicalizing ecology, or decolonizing nature, outside of that Euro-American context.
Am Johal 7:12
You know, when you talk about the, kind of, ecological discourse is not landing down politically, socially, artistically, sometimes I really resonate with me when I was doing my doctoral work. I was trying to bring Badiou's work into ecology and I was reading... You know, I've got on my shelf, all these sort of environmental ethics textbooks and stuff that was all about the individual and deciding to recycle or not, and, and finding it really lacking in terms of a political sensibility, or an outside. And I think maybe particularly in the world of visual arts, there was kind of a desire of an outside that was a space that may be allowed for circulation there that resonated with people. And I'm wondering, in your project, Against the Anthropocene, of course, we see this word being thrown around. A lot of critique of that term, as well, but you did a frontal critique of it as well. And, and wondering if you can speak about that project, where you take a critical lens, do the framing around the ecological crisis, and you know, how areas are being articulated and projects are being built out of that. And also how the field of visual culture and art takes these questions on.
T.J. Demos 8:32
Yeah, the Anthropocene thesis was another node of trending ecological discourse in the teams and earlier, but especially the way it was taken up within the cultural sector and the arts during those years in the early teens. And Latour was indeed, part of this, I felt like that was, you know, part of the motivation behind the book, which I thought of at the time as a, kind of, almost like a manifesto. I wanted to write something that was short, that was polemical, that made a strong or attempted to make a strong political intervention, within the way that this terminological geological conception was unfolding. The problems that I had with it were that the Anthropocene read to me as a kind of neo-universalist discourse, in the sense that it presumed that this was happening because of so-called human activities. And it was happening everywhere. And the way that that got articulated was to basically erase causal differentiation, the fact that some people, some nation states were much more culpable and responsible for the causality behind climate disaster than others. And it tended to disavow the unevenness of impacts, right? That the Anthropocene, or the kinds of climate transformations that the Anthropocene inaugurates, really affect people in different places in very different ways. In ways that really depend on what kind of resources and economies and political conditions people are living within and have access to.
So you know, by now, it's pretty clear within political ecology and climate justice discussions that it's, you know, it's understood that climate disaster generally tends to affect the most vulnerable in ways that are the harshest, precisely because they have the least access to resources. It's what someone like Mike Davis would call an unnatural disaster. When something like Katrina unfolds, it's going to impact some people much more than others depending on the convergence of race, class and other social factors. So the Anthropocene, as a thesis, tended to disregard all of that, in ways that I found really objectionable. And I wanted to offer a corrective or at least intervene and put some things on the table that would challenge some of these ideas, including the notion that if the Anthropocene provides an analysis of the problem, it also preempts certain approaches to solving it. And I found this also in the logic of the Anthropocene, that it's specifically, in a way that it describes the problem, ends up calling for and opening up the possibility for specifically technoscientific solutions. Specifically geoengineering and carbon capture, in other words, more green capitalism. Which connects broadly to the argument of disaster capitalism, of Naomi Klein and others, that this was kind of the perversity of climate breakdown, that even as it's happening, even as it's caused by capitalism, capitalism is setting up the conditions to profit from that disaster. And worsen it, in many ways.
So I was attempting to, in this book, intervene in that logic and challenge it, as well as some of the figures at the time that seemed to be or were actually connected to these developments, like Latour, who for some time actually supported the work of, for instance, the Breakthrough Institute. This is an ecomodernist think tank and California, in the Bay Area, that has long supported technological interventions of the prioritized ways of approaching climate disaster. So they've supported geoengineering, which Latour ultimately also supported with some complex arguments. But I found as is often the case with Latour, there's disavowal of really concrete political challenges in his theorizations. For me, also, the Anthropocene possessed an aesthetic element—in the way that visual practitioners, including artists, but not only artists—were using it as a lens to configure visuality. Often through the use of satellite imagery, new technologies of visuality that produced this view from nowhere that would look at the Earth and analyze conditions of transforming environments. This is what, for instance, Donna Haraway, who's a colleague of mine, calls "the God trick," that this production of a view from nowhere, which has no situated basis and social conditions or political reality. So that was being mobilized to support the problematic ideological assumptions of the Anthropocene thesis. And you see this in the work of, like, photographers, like Edward Burtynsky, and others that I ended up discussing in that book in order to challenge the aestheticization of the Anthropocene as something that ultimately affirms human narcissism at the level of species being through visuality. So that was something that I wanted to contend with.
