Radical Futurisms w/ T.J. Demos

19 Jul Radical Futurisms w/ T.J. Demos

By Chris Hoff

In his new book Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come T.J. Demos draws on radical futurisms and visions of justice-to-come emerging from the traditions of the oppressed as materialized in experimental visual cultural, new media, aesthetic practices, and social movements. His new book poses speculative questions about what comes after end-of-world narratives. Recently I had the opportunity to meet with T.J., who is the Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in Art History in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies, to discuss his new project. Enjoy.

Chris: Hi, TJ. Welcome

T.J.: Thanks, Chris. Great to be here.

Chris: My first question for you is, in Radical Futurisms, your new book, you state that we are living at the end of democracy, liberalism, capitalism, a cool planet, civilization as we know it, and point to recent experimental visual culture, new media expressions and aesthetic practices and social movement formations as showing the way to a post-capitalist horizon of collective emancipation. What are some of the projects you highlight that stand out to you in this effort of imagining new futures?

T. J. : Sure. Well, as someone who’s coming from the arts and culture, I’m trained in art history and visual cultural analysis. I’m really interested in artistic projects where our artists and cultural practitioners, more broadly, as well as activists affiliated with social movements, are thinking about the emancipatory future ways of escaping from the dominant condition of oppression that ultimately stems from, what I argue, is racial and colonial capitalism. And it’s legacy.

It’s long legacies and it’s imposed futures. So, I’m looking closely at indigenous futurisms and Afrofuturisms and ecosocialist futurisms. The more research I’ve done in preparation for the book, I’ve discovered many really intriguing and compelling practices of thinking about futurity.

It’s really something that’s being done and practiced internationally with lots of artists. So, some of the ones that I’m looking closely are TJ Cuthand, an indigiqueer filmmaker based in Toronto who’s done this amazing short film called Reclamation, which imagines, what if several colonial people actually left Earth and went to Mars and left a broken planet to indigenous survivors? What would life be like? And what would decolonization look like under those terms? Or, there’s an African-American collective based in Philadelphia called Black Quantum Futurism, and they do a lot of filmmaking and music. Moor Mother is one of their members, Camae Ayewa. And they also have a community futures lab that they’ve run in North Philadelphia where they’re drawing on Afro diasporic traditions of imagining time in all sorts of different ways that are opposed to, say, what they call the master’s clockwork universe. In other words, it’s trying to escape from the conditions of the racialization of temporality and the way that they argue Black people and people of color more broadly get stuck into these temporal traps and oppressive encasements.

So, how can they draw on Afro diasporic alternatives to dominant notions of time, but also look, how can they look at advanced technological approaches to temporality, like, for instance, quantum field theory? So, they’re bringing together really heterogeneous understandings of time. And it turns out there’s lots of different ways to understand time.

There’s no single dominant understanding, even if that is the one that we’re mostly subjected to, for instance, just the hourly time measurements that capital imposes on us that measures everything in terms of a very rigid model of time that is equated with economic value. So, there’s lots more artists. Jonas Staal, you mentioned, Jeanne van Heeswijk, are doing trainings for the future, which invite artists and collectives to get together and think about different ways of imagining emancipatory temporality and also beginning to practice it collectively in what they call rehearsing for freedom in the future.

Chris: I will ask you about those projects, but you did mention time. In your book, you do go into detail on chronopolitics. And you write that radical futurisms remake time, they de-essentialize time, and they de-normalize time. And I wonder if you could say more about that.

T.J.: Sure. As we know, as I mentioned before, we live with this time that we’re subjected to this linear chronology where we understand time is something where one thing happens in the present fades into the past. We look forward to a future, as we move through this spectrum of progress and development. And this is something that has been the site of lots of struggle in the past in terms of, for instance, how we measure time and how we value it.

So, the struggle over the working day or the working life, at what age should retirement occur, what can we expect from our activities on a daily basis? How do we measure them? All of this involves what we could call capital’s calculative machinery. And it extends from sites of class struggle in the past. Marx’s book on capital has a substantial chapter on the class struggle over the working day. That’s really interesting, especially if we think today about what artificial intelligence or AI is proposing in relationship to labor and ways of increasing the oppressive domination of workers’ hourly productivity.

