I N T E RV I EW
HELENA FEDER
Changing Nature: Stacy Alaimo
and Cary Wolfe at ASLE
The Tenth ASLE Biennial Conference: “Changing Nature: Migrations,
Energies, Limits” at the University of Kansas in Lawrence was a re-
sounding success, in part due to the plenaries delivered by Rob Nixon,
Stacy Alaimo, and Cary Wolfe, among others (thanks again to Paul
Outka for his wonderful work organizing this conference). In the inter-
views that follow, Alaimo and Wolfe each discuss and extend some
of the ideas presented in their joint plenary, touching on their past
and current work. Alaimo’s talk, “Composing Blue Ecologies: Science,
Aesthetics, and Animal Studies in the Abyss” asked, “At the start
of the 21st century, even the life dwelling in the deepest realms of
the ocean is precarious, as industrialized fishing, drilling, mining,
dumping, climate change, and acidification threaten marine ecologies.
What would it mean, what would it take, for people to care about life
on the ocean floor?” Alaimo argued that the political will needed to
create protected areas in the global seas depends upon the kind of
data and images that highly visible “big science” (as well as activist
sciences) provides, such as the ambitious Census of Marine Life
project.
The project frames images of sea creatures in ways that transfer “an
immediate, popular, visual sense of ‘value’ to both the project of the
census and to its ‘discoveries.’ The frames are not subtle; indeed their
reflexivity, and the frames within frames, embody an argument about
vision and value, enframing as care rather than commodification.”
Quoting Rancière, Alaimo’s talk ultimately posed the question: if “pol-
itics consists in ‘refiguring space,’ could representations of diverse and
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21.4 (Autumn 2014)
Advance Access publication December 3, 2014 doi:10.1093/isle/isu146
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multitudinous sea creatures reshape oceanic geopolitical territories
as zones of concern for sea cucumbers, squid, copepods, hydrothermic
vent snails, hydromedusas, cuttlefish, black swallowers, sea angels,
Dumbo octopod, flamingo tongue snails, fatheads and other creatures?”
Wolfe’s plenary, “Humans, Animals, and Recent Biopolitical
Thought,” approached the politics of our relations with other animals
by insisting on the importance of bringing two independent intellectu-
al genealogies—animal studies and biopolitical thought—into conver-
sation with each other. “Animal Studies has been primarily a North
American and British phenomenon, and has worked mainly within an
ethical framework, while biopolitical thought has been largely a
Continental phenomenon and, more recently, has contained a strong
component of Italian political theory and philosophy (Agamben,
Esposito). Thinkers such as Donna Haraway have complained, and
rightly so, that biopolitical thought has stopped at the water’s edge of
species difference, but I argue that, because race is a fundamental op-
erator for biopolitics, this genealogy can be of great use in thinking
about the plight of human as well as nonhuman beings, because you
can’t talk about biopolitics without talking about race, and you can’t
talk about race without talking about species.”Wolfe argued that once
we understand how biopolitics “traverses species boundaries” we can
more fully confront problems like factory farming. In both their
remarks, Alaimo andWolfe asserted the concept of politics as immedi-
ately necessary for engaging the grave, complex ethical and ecological
problems (indeed, questions of care) shaping the world.
Interview with Stacy Alaimo
H: In the Q&A following your plenary you mentioned that you are
uncomfortable with the term ecofeminism. Early on, the movement
did have moments of embarrassing essentialism, not that it’s a bad
thing to run naked in the moonlight. [S. laughs] There are, of course,
materialist ecofeminisms.
S: Yes, the critique of militarism and such. I know that Donna
Haraway writes about having done some of that kind of protesting,
and I was doing that sort of protesting in the 80’s, against apartheid,
nuclear weapons, and situations in Central America. I went as a
student to the capital and marched. I was part of a group called
“Women Against Military Madness” in the Twin Cities (one of the best
things about this was one of the members was the police chief’s wife,
and she would get arrested for civil disobedience around, say, the
National Guard being used to go down to Central America). And I
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participated in door-to-door activism for various feminist and environ-
mentalist causes, though not usually as the same thing.
Now I would like to do something that is really hands-on. My
dream would be to be able to go with a group of people scuba diving
to clean up the oceans. Because of the academic and intellectual work
that we do, I’m craving that kind of hands-on action in the world,
something tangible. There’s all of this plastic in the oceans that would
kill animals, and getting rid of it would be nice, as a complement to
the intellectual work we do.
H: I couldn’t agree more. While we’re on the subject of intellectual
work, do you plan to present work at another ASLE conference, or
maybe the next meeting of SLSA (Society for Science, Literature, and
the Arts)?
S: I’ve been to SLSA. I was there last year; we had two panels on
aquatic creatures, with Ron Broglio, Joni Adamson, and others. This
year I’m going to the 4-S, with Eva Hayward, Stefan Helmreich, Nicole
Starosielski, and Kim DeWolff.
H: I’m sorry I missed those panels, particularly as I am the ASLE
representative at SLSA.
S: Oh, I used to do that. I used to be the ASLE representative
at SLSA. I would put together SLSA panels for ASLE and ASLE
panels for SLSA because I thought there needed to be much more
conversation.
H: And, thanks to your work, there is now a core group of people
who attend both conferences.
S: There are more people than there used to be. We used to have to
search for people. Okay, I’m going to be good now and answer your
questions.
H: And I’ll try to be efficient. I really enjoyed your talk; I think
everyone did. Is there anything more you’d like to say about the
Census of Marine Life project? For example, what brought you to
marine ecology after the last book?