At the same time, trying to contribute argumentation for the support of alternative terms. Like, for instance, the racial Capitalocene, which I find is much more politically enabling. It names the causality behind climate breakdown really clearly. And it opens up political options in terms of how we address it, in ways that don't artificially divide climate science from social science, but actually insists on thinking the two together, through for instance, political ecology. So I'm thinking about this term racial capital saying that lots of people have written about elements of this term from Jason Moore to Françoise Vergès. And I think that that's really a useful corrective to the Anthropocene thesis, even though I acknowledged at the same time like the Anthropocene is not going away. This is going to be the term of choice that's broadly used. But more recently, I've been interested in ways that the Anthropocene thesis is being mobilized within a critical framework. For instance, I've been reading this book of Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, which I find really compelling and mobilizing the term Anthropocene critically within an anticapitalist framework, and supportive ecosocialism, or rather what he ultimately argues for, which is degrowth communism.
Am Johal 15:14
It seems that writers like Amitav Ghosh, some of his ideas align very strongly with that even though he doesn't use the term himself. In your book, Beyond the World's End, you again tie together artistic and activist responses to existential environmental questions at stake. And near the beginning of the book, you write: "We're entering the end game—the terminal point of democracy, of liberalism, of capitalism, of a cool planet, of the Anthropocene, of the end of the world as we know it." Pretty bleak setup, but also correct in terms of having just gone through, once again, another summer of intense wildfires throughout the province of BC. Just a few years ago Lytton burned down, and I'm from a small town BC, my parents had to evacuate in 2017. And there's a great book, Fire Weather, out right now with John Vaillant, who's based here in Vancouver around the Fort McMurray fires. But all of the implications of what's happening today and in our lifetime, things are going to get worse before they get better in many respects. And wondering if you can speak on building on it of course. You also, you know, there's like these artistic and theoretical kind of movements like accelerationism that emerge, but it was almost like, it was like a fad. It lasted like 18 months or 24 months, although it's still around. But yeah, wondering if you can speak to this project Beyond the World's End. I have it right in front of me.
T.J. Demos 16:48
Yeah, you know, contending with that, that experience, that sense of bleakness... Really is an important part of what drives my work. As well as the commitment not to surrender to it. And that's no easy thing as you're pointing out. Like I, being based in Santa Cruz, we're in a fire vulnerable area, and have experienced wildfire risk and threats that have displaced people, led to deaths, all sorts of really awful stuff in recent years. And we know that will likely get worse in the near future. So, you know, like what that means—how to situate a confrontation with bleakness, without surrendering to fatalism and negativity, catastrophism, is... That was part of the, you know, the motivation behind that book, like, let's, let's talk about the world's end. Or the ending of multiple worlds, which is ultimately what I tried to open up at the beginning of that book. Because the question, the quote that you read from the course, it goes on to challenge some of the assumptions of some of those phrases. Specifically, what I've learned is that climate anxiety is distinctly a kind of, often a liberal settler anxiety. Which is largely attuned only to climate science and mainstream media, to a near future climate disasters. So the apocalypse is all—is generally in front of us. It's something that we may be entering into, but it's in the future. Whereas we know from other communities, other research other scholars, activists, practitioners, that maybe the catastrophe is not in the future, but it has already occurred. And in the book, I cite, for instance, the work of the Anishinaabe scholar Lawrence Gross, who argues that, you know, Indigenous peoples have long struggled with what he calls a Post-Apocalypse Stress Syndrome. In other words, that we're effectively living in the aftermath of world ending disaster, which is that of settler colonialism—which has ended the world effectively for Indigenous people long ago, 500 years ago. Or at least a cascade of multiple endings, leaving multiple survivors, as well, struggling against the continuity, the ongoingness of those ends as well.
