Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 91: The Digital Unconscious and Decolonizing Lacan — with Clint Burnham
Speakers: Paige Smith, Am Johal, Clint Burnham
Paige Smith 0:06
Hey everyone, I'm Paige Smith with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is created by my office, SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement, and it's recorded on the territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this special episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal speaks with SFU professor and Lacan Salon president Clint Burnham. This interview was filmed in person and at a safe distance on SFU's Vancouver campus. Am and Clint speak about Lacan's enduring impact on clinical psychoanalysis, and Lacanian theory in our current cultural and political moment. I hope you enjoy this episode.
Am Johal 0:45
Hi there, welcome to Below the Radar. really delighted that you could join us. We're usually recording an audio on our podcast, and also will resume since the pandemic landed down. For the first time, we're recording live in-studio at the World Art Centre. We're here with our guest, Dr. Clint Burnham from SFU's English department. Welcome, Clint. It's a number of things I want to talk to you about. You've been involved with the Lacan salon for a long time, since like, 2005, 2006? And for our listeners who don't know, about it, could you introduce it a little bit, and yourself as well?
Clint Burnham 1:22
Sure, yeah, happy to do so. Yeah, so, Lacan Salon started in the fall of '07, 2007, and Hilda Fernandez, who's a clinician here in Vancouver, and she's actually doing her Ph.D. in Geography at SFU now, you know, she sent around this email saying, Let's read Lacan together. And so she was there from the very beginning. Paul Kingsbury, who teaches geography at SFU was there, I was there, a few others, Jessie Proudfoot, and basically, it's been a reading group that meets every two weeks on a Tuesday evening, and we've been working our way through the massive move that is the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. He's a French psychoanalyst, active from the 50s until 1980. And, essentially, one of his key kind of bodies of work are these, these seminars that he gave, on a weekly basis from '52, or '53, until 1980. And we read a chapter or two at a time, very slowly, very closely, different people facilitate. It's really been a great sort of collective experience, there's been hundreds of people who've been who've come to the salon over the years. And then since March of 2020, when the pandemic hit, we kind of, okay, we realized we can't really crowd a bunch of people into a room together, that's not really working anymore. And we decided to try doing it online, using zoom as everyone is. And it's, so it's really created kind of like this online, or virtual, or world community of people reading Lacan. And his ideas and his thoughts, which we can get into as well, have been read around the world, he's translated into dozens of languages, he's read in Japan, he's read certainly in Latin America, there's a huge sort of psychoanalytic community, across Europe, in Africa, and across Canada as well.
Am Johal 3:27
Now, the Lacan Salon's also done what they call the LaConference, which is, you know, conferences done on different themes every couple of years, wondering if you can talk a little bit about some of the past conferences, and remember, there was one recently on love, just a few years ago–
Clint Burnham 3:41
It's LaConference. But so we, when we began this conference series, I think it was 2011 was the first one? We've had it around town. And yeah, they sometimes they're on a certain kind of a text, or an anniversary, I think it was in 2016 when that conference was on love. And the most recent one in 2018 on, was on the environmental economy environment. And that's being turned into a book, being published by Palgrave next year, that Paul Kingsbury and I are co-editing. And so, again, we've, you know, we sort of--we do on a very kind of small scale. Like, I think usually our budget for these conferences have been two or three thousand dollars. And you know, we try to fly like one person in maybe, have a local person as a keynote as well. And...
Am Johal 4:34
Anne Dufourmantelle was here a few years ago.
