In Noah’s Arkive, Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates examine the long history of imagining endurance against climate change catastrophe—as well as alternative ways of creating refuge. Arguing that the biblical ark may well be the worst possible exemplar of human behavior, this book uncovers the startling afterlife of the Genesis narrative and surveys the long history of dwelling with the consequences of choosing only a few to survive in order to start the world over. Here, Cohen and Yates are interviewed by Steven Swarbrick.
“The worst thing you can do, we have learned, is to imagine that you are no longer on an ark.” (from Noah’s Arkive, page 3)
Chapters
In Noah’s Arkive, Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates examine the long history of imagining endurance against climate change catastrophe—as well as alternative ways of creating refuge. Arguing that the biblical ark may well be the worst possible exemplar of human behavior, this book uncovers the startling afterlife of the Genesis narrative and surveys the long history of dwelling with the consequences of choosing only a few to survive in order to start the world over. Here, Cohen and Yates are interviewed by Steven Swarbrick.
“The worst thing you can do, we have learned, is to imagine that you are no longer on an ark.” (from Noah’s Arkive, page 3)
What is University of Minnesota Press?
Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
Genesis is a story that wants to be misread. Everything we know about the story is not there.
Julian Yates:
The worst thing you can do is think that you're not or no longer on an ark that you got off.
Steven Swarbrick:
Hello, and welcome to the University of Minnesota Press podcast. My name is Steven Swarbrick. I am the author of The Environmental Unconscious, Ecological Poetics from Spencer to Milton, published by the University of Minnesota Press this year. And I'm joined by Jeffrey Cohen and Julian Yates, coauthors of the outstanding new book, Noah's Archive, also published by the University of Minnesota Press. Jeffrey and Julian, it's so good to be in conversation with you.
Steven Swarbrick:
Would you please start us off by introducing yourselves to our listeners?
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
I'm Jeffrey Cohen. I'm the dean of humanities at Arizona State University, and really happy to be here today. Thanks, Steven.
Julian Yates:
Hi, Steven. Hi, Jeffrey. I'm Julian Yates. I teach in the English department and in the Material Cultural Studies at University of Delaware, and it's a delight to be here. Thank you for organizing this, Steven.
Steven Swarbrick:
Thank you both. I'd like to begin by just saying how much I enjoyed reading Noah's Arkiv. For listeners who are hearing about it for the first time, it's a book that engages with so much, both old and new, including big umbrella fields like the blue humanities, eco criticism, critical race, immigration, and climate change studies. It's also, I I believe, a a remarkable demonstration of the power of close reading. So the the focus of the book is the Genesis story of Noah and the ark.
Steven Swarbrick:
And throughout the book, you pay fine grained attention to a story that I think many readers find spare, at times cryptic. And in the process, you make an otherwise familiar story strange and new and urgent for our times. So it's a terrific book. I'm excited to dive in. Why don't we start with what brought you together to work Arno's archive?
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
Julian, I wonder if we have two different versions of the story.
Julian Yates:
We probably have three or four. Why don't you start, and then I will give my version, and it will be identical to yours. It's really just because, of course, you know, you you can't write a a Noah's Ark book without two authors.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
So in my version of the story, it begins in friendship. I had started a smaller Noah's Ark project a little bit before Julian and I started to talk about some of the themes of the book. And the more Julian and I spoke, we do have a deep friendship and have been presenting projects together for a long time. The more obvious it was to me that we needed to write this book together. And I think the moment of crystallization, strangely enough, was in a whiskey bar in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where we decided that as tired as we were, we were going to hash out the entire book on a piece of paper and then take a picture of it and send it to Doug Armato and ask if Minnesota was interested in it.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
We drank a lot of whiskey. We did a lot of thinking. We had a lot of fun plotting it out, and then the book set sail from there. That that's my version.