There's also the work of Black studies scholars like Christina Sharpe, and her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, which examines the conditions of Black existence, again, in the wake of world ending disaster, in this case, racial slavery or that world ending cataclysm. So, ultimately, the book is an investigation of the cultural and experiential terms of what it means to live within the midst of these multiple apocalypses and how to think about the ethical and political imperative to connect them. The Indigenous scholar Zoe Todd argues for this as well, that we have to not just register the existence of multiple endings of worlds but actually do the work of thinking of connecting them. And that's, that provided some provocation for the methodological basis of the book where I tried to do some of that work and think intersectionally between apocalypses in addressing artistic and aesthetic projects of people like John Akomfrah, and Arthur Jafa, Angela Melitopoulos—different practitioners that are actually mobilizing, often film and video but not just, in relationship to these... the ongoingness of disaster, and what life is like in the wake and what kinds of possibilities for struggle exist to reach potential points of emancipation from all of this.
I'm also looking at activist practices, like the Indigenous convergence against the Dakota Access Pipeline, for instance, figures in the book. And that was also part of the methodological basis of attempting to place art and activism on a spectrum. Of political aesthetics, instead of opposing them, as do many gatekeepers of contemporary art. So as to ask ultimately the question what comes after the world’s end? Or the ends, the endings of multiple worlds. Which opens a discussion of emancipatory futures that might ultimately surpass the 500 year project of racial colonial capitalism. So that's really a big part of that book, and obviously sets up the conditions for my most recent project on Radical Futurism.
Am Johal 21:29
Yeah, I would say I just wanted to say, I really enjoyed reading, I thought it was really on point from Sternberg Press, Radical Futurism: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come. And you lay out through visual culture and social justice movements, the questions that come after the many end of world narratives we have before us. But wondering if you can maybe define or speak a little bit to before we speak about the book, the term "chronopolitics" and what you mean by justice-to-come?
T.J. Demos 22:04
Sure. Chronopolitics is a term that refers to the time of politics, right Chronos. It brings Chronos and politics together. So there's the time of politics, as well as the politics of time. And in terms of that, what I'm referring to is, you know, the time of politics within dominant political experience is such that within representative, or so-called representative, democracy within liberal capitalism, we're called on to be political a few times every few years, when it comes to say, voting. That's the dominant experience, many people even opt out of that. So in other words, our relation to the political is strongly restricted, according to this kind of temporal configuration. And chronopolitics, then, would challenge that limitation, and insist on opening up the temporality of politics to, for instance, the way we organize conditions of everyday life. It also challenges the politics of time, the way time has been increasingly dominated and defined by capitalism's calculated machinery. Like the way many experienced this is through wage labor and clock time. Punching in and out of a clock, getting paid for that time, thinking of monetizing time. And "time is money." All of these kinds of dominant ways of thinking about temporality within the dominant economy, is what I'm trying to identify and challenge. Again, in terms of calling attention to different ways of understanding temporality and thereby politicizing it so as to challenge that calculative machinery of capitalism.
So one example is the work of the Philadelphia based Afrofuturist collective called Black Quantum Futurism. They do a lot of work thinking about temporality within their practice, which is, it's mixed media, it's music, it's sonic futurism. It's oral future telling, it's community organizing, it's doing anti-gentrification work on the ground in areas of Philadelphia that have experienced a lot of discriminatory housing practices over the years. And they identify the imperative, for them, of escaping what they call the Master's Clock[work] Universe. In other words, the long history of racial capitalism and the way it's defined temporality that has affected Black lives in all sorts of ways. In terms of projecting stereotypes onto them, delimiting experience, oppressing labour conditions.