S: Well, since I had thought through the idea of transcorporeality
pretty thoroughly, and material feminisms, and new materialisms, I
really wanted to try something completely different. When I start a
new project, I pose a question that’s a theoretical and a political
problem. I’m a theory person and I’m also a cultural studies person; I
always want to find those places where the theory isn’t quite working
and a real problem in culture draws some sort of attention to it. And I
have to find something that sincerely puzzles me, something that I feel
very uncomfortable with. There’s this concept of productive baffle-
ment (Calvin Thomas has a piece called “Productive Bafflement”) and
I believe this about the academic work, that you should go toward the
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thing that baffles you most. So, I wanted to try and get away from the
concept of transcorporeality and dig through something else. I had
seen the census of marine life and I had been reading more about all
the various crises in the ocean, and I thought it’s very hard to extend a
concept like transcorporeality to the bottom of the sea (if that even
makes sense; I’ll come back to that).
I wanted to explore other ways of thinking about our relations to
these creatures, because they’re so incredibly different and distant from
us. In terms of animal studies paradigms, I wanted to see what the
limits of some of these things are. A lot of the animal studies books have
to do with relations to companion species, with kinship, affinities, or
likenesses, but what do you do with animals that are so far beyond
that? We know almost nothing about these ocean creatures. And then,
as a science studies person, I really wanted to think through this idea of
how the aesthetic is operating through science and what that means.
H: A book just came out (I thought of it during your talk) on the
aesthetics of disease—did you by chance see the BBC article on it? It is
full of stunning images of diseased human body parts seen through a
microscope. Though this is back to corporeality again . . .
S: Interesting. I would like to see that. Ironically, I was trying to get
as far away from the idea of transcorporeality as possible, to do some-
thing new, because I’m afraid of doing the same thing over and over. I
think the Zen idea of “beginner’s mind” is always a good one. And
I’ve never worked on the aesthetic before. Never. But then, ironically,
even though I was trying to get away from transcorporeality, I got a
number of quite wonderful invitations to contribute to projects
seeking to create the new field of material ecocriticism. I wrote an
essay for a special issue of ISLE on Material Ecocriticism that Heather
Sullivan and Dana Phillips edited, a companion piece for Serenella
Iovino’s and Serpil Oppermann’s Material Ecocriticism, and another
piece for Jeffrey Cohen’s Prismatic Ecologies. Because I was so im-
mersed in researching the ocean, I did end up thinking through how
transcorporeality includes the ocean, and I did pieces on that, bringing
in a lot of ocean activism and activist films, activist websites, and activ-
ist art, all trying to get at some of these same sorts of ideas in new ma-
terialism about materiality in something like plastic, the material
agencies in plastic. This is the piece that’s coming out in Material
Ecocriticism; the book is not out yet, but a related piece is in ISLE.
I have done a lot of work now on the ways in which activists try to
connect the ocean to the materiality of our everyday lives. It’s a very
transcorporeal idea. So, I have the transcorporeality in all the new ma-
terialism stuff and then this sort of transitional “ocean-as-transcorporeal-
and-the-new-materialist-ocean” work. As I move forward with my
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new book I really want to look back, at least to William Beebe. I did ar-
chival research on Beebe at Princeton, on some of his accounts of deep
sea animals. So, I want to get at how scientists but also writers and
activists make sense of these creatures.
H:What do you think of the term extremeophile?
S: Well, Stefan Helmreich has a piece on that, on forms of life, and
I think that’s all really interesting. I’m not sure if I will work with it
or not.
H: I am curious about the use of the word as a category in this
context because the organisms you’re looking at are so unlike us that
they’re often (and, obviously, problematically) called “alien.”
S: The piece that’s coming out it in Greg Garrard’s Oxford Handbook
of Ecocriticism is about that, in part. I critique a few James Cameron
films that portray the ocean as alien, which is not helpful. One of his
films is about encountering aliens in the sea. I don’t know if you know
that one—The Abyss.
H: I think I’ve seen that.
S: It’s been a long time since I wrote this piece. So there’s that
one, and one about the science of the deep sea. My feminist critique
is that it is ultimately all about imposing a transcendent notion,
because Cameron and the scientists keep saying that the reason
why the deep seas and vent life are so interesting is because they
help us imagine whether there’s life on other planets. For them,
that’s the important thing. So the sea, going down, is continually
subordinated to the transcendent rise of the “real science,” which
would be learning about other planets (over and over in the film).
At the end of the film, even as it’s supposed to be about science, the
scientist puts her hand on the window of this submersible against
what at first looks like some kind of sea kelp, but then becomes the
“hand” of the alien. To me, that’s all about getting out of any kind
of sense of responsibility for the damage we have done, because this
is actually an environment that’s part of our planet, and it’s full of
our garbage and waste. To say “ooh, these are alien” is a pretty ri-
diculous sort of way of avoiding moral or ethical responsibility to
these creatures.
H: Sure. And it’s another way to market the oceans as spaces for
colonization.
S: Yes.
H: Justice becomes increasingly complex when we realize every-
thing and everyone is to varying degrees permeable. As your work
engages explicitly political thinkers like Rancière, what do you do
with questions of justice when certain kinds of harm do not have clear
sources or agents?
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S: When I was researching Bodily Natures one of the issues that
came up was the hope that, at some point, we’d actually be able to
determine which chemicals created someone’s cancer which, legally,
would be huge. Because right now if you get cancer, or any other kind
of disease, it’s “well, you’re just exposed to all sorts of things, it could
be this, it could be that.” Or, more likely, people blame it on genetics,
which is just the easy way out of looking at the environment while
denying any environmental implications. But if that technology devel-
ops, that would really change things in terms of legal culpability.