Julian Yates:
I mean, I think in fairness to Jeffrey, he had been interested in giants once upon a time, which probably necessitated having to think about the, the Genesis narrative and and Noah's archive and Noah's Ark, the story of that. For me, it had been a sort of fixture of childhood in a very sort of remote story you know, but you don't actually ever read it or let alone close read it. But, Jeffrey, remember, we had a prebook that we didn't write, which this book became a much more grounded version of, which was about escaping the gravity of planet Earth and, I think it was called Adventures in Groundless Reading or something like that. The more we actually started to try and think about what it would mean to do that, the more we both sort of connected with this figure of the ark as Earth, as spaceship, as all these different kinds of vessels.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
That's right. In fact, adventures in groundless reading was the original subtitle of the book. And then as the book gained velocity and started to plot its own trajectory, we abandoned that one. We abandoned the next one, which was, towards an ecology of refuge. It just felt like Noah's archive says it all, so that's what it became.
Steven Swarbrick:
Well, in part of the the archive you're exploring, it's, of course, biblical. You also range across a number of contemporary media examples. I was fascinated by the composition of the book. As one would expect, anyone who's familiar with your work, it blends literary and philosophical analysis, but it also incorporates firsthand experience of traveling to arc sites and your own sort of narratives of of encountering people who are trying to reimagine the arc story and bring it to life today. For many of us who work in earlier periods, whether it's early modern or medieval, we rarely get to see our primary texts come alive in front of our eyes.
Steven Swarbrick:
So I'm curious, was it always part of your plan to unfold first person narrative into the work, or did that just emerge as you were writing? And how did your encounters inform your thinking?
Julian Yates:
Couple of responses to that. One is that I think we're both really very aware the period at about fifty year intervals, people write Noah's Ark books, big academic Noah's Ark books dating back really as far as you'd like to go. I mean, Athanasius Kircher's, monumental sort of seventeenth century art book comes to mind, but there are so many others. And the story always gets essentially retold, maximized beyond its biblical sort of skeletal form. And so we were very conscious that there's a tradition, a genre, a sort of mini genre or minor genre of art books out there.
Julian Yates:
So we're very conscious that they would shift by discipline and that the arc story would be deployed for a variety of different reasons, whether it's because of the discovery of a fossil record, right, in the the early modern period and having to deal with that or whether it's to do with, in our historical moment, the ecological devastation of climate change. At the same time, we're both, I think, committed to the idea that, thinking, theory making happens in a variety of different discourses. I'm gonna sound facetious, but I'm not, that much of what we call literature and culture works out as sort of Genesis fan fiction. But, Jeffrey, you wanna talk about why we why why don't you just talk about whatever you wanna talk about, but you could talk about why we went to ARCS? We were worried we were Noah.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
Well, I mean, it it was also impossible not to go to visit ARCS. It was not an option not to make these visits. So we thought if we're gonna look at the long history of imagining Noah's Ark and realizing it in literature, in art, we needed to go to some ongoing art projects. COVID threw a monkey wrench into it. We didn't get to visit as many as we wanted to, but we did really enjoy the ones that we went to, and it was formative.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
So I said the project began in friendship. It was sustained by friendship, and Julian and I travel well together. We both have similar obsessions and similar strange ideas of fun. So visiting these places where we would take a lot of notes and then sitting in a often in a coffee shop and writing frantically together into a Google Doc and then maybe even staying up until late at night having moved from a coffee shop to a bar. We'd get a lot of stuff done and a lot of thinking done together, and that kind of, like, mutuality of processing really served us well.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
Having said that, not every visit was as enjoyable as we thought it would be. So visiting the ARC encounter in Kentucky was soul crushing. It was not a pleasant experience. It actually made us feel bad that we spent money on it. It's such a homophobic space.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
There there's lots that we could have written against it, but we always found ways through it in order to find something affirmative. So we followed up that visit with a visit to the local library as a kind of antidote to the fascistic structure of that really fundamentalist arc. Every encounter was valuable for advancing the project. Every encounter helped us to see both the possibilities and the limits of what it is to build an arc in place. And every encounter helped us to think through exactly what our project was about.