This is something that a lot of people are thinking about today. But it also comes out of anti-slavery struggles, anti-colonial struggles, and the way, indigenous peoples, for instance, in the California context, were subjected to the Spanish mission systems in position of temporality, according to the clock time that was measured. And labor had to conform to those expectations.

So, this is the dominant understanding of temporality that lots of the artists and practitioners that I’m looking at are trying to struggle against, whether that’s in terms of giving a new kind of value to seasonal time, to the time of natural cycles that correspond to the requirements of agricultural labor, for instance, and society’s reproduction at the most elemental levels of production of food, or whether it’s mythical time or cosmological time in relation to traditional communities or, say, Afro diasporic traditions, like Black quantum futurism is really interested in the Dogon of Mali. They have a really rich cosmological, mythological system that they’re interested in. That also involves thinking about the deep past in the future in terms of their own system of thinking and their worldview.

There’s ways of thinking about anti-racist time. I mentioned quantum time, where the idea of linear progress is challenged by people like Niels Bohr and other theorists of quantum temporality, such that we can actually document now through empirical scientific research the fact that energy operates in all sorts of ways that is not standardized and measurable, but actually sometimes slows down, sometimes speeds up. There’s processes like retrocausality where something can exist in two different times at the same time. There’s fascinating stuff that goes way beyond my understanding as a non-scientific researcher. And then, there’s also ecological time, which is really important in combating the temporal trajectory of, say, fossil fuel capitalism. So, these are just the entrance points into lots of complex ways of understanding temporality and heterogeneous forms.

Chris: That’s wonderful, yeah. You also write that futurisms are radical because they grow out of the tradition of the oppressed. I’m wondering if you could say more about that.

T.J.: Yeah. The tradition of the oppressed is an important term in my book, and it’s one that I draw on from the German-Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin, who used that phrase in his work, where he wrote, in the face of German Nazism, that part of the struggle against fascism was necessarily a struggle against historiography or fascist ways of conceiving history. And what he had in mind there was the idea that, somehow, German Nazism was the inevitable culmination of the past, as if all his historical trajectories lead to this triumphant understanding of the present political circumstances. And it’s exactly that kind of ineluctable historical progression that Benjamin was trying to write against. And he said, in the face of fascism, we need to reinvent a radical understanding of history.

It’s not what many people would think of in the face of this genocidal violent regime, but as a historian, that’s one thing that he was trying to contribute. How can we dig deep into the way culture is constructed, and along with it, politics, in relationship to time itself? His argument, ultimately, was that we need to think more about and ground ourselves within the tradition of the oppressed. In other words, those who are most subjected to forms of state violence, for instance, oppression, and who are disenfranchised and excluded sometimes in brutal industrialized exterminationist ways. These are the traditions that we need to hold dear in order to think about and invent ways of going to the roots of things in terms of a radical account and temporality.

So, in terms of radical futurisms, the radical is a key word also. And this term is multivalent. I draw on Angela Davis, the Black radical thinker who’s also affiliated with UCSC where I teach. And she defines radical as going to the roots. And what she means is it’s got to be anti-systemic. It can’t just be a superficial analysis of the conditions of power and oppression. It has to go to act to the structural roots of things. And it’s got to be, in going to the roots, there has to be an ecological element.

So, I’m trying to draw on these two ideas, plus lots more references, including, for instance, the way the literary theorist and Marxist philosopher, Fredric Jameson, talks about the future as disruption. The notion of a future that is different substantially from the present can’t just be conceived of as the present, as it is extended infinitely into worlds to come. It has to be fundamentally different if it’s a future that is actually worthy of the name. And so, his proposal in his book, Archaeologies of the Future, is to conceive of the future as disruption, in other words, structurally, economically, and politically different from the present of, basically, the dominant economic and political regime, which is capitalism. So, Jameson is really interested in theorizing that. And I found that really beneficial and fruitful within my analysis.