But I think in terms of environmental justice, there are people
trying to address those issues on the ground. There’s porousness and
permeability—toxins travel everywhere—but on the other hand there
are also levels at which things are undeniably dramatic. I think multi-
ple chemical sensitivity is interesting because of the fact that in
moment by moment reactions your body is actually telling you some-
thing is wrong, rather than having to go do the research. It doesn’t
much matter if you can find the research or not in the moment. If you
walk into a room and the room is making you sick, you leave the
room. There’s a way in which the immediacy of the bodily reaction
makes that syndrome really interesting for these issues. It cuts through
a lot of the layers of mediation and denial. . . . One of the problems too
is the kind of ill-fit between the environmental illness paradigms and
disability studies. That’s something that interests me too. I wrote about
that in Bodily Natures.
H: I was wondering if you wanted to talk a little about climate
change, given your new work.
S: One thing that has interested me for a long time is the role of the
domestic. When I wrote On Domesticated Ground the argument was that
feminists of all sorts were thinking of nature as outside of the domestic
space. Instead of seeing nature as the site of essentialism, it was in fact
the opposite. It was the site where you get away from gender roles,
gender norms, gender essentialism, and sexual norms. It was a queer
space, a gender minimizing space, this almost nascent poststructualist-
feminist space. And so, I was really critical of this “what you can do at
home to save the earth” movement that was going on at the time,
because I worried that posing the domestic as the mediator between the
citizen and the political realm, the public sphere, was really problematic.
It put all of the work on women, for one, but also there are a lot of
things we can’t solve at home. Clearly, we need regulations, we need
oversight, we need different laws, we need technologies, we need all of
these things that you don’t have in your kitchen.
On the other hand, while I still believe my early critique, it seems
we don’t really have much democratic power in capitalism. I think
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now I’m embracing the idea that there’s something to be said for think-
ing through your everyday life, and feeling like your everyday life ac-
tually has material impact on the world and that you can be an ethical
and political being in the smallest of ways. There’s something really
satisfying about that. So, thinking in terms of climate change of course
means considering how your carbon footprint increases with almost
every single thing you do. That can be paralyzing and guilt producing,
but also liberating; you can also embrace the many possibilities for re-
ducing your carbon footprint. And I think that’s important. One of the
best moments we had in one of my classes was the day my students
had read a book about climate change. We read one of Mark Lynas’
travel books, in which he went to various places and talked about how
the climate was affecting things. When he was in England, he told
people that because of the shifting habitat, this newt would have to
cross a giant highway to survive. And there was no way it was going
to make it; the odds for this newt’s survival are very low. And there’s
something about that story that really hit them. After we read that, we
had class every day with the lights off, even when it was sort of dark
outside. Because that’s energy. That’s carbon. That’s climate change.
We turned the lights off every day—they insisted on it. They directly
connected it to that newt. [laughs] It really was great.
So I think that those connections are important. They’re mediat-
ed, of course, by knowledge, by science, by politics and everything
else. It’s not direct but it doesn’t have to be. And it doesn’t have
to lead directly to the newt. It’s just that idea that everything that
you do does have some sort of impact, and that’s really interesting
in terms of thinking through basic questions like, “What is ethics?
What is politics? How do we function in this world?” To think
of ethics as something defined by a Judeo-Christian history of sex
laws seems absurd to me; it seems ridiculous. Who cares who
anyone has consensual sex with? Climate change redefines the
ethical terrain.
H: Moving sideways, but only slightly, has the idea of nonhuman
cultures informed your work on marine life? Perhaps something like
Hal Whitehead’s book on sperm whales?
S: I’m bracketing mammals because I’m trying to understand what
we make of those creatures that we don’t know very much about.
Scientists don’t know much, nobody knows much, so what does that
mean? But I’m a firm believer that all sorts of animals have social
worlds and social lives, and I teach that concept. But because of the
nature of my work, I haven’t written about it much.
H: I can see why you want to focus on creatures that are quite
different.
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S: I think it’s a difficult thing that someone needs to write about so
that’s where I’ll go. I’m a scuba diver, and I love whales and dolphins
and all of the charismatic megafauna; who doesn’t love them? It would
be great to study them, but a lot of people have written about them. As
a cultural studies person, I always try to head toward what I think
needs the work, and I think the thing that needs the work is the deep
seas, because they’re completely unprotected. They have few advocates.
They’re just sort of “out there” and capitalism, industrial fishing and
mining, are ravaging them, and it’s all being done pretty much invisibly.
H: Yes, international waters . . .
S: Yes, anyone can do whatever they want, basically. It is an
immense pillaging of the seas. I think this is a serious issue and I want
to try and do what I can with it.
H: And if I’m remembering your plenary correctly, it is also an ex-
periment in stretching our sympathy.
S: Yes, without making it into some kind of science-fiction alien
fantasy. So Cameron, for all of his exploits going down to the deep sea,
spending millions of dollars going down there, he has a history of just
making it into fiction. And that’s what he’s going to do, actually, with his
footage of going down to the Mariana Trench; he’s putting it into the
next Avatar film. So there’s this direct fictionalizing of it, and I know that
people who do theory make something very interesting of that, but on
the other hand sometimes it’s not useful to fictionalize this part of the
world with these creatures because they’re actually living creatures and
we have to come to grips with them as living creatures. And if we’re
always fictionalizing everything, I think we have to be worried about
that. That’s why I go to Bruno Latour’s chain of mediations and circulat-
ing reference because I want some sense of the real coming through, and
not just all this made-up shit with bizzaro animals there to entertain us.
H: Countering the idea that narrative can solve all problems.