Steven Swarbrick:
Jeffrey, following up on that last comment, the encounters that you had and some of the challenges that you both faced, did these experiences shed light on the story itself? I found these, narratives so fascinating and and useful because it created a resonant loop between the analysis that you're doing of the story, what you were finding in the kind of contemporary arc building that you're seeing unfold, and also some of the, again, the challenges, the resistances that are built into those structures and in those places.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
I would actually say what the ethnographic adventures that we had, what they enabled was the writing of the book itself. And in the original conceptualization of the book, every chapter would have a kind of interspace where there'd be an ethnographic encounter with one of the arks. Eventually, we decided that it would just be the first chapter, had a bit about the first ark that we went to visit. It would relate some of the writing and thinking that we'd done elsewhere. But, actually, most of the thinking that we did as as site visits got incorporated into the structure of the book.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
So it didn't seem necessary to put those narrations into the book itself. We do have footnotes that show you exactly where to find what we wrote on those things, but they didn't seem quite as important to the book. The book already contained them. It was the first encounter that seemed the most important to us, not only because it was a visit to an arc that will never be completed, and it was a visit that opened up possibilities to us that we didn't expect at all. It was also the fact that we realized in retrospect that we went to Frostburg, Maryland to see the Arc of Safety, and we were ill equipped to ask the questions that were at the heart of the book.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
And it was the lingering questions that we did not ask that helps us to frame the rest of the book. So by the time we got to our encounter in Kentucky, we were ready for opening things up, got things shut down there. But, again, it became really important to deciding what the stakes were of imagining the kinds of refuge a book like this could give.
Julian Yates:
I think that what I'd say is that part of the commitment of going to the auction process largely. Right? I mean, Jeffrey, I mean, that's really part of the commitment to it is that I mean, we felt that we were writing a book, which was also, to a certain extent, building a kind of arc or archive of this story. We were committed to the idea that the story is really ongoing. It's still working itself out.
Julian Yates:
When you ask, Steven, did the visits shed light on previous arc iterations or even the Genesis story itself, I think it did in the sense that we were so tuned into the way in which these arcs in process were attempts to begin something, to actually set something in motion, and sometimes they stalled and got stuck, like in the Frostburg example, the first one we went to. To a certain extent, I felt like we were ill equipped every time we encountered one of these arks and and were constantly learning by being there. We were beguiled to a certain extent on our initial arrival in the Kentucky Arc because it was so not what we had expected. And as someone who's most sort of distant reader of ethnographic theory, I mean, that was a crash course in the sort of what it means to encounter the metaphysics worldview of of other ways of thinking and being, and we tried to be polite largely. I mean, that was our attempt to sort of resist the urge to close read at that point and to be open to what we were encounter until we were shut out or invited in.
Julian Yates:
And that was a early constant phenomenon that really, I think, gave us energy while writing. And the other thing that I just want to sort of I mean, that Jeffrey, that you mentioned was just that urgency of live writing because we both sort of collaborated with other people and this gave us a way to stay in contact. I It was obviously cut short by the pandemic, but then then we moved to Zoom.
Steven Swarbrick:
It's like opening possibilities and closing off other ones. It's a recurring thread throughout the book. One of the things that you highlight at the beginning of the book, and and this is emphasized up to the very end, the arc story is a story about human and nonhuman endurance in unlivable times. At the same time, one of the things you highlight so well in this book is that this particular arc story has itself endured. It's not the only flood narrative.
Steven Swarbrick:
It's not even the first. When I'm teaching the Genesis story, I teach it alongside the epic of Gilgamesh, and my students are always really amazed to see the the connections between them. I'm curious, having written this book, why do you think that this particular flood narrative or this particular arc story has endured the way that it has?