And then, finally, there’s the Black radical tradition, which is coming out of people like Cedric Robinson who wrote a book, an important book, called Black Marxism. Looking at figures W. E. B. Du Bois and Richard Wright and others. Robin Kelley is another figure associated with this. This is a really important tradition of radical approaches to, not only present politics, but also the historical foundations of emancipation and, by extension, the possibilities for imagining a future otherwise. So, there’s lots more, but radical futurism turns out to be a really complex and rich nexus of traditions of critical thinking and, also, emancipatory, anti-racist, anti-capitalist practice.

Chris: You also compare radical futurism to extractive futurism. Can you share what the difference is there?

T.J.: Well, extraction, in my understanding, is defined by a one-way withdrawal of value from sites of resource wealth. So, that can involve modifying nature and mining it for all available value or mining, extracting labor or culture or time. And generally, I think of it as a one-way withdrawal that is appropriating value, even if it does give back, but what it gives back generally is pollution or negative forms of value, exhaustion, damage, environmental destruction.

So, radical futurism is, I think, defined in my analysis as an anti-extractive relationality. So, instead of that one-way withdrawal of value, it’s a relationality of care that’s founded ultimately on solidarity. Solidarity is a term that is really important, obviously, within political struggles, but it doesn’t really get talked about a lot or theorized within the art world context. And I think one reason for that is because the artistic domain has been so utterly defined by competitive individualism that practices of solidarity are almost non-existent, except if you look at the periphery of artistic practices when it comes to collectivization and forms of collaboration that don’t often get recognized by dominant institutions within the arts system.

So, solidarity means, according to groups like the Debt Collective, they’re currently working to push for the abolition of student debt, but also medical debt and all forms of indebtedness. According to the Debt Collective, solidarity is defined by the socialization of vulnerability. And that’s, I think, a really beautiful way to understand it. In other words, rather than privatizing and individualizing risk, which we know this is how we’re supposed to think about it, what are the ways, whether it’s through mutual aid or a caring economy, how can we socialize vulnerability so that we get each other’s backs and we’re empowering community values? This is the antidote to extractivism, as I see it, which means relationality is a two-way street. It’s giving back. It’s standing with contributing to the common good and not dedicated to endlessly building private assets.

Chris: In radical futurism, you also spotlight Jonas Staal and Florian Malzacher’s Training For The Future. And Jeanne van Heeswijk’s, Trainings for The Not-Yet. Both projects are participatory gatherings where people practice futures together. And I guess I’m curious, what can we glean from these projects when working with folks exploring possible futures?

T.J.: That’s a great question. I think there’s lots to look at because both of the projects you mentioned are themselves like assemblages of collectives. So, we could do a detailed analysis of all of the different contributions that took place over these events that, in the case of Staal and Malzacher, went for a few days, but in Heeswijk’s practice, this was a few months of gatherings and trainings. So, there’s lots of specific analysis.

But I thought I’d focus on this term, “not yet,” because I think it’s really interesting, because what they’re trying to cultivate here is what I would refer to as the agency of the not yet, meaning what happens when we recognize, as Jeanne van Heeswijk argues, we need to, that we need train for a different future, but ultimately, we don’t actually know what that future will be. We have some idea of it. We know some of the dominant, the main problems of the present and the harms and violence and traumas that they cause. But when it comes to actually defining what an emancipated future will be, we can’t really know.

And this is partly because there’s a philosophical problem that’s referred to as an identity problem. The we of the present, the collective agency of the present, or we could break that down even into individuals of the present, are part of the production of collective imagination. But that is done so. As we know, it’s based on present conditions of trauma, of violence, of the experience of what life is like under the terms of racial and colonial capitalism. But it’s distinct from a future we or future subjectivity of emancipated futurity, meaning that we in the present have to be open to a future of difference that we can’t ultimately fully know or experience.

So, what does it mean to think of subjectivity as bearing an openness to non-knowingness? And how can we come to terms with the fact that we can’t know everything, even as we struggle against the real knowns of present violence and harm? I think that this is a really interesting test case of how we can think about training for a future when part of that training has to be the practical and speculative and even psychological elements of learning and coming to terms with our own non-knowingness. I think that could be an interesting point of discussion within psychology.