Clint Burnham 4:37
Anne Dufourmantelle, the late, an amazing sort of French, critic, deconstructive, critical psychoanalytic critic and clinician. She was quite, quite amazing. And it's a... we've really tried to keep these open to the public with no sort of conference fees. It's, on the one hand, it's very, abstruse, complicated, sort of dense theory and so on. But at the same time, we've had these reading groups, and we've had these conferences where, you know, anyone can walk in the door and take part. So we really think there's a, there can be a way to, and I think it's what's interesting about what we're doing here, Vancouver, there can be a way to talk about ideas, with different audiences that doesn't depend on having a Ph.D., and having a lot of money. It just depends on a willingness to sit down and read texts, and think about them and talk about them in a thoughtful way,
Am Johal 5:32
As you were saying about Lacan in Latin America, in Europe. He's read and within psychoanalysis, itself, is quite mainstream, in terms of people taking up his ideas and utilizing them in clinical practice in a North American context. It's at least within psychoanalysis itself, or in the more professionalized forms of it, it's maybe more marginalized here. But in... at universities, in theory, and other places, in art, Lacan, somebody gets referenced quite a bit. How do you account for the way his ideas and his work have been kind of filtered, in at least a US-Canadian context in comparison to how his work circulates in other places?
Clint Burnham 6:22
Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. It's something we think about a lot. So on the one hand, he has this kind of global clinical practice. And, but that it's global, in the sense that it's Europe and not North America, I mean, it's in South America, it's in Asia, it's in India, it's in Africa. But it's not in Canada, in the US, where the therapeutic practice tends to be much more, "Let's solve a problem." Whereas talk therapy and Freudian therapy and Lacanian theory therapy isn't necessarily about just making you feel better in the short term but spending time to try and understand what the more structural or deeper kind of causes are. And I think for Lacanian theory, in particular, what does make it different, both from a lot of forms of therapeutic culture, but even from classical Freudian therapy, is that he's not saying this is just an individual problem. He's saying, this is social. I mean, he has these famous sort of sound bites, like "The unconscious, the discourse of the other," or this idea of ecstasy instead of intimacy, instead of something being interior to you, it's exterior to you. So your unconscious is social, it has to do with the world that's around you. And that's, I think, why his ideas as well have been sort of taken up in film, and in fine art, and in political theory, and in philosophy, because it's not simply a matter of this kind of interiorized individualistic sort of approach to what psychic sort of turmoil is but to sort of locate it in a more kind of social context. I'll give you kind of an example of this. So I sort of a key Lacanian idea is the sort of notion of the split subject. So it's like the idea of the unconscious, we have these desires, libidinal desires, or anxieties that are within us that we don't know what to do with, in certain kinds of ways. And so for Lacan, he says this is because we're also subjects to language, and language is something outside of us something that we don't, you don't own your language, you have to use the language that's there. So you think of what we now talk about in everyday language, and in a political way of microaggression. So microaggressions are these things that appear to be on the one hand as a minor, or as a, maybe even a positive kind of statement that somebody makes that when read in a different kind of way, when you look at it a bit differently, turned out to be some kind of a form of sexism or racism. So if I say to you, "Oh, I love your skin, you have such beautiful hair, right?" Like from a white person to a person of colour. There's, on the one hand at the surface, "I love your skin, you have a beautiful skin colour, I love your hair, can I touch your hair, right?" This is, "I love your beard." This appears to be a, you know, a sort of a positive sort of statement. But, you know, any four-year-old child will tell right away, there's something else going on there. And when Lacan theorized this, he says, well, unconsciously, there's a kind of malevolence or an aggressivity that's at work there at the same time. So, that's an example on the one hand of that Lacan's theorizing of who we are as subjects and so on, is social, that it's not just saying it's an individual, you know, the racism isn't just an individual problem, but it's social, but also that it has to do with this, that it can find an example in these kinds of everyday political sort of interexchanges.
Am Johal 9:51
Now, how were you first introduced to Lacan, and how do you use his work now in terms of writing that you're doing?