And this is also similar to in some ways, the way Indigenous artists like the collective Super Futures Haunt Qollective, they're a Northwest based collective, Indigiqueer group of performance and mixed media artists, who talk about the dispossessed of chronology of colonialism, that projects Indigenous communities into for instance, an anthropological obsolescence. As if indigeneity is by definition of an "in the past," not in the present, let alone the future. And there's just amazing resurgence of voices challenging these dominant views and these temporal constructions that are deeply oppressive and have been ongoing for a long time.
So chronopolitics then helps identify other times of liberation, of emancipation. Like, for instance, Black Quantum Futurism drawing on Afro Diasporic temporalities, like they're researching the Dogon of Mali, in terms of an Afrocentric practice of temporality that that is attuned to seasons of agriculture as well as cosmologies of mythological time. They're also drawing on quantum field theory, which is really fascinating, which attempts to overcome Newtonian linear time, in favor of new modes of temporal agency. Black Quantum Futurism likes to develop experimental practices have what they call retrocausality. The fact that causality is not necessarily based within a linear projection of past that constructs the future, but actually, the present, according to them, can intervene in the past and rewrite conditions of the future. They also talked about the superpositioning of events that quantum field theory opens up, like being in two places at once. And these, these formations, these theoretical formations enable new kinds of political possibilities, which I'm trying to develop in terms of chronopolitics.
Also, in going back to, ultimately the work of Walter Benjamin, who figures, you know, somewhat prominently in certain chapters of the book. And he was, of course, he talked about the imperative of developing an antifascist historiography. He was theorizing shortly before his death, in the face of German Nazism, the necessity of rejecting fascism's tendency to project historical inevitability, as if it was the ineluctable result of progressive development. Instead of being the genocidal antimodern regression that actually was. So this is, I think, you know, really important to think about historically. And it is also unfortunately, becoming increasingly relevant in terms of the present in terms of, you know, what's happening these days in relation to the resurgence of fascism today. So ultimately, chronopolitics is one way to try to politicize time in order to intervene in that—in this current emergency politics that is leading to fascism.
Am Johal 28:09
I'm wondering if, T.J., if you could speak a little bit to in discussions around environment and climate change, there also seems to be a trend around fascist or authoritarian kind of views—the language of blood and soil that reaps into the more right wing forms of environmental movement or discussions around climate change or something that gets distorted into a form of authoritarian populism that seems to tie into a kind of green or environmental agenda. Which is, of course, troubling, but certainly we see it in France with Marine Le Pen. You see it to some degree in Italy, but other examples as well. Wondering if you can speak to kind of that aspect of the environmental movement or climate discourses that take a kind of reactionary tone.
T.J. Demos 29:06
Absolutely. It's a real growing problem and challenge, politically today that we need to continue to think about. I recently read the book by Andreas Malm and the Zetkin collective, called White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. Which offers, I thought, a really good overview—especially of European varieties, with some attention to the States as well—of this conjugation of international white supremacy with petrocapitalism, that expresses itself in relationship to a strong, xenophobic and anti-migrant politics. Which spells out the danger of fossil fascism for them. In the American context, this would refer to Trump's like pro-fossil fuel ethnonationalism, as an exemplary crystallization of this project, that has deep roots and indeed goes back to the history of early 20th century fascism. So I'm, you know, I think this is important to follow, especially within thinking about environmental politics these days.
And I think it's, there's something here that is, you know, that connects fossil fascism to liberal green capitalism, ultimately. These are not opposed, so much. Rather, green capitalism tends to share the same economic interests as fossil fascism, even if they're not the exactly the same social ones. But when the dominant economic system increasingly cannibalizes the political system—and here I'm thinking about the work of Nancy Fraser and her recent book Cannibal Capitalism. The end result, not surprisingly, is a kind of authoritarianism that can't seem to help relying on these tried and true tactics of social division. Meaning in this case, structural racism, in order to disempower any and all opposition, that seems to be an accurate analysis of where we are these days. Where just the extractivism of the dominant economic system has cannibalized the political possibilities or resistance to it. And the result of that is increasingly extreme forms of authoritarianism. Even, you know, increased articulation of the dreams of capitalism without democracy that we're seeing in all sorts of places, that is leading also to increased violence of a militarized police state to shutdown opposition to the conditions of this, this anti-ecological, political, economic death drive toward planetary disaster. So, you know, how can we analyze these conditions and organize against it?