S: Yes, that narrative can fix everything. But could we go back to
Rancière? I’m happy since you actually know his work and that was
Cate’s [Sandilands] reaction too, that neither of you thought that my
use of him was crazy.
H: I was thrilled. Wolfe gives him, as he said in his plenary, a bit of
a kicking. Of course aspects of Rancière’s work are problematic. But
you can use what’s useful.
S: Feminists have done this for a very long time. We take whatever
wewant and pirate it.
H: Yes. His notion of politics helped me articulate the way in which
a community of beings is political, not simply “social.”
S: It really helped me think through sea creature images. When I
presented a very early version of this in Alberta, someone stood up in
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the audience and said, “You can’t read Rancière that way! You can’t do
it!” And I said, “Why not?” Since then, Jane Bennett has produced a
posthumanist reading of Rancière.
Bennett talks about being at a conference with him, at which he
said that absolutely none of this posthumanist stuff about animals
counts. But she concludes his theory still works in this context. And
we wouldn’t have feminist theory, frankly, if people didn’t say, okay,
this theory is completely denigrating the movement but let’s do this
with it.
H: And many of our favorite literary works.
S: Let’s play with it and see what happens.
H: I wanted to ask you, as a science studies person, about some-
thing Rob Nixon said in his plenary, his concern about “quantitative
creep” in the humanities.
S: “Quantitative creep” . . . what does that mean?
H: Well, it seems it may mean a lot of things, but I think he was re-
ferring to the way in which, when the humanities are under attack
(when legislatures all over the country are cutting funding to state
schools, etc.), some academics look for ways to make their work seem
quantifiable. Or start trying to incorporate “data” to make their work
seem “relevant” to other models of knowledge or to the idea of profit-
ability, to make literature and philosophy and the like “valuable” in
such terms (which degrades both the humanities and the sciences).
How do we, how should we, approach interdisciplinary work in these
difficult times?
S: I think that environmental studies, which deals with the actual
material world, has to incorporate science. But I think that we need smart
ways of doing it, and that’s where science studies theory, and other
theory comes into it. The funny thing to me is that when I talk to scien-
tists they think our work is valuable. For example, when I talk to this
coral reef specialist at UTA and I tell her about my work, she thinks it’s
so important. She thinks what we can do in the humanities as far as
making these ideas interesting and accessible, putting together argu-
ments and making connections by drawing on science, is important. I
think sometimes people in humanities are their own worst enemies
because they assume that other people will discount them, and my en-
counters with scientists have not suggested this at all. I think there’s
often a great mutual respect, or there can be, and I think that we need
to pose questions that are difficult, relevant, and important. And then
use whatever we can use to answer those questions. I think the whole
idea of having these sorts of disciplinary parameters in advance is
foolish. I don’t see how it gets us anywhere. And as someone who’s a
feminist theorist, a cultural studies person, and an environmentalist,
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it’s all about contesting these kinds of boundaries, because if you want
to do something useful you need to make connections across things.
H: I agree.
S: And to me science studies means I trained in theory, literature,
and the humanities. I engage with science, I read it, but I’m not pro-
ducing science. But I can offer this kind of approach to it, I think, and
other people who are in the humanities can offer a different sort of ap-
proach to it, and think through issues and assemble connections. We
have all sorts of things to bring to the table. But I don’t think that
means that we can exclude other sorts of information. In Bodily Natures
I even draw on the social sciences and popular epidemiology. When I
teach, I try to get graduate students to understand this approach:
here’s your question; what sorts of things would answer that question?
And don’t just make shit up. I think that’s the worst thing about our
discipline. I think we sometimes train people to think that they can
just make anything up.
H: Well, there are times when people don’t seem to see the line
where close reading and theorizing ends and factual research begins,
or vice-versa.
S: Right. Sometimes they will be talking about something that has
a factual answer. And I say, “That is a question that has an answer.
What you have to do is go out there and find the answer. There are all
sorts of studies that would give you the answer to that. Don’t just spin
out weird theories about it. Find out.” I’m a theory person; I believe in
theory. But I think we have to be better and smarter and savvier about
knowing which sorts of research, which sorts of data, which sorts
of approaches, and which sorts of disciplines fit with the kinds of
questions we’re asking. And then if you want to do interdisciplinary
work, figuring out how you bring those things together in a way
that’s useful. That’s what I’m trying to do all the time. And it’s sort of
intuitive.
H: Yes, it is intuitive. And this perhaps is the gift that our discipline
brings to the conversation, intuition about and across various kinds of
questions, texts, and bodies of knowledge.
S: Yes. And it’s a little scary. You can mess up.
H: When your work’s intuitive, you’re always bringing so much of
yourself to it, and in animal and environmental studies the stakes are
so very high. So just one last question, what are you reading right
now?
S: I love Nicole Shukin’s book.
H: Animal Capital?Me too.
S: Love that book. Actually, I was thinking about it on the walk
home. I was thinking about how Animal Capital is in some ways, or
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could be, considered a kind of mirror image to the politics of visibility
that I’m trying to talk about with the sea creatures.
H: Yes, the way she looks at animal materialities in systems of pro-
duction and consumption.
S: It’s the visibility that’s all around us that’s invisible. So this
[pointing to the table, pointing to the chair], was this an animal, was
some part of an animal used to make this, where are the animals in
this room that we’re not seeing? So I was really struck by this sense
that if you take Shukin’s work and then you take what I’m trying to do
with the deep sea creatures and Rancière, and you put them together,
you have this kind of distant bringing-into-visibility. Her work brings
into everyday life the visibility of the animals that are rendered all
around us. I wish I had given that answer to one of the questions after
the plenary, I think maybe Cate’s question, about biopolitics. I think
you could make this parallel—maybe not with Cary’s work as much—
but with Shukin’s work and my work and biopolitics. I think it would
work out really nicely.