Chris: Yeah, for sure. You mentioned solidarity. And maybe now we start talking about practices of moving into the future. It can be argued we live in a time of particularity over solidarity. And you write about liberal identity politics as a block to solidarity and radical futurism. And I’m wondering if you could say more about that.

T.J.: Yes, liberal identity politics turns out to be something that I’m really concerned with and critical of. And I think that this is actually a real barrier to practices of solidarity, which, in my understanding, really must be forms of solidarity across difference, meaning multiracial solidarity, solidarity across gender and sexual divides as well. The problem is that, these days, there’s increasing movement and energy around forms of group belonging based on shared identity. But that tends to lead toward increasing exclusive separatism or divisions between people.

And it blocks the politics of solidarity because it’s dedicated to the particularities of identity, whether it’s African-American women organizing together or working class white people organizing together. This may be understandable and necessary on a certain level, but it can’t be, I think, the endpoint. Really, we desperately need forms of organization and solidarity across these notions of difference.

Part of the problem with liberal formations of identitarianism is that it’s directed at uplift, but we have to ask uplift into what. If we follow someone like Cornel West, he’s saying that this basically reproduces systems of oppression, even if it puts, what he says, Black faces in high places. But ultimately, it doesn’t change anything except bettering the lives of a select few or a select elite. And here, a really good book on this topic I found is Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s Elite Capture.

Chris: Yeah, I read that.

T.J.: He gets into exactly these problems. So, worse than liberal identitarianism is fascist reactionary formations, like those based on the so-called replacement theory, as if there’s a white genocide happening leading to groups like Identity Europa, which was born in San Jose, or The Proud Boys or neo-Nazis that are explicitly racist and anti-migrant and leading toward an exterminationist politics because they can’t ultimately deal with, think about, or tolerate the other figures that are different from them, based on identitarian terms. So, identity in this sense means something like white supremacy, which we have to recognize, I argue. And this is, by no means, new. people like W. E. B. Du Bois knew this 100 years ago. White supremacy is an effective ruling class power, which offers a racial point of identification in whiteness that ends up obscuring class differences and which prevents multiracial solidarity. So, Du Bois talks about the problems during reconstruction when there was a failure of solidarity between white working-class workers and newly emancipated Black workers because of racialization that got in the way of solidarity that ended up allowing racism and ruling class power to continue uninterrupted.

So, I find that it’s extremely disempowering to the left and leads to cycles of greater oppression and harm and trauma. Even producing more impulses to find places of refuge, ironically, within the traumas of identity, this is the bind that we’re in. Another book that I find really useful is Asad Haider’s Mistaken Identity, where he looks closely at the problem of identity itself in relationship to political struggles. And Asad Haider wrote that book in Santa Cruz when he was doing his doctorate at UCSC, actually. So, it’s really, really interesting.

So, if the left is ever to empower itself to win, I argue as part of radical futurism that this will take a multiracial working-class struggle, ultimately, meaning working across differences. I quote Alicia Garza at one point. This is one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, who said in her manifesto for BLM, she said, when Black women get free, everyone gets free. And I think that principle is really crucial to recognize that, when systems of oppression that don’t necessarily at least superficially affect people who are not part of that class of the victimized actually does harm culture more broadly.

So, it’s not that those of us who are white should recognize and assist in Black Lives Matter struggles because it’s somehow our ethical responsibility because we want to help those who are disadvantaged. It’s rather because systems of racist oppression also harm ourselves. It prevents the fulfillment of human relationships. It creates all sorts of violent traumatic effects in us. It debilitates political struggles that could otherwise be based on multiracial solidarity. There’s all sorts of ways that this is harmful to all people.

And so, I love this phrase, when those who are the most oppressed get free, it’s only them that everyone else will be free. And until then, we can’t consider ourselves free or emancipated at all. In fact, our freedom or the freedom of some cannot be based on the oppression of others. So, it’s this kind of thinking and imagining that radical futurisms help to make possible.

Chris: So, I think you touched on this in the book, but these are hard times we’re in right now, I think we can all agree. And it’s easy to want to quit, for example, right? But I’m wondering, how do we defeat this fatalistic nihilism in these times?