One area that I'm thinking about these days and connects in some ways to Radical Futurisms, which addresses one possible area—one important area of divisiveness, which relates to identity politics, for instance. Another one is, you know, the divisive binary between jobs versus the environment, which we hear so much about. That's a major obstacle to, to climate justice organizing, that would bring—that would insist on bringing labor and ecology together in order to form a majoritarian anticapitalist opposition. And so that's something that I'm thinking about. Others are posing the stakes of that struggle like Matt Huber's recent book, Climate Change as Class [War]. Ultimately, this is you know, this is shaping up to be the major one, you know, a major site of struggle today against ecofascism, ultimately.
Am Johal 32:52
Yeah, Matt Huber, ran into him in Banff a number of years ago, the Banff Research in Culture that Imre Szeman used to put together. And he's got strong links, I think with Geoff Mann, who teaches in SFU's Geography department. Good question around—just last week, we interviewed Travis Holloway, who has a really great book out on—called How to Live at the End of the World. It also found a nice link with your work, talking about futurity and multispecies flourishing. And also, interestingly, both in your work and Travis's work, these themes of friendship and community come up in the context of ecological questions. And I'm working on a book with my collaborator, Matt Hern, around friendship and community in light of waves of authoritarian populism, but also inside of the larger, existential ecological question today. And so that part of your most recent book resonated with me, as in towards the end of it, those themes seem to be being picked up by a number of people in different contexts.
So I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to that notion of multispecies flourishing, what radical democracy might look like beyond the human? How do we rethink these notions of friendship and community beyond? You know, Jean-Luc Nancy and other people, is that we have to kind of... How do we think about the ecological, or how do we make those philosophical questions new in the context, the ecological context that we're in today?
T.J. Demos 34:28
In the book, I opt for the term "comradeship" rather than friendship or community, even though I think those terms, there's some overlap with those terms. But I'm, I'm moved to think about comradeship in relationship to the recent work of Jody Dean, and the need for thinking about, more specifically, political forms of relationality. Not that friendship and community couldn't also be discussed in this way. But my entry point was through comradeship. Maybe it's because it's also a term that's used frequently and commonly within socialist organizing contexts, including within DSA. And I wanted to think more about this, this term of political solidarity as well. Solidarity being a concept that really is in many ways alien to artistic practices and art world systems. Because, of course, within the art context that's been so thoroughly commercialized and institutionalized over the last century or so... The system is just ruled by competitive individualism. As in, you know, that's policed and managed in all sorts of ways. So how, you know, how can we think about solidarity? Which, of course, is a really strong concept that binds a lot of organizing practices within the political sphere. But insofar as some of us want to bring artistic practices and activist or political engagements together, often, solidarity is something that doesn't really translate so easily. So, this is something I wanted to, to discuss and set up and, again, to try to theorize the possibilities of and ultimately, I would argue the necessity of multiracial forms of solidarity across difference. And that means contending with the divisiveness of identity politics. Where I found the work of people like Asad Haider, especially his book, Mistaken Identity.
Am Johal 36:35
He's been a guest on our show.