Clint Burnham 10:01
Well, how I was introduced to this, I mean this goes back to when I was an undergraduate in the 1980s. Victoria. And you know, theory was this, cultural theory was this brand new thing in the Canadian Academy at that time, and my professor at the time, Evelyn Cobley, she was the first person hired there, this is '85 or '86, to teach theory. I came from a background where I was the first person in my family to go to university, you know, I didn't grow up reading Shakespeare, or Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, and so on, I grew up reading, like, the Hardy Boys and you know, Reader's Digest or something, right? Like, I didn't have any, what's called "cultural capital." But when this thing called theory arrived, well, nobody knew what it was. So this was something where if I figured out how this worked, that would give me an edge. I mean, I think that was unconsciously what was sort of happening there, I'm gonna, I'm gonna start getting good at this, understanding this, and learning this. And even though I don't have all of the English canon already in my background, this is something that I can sort of pick up on. And Lacan was one of the figures that people were reading. I had this one professor, another professor, Steven Scobie, who is teaching about poetry, but also about film, and so we're reading him in terms of film theory. And so this was a new thing at that time. And then when I was working on my Ph.D. in the early 1990s, the big Lacanian theorist was Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher. He was very new, then his first book, Sublime Object of Ideology, came out in 1989 in English. And he sort of made Lacan more exciting, because, on the one hand, he was talking about pop culture. He was giving and finding all these examples from Hitchcock films, or Jurassic Park, or what have you, but also that he was talking about Lacan in a political way. So, he came from Slovenia, he came from the Balkans in the 1990s, the Balkan Wars are going on, of course, and he was, what was really interesting about what was one of the ways in which, in which Žižek, talked about this kind of rise of racism and violence in the Balkans in the 1990s was what he called "the theft of enjoyment." So, if I see somebody playing basketball or tennis, somehow I think that their enjoyment steals my enjoyment, it's a threat to my enjoyment like it's a zero-sum game. And again, you know, that takes place in more innocuous forms to I mean, you know, a teenager sweeping in on the weekend, we get annoyed with this, but in a more malevolent way, of course, this is Žižek argued and, you know, coming out of the former Yugoslavia, that racism itself was the was this was based on this idea, that the racial other, that their enjoyment is a threat to my enjoyment. And so he theorized racism as being not only an economic thing, or not only rooted in some kind of a biological fantasy of what race itself is, but that it had to do with ideas of enjoyment, so he brought this different kind of vocabulary into political thought itself.
Am Johal 13:12
And how do you use the work now, in terms of what you're reading I know that you were working on some things related to Žižek, and photography and other way, but it's continued on with the writing that you're doing now.
Clint Burnham 13:26
Yeah, a lot of it has to do with thinking about digital culture and the internet and so on. I had a book that came out in 2018 called Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? on Žižek and digital culture. I'm working on a new project called Lacan's Laptop. And so, what I like to do is to look at these things in a very ordinary kind of way. So if you just think of, say the phrase, "LOL," that somebody types in an email or sends as a text, and so on. LOL, laugh out loud what is what does LOL mean? Why do we say that? Why do we write LOL? Is it--are we laughing when we do it? So, there's two kinds of ways of thinking about this. One is that, what Žižek talks about in terms of enjoyment, or what in French Lacan would call jouissance. And that doesn't mean just enjoyment in the sense of having a good time, but almost like, a kind of an almost unbearable sort of enjoyment, and jouissance in French also refers to, like, a sexual orgasm. So, this kind of intense kind of enjoyment, is LOL about that? Is it about this--is it that you want to signal you're really have a good time? Like, "laugh out loud," but it's like, what kind of weird excessive thing there. "Laugh out loud" is kind of like, "I would have voted three times for Obama," because what else, what other kind of laughter is there? I mean, is there silent laughter? You know, it's like, it's like you're really trying to overcompensate and let that person know you really were laughing hard. But the other way to think about LOL, what we call them, emoticons and so on, is that it's almost as though by typing LOL, you don't have to laugh. And Žižek has this whole kind of theory of what he calls interpassivity. An example he gives of that is the laugh track on a TV show. So you get home from work and you're tired, it's the end of a long day. And you put on Seinfeld, and you know, they make some, Kramer does and kind of a stupid routine. And you hear that the audience laughter, you hear the canned laughter. They laugh, Žižek says, so you don't have to, that their laughter does be enjoying for you, in a certain kind of way. And he says, Žižek's idea of interpassivity is a kind of a counterbalance to the whole excitement in the 1990s when digital culture was first new, and everything was supposed to be interactive. Like now you can, it's kind of like the Choose Your Own Adventure