T.J.: It’s a critical, urgent question to ask. And I see it. I see this nihilism or this temptation toward giving up or just not knowing what we can possibly do, and being so sickened by how things are going and faced with the difficulties of knowing how to intervene in any kind of meaningful way indeed leads to a potential defeatism. I see this in my students in my classes and lectures talking to people in my activism. It indeed is extremely difficult. And ultimately, I don’t know what will change this.

What I do argue and what I think is there for us to build on, although necessarily as part of a long struggle, this is not something that can be shifted or turned around immediately, but the answer, I think, is organizing. Becoming involved in organizations and doing the groundwork to build communities, to educate ourselves, to learn the lessons of the past, and to practice solidarity, which necessarily needs to happen at the speed of trust, in order to combat these forces of increased depression, of economic disempowerment, impoverishment, political disenfranchisement.

And now, as I mentioned before, social media alienation and AI fascism. The way AI is, basically, doubling down on the technology of regimenting temporality through, for instance, recommendation algorithms and what some people talk about is the disciplining of risk, so that if algorithms can accurately predict the near future and thereby make it profitable for some, this is effectively a way to eliminate contingency and get rid of possibility in the name of probability.

So, an interesting book here is Dan McQuillan’s Anti-Fascist AI and how we can think about different approaches to technology, where ultimately, we need to examine the whole social structure of our society. As long as we have, basically, billionaires in corporations in charge of framing and defining and producing the technology, well, it’s not going to be surprising that we’ll see it work ultimately in their favor.

So, I think organizing, getting involved, politically transforming our education, transforming the media, moving away from a corporate-dominated system where everything, including lives, values, culture, politics, and time is dedicated to the production of profit beyond before anything else, this is ultimately the problem. So, it’s an old question, how do we defeat capitalism ultimately, because capitalism is serving the interests of those who are the few and the elite, not at all the wellbeing and welfare of the many, even though capitalism itself is always transforming and entering into new technological modalities these days?

But yeah, I think this is what I try to argue when I’m asked this question. And I get asked this a lot, like, what can we do? Organize, really. And that’s no simple thing. It involves all sorts of difficulties, like, how do we organize? How can we organize across generations, as well as cross racially? How can we get rid of authoritarian impulses? How can we do the work at the subjective level of addressing our own relations to, sometimes, they get internalized of violence and authoritarianism of patriarchy, of other forms of sexual violence? That’s what we need to do. Unfortunately, we don’t have the billions of resources that ruling class interests have. So, it’s definitely a struggle, but it’s always been a struggle. We’ve defeated fascism in the past. I think that remains the challenge today.

Chris: You have me thinking previous guest on my podcast talked about not wanting to be a part of a movement that didn’t include grandparents. And I think that’s important. it’s always stuck with me because I think we’ve moved so far away from that now. How can we go back to that, what you’ve been speaking of, that relationality across generations, across difference, across all that?

T.J.: Yeah, absolutely.

Chris: How can we build those coalitions?

T.J.: They need to be built, exactly.

Chris: Decolonizing the future, what do we do?

T,J.: This term, “decolonizing,” is an important one. I’ve written about this in past publications, like Decolonizing Nature. For me, decolonization is a term that’s defined by indigenous peoples in the Americas who have addressed this from the perspective of the colonized. So, for them, the dominant way to understand decolonization is it means the return of land and sovereignty to indigenous peoples, so, meaning changing the conditions of colonial capitalism and its regime of private property.

So, it extends out from there. Once we’re talking about decolonizing land, well, what does that mean in terms of education? How can we think about private property in critical ways? How can we think about decolonizing the mind or language or the university, right? So, it turns out colonization or coloniality is so rife within dominant culture that it’s crucial to examine all aspects of this. And there’s massive attempts to do so across all disciplines and fields, in my experience.

So, recently, there’s been a move away from the term post-colonial to de-colonial, which is I think is significant in relationship to think about temporality. Post-colonial suggested, at least according to some, that, even if it was just a connotation, that colonialism was in the past. And it is possible to reach a post-colonial state. And indeed, some states in the global south, like, for instance, India or Latin America, have entered into a post-colonial political system. Decolonial is more of an acknowledgement that, well, colonialism never ended. We’re still actually living with it. Even if some states have gained formal independence, they’re still dominated economically and politically by a western Euro-American hegemony. So, colonialism has never really ended. So, to decolonize is not so much a discreet historical event, but an ongoing process.