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
Because we live in catastrophe. There's something about the way Genesis narrates a very human experience of anthropogenic climate change. Right? God sends this flood because of human action, so it is human caused. And there's something about that endurance of family and attempts to save things that even as it goes badly wrong, it's such a good story to think with.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
One of the things that Julie and I found continually fascinating is the ways in which Genesis, in its narration of the flood, is a story that wants to be misread, that wants to open up possibility. And whenever you go back to it, you keep realizing everything we know about the story is not there. And yet there's something about the structuration of the story that wants you to put in the what is not there. And its long history over time is about populating it with possibility. So we have so many contradictory stories of the flood.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
Some of them are really useful for the times we live in right now. Some of them are really dangerous in the ways that they seem to value gated communities and closing things down and small survival. So we wanted to think through what are the actual affirmative possibilities for refuge that are in the story, and then what kinds of limited readings endure to this day, and give us a cognitive frame for dealing with catastrophe that is actually not very useful, And in fact, maybe doing us great harm.
Julian Yates:
Yeah. Absolutely. And the other thing that comes through is the way in which the story, if you reduce it to its governing tropes or images of just what comes to mind if you close your eyes and you say the story and you think of the story I mean, the figure of the ark, happy animals and humans, landfall, rainbow. The pull of the story is when reduced to those elements is really turning disaster into catastrophe, into something that's passed. And that that that's really part of the narrative pool that makes it such a powerful story, not about disaster, but about a foundation about producing something new as long as you don't dwell too long on what happens next.
Julian Yates:
Right? I mean, it's a way of sort of clawing your way into the future in a way without really actually having to imagine it.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
Because Julian just said that, I have to share what's one of my favorite lines in the book. And I I love the line because it got at something that we were trying to get our heads around for a long time. And then once we wrote it, it just seemed like, okay. Now we have our way forward. And like many of the lines that I really love in the book, I have no idea who started it, who wrote it.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
It's something we both wrote, and that's all I can say about it. But there's a line where we're trying to get at the complexities of the arc story and then get at the complexities of Genesis. And we describe Genesis as an anthology of origins and initiations. Of false starts, restarts, and continuing starting over. It was once we framed Genesis that way, as a thing that keeps on beginning, that we got our hook into why the arc story is so powerful.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
It's never enough. It's not foundational. It's filled with mistakes. Things have to keep resetting. And that's what Genesis as an anthology of beginnings really offers.
Julian Yates:
Right. Or even a a sort of an attempt to theorize beginnings, to actually deal with the moral philosophical problems of beginnings. Have we begun yet? Was this a false start? Was this a good beginning?
Julian Yates:
Is this what we hoped for? What were the costs to this beginning? What got unbegun so that we could begin? All of those sort of questions about the way in which process or making. Build yourself an arc.
Julian Yates:
It's a project. All of those things sort of feed into that. And it's so funny because and this is this is part of the fun of this is that I didn't think you were gonna refer to that line. I thought you were gonna say that, the line you were thinking of, Jeffrey, was that the worst thing you can do is think that you're not or no longer on an arc that you got off.
Steven Swarbrick:
Julian, you read my mind. My finger was on that very line. This is on page three of the book, and maybe I'll just start a little bit above that because I think that this passage in particular gets toward the oscillation between beginnings and endings. At one point, you say, as a kind of challenge to eco critics, to your readers, let's look to the future even if all the time we have to look backward. So I found that turn within the beginning to be really fascinating, but it continues over onto the next page where you write, The afterlife of the Genesis story offers a nonconsolidary, non solidific, open structure for wrestling with what it means to construct an inside and out, boundaries, walls, and the costs of refuge for a restricted group.