approach to digital texts, in that it wasn't passive like reading a book, or watching a film, or watching TV were seen as being passive. But with the internet, now it was... now it was at the computer, now it was interactive. And he says "No, it's more like interpassive." So, in the same way, that a television show soundtrack laughs so you don't have to laugh, the typing out LOL... Again, it's interesting that it's laughter that's involved in both of these examples. You type LOL so you don't have to bother laughing. I mean, how often if you type LOL do you actually laugh? And you know, language, as you can imagine, have you ever done theorizing about what LOL? Some people talk about it as what's called I think it's John McWhorter, the African-American linguist working at NYU, I believe, or Columbia, who talks about it as being like a grammatical particle. So you're thinking of the Canadian vernacular when somebody says "eh," and then we all have these friends who like, they say it twice in every sentence, or we say like, and like and like, or, you know, you know, or yo. All those different sort of scenes or words are, they don't really carry a semantic meaning, but rather, they just punctuate the sentence itself, especially in spoken language. And LOL has that kind of function too. We all have those friends who when they send a text, they almost always seem to have LOL at the end of the lowest of the little text itself. It's almost like a sign-off thing, or what linguists would say, a signal for turn-taking, that somebody else can now sort of engage in a conversation. So that's one thing I've been thinking about in terms of the digital, and thinking about the digital in terms of psychoanalysis and the unconscious. And another way is a, and I had an article published a couple of years ago on The Conversation, the website, and this was when the Canadian politician Tony Clement, got in trouble for his sexting, that he was going on to social media. And it didn't seem like as I remember, and I could be wrong... he, I think, I don't know if he was actually still in office at this point or if he resigned because of it, or just became this sort of public pile-on, I don't think it was that he was actually sending lewd pictures and so on, but that he was, as one woman put it, "aggressively liking" people on Instagram. So he would go on to their Instagram feed, and just like five or 10 or 20 of them at a time, and sometimes late at night and so on. But he's also sending messages, and messages have a sort of licentious or flirtatious sort of nature. And this kind of sexting, the most famous example probably is the American politician Anthony Weiner, who--unfortunate name--but who was sending dick pics or crotch pics and so on to two young women from his phone as well, sometimes even when he was in bed at night for his wife and that. So, it's on the one hand, we have to think about, why is it that we are doing this? And by we, I mean, I mean, almost all of us have no doubt sent vaguely inappropriate sort of texts and so on. That's, it's just been, it seems to be the nature of, you know, the device. I mean, you think of your phone, it's in your pants pocket, and next to your genitalia, or it's in your purse next to your money, and perhaps your birth control pills. Or even think of the, like I said, one idea I have, or a title I have for a new project is Lacan's Laptop, this idea of this device that we call a laptop. It's over our lap, it's like, it's somehow connected to that to that part of our body. So in some ways, this... the title of my article was, "All Texting is Sexting." Because in some ways, our engagement with these devices is already predetermined in a kind of way, to have this licentious or libidinal sort of aspect to it. But psychoanalysis would also tell us that any speech, any interaction, is always about wanting to be loved. That we always are desiring this, or seeking this, and this in no way, I mean in no way to sort of like, try yo minimize, you know, actual aggressive acts and so on, or you know, totally inappropriate kind of messages and so on, but even the most innocuous have that kind of undertone to us. And we can see this in--one of the advantages of psychoanalysis is kind of like, you know, I think it was... a member of the British family, like 50 years ago said, "Well, we're all Marxists, now." I think in some way, we're also all Freudians now. And I'll give you an example, there's the food delivery service, Skip the Dishes, of course, they have, since the pandemic began, they've been making money hand over fist, more than restaurants, perhaps, but Skip The Dishes had these two billboards a couple of years ago. So, pre-COVID. And one of them said, "For when the hot pic you sent to Dan went to dad." And another one said, "When your text about Barb went to Barb." So the first one, about when your "hot pic" you sent to Dan went to Dad. So it's what's playing with a couple of different things there. One is the mortifying idea of sending this sort of semi-nude picture of yourself that you meant to send to your boyfriend or your husband, instead, it went to your father. So obviously, that's playing with the whole kind of incest taboo, that we don't want our father to think about us in a sexual kind of way, and so on. But then you have to think about, you know, the ad itself, it's Dan and Dad then and that are very close to each other. I mean, maybe--is it the idea that you know, you would type in D-A-D instead of D-A-N, although, you know, on your list of contacts, and so on, but maybe you are attracted to Dan because Dan reminds you of your dad. So there's that sort of play going on. And then the, when the text