I like what Nick Estes, who’s an indigenous member of the Lower Brule Sioux tribe and part of the Red Nation, which is a really important radical indigenous collective based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And he points out that we could start this idea of decolonization of land through looking at extreme cases of wealth inequality. For instance, he points out that Ted Turner, the media mogul, owns approximately 200,000 acres of Sioux treaty territory alone. And he has the largest privately owned buffalo herd in the world. So, Nick Estes suggests that we could begin with land transfers with the material redistribution of wealth moving toward economic and political systems dedicated again to the wellbeing of the most oppressed and those who are colonized, rather than prioritizing the wealth of the few.

So, I think this is the idea. To me, that suggests that we can’t think of decolonization simply in terms of symbolic declarations of solidarity with these kinds of projects. Rather, we have to examine, like, well, what would it mean actually to materially redistribute wealth and move away from the profound levels of economic inequality that exist today? I teach in a university, the University of California, well, which is, in some ways, experiencing for the last few decades the gradual neoliberal of education.

So, that question comes up for me in relationship to the university. Like, how can we start to address conditions of academic precarity of the adjunctification of academia hiring part-time laborers who don’t have healthcare benefits or economic security? How can we start to look at the hierarchical structure of the university? Where does it invest its money? It turns out that University of California has asset managers that invests in things like the commodification of housing that’s driving unaffordability, even in Santa Cruz housing unaffordability.

So, what does it mean for me as an academic to be part of that system, where my pension funds are actually going into the financialization? Or, we could say the colonization of land through housing, through commodifying housing. What can we do? What kind of organizing can we do within the university? This is a really crucial question that I’ve been asking and been part of in terms of community organizing within the University of California for the last few years. It’s part of the grad UC worker strike that happened last fall.

So, these are practical ways of addressing, how can we each contribute to this idea of decolonizing the future that is premised on the return of land and sovereignty to indigenous peoples? But not just that. Obviously, this needs to be about the overturning of the conditions of colonial capitalism. So, small steps can get us there. And this is the hard work of organizing, building solidarity and challenging and trenched systems of power with massive resources, which is no easy thing to do. But I think we have to continue to have these conversations, develop strategies, do the work of organizing, build solidarity. It’s the only way, even if it’s indeed hard to be hopeful that things will change anytime soon.

Chris: Just a couple more questions. You write about putting our subjectivity at risk. What does that look like? And what are the possibilities there?

T.J.: Well, I mentioned overcoming identitarianism, for instance. And this, in recognition of the dangers and risks of liberal identitarianism and fascist movements toward identity and speaking to someone who is straight white male. There’s lots of critical difficult thinking that needs to be done in terms of my own relation, for instance, to whiteness, to masculinity, at times, when these identity categories are being reclaimed and exploited by the right in all sorts of dangerous ways that are racist, that are sexist, that are oppressive. And we see this gaining increased political legitimacy within the Trump phenomenon that, despite our own rational expectations and critical observations, continues to develop, even though it seems just absolutely Wild. Against common sense. So, that means, for me, really, a process of disidentification, of recognizing the dangers of white supremacy, of looking at whiteness historically, of thinking about it in the present and the future, and disidentifying from it in ways that, I think, back to people like Frantz Fanon, the radical psychoanalyst who worked with the Algerian revolution against French colonization. He talked about things like being a race traitor or a class traitor. I think, ultimately, that’s what it looks like these days. And that’s really putting our subjectivity at risk, in some ways. Allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, in other words, resisting the reactionary movement towards, say, racial justice in retreating to defending our own race privileges or our class privileges. I think this is something that is important for us to do individually and collectively.