T.J. Demos 36:36
Oh right, great. He's also did his PhD at UCSD and here in Santa Cruz. And worked with Max Tomba, who's in the History of Consciousness program and wrote an important book called Insurgent Universality. which Asad draws on, and I end up drawing on as well, because I find it really enabling in terms of theorizing conditions of the universality that is not the same as the dangerous universalism that hides the hidden, often European white particularity within it. So how can we rethink and certainly universality, and along with it, the conditions of solidarity at the same time? So that becomes a really important element. And that's something I extend them to beyond the human, toward the prospect of what some people would call multispecies justice, or multispecies flourishing—which I too want to think about and have done some work on, including beyond this recent book, Radical Futurism.
I recently wrote an essay for a Spanish publication that addressed the topic of extinction, extinction on the visual culture that that goes along with it, where I compared some of the work of like liberal photojournalism and conservation—such as the photographer Joel Sartore, who's done these images of at-risk species that are like portraits of animals that are at risk, that tried to mobilize compassion that can then catalyze politicization in order to challenge the extinction crisis. But remains according, at least according to my reading, very much within a liberal framework of generating guilt, demanding compassion, but not really offering any concrete steps to how to challenge the ultimate elephant in the room. Which is, you know, the dominant economic system that's not only it's providing the conditions of the mass species extinction crisis that we're living through right now, but also is the very system that this photographer Joel Sartore is relying on to fund his practice. So, you know, liberalism is filled with all these contradictions.
Against this I post the work of the Dutch artist Jonas Staal, and the British academic Radha D'Souza, and their project called the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes. Which was a multi-day public tribunal that placed extractive and fossil capitalist corporations and states on trial for driving climate breakdown and the extinction crisis. And within this context, they refer to two extinct animals as comrades. And then part of the set design for this project was these signs that were held up with images of different animals that have gone extinct, with the word comrade in different languages written on them. So that's just a small part of this testimony driven project that was using the language of political solidarity across species, which I found really provocative and compelling, in terms of offering an opportunity to to think about these kinds of speculative possibilities of theorizing relationality according to this political form of solidarity. What does it mean to have solidarity with extinct species?
So I deal with that in the essay and ultimately come around to suggesting that maybe we should—could be thinking about extinction as a form of strike. As a labour withdrawal from world systems, against this deadly exploitation and environmental destruction. And this is a, kind of, proposal that I had because ultimately, you know, the idea of multispecies flourishing is more of a climate justice demand than an accurate reading of current circumstances. Really, we're headed in exactly the opposite direction of multispecies flourishing, where we're headed toward multispecies extinction. So if we rethink extinction as a strike, that may risk a kind of anthropomorphism—in other words, turning animals into striking workers. But that itself may work against the larger anthropocentrism, which I'm interested in, and points toward what I think is unnecessary reconciliation of labour and environmentalism for an effective struggle for life. And the work of Jonas Staal and Radha D'Souza may not get us very far practically in relationship to that, but it's a small step, I think, that offers some really helpful speculative ways of rethinking conditions of comradeship and relationship to multispecies being and relationality. And, you know, this is something that art offers, is these areas of speculative fabulation that can enable in the best case, modes of political engagement.
Am Johal 41:39
Yeah, and certainly, around what you're talking about earlier, around solidarity, Astra Taylor is writing a lot around that. Brian Massumi continues to write and think about the more than human, and many others as well. I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to, you know, projects either you have, that you're currently working on now, or that you hope to get to in the in the future? What are you thinking about today, in terms of where your work is taking you?
T.J. Demos 42:11
Well, after writing a book like Radical Futurisms, which ultimately, as you know, it's very hopeful. Or maybe, you know, to invoke the term of Yarimar Bonilla, maybe it's pessimistically optimistic. There's, you know, I have a little bit of a sense that it's, it's too positive. And I want to, I want to keep thinking about—and I think it's important to do so—to think about, like, what is—if we can identify horizons of emancipation. Which for me, would necessarily be an anticapitalist horizon, that supersedes the conditions of racial and colonial capitalism. What is, what's keeping us from getting there? Obviously, there's organizing challenges, there's problems on the left, there's all sorts of stuff. But ultimately, there are real oppressive forces that are preventing organization, that are preventing political transition, that's preventing the real material challenging of the system of fossil capitalism, fossil fascism. So I'm, I'm wanting to think about the conditions of the administration of racial colonial capitalism.