H: I do too. I sat in on a seminar she ran at ASLE in Canada. There’s
a core critique of capitalism that’s dialectical, in Shukin’s work and
your work, and it doesn’t happen often enough.
S: I agree. This has been so much fun. It’s great to talk to you. And
you know the interview format actually allows for a more substantial
conversation than just chatting, so I appreciate that. That’s great.
H: I’ve had a lot fun too; this has been very interesting. Thank you.
Interview with Cary Wolfe
H:What are your current thoughts about posthumanism?
C: That term is problematic, but I guess there’s no getting away from
it—from any of these terms. I think it’s easy to overinvest in the work
that they do and don’t do, and that work is different conceptually
versus institutionally. Some of the different kinds of investments people
have in a term like “ecofeminism” are for institutional, not conceptual,
reasons. That asymmetry often gets lost, I think, in debates. [Wolfe and
Alaimo had a question on ecofeminism after their joint plenary]
H: We should actively re-engage such terms, particularly potential-
ly useful ones like ecofeminism. In his plenary, Rob Nixon talked
about his new work as, in part, a continuation of “slow violence,” for
example.
C:What’s he working on right now?
H:He’s going back to look at the concept of the anthropocene itself,
what that means in the geological community and its political
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implications, given how unequal humans are in terms of their agency
in the world already. We are in the “Age of Man,”with greenhouse gas
emissions and the rest but, on the other hand, it’s really the “Age of
Some Men and Not Others.”
C: I was involved in a big event on the anthropocene in January at
the House for World Culture in Berlin. It was big, a three-day thing,
with probably around twenty invited speakers and keynotes. Claire
Colebrook and I had an hour-long dialogue onstage about the idea of
the anthropocene. [This is available on youtube: http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=YLTCzth8H1M]
H:What else are you working on at the moment?
C: An art project. When I was a student I won a couple of Academy
of American Poets prizes, and I was faced with a decision about
whether to pursue an MFA or a PhD. So, I quit writing poetry for a
long time but now I’m involved in a big collaborative project that has a
few different components with Maria Whiteman, who works in
image-based art. The project involves photography and video, and for
some of these pieces I’ve written texts. I wouldn’t describe them as
“poetry” in the sense that would appeal to professional practicing
poets, but most people are going to see the texts as poems. They’re dif-
ferent because I produced them in this context of pre-existing raw
footage of images, so they unfolded in dialogue with this video mate-
rial and photographs. It’s a different compositional process—even my
relationship to the text produced is different. And the poems are
pretty long; each text is about four pages, very vertical. They’re part of
four video pieces that are part of a larger project on animal movement
and migration. We have a photo essay coming out in a journal in
Canada—an essay I wrote in conjunction with a series of diptych
images Maria put together.
Well that’s one of the things I’m working on right now. That whole
body of work will probably take a couple of years. I’m also working
on a book on Wallace Stevens. My literary field is actually American
Modernism and, within that, modernist poetry. My first book is on
Pound, from my dissertation on Pound and Emerson. The funny thing
is, I’ve been teaching this material for the last twenty plus years. The
way that my academic career developed, everywhere I was had a PhD
program and a 2/2 load. Typically, three of those courses would be un-
dergraduate and one graduate, and on the graduate side I got pulled
more and more into teaching “theory.” That led into the matrix of
work on systems theory and animal studies that occupied me over the
next however many years. But all along on the undergraduate side,
and selectively on the graduate side, I continued to teach this literary
material. There’s a graduate course that I teach pretty regularly called
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“Genealogies of American Romanticism” on Emerson, Cavell, Stevens,
through Luhmann and Derrida, but I’ve never had time to just sit down
and write the Stevens part. The book is tentatively titledWallace Stevens’
Birds: the poetics of extinction. There’s a snapshot of part of the argument
in the Stevens chapter in What is Posthumanism?, the systems theory
rearticulation and retheorization of the core paradoxes in the romantic
genealogy that people see in Stevens and Emerson, but that’s only part
of the argument.
H: I look forward to reading it. This would be enough to occupy
anyone for a few years, but do you have any long-term plans for
another theory project?
C: There is a third project that has evolved quickly over the last
several months, a political theory project on biopolitical thought after
biopolitics. That project took shape from a graduate seminar I was
teaching on systems theory and biopolitics last year. The topic of the
seminar was systems theory, but biopolitics was going to be one of
three examples at the end of the course of how systems theory can
help you rearticulate and redescribe different theoretical problems. I
had Judith Roof come in to the course and talk about questions of
gender and sexuality, and I was going to do a class on how systems
theory makes biopolitics look different. What I did in the course of
thinking about that part of the class was to go back to Esposito’s work
on biopolitics, specifically, his insistence that the immunitary para-
digm is what Foucault really doesn’t recognize as constitutive of the
biopolitical problematic. The immunitary paradigm, as Espositio artic-
ulates it is, in deconstructive terms, the logic of the pharmakon and, in
systems theory terms, it’s a theorization of a self-referential autopoietic
system. Esposito actually references Luhmann, and he references
Haraway and other people who have invoked this immunitary and
autoimmunitary model. But he doesn’t really do very much with it. A
lot of it is very between-the-lines; so I said, I’m going to go through and
systematically cross-map Luhmann’s theorization of the self-referential
autopoetic nature of the political with the immunitary paradigm in
Esposito. What has happened is that the project has gradually gotten
bigger and bigger because it came into conversation with work by other
people who continue to think about what biopolitics is interested in
beyond the codification of biopolitical thought that we’re now stuck
with. As you know, Esposito is trying to think an affirmative biopolitics
outside of the thanatopolitical drift you get in someone like Agamben.