And think about, not just putting our subjectivity at risk in a negative way, even though it could be understood as part of that, but it’s also allowing our subject positions to expand and grow and benefit from conditions of racial justice and gender and sexual justice. I think this is really crucial. So, that’s how I think about it. To escape from this doom spiral of Republicanism becoming ever more openly, anti-democratic, authoritarian conspiratorial, and working with these new emerging technologies of surveillance, of militarism, of AI to entrench further inequality, how can we transform ourselves into a non-authoritarian, anti-oppressive subjectivity that is consciously anti-racist? And that doesn’t mean escaping from conditions that we were born with and the privileges that some of us were born into, but recognizing them, disidentifying from them, and contributing to building new articulations, new imaginations around multiracial justice. That’s what I’m thinking about when I’m proposing that radical futurism ultimately necessitate putting our subjectivities at risk.

Chris: That’s awesome. Last question, and it’s a question I like to ask all my guests. And that is what books… I know you’ve mentioned several books, but what books or ideas or thinkers, art, films, what’s capturing your attention these days?

T.J.: There’s a few things I’ll mention, in addition to some of the references that I already cited. One is there’s an HBO series called The Last of Us, just to get into popular culture. It’s a post-apocalyptic series dedicated to this near future in which there’s a fungal viral infection that overtakes the earth. And so, it leads to a post-apocalyptic tale of some survivors who are trying to figure out how to live under these conditions.

And I won’t give anything away, but there’s some really interesting positive expressions that are explicit about, for instance, communism, that this is a term that you basically never would hear within Netflix or HBO or dominant US-based media. So, I found that really interesting. Maybe, we’re starting to cross a threshold where terms that were once impossible to even articulate and frame positively, to discuss positively, are coming up.

Maybe, that is something that we need to take seriously and not understand it in the old ways of like Stalin’s authoritarianism, but what would it mean to live in a community of mutual support, of solidarity, where the wellbeing of all is necessity, where we’re escaping from competitive individualism and toxic masculinity. All that stuff that is part and parcel of the culture of racial colonial capitalism. It’s a really interesting series. I recommend it. That came out last year.

A couple of books that I’m reading. One is, you might be interested in the Psychoanalysis Under Occupation, Practicing Resistance in Palestine by Laura Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi. I’m finding it really interesting to look at how people are thinking about subjectivity and politics under conditions of military occupation within settler colonialism. So, that’s a really interesting book. There’s part, a longstanding interest of mine within Palestinian liberation politics and how that leads to further understandings of internationalizing solidarity and thinking about it within context of current-day settler colonial states outside of the U.S., but certainly is structurally connected to it. So, that’s a really interesting read. There was recently a Guardian article on Lara Sheehi who has lots of involvement in psychoanalytic associations within the U.S. So, there’s lots of politics going on within the U.S. in relationship to ways of thinking about Palestine, the specter of antisemitism, all of the dangers and risks of instrumentalizing that term against critics of Israel. It raises all sorts of difficult, challenging, complex issues, but really worth looking at.

And then, finally, another book that I mentioned is… well, I’ll cite another one, Matt Huber’s book called Climate Change as Class War, which I find really interesting and compelling, based on the idea that it’s time to return to and rethink class. It’s something that’s been largely expelled from lots of political discourse. But what does it mean to think about, specifically, climate change in relationship to class problems, and specifically, for instance, overcoming the longstanding bind between jobs versus the environment? Clearly, that’s been really debilitating, and that’s prevented forms of solidarity to take place between labor organizing and environmental organizing, because we’re in this economy of imposed scarcity, so that we’re led to by political and economic elites to believe that we can’t possibly have good jobs and environmental sustainability.

But in fact, that has to be the beginning of our demands. We have to have both, clearly, to make any progress in relationship to environmentalism. We have to have labor on board. We have to have a just transition and a worker’s green new deal that prioritizes the transition of people into new lines of work, if they’re ever to leave the fossil fuel economy and not fall into fascist reaction, because they think liberal elites in Washington want to take away their jobs. So, how can we have a new theorization of environmental politics through the lens of class? Matt Huber is doing that in this book, Climate Change as Class War. I highly recommend it.

Chris: Wonderful. Great suggestions. Thank you for that. And thank you for everything. I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing with us today. It’s just been really helpful. Thank you.

T.J.: Thanks, Chris. I really enjoyed it.

This interview was originally recorded for The Radical Therapist Podcast on 7-7-23. Some editing has been done for continuity.