about Barb goes to Barb, so it's the idea that we're, you know, doing this kind of catty gossip online, on texting, and so on, as we are wont to do, and you accidentally send it to the person that it's about. And in both those cases, you have to wonder how much of an accident, is it, that's happening there? But there's also two more kind of levels of the text about Barb going to Barb. One is, of course, is with word calling it, the having chosen the name Barb, it suggests a kind of a barbed wit already, like there's a kind of a nastiness going on there--and this is only a personal thing, but my mother's named Barb. So it sort of fits in, even perfectly, to my kind of theory of how these things work. And then finally, the both of these ads are for Skip the Dishes. So what they are saying, "Oh, you have the digital malapropisms, these mistakes that you made these parapraxis, as Freud called the Freudian Slip, you have these mistakes that you made, which of course Freud would argue these review what we really want to have happen, we really want Dad to see that hot picture of ourselves, we really want Barb to find out what we think about her finally. So there's that, but also that when these bad things happen to us, Skip the Dishes, order in some food." So, feed yourself as comfort--and we have that whole category of comfort food, when you have this kind of psychic problem going on. And then just to wrap it all up in a neat little bow, of course, when we're looking at digital and social media platforms, we talked about the news feed, we talk about your feed on Instagram or Twitter, as though we're being fed by that social media. And indeed, when somebody puts a hot pic of themselves up on Instagram, we what do we call it, we call it a "thirst trap." As though the person who's looking for likes on Instagram is thirsty.
Am Johal 23:51
Clint, now, there's been obviously the move during the pandemic. We live in pandemic times, Eddie Van Halen just said today, there's like a lot of different stuff going on. But you've had to, as with a lot of people in the post-secondary context, to move to teaching online, over Zoom, or Canvas or whatever platform. And how do you think through that, or how's that actualized in the context for you, in terms of it as a cultural phenomenon that's happening?
Clint Burnham 24:22
Let's start with the hard stuff, though. Let's put to the side all the cute little Freudian kind of stuff, and look at the politics of it. And here there are two aspects that I think that are really worrying. And they both have to do with how big tech is trying to control thought. So, an egregious example is a couple of weeks ago, there was going to be a talk by Layla Khaled. Is that right? Palestinian activist in her 70s at the SFSU, at San Francisco State University. And this talk was going to be online, like everything has to be these days, and it was shut down by Zoom, and Facebook, and YouTube. So big Tech, which is--and I believe that YouTube is owned... no, YouTube is owned by Google. So it's three companies. There's not even just all just Facebook, but it's three different companies. And so they're stopping the spread of information, the free democratic discussion of political ideas. And in part this is, this has been argued this is because of a, if not Israeli, Israel-funded sort of psyops app, a group called Israel Action Team, which is active on the platform Telegram. So, it mobilizes people and it has all these sort of like, boilerplate emails, or, Twitter, or Telegram, or Instagram or Facebook sort of messages to put out there. And so, they mobilize, it's like a, you know, like, a troll farm essentially, that they go after go after public institutions to stop these kinds of determinations of Palestinian ideas. So that's really very troubling, and Facebook and other owned social media as well, have been shutting down Antifa accounts, as well. Antifa is, you know, again, this mistaken idea, it's one ideology, as opposed to sort of like, more like a decentralized sort of group of leftist activists. So that's those ways in which big tech that we are more and more reliant on, with the pandemic, is very much one that is interested, that wants to police thought, and wants to police thought, in an anti-democratic function. But also the other side of it. Yes, of course. So I've been teaching on Zoom, and then like I mentioned, Lacan salon is now, we're now circulating on Zoom. And I mean, there are many amazing and wonderful aspects of computers and the worldwide web, and the Internet, and the digital in general. I mean, that's a very important sort of thing to keep in mind, many of us have jobs that we can only do now, because of this kind of technology. Ideas are much more available, books are much more available, films, and music, and culture, is available in a global way, that was... we couldn't have conceived of 30 years ago. And these are very, I mean, it's really important to keep that in mind when we're talking about the problems that are associated with this. But there's also, and the former VP academic of my university said, you know, what the pandemic is showing us is what SFU is going to look like in 2030, i.e. that they want it to be more and more online, and they want more and more education to happen online. And that's troubling, because education should still take place, even like, even in this incredible setup that the technicians and the infrastructure that it took for us to be here today is different than if we were doing it on Zoom, or if we, if it were just audio. But so those political things, I think, are really important to sort of keep in mind as threats to education as threats to democratic discussion.