H: I really enjoyed your joint plenary with Stacy. Both of you
placed an idea of politics at the forefront of your arguments, as
opposed to an abstract ethics which, as you have said, tends to domi-
nate animal studies.
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C: Well, ideally, what it will force will be a much more complex un-
derstanding of the political and of politicization, which are not the
same thing . . . in ways that won’t necessarily eventuate in the political
having a more central place in critical thought. For example, one of the
things that I’m going to argue in this political theory project I’m
working on is that if you actually cross-map the paradigm of the
immunitary mechanism of biopolitics with the systems theory theori-
zation of the political as an autopoetic system, what you realize is that,
paradoxically, insofar as you insist on a strong concept of the political,
you actually end up with a very weak concept of the political—weak
in the sense of the political being a domain that can overdetermine
and steer other social systems. The force of the political—if you actual-
ly carry through the theorization of self-reference in a way that
Esposito doesn’t—paradoxically becomes more attenuated the more
you insist on a rigorous concept of the political. And the problem with
Esposito is that he wants to have it both ways. He wants to insist that
the immunitary mechanism is fundamental, and yet he wants to retain
a very broad sense of the efficacy and force of the political, of the sort
that you have in Agamben. So the intervention I’m trying to make is to
say no, if you actually want to theorize the political as a self-referential
immunitary mechanism, you will be forced to acknowledge that the
political ends up having a diminished force in contemporary culture.
Now what does all this have to do with biopolitics? It dovetails
with attempts in current biopolitical thought by people like Tim
Campbell, Gregg Lambert, Jeff Nealon and others to say well, if it’s the
case that this sense of the political is bound to end up being weak,
insofar as the theorization of it is strong, then we must ask what are
the processes of politicization that actually take its place? One answer
is Deleuze’s late work on control society. It’s kind of a sequel to his
book on Foucault, so you can take Deleuze’s reading of Foucault, his
remarks on control society (in his late conversation with Antonio
Negri) and say, we have to think a new logic of the political and
politicization that doesn’t end up caught in this sort of paradoxical,
self-defeating status that biopolitics eventuates in. Another example is
the work of Tim Campbell, who translated Esposito’s Bios for the
[University of Minnesota Press] Posthumanities series, and who wrote a
great book in the series called Improper Life. Tim is very interested in
what Italian political philosophy calls the impolitical, or the unpoliti-
cal, in relation to the political proper, as a resource for thinking ques-
tions and issues of community outside of a strictly delimited political
framework.
So the question becomes, how do you continue to press the ques-
tions that are pressed by biopolitical thought and not end up in this
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kind of tragic drama of the political that we end up with in Agamben?
One way to think about it—to put it in shorthand—is that there’s a re-
lationship between systems theory and Foucault, and then Deleuze
and his reading of Foucault, that attempts to re-think the political
outside the more classical parameters ruled by political thought,
whether you’re talking about Agamben or Esposito. So that’s the third
project I’mworking on right now.
H: Did you arrive in Kansas in time to see or hear any of the tornado
warnings? If memory serves, somewhere in the Q&A someone asked a
question about complex or overwhelming systems and the increasingly
polarized (and, for many, disempowering) experience of place, the way
in which various groups of people experience place in such radically
different ways.
C: And not just people.
H: Right. When I say people I mean . . .
C: . . . nonhuman persons included . . .
H: Yes.
C: I think that’s right. In the Q&A, I was making the point that
there’s no generic, one-size-fits-all answer to these questions that, to
me, has much political force. Now a traditional reply would be to say
that such a position is somehow hampered or enfeebled or lacks verac-
ity as “critique.” And my point is exactly the opposite. My point is that
actually it’s because such answers are nongeneric, because they are very
situational, and have to dowith the pragmatic contingency of the itera-
tive instance, that’s precisely why they have political force; that’s why
they have traction. So whenever you’re talking about conjugating the
relationship between a so-called universal phenomenon—let’s take
global warming as an example—and how it’s experienced by different
communities or different persons, it goes without saying that that
always has a nongeneric character. So the universal nature of the
problem never exists “as such” in some kind of generic transparency. It
only exists as it’s iterated through these particular instances. I see that
as a political resource for carrying out these kinds of critiques, even as
the political alliances that can eventuate from them have to do with
this “universal” phenomenon commonly called global warming or
climate change. I take it for granted that there’s no view from nowhere,
on any political question.
H: Yes, and what does this mean for an inclusive theoretical, politi-
cal (even imagined) space, for mass movements necessary to confront
global power’s very material and virtual existence?
C: I don’t think those are mutually exclusive at all. I think those
communities have more traction, in relation to each other, because
they’re not presuming to step outside of their own location. So, having
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said that, the next shoe to drop—and I talk about this in Before the
Law—is of course the shoe of ethnocentrism, if you criticize the formu-
lation of the traditional rights-holding subject or the subject of politics,
and the kind of formalist and conventionalist notion of the political
subject that reaches back from people like Hannah Arendt and
Rancière.