Steven Swarbrick:
So there's so much packed into that, the idea of costs. It's something that readers who maybe think they're familiar with the Genesis story might alight on and find surprising, the emphasis on boundaries, exclusions being part of what the Genesis story is telling. And this is all wrapped in under the heading of arc thinking.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
The original title of that chapter was what is called arc thinking. And we wanted to give it this really, like, hard syntax to wrap your mind around it to get it the fact that our thinking is not actually human. It's this thing that keeps happening in the world. It's a kind of algorithm that catches us up and makes us do things. And if we're in it, we have a really hard time getting out of it.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
We wanted to allow that some of our thinking is not human motivated. Or if it was set in process by humans, it escaped us a long time ago, and it keeps coming back and doing things to us. What we try to capture is that our thinking, if left to its own devices, will, like any negative algorithm, actually enact incredible violences upon us. It will exclude. It will sort.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
It will diminish. But like any kind of architecture, if we can reconfigure it, open it up, change its possibilities, maybe there is the possibility of building some kind of refuge in it. Maybe there is the possibility of within the thinking, the the mechanics of the thought itself, altering it so that there's more space for cohabitation, more space for dwelling together.
Julian Yates:
And, I mean, the book ends, right, with the the notion that arc thinking continues beyond the finite limits of a story or an iteration or a way of completing the building project, writing project, making project, making a community, making a family, making a a a social unit, establishing a difference between humans and animals, that that actually will start over. It must. So that it's a continuous process. I don't really know what arc thinking is. Do you, Jeffrey?
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
No. And I think that's one of the things that I'm proud of about our book. We didn't come to a definitive conclusion of, here's our thinking. Here's how it works. Here's your schematic.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
Go ahead and do it. It was more that it's a thing that we're inside, and we have a really hard time seeing it's outside, but it keeps on moving.
Julian Yates:
I think we can tell you when it goes wrong, it means you think you're done. Where I'm left at the end of this project is really thinking that there is no way to ethically square out the process of arc building in a way that makes you clean, that actually accommodates everyone, that there's actually a fault or there's some kind of cut that is part of that act. Our thinking can lead towards a complete attempt to program the borders group membership, and and that I think is something that Jeffrey alluded to when he sort of quoted the line that migrated through the book in and out in various forms of what does the fascist arc look like. And that is the tension, right, that I think puts pressure on the story in terms of it being what looks like a sort of potentially feel good template for responding to the challenges we face environmentally in terms of a of a kind of one size fits all template for weathering disaster and turning it into catastrophe.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
So Julian does a really great job too of getting out why the book was so hard to end. You know, we had it all sketched out right from the beginning, but I believe the original title of the last chapter was landfall. How did it change to landfalling, which I know you came up with, Julian, and it's brilliant.
Julian Yates:
Okay. Jensen's emergency skin and the brilliance of that story and the fact that both of us, at the very beginning, were interested in not writing off the miller's tail, choices the miller's tail. I'm thinking about the flood of laughter instead of the flood of water as a a generic mutation that was was actually much more significant than than it might appear. The chapter on landfalling, right, is a series of cautionary stories about thinking about landfall, about reaching the end. But, yeah, we're I we're we're both cautious about ending.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
Yeah. So the the book actually doesn't really end. It's just a recursive series of here's some possibilities.
Steven Swarbrick:
Well, in a book this rich and this fun, I can understand not wanting it to end. But since you've already brought us back to the the literary aspect of it and the the generativity of these texts, maybe we can talk a little bit more about some of the pressures that you had mentioned. You've already quoted God's imperative to Noah, make yourself an ark. There's the literal reading, go make yourself a physical ark, but also the sense of make yourself into a a vessel for ark thinking. It's an enigmatic command.
Steven Swarbrick:
And one of the things that I think is gonna be really useful to a wide range of readers of this book is is how it makes something that seems familiar and, as you had said, Julian, maybe a little too cozy, unfamiliar, and strange. Jeffrey, I was thinking about your earlier work on monster cultures, and there is something slightly monstrous, about the arc narrative that is often not talked about or overlooked, maybe even repressed in the narrative. And it's part of the title of this book, The Archive, right, that there is this sort of unconscious to the narrative that you are trying to uncover. So can you maybe walk us through some of the stranger elements of the story that you bring to the foreground in this book?