Am Johal 28:08
Is there a worry around, in terms of recording lectures in an asynchronous way, that the content that you teach in a particular year will be reused by the university, for example, or in the context of precarious labour, like sessional instructors, where courses that they teach will then be recorded and utilized by the institution in a context where they don't get paid in the future. Is there concerns raised by your colleagues?
Clint Burnham 28:37
Yeah. And by the Union as well. SFUFA, the SFU Faculty Association, because we do have IP rights to courses that we teach. And, I mean, I think depends on a department by department or discipline by discipline sort of idea, because there is, there's always this sort of, these ideas coming from well-meaning colleagues in different disciplines, "Well, why not just record your lectures for the semester, then you then you don't have to rerecord them?" And as though, for myself, and many of my colleagues in the humanities or social sciences, every year, you're teaching differently. I would bring in, you know, different new words of poetry or what have you, I try to be responsive to what is happening in my lectures. This year, I can never use them again, because they're all referring to COVID. So they're, they'll be outdated, you know, let's hope, within a year 18 months. So, but there are those kinds of pressures and ideas that you know, towards centralization. And I think, you know, in terms, certainly in terms of the educational precariat, sessional and other sorts of other forms of labour there is, there's also the fact that people are doing more work because teaching online is a big time suck. There's more prep, you're sort of chasing after students more, they're chasing after you. It takes more time to read and pay attention to written comments than if, just if you're sitting down in a room with people for 45 minutes. So, and those things can be more exhausting as well.
Am Johal 30:15
Yeah so, to get through the rainy season during the pandemic times, you've got yourself a Canadian Tire tent to block the rain. How's it working for you?
Clint Burnham 30:25
You actually are going to bring that up?
Am Johal 30:27
Yeah.
Clint Burnham 30:27
He said he was going to bring that up.
Am Johal 30:28
Does it feel the rain so you don't have to feel it?
Clint Burnham 30:31
I actually should have had my you know, my Canadian Tire logo on the back of my shirt to get some product placement money here. Yeah, you know, I mean, very fortunate to live in a house, and to have a yard, and to be able to sit outside, and to have friends like yourself and others just drop by, and so we made the $150 purchase of a Canadian Tire Coleman. I draw the line though, at the outdoor heaters. I think they should be banned everywhere. I think that they're, you know, when I was growing up, if I left the door open, my mother would say to me, "We're not heating the neighbourhood." Actually, now, it turns out everyone is heating the neighbourhood and, you know, heating the planet in a way with those burners. But yes, we'll do what it takes to get through.
Am Johal 31:17
Is there a question in the audience? Is Melissa there? Yeah, can you please go ahead? I know you've been waiting for a while.