If you critique the formalist and conventionalist rendering of the
subject of rights, which always ends up being grounded in the human
being’s capacity for language, for “meaningful” or “relevant” speech,
then you still have to deal with the question of universality. How do
you get out of the problem of saying that, well, in these contingent and
situated communities, we just care about what we care about and to
hell with everything else? That’s where the phenomenological and
ontological domain has to re-enter as a way to confront the question of
ethnocentrism, and this is exactly what Arendt is running into in The
Origins of Totalitarianism. What she experiences is a collision between
her very formalist Aristotelian idea of the political and of the subject of
rights and the fact that suddenly she is surrounded in the wake of
World War II by millions of stateless people, who are in the condition
of bare life and who have, by her own definition, no political status in
precisely those terms. This is where she runs into the problem of what
she calls “the right to have rights.” And dealing with the right to have
rights forces you back into these ontological, phenomenonological
questions that we used to talk about in terms of the universal. What
I’m critical of in Before the Law is the knee jerk response to this dilemma
that you get in biopolitical thought, in the attempt to think an affirma-
tive biopolitics. That is to say, if we start drawing ethnocentric lines of
membership in a community ( just to telescope all these into one for-
mulation), then that is bound to turn into the kind of autoimmune dis-
order that Derrida talks about in Philosophy in a Time of Terror, and that
eventuates in the Agambenian thanatological paradigm of the camps.
So, to put it bluntly, in the bios/zoe distinction, if you start drawing
lines between Aryans and Jews, that is necessarily going to lead to
drawing lines within the zone of immunitary protection itself. Now
it’s not just Aryans and Jew, it’s blue-eyed Aryans versus brown-eyed
Aryans, and now it’s blonde-haired blue-eyed Aryans versus blonde-
haired brown-eyed Aryans, so you get into this runaway autoimmune
disorder that actually ends up using that very logic to devour the
community that supposedly it’s meant to protect. The example that
Esposito gives is actually of Hitler, in the bunker in Berlin, as Berlin
is being invaded by the Soviets, sending out the telegram that says,
“The entire means of subsistence of the German people must be de-
stroyed because they are unworthy, so that the Third Reich can be
Changing Nature 889
saved.” That is the quintessence of the autoimmune disorder pro-
duced by this immunitary logic.
So the problem you have to confront—and this seems to me right
now of the moment in biopolitical thought—is how do you think an
affirmative, positive biopolitics, regarding the vast diversity of life, in
ways that don’t end up back in this autoimmune disorder but also
don’t avoid the problem altogether by just saying that we can’t draw
any lines anywhere—this is what Esposito does. Even if you don’t
use the word “equal,” there’s a sense in which, at the end of his book
Bios, all forms of life in relation to norms have kind of the same stand-
ing. And at that point, “life” is just as blunt an instrument as the
human/animal distinction. So the way that I confront this problem—
and Stacy invoked this in her remarks—is to say, look, you are always
going to be drawing lines of some kind, and you’re going to do that
from a very specific location. And if you didn’t do that, your so-called
political actions would not have any binding force at all. But you
draw those lines in the knowledge that—to put it in deconstructive
terms—those actions are always blind, they’re always necessarily ex-
clusionary, they’re always necessarily contingent, and therefore
whoever you think your community is is always under erasure in a
radical sense. And in fact, the history of science shows this with
regard to nonhuman animal life. The history of science shows that all
of these places that we used to confidently draw the boundaries,
between those whose lives count as lives and those whose lives don’t,
are constantly shifting. That’s what keeps the zone of immunitary
protection from ossifying and hardening and flipping over into an
autoimmune disorder. On the one hand, yes you do have to make
those decisions, yes you do have to draw those lines and, on the
other, you do so in the knowledge of the contingency and blindness
of those distinctions, knowing that you will have been wrong, and
that it’s a good thing that you will have been wrong. That’s the only
thing that opens the community to futurity and to a constantly
broadening membership that you can’t sit here right now and antici-
pate and designate and describe, right?
H: Contingency and blindness are the conditions of knowledge,
and I like the idea (though it also scares me) that it is a good thing that
we will have been wrong. Given that (to push the point), what about
our relations with the deeply inhuman, geologic time and processes,
the ontology of rocks . . .?
C: I’ve thought a lot about this with regard to object-oriented-
ontology and speculative realism. We have published, and are publish-
ing, some of that work in the Posthumanities series. The problem is,
how do you not end up back in a flat ontology that just evacuates all
890 I S L E
the phenomenological and ontological specificities, differences, and
asymmetries that supposedly are the things that you want to hold on
to, to open the community to its own difference? Actually I’m not in-
terested in ontology; I think ontology is a misguided philosophical
project, period. The problem with flat ontology is that you just end up
back in the situation of, well, a rock is a Bonobo. And a rock is not a
Bonobo. The way I put it in Before the Law—in this moment where I’m
actually talking about Levi Bryant’s work, which I like (and this could
also be taken in the direction of calling into question some of what
Latour is doing as well)—is to say is there not a difference between the
chimpanzee used in biomedical research, the cage that the chimpanzee
sits in, and the flea on the chimpanzee’s skin? And is that not a differ-
ence that matters infinitely more to the chimpanzee than it does to the
cage? I think that there is a difference. And I think it’s a difference that
is ethically and politically of the moment. And the problem with flat
ontology is that it evacuates those radical asymmetries. Having said
that, what flat ontology is right about is that the chimpanzee, like the
human being, is an object. It’s a concatenation of the material processes
that actually, strictly speaking, have nothing to do with the human,
which can possibly manifest into something called a Bonobo or a
human being. And, in doing so—and this is the important point—
such processes can create ontological domains that are actually not re-
ducible to their material substrate. This is what Heidegger was right
about. Heidegger was right that the being of beings is not a being. It’s
not an empirical, concrete object. So whatever we’re talking about is
not a being in the sense of an empirical object. Having said that, what
he’s wrong about is that Dasein coincides in any way with the human/
animal distinction, in terms of having a world (even in the mode of not
having, as he puts it regarding animals), and what he’s also wrong
about is that whatever Dasein comes from is really in a way just a
brute concatenation of material processes that happened quite improb-
ably to eventuate in this thing called homo sapiens.