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
Steven, I appreciate that question. And I think for me, it gets at a personal stake, which is just a lifelong obsession with things that are in excluded. I mean, they're inside and excluded at the same time. Right? And how does that work?
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
And, honestly, that is the one theme of everything I've ever written as far as scholarship goes. It starts with monsters. It goes through my work in environmental humanities. You name it. And the arc is the figure of an exclusion where things are on the outside wind up inside.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
It's a preservational moment. One of the moments of fascination for me because I've done so much work on giants is the fact of the existence of giants both before and after the ark. I'd wrestled in previous work about medieval thinkings through of how the giants survived the flood that was supposed to wipe out everything. And it was in thinking through, what is excluded from the ark and yet how it comes back that helped me to find a kind of frame for what the ark can and cannot do. Another thing that I'll just say is that, you know, we we have a chapter on stowaways that kind of catalogs all the strange things that wind up inside that you don't expect to be there.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
One thing that surprised us is that unicorns are often depicted as being on the ark and the obsession with trying to save them. But having said all this, I believe if there's one monstrous moment, it comes down to right after God decrees to Noah, build the ark, and Noah does not respond. He simply builds the ark. This is a real tension point and I think a difference between Christian exegesis and Jewish discussion of what happened. If Noah had been, say, like, Cain or Abraham or Moses, he might have said to God, are you sure you really want to destroy the earth?
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
But Noah does not challenge God at all. He simply builds the ark. Right? And you could take that as an example of perfect obedience, which it often is said to be in the Christian tradition, or you could take that as a moral failing on Noah's part. He could have saved the world had he argued with a god who often likes to be argued with and will change his mind when someone challenges him.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
So it was trying to think through that moment as well, the different possible Noahs and Noah as monster himself or not.
Julian Yates:
I love that. But what I love most about it is that I don't think that Jeffrey and I have come up with a single question about the Genesis story that generations of readers and reenactors and makers have not asked also. In other words, everything Jeffrey just said occurs in stories in which Noah does argue with the divine or where missus Noah burns down not just one but two arcs prior to the one actually launching. One moment that just tickles me still is in his reading of the, Noah story in his institutes. Calvin actually has the line, Noah might have been forgiven for thinking that God was mocking him.
Julian Yates:
And there is that moment that still stays with me and I actually is the bit that I actually do reread where we assemble all the different questions from, you know, across the sweep of the book that readers have had for the Genesis story. You know? What did everyone eat on the ark? Was there sex on the ark? What actually happened on the ark?
Julian Yates:
Or a moment that still stays with me and that is, how on earth are we supposed to actually gather and this is a sort of pre industrial sort of pre pre agricultural revolution sort of question. How would we actually ever be in a position where we could gather enough food to put on the arc for all of this? So the questions that we ask take the sort of different permutations based on the the sort of the particular moment that these readers are in. And so what what absolutely kills me still is the way in which the complexity that we don't experience when you you sort of don't really read the story or imagine it as a set of instructions are already there in plain sight, and that's sort of why the book is really an archive more than an arc.
Steven Swarbrick:
Well, and these questions that you're raising and others have raised about the story, it speaks to why this story has endured the way it has because it generates so many questions and perhaps so few answers. But also a point that you made in the book that I found so so true that provides the reader a minimal scaffolding for navigating this. The story itself is built in such a way that it resists any kind of narrative closure. You both have been working in the environmental humanities for some time, and this book is both in the field of environmental thinking insofar as the futures it allows us to imagine. Do you think that the Noah story provides any challenges to the the state of the field as it currently exists, eco studies?