Clint Burnham 31:25
I'll rephrase it, because--
Am Johal 31:26
Melissa is such a diligent person that she got her mask on,
Clint Burnham 31:32
As technicians in the room do as well. So, the question was asking, was about interpassivity, and how we want to be loved, and how that works out in terms of the digital age, and with a move online. I'll start with a, you know, there's this cartoon I saw the other day, which shows somebody in a zoom meeting or something, and somebody else is saying to them, "I can't tell if you're looking in my eyes, or you're looking at your email." And, you know, which can be you know, "I'm looking at my email from my other girlfriend," right? Like, it's, there's always this kind of like, adulterous aspect to when you're on Zoom, because you're always trying to multitask, which is what we're called on to do all the time. Yeah, and I think that that, where you're looking at who you're looking at, I have been thinking about that in terms of Zoom, and also who you're speaking to, and who is speaking. So I was talking about the, how big tech is silencing political debate. But there's also a way in which, and everyone who's now a, who's any kind of a professor or an instructor, when they're on Zoom, we have this phenomenon that we call the "Zoom Silence." So, you know, I've got my, my 20-minute sort of lecture, maybe I'm narrating a PowerPoint, let's hope not, I try not to do that, because those are really boring. But I'm talking away all these great ideas I, you know, I spent the day sort of working on for this lecture that I'm delivering, and 15 or 20 minutes in, I start to realize, I haven't heard anything, and it's like, it's really, like, disturbing not to hear anything. Before, if I was, you know, and I've been in this very room and given lectures, and so on. And if somebody started talking in the middle of my lecture, I would be really upset. And I would've said, "I'll take questions later, let me just finish this thought," and so on. But now, I almost want to hear something, it's only you know, as we say, it's just crickets. It's not even crickets, nobody can even hear any crickets. And, and students also, will talk about how, when there is a discussion going on, they're not sure if they should unmute their mic to talk, because, "Is what I'm going to say important enough?" And so there's this way in which, in media technology and media theory, it's called the affordances of the interface or the affordances of the technology. So the affordances of, of zoom is that, you know, usually if you're listening to a lecture, everyone's mics are muted, but it sort of results in this real sort of deathly silence. Or the other thing, going back to looking at each other.
Clint Burnham 34:09
Of course, everyone knows now that when you're on Zoom, and all people only my age in their 40s, or 50s will remember this, but there used to be a TV show called Hollywood Squares, which would have this grid of people sitting all above--and there actually, it wasn't even just a grid, it was a set built with people on chairs above each other and this, and their names and so on. And now we're in this kind of Hollywood Squares of Zoom, where there's this sort of grid in front of you. But of course, everyone's grid looks a bit different. Like if I point out right now on Zoom, it doesn't mean the person above me is going to see me pointing at them because they may be below me on their grid. But there's also this whole thing of where you're looking. So if you have like, a usual kind of laptop screen, there's a little camera at the top with a light on to let you know that it's on. And if you look at the camera, you can't actually see anybody's eyes in the grid itself. Whereas if you look in somebody's eyes, then you, they can't see you looking into the camera. So it looks as though you're looking away, that you're on an email, so on. So this whole interplay of where people are looking, and what they're looking at, results in a very kind of discombobulating sort of lack of trust in the actual medium itself, which I think it--on the one hand, like for Zoom silence, these are reminders that--because we don't want to be nostalgic for, or too nostalgic, I was already nostalgic for being here with Am. But you don't want to be too nostalgic for the idea that in a classroom, that's when the "real teaching" takes place. And there's many obstacles, both, you know, socioeconomic or just simple misrecognition, or the spatial logic of the room, and so on, that mitigate against real kind of learning taking place. And so, we always have to be thinking about this. But in the same way now, with this technology, there's a whole new set of things that are making learning and genuine conversation taking place. But I will say, and I was talking with a colleague about this today who is teaching in our graduate program, and you know, in terms of Lacan Salon, and I'll be talking at the Salon in a few hours, I will say that there is an amazing amount of real conversation and dialogue that can take place with this technology. It is possible, and that's what I mean--I don't want to like just totally, you know, throw the baby out with the bathwater, and be this kind of Luddite who thinks the technology is bad, and so on. It's not that the technology is bad, it's just that it offers a different kind of, what would Heidegger call a kind of in framing of our being that we have to be aware of, and to be critical of at the same time. And both those institutional, or apparatus kind of in framings. And then the, I think the more malevolent sort of ways in which big tech is using this moment as a way to monetize education and crush free expression.