H: To link back to your other projects, what role might art have in
these formulations?
C: Well, how delimited is the concept of art you’re invoking? The
reason I ask is the question of the function of the aesthetic in the
process of politicization seems to me a little different from the question
of the function of art in the process of politicization. In the broader
sense, I think the problem is just how picky do you want to be in a
democracy about what is considered art? I don’t think art—officially,
in a somewhat delimited sense—I don’t think art is that important in
terms of processes of politicization. But I think the aesthetic in the
Changing Nature 891
process of politicization and democracy is really, really important.
And that would eventually lead us into talking about . . .
H: And when you say the aesthetic, you’re thinking . . .?
C: Right, in what register do you want to talk about that? Do you
want to talk about it in the register of affect, in the register of some
kind of negative capability that binds communities? How do you want
to talk about what you mean by the aesthetic, the relation of the aes-
thetic, in traditional terms, to utility, right? Well, this goes back a little
bit to my response to Cate Mortimer-Sandilands’ question. . . . I worry
a little bit about overgeneralizing about what counts as the aesthetic,
even within a particular society, for just straight-up reasons of anthro-
pological and demographic specificity.
I think, for me, one person’s aesthetic is another person’s commodi-
fication or decadence or whatever, so we can sit here and list examples
of what you might be tempted to call debased forms of commodifica-
tion of the aesthetic that might have a politically binding force in dem-
ographically different kinds of communities. Even within US
democracies. So that’s why I responded to Cate’s question in the way
that I did; I think underneath her question there’s an impulse to make
a generalized formulation about the relation of the political to the aes-
thetic that is problematic and would give me pause. And, in fact, I
would see my reluctance to make that formulation as actually being—
in terms of politicization—a democratizing move. So again, I think one
place this ends up is in a little different idea of the theorization of the
political, and what the political is in relation to processes of politiciza-
tion. Again, I don’t feel tempted to give a one-size-fits-all answer to
the relationship between aesthetic and politics. And I think you can
just look at the demographic differentiation of US culture to see why.
For example, where I live in Texas is such a multiethnic, multilinguis-
tic, multicultural place, especially Houston, that you really have a
sense of how different kinds of aesthetics play a different politicizing
role in communities, whether you’re talking about the Hispanic com-
munity, the African-American community, and how those communi-
ties do and don’t interact. And every time I go to places like Portland
or Seattle I’m always struck by this. I always come back to Houston
and think, those places are so white; everybody seems to be wearing
Mountain Hardware, riding Trek bicycles.
H: To move toward another kind of disciplinary question, yesterday
Rob Nixon spoke about something he called the quantitative creep in
the humanities. I was wondering if youmight talk about that briefly.
C: It’s a huge problem. [Laughs] In fact, I don’t know anyone—I
mean, I’m sure they’re out there, but I don’t know anyone who’s
rah-rah for quantitative creep in the humanities.
892 I S L E
H: Certain administrators perhaps . . .
C: Administrators are behind that, but I think the quantitative
creep in humanities is an epiphenomenon of a much broader move-
ment that’s been happening in the corporate university pointedly in
the last 15 years, at least in my experience. Actually, it goes all the way
back to the 60’s, and the Kerr report on the University of California
system, a founding moment of this particular logic. What’s going on in
the quantification of the humanities is part of the broader phenome-
non that cuts across the entire university, and has to do with increasing
use of the metrics of accountability.
H: I feel that interdisciplinary work is more important than ever.
But some might confuse genuinely interdisciplinary work with schol-
arship that tries to conform to business models of value or refashion
itself into “data” to justify its existence in an environment hostile to
theory, philosophy, and the arts.
C: Yes. I guess certain areas of media studies are where you would
see that more than anywhere else. It’s part of the broader shift to
define what counts “as” real knowledge, and if it’s not quantifiable
and, ideally mathematizable, then it doesn’t count as real knowledge.
H: Speaking of the problem of knowledge, what are you reading at
the moment? What do you recommend?
C: My problem is that I’m a little bit of an indiscriminate omnivore,
which I guess some people would describe as . . .
H: Intellectual promiscuity . . .?
C: . . . it’s a familiar experience that if you have broad interests and
you do interdisciplinary work, you’re always in the room with people
who know more about some aspect of what you’re talking about than
you do . . .
H:Which is great, because then you learn all the time.
C: I’m fine with that, but it just makes for way more projects, you
know, than I can take on. But I will go as far as to say that I’m going to
continue to actually write more about art—broadly speaking—and do
more with art as part of whatever it is I’m working on. I don’t know
the individual forms that that’ll take, but that’s going to happen. A lot
of my current reading revolves around projects for the Posthumanities
series, and for other presses and journals with which I have some kind
of editorial involvement. For example, I’ve been going back through
Derrida’s book Cinders, which we are going to republish in the series,
and thinking about how different the text looks in the context of
twenty years of biopolitical thought and the place of fire, ashes, voice,
testimony, and the Holocaust in that genealogy. It’s a very different
book now, in that light. I’ve also been reading Michel Serres’ book
Biogea, which Minnesota brought out in their Univocal translations
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series. And Eric Sanderson’s book Terra Nova: The New World After Oil,
Cars, and Suburbs. And lots of old Wallace Stevens criticism! Harold
Bloom, Helen Vendler, Joseph Riddell. It’s really remarkable work in
its own way—good old fashioned literary criticism!
H: This has been great. Thank you, again, for the interview.
C: You’re welcome.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my graduate student, Jeremy South, for his
help with transcription.