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
I don't think it's a coincidence that for Julian and for me, the archives that we work in are early archives. They're not contemporary ones. Even though a lot of the book is contemporary in its focus, and we're interested in all that, but both of us are trained in a much earlier archive. I will say for me as an environmental humanist as well as a medievalist, A thing that drives me a little bit crazy is the assumption in much of the environmental humanities as practiced at this moment that what we face now is completely unprecedented, that humans have never thought about these issues seriously. In fact, what I find that contemporary critics are really good at doing is a vast injustice to the past.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
The people that lived before us going back thousands of years, going back as far as people were writing, were damn smart. They came up with all kinds of alternatives to the narrowed stories that we often tell. If we could more humanely come to grips with the traditions that we're working with rather than rejecting them out of hand or believing somehow that we're so much better than the people that came before us, I actually think we'd get a lot more traction on what's possible in the future. So, Steven, you brought up the line about, you know, sometimes looking to the future means looking to the past. And it really is a curve or a vortex where if past touches future making, a different future becomes possible through that contamination or through that opening up of possibility.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
And one of the things the book tries really hard to do is to give the past its due as a storehouse of possibility. Some of it good, some of it bad, but not something that we can imagine that we have somehow superseded and it's over and done and not relevant anymore.
Julian Yates:
Right. And, also in terms of what you mean by futurity, what you mean by the future, you know, because the danger, right, is that the moment you try to imagine that is you fill it in with scripts that preexist, that you that go unexamined or that you don't even know that you're filling in. I think having the sort of broadest sense of of how the narrative is not quite what people think it is and that it's a much more complicated, contested set of stories that are tuned to loss and that get reused, highly self consciously reused as a as an attempt to produce foundations, I think is something that yes. I mean, we'd we'd be pleased if it made the field think about its own periodization, the the sort of the automatic aspect to the way periodization works or doesn't change or simply changes its scale from, say, regnal dates to, energy arrivals.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
Maybe related to that too goes back to the original subtitle of the book adventures in groundless reading. One of the things that we were trying to write against is the relentless historicism of so many fields where scholars somehow convince themselves if they can only find the right political or social context for something, they'll explain the story. Then that will take the life out of the story. And we're really interested in ways in which narratives exceed their contextual moments.
Julian Yates:
Absolutely. And the the affect way the sort of the affective register in which you experience that frequently, especially when you're working on something like the genesis story from theoretically the beginning until the end of time, is that when one feels overwhelmed by the scope of that narrative, there's something nicely facetious about the notion of grandless reading in the sense of if someone says to you, but your reading is grandless, you can say, thank you for noticing or not periodizing in an automatic sort of way.
Steven Swarbrick:
I'm really fascinated hearing you both talk about the temporality of the project, thinking about possibility as something not just located in the future or in the present, but as something that from a retrospective angle that you can find in the past too. This is a hopeful book, but it does have that backward looking direction to it. And so I'm curious, what are some of the resources for hope that you're finding in both the original arc narrative and some of its later iterations? And what are some of the meaningful connections you found thinking about past and present?
Julian Yates:
First of all, there's always more on an arc than you think there is. I mean, the arc is never merely what it announces. It's so much more than that. Hence, the the presence of unicorns, the presence of devils, the presence of of everything that you can't possibly leave behind or imagine life without. So the the the notion of excess to it, it becomes a structure that kind of proliferates or beyond itself even within its announcement.
Julian Yates:
So to a certain extent, the narrative we we carry around with us in our heads from central casting is the most parsimonious of arc narratives. It's impossible to imagine the arc without stowaways, and that automatically can sort of overwhelms the story. I'm thinking of the moment in Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit where, in other words, the capacity for identifying with all the wrong people. It should never be underestimated as a readerly way of combating a narrative that you, do not find hospitable. So that, the protagonist of oranges are not the only fruit is obsessed with a gorilla, made out of a Brillo pad that always, always goes overboard but is always recovered to the ark.