Ultimately, this has to do with policing. I was in Germany during the winter last year. And there were a couple of events that were unfolding at the time when I was there. One was the struggle in Germany against the demolition of Luetzerath, in favor of lignite coal mining. And there was a big resistance movement to save Luetzerath against this extractive fossil fuel project. At the same time, there was mobilization against Cop City in the US in Atlanta, Georgia, where environmentalists and social justice activists, antiracist abolitionists, and Indigenous communities were struggling against this formation of a large scale police training center construction, called Cop City. This, like, 94 million—and now it's even, I think, up to 130 or 140 million dollar project—that will support the training of counterinsurgency policing that emerged after in some ways, ironically, but not surprisingly, after the Black Lives Matter manifestations of the last few years. Which according to the right, were the scenes of very violent resistance. So according to them the answer—according to the right, the answer is not to defund the police. Rather, it's to train the police even more, which means, you know, directing more and more resources toward policing. So this formation of Cop City... the resistance is definitely inspiring and hugely important, but it also is, I think, deeply symptomatic of what's happening these days in relationship to fossil fascism.
That is the conjuncture of police militarization, of counterinsurgency training, of racialized environmental injustice, of forest and ecological destruction, of using lawfare and the weaponization of terrorism charges against nonviolent protesters. So I want to think about that. I'm looking into that and reading a lot about that researching the conditions of Cop City and also the policing strategies that are going along with this, to think about, ultimately, like counterinsurgency, which is an important term that theorists like Stuart Schrader, in a recent book, talks about is it something that precedes seeds and constructs the insurgency that it wants to combat. So counterinsurgency comes first before the insurgency, it's something that anticipates insurgency and prepares for it, and criminalizes it in advance. So this is, you know, something that is really, I think, disturbing, but also important for organizers on the left who are opposing these conditions might be thinking about—which is how to develop a kind of counter-counterinsurgency. How to, again, anticipate the resistance to the mounting opposition to Cop City, in a way that anticipates the counterinsurgency strategies of the state.
So, um, you know, this is in some ways that connects to Radical Futurisms. There's the theorist Jasbir Puar, who talks about this term prehensive futurity. Which means, you know, prehensive, in terms of being able to grab things. So to grab the future, as a way to describe how states and military authoritarianism tends to construct the future that it wants to guarantee in advance so that it can prepare for it and then be assured of profiting from it. It's a right wing strategy. So I want to think, you know, this poses the challenge for those of us who want to challenge this, which is how to come up with a prehensive futurity on the left. Like what would a counter counter insurgency be that would challenge the conditions that are developing within Cop City today? Where Cop City is just you know, it's one instance of an arguably global set of phenomenon that's happening today. And you know, what, again, what Malm and the Zetkin Collective call fossil fascism. This is really the struggle for our world, for what the world can be, and for the future. So that's it's very early, early days. But this is the kind of stuff that I'm thinking about and working on right now. And
Am Johal 47:45
And Jasbir Puar just, I think, very recently moved to Vancouver to take up a position at UBC. I haven't met Jasbir yet, but hopefully, soon she'll be a guest on the show.
T.J. Demos 47:55
Yeah, I heard that, that would be great.
Am Johal 47:57
Yeah. Anything you'd like to add, T.J.?
T.J. Demos 48:00
Not, no, I think that pretty much covers it. We talked about a lot of stuff.
Am Johal 48:06
Yeah, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar.
T.J. Demos 48:08
Thanks again for having me.
[theme music]
Kathy Feng 48:16
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with T.J. Demos. You can learn more about his book, Radical Futurisms, and some of his other works in the show notes below.
If you would like to support our podcast, you can donate at the link in the description below. Your generous donation will help support the podcast's activities and associated public events with SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement.
Thanks again for listening, and we’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.
[theme music fades]