Am Johal 37:10
Interesting, it kind of comes up also at a time of the proliferation of fake news, and general challenges to sovereignty, like the stuff that Benjamin Bratton talks about in The Stack, it all gets really amplified or accelerated and in a moment like this. I do want to get nostalgic for a moment which has to do with any thoughts, memories of Eddie Van Halen.
Clint Burnham 37:35
You're always the one with the rock references. I remember, I'll get nostalgic. When we were doing Humanities 101 20 years ago, and we had a talk that was given at the, I think we were at the storefront in what's now the Portland Hotel. And you brought out a Twisted Sister album for somebody, that you gave to them. I do like you know, Van Halen and California Girls, you know, you know, or Jump, right? Like, I'm wearing white jeans, yeah, so I'm halfway there and you got the headband. So we could do the two of us, we could do, you know, lower half me upper half Am, and you got that you got the better hair than I do. So.
Am Johal 38:17
Wondering, if you have a time, if you'd share a poem with us.
Clint Burnham 38:22
So I'm just gonna read the first, this is about a five or six-page poem, but I'll read the first couple of pages of it.
Clint Burnham 38:28
No poems on stolen land.
Clint Burnham 38:30
I’d like to acknowledge that we are on stolen land.
I’d like to acknowledge that we are on borrowed land.
I’d like to acknowledge that we are on pickpocketed land.
I’d like to acknowledge that we are on overdue land.
I’d like to acknowledge that we are on full land.
I’d like to acknowledge that we are on empty land.
I’d like to acknowledge that we are trespassing on someone else’s property if that someone else had property and if we are who we think we are and not, in fact, perhaps also someone else’s acknowledgement.
I’d like to acknowledge the knowledge of like to acknowledge you like me acknowledging.
I’d like to acknowledge I meant that.
I’d like to acknowledge I meant to say we are on land that was emptied when my grandfather moved here in what was it, 1948?
I’d like to acknowledge my Dene sister.
I’d like to acknowledge my Gitksan brother.
I’d like to acknowledge my Tsleil-Watuth cousin.
I’d like to acknowledge my Nuuchaanulth mother-in-law.
I’d like to acknowledge my Skwxwú7mesh daughter.
I’d like to acknowledge my Okanagan boyfriend.
I’d like to acknowledge that we are getting into dangerous territory here.
I’d like to acknowledge that my grandfather moved here in what was it, 1948, and then went back to Winnipeg and then came out again with my grandmother and my dad and I’d like to acknowledge I always hate it when I see the little items on maps saying I.R. #30 but I also like seeing I.R. #30 – and it’s usually in italics for some reason – because they acknowledge how they’re little spaces marked I.R. #30 both part of the cities, of human habitation, which are on the maps, and the landscape, the time immemorial blah blah.
I’d like to acknowledge the last 5 minutes of colonialism.
I’d like to acknowledge fifty pages of postcolonial bibliography.
I’d like to acknowledge the virtual rez.
I’d like to acknowledge the talking memory stick.
I’d like to acknowledge the suburban rez.
I’d like to acknowledge the low-res rez.
I’d like to acknowledge acknowledging.
I’d like to acknowledge the brass mask my uncle made at reform school in the 1960s on Vancouver Island.
I’d like to acknowledge the hot chocolate I had on army maneuvres on Skowkale land in July 1980.
I’d like to acknowledge … both I can’t acknowledge and I’d like to acknowledge Oka.
Clint Burnham 41:27
I'll stop there.
Am Johal 41:28
Thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar.
Clint Burnham 41:32
Thanks for having me, Am. Take care.
Paige Smith 41:37
Thanks for tuning in to hear from our special guest, Clint Burnham. And we want to also thank the technical team at GCA Production and Event Services for capturing this conversation so well, and for accommodating us in the space was such close attention to the health and safety of all involved. You can find links at the Lacan Salon and other commentary by Clint in the show notes of this episode. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch you next time on Below the Radar.