Julian Yates:
There's always more.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
There's always more, and in that more is hope. One possible reading of Noah making the ark is an act of hopelessness. He's given up on the world. If he can save his family, he'll save his family, and they sail away. But one of the things that Julian and I came back to again and again is even from the very first artistic depiction of an art that we have, it's from the point of view of those who have been left behind, the ones who've been consigned to the space of no hope.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
So why is it that the artists tend to dwell with those who've been excluded rather than the ark itself? Genesis never offers that. There's nobody outside of the ark. There's only Noah and his family. Why is it that artists resolutely stand with those who are about to be drowned?
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
There's hope in that. So we wanted to recover what an expanded idea of refuge could give as far as hope. And then another thing I'll say too is I find extremely tedious the kinds of criticism that are built on negation, on giving up, on lack of hope. I think that that is no at is worse, where you declare there's no future worth salvaging, when you declare that the structures we inhabit at this moment are only good for setting fire to or blowing up because there's just there's nothing redeemable. You give up on a lot of people when you do that, and you give up on their futures for them.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
So what would a frame be in which even a catastrophe can become a utopia? And Rebecca Solnit writes so eloquently on this that sometimes what disaster does is reveal that the preconditions of the disaster were the injustice. And that once things fall apart, there's the possibility of actually creating a kind of utopia where different rules might be imagined. So that that's where we get at the mixture of past and future that can lead to hope. And we don't mean hope in a way that's deceptive.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
We don't mean hope in a way that leads people on. We don't need, like, Lauren Berlant's idea of cruel optimism. We're not trying to sell people on a vision of a thing to come. Rather, it's a hope that's imbued in every day.
Julian Yates:
Hope's not an achievable end or a commodity or a product or a place you get to. Hope is a process, and and it's a process largely of of inquiry, of questioning, of asking difficult questions. I mean, are you satisfied with the arc that you're building? That that assumption that you don't get to be free of the act of actually making a world, that you actually have to inquire into the consequences of individual acts. So for me, hope is not about ending, it's about a continuity of process, not you don't get to be done.
Julian Yates:
You never get to get to the future. It's about being embedded in a series of questions. So the the genesis is a feasibility study on making something. Oh, don't do that. You saw what happened.
Julian Yates:
Now we've got to work out what they did wrong. So more sort of knower as systems engineer or something. I
Steven Swarbrick:
don't know.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
There's an intimacy between the hope that we're trying to imagine and even the educational project of universities and other institutions. And it's trying to figure a way where humanities matter moving forward and how to make a more accessible world to many rather than to shut things down and keep it excluded, elite, or for the few.
Steven Swarbrick:
As I read the book, the words that kept coming to mind were tension and and contradiction as being key to the kind of hope that you're envisioning. Whatever hope or activism or futures we imagine have to come from the tension between, as you were saying, Jeffrey, earlier, between both this idea of utopia that's imagined within the story, but also this persistent negation that, as you vividly describe, is just built into the architecture itself. It has borders. It has walls. And in your chapters, you go into great detail about the kind of structural divisions that go into how it's imagined still today in the in the kind of arc revivals.
Steven Swarbrick:
But I found really powerful that you aren't ending with exclusion and negation, but using this as a starting point for thinking about what new features for the humanities and for the environment can be derived from this story. And to that end, still thinking within the frame of how this book fits within the broader context of environmental studies, and I was thinking about the arc as a figure in relationship to other prevalent figures like the Cyborg or a companion species. I'm thinking of Donna Haraway's work or the many kind of metaphors of enmeshment and entanglement that we often find that I have used and some of us have used in our own work in the past and so forth. And I'm wondering if with the arc, if you were actively trying to think beyond some of the tropes, some of the habits of thought, dominate in the field currently, and if you were able to see a way outside of those frameworks in this book.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
I don't know that there is an outside of the frameworks, but I will say that the arc as we imagined it would not have been possible without writers and thinkers like Donna Haraway and Miss Singh. You you name it. All all there are theorists of entanglement and especially those who work with a feminist anti racist project behind them were essential to trying to think through what the possibilities are here. And a lot of their work was really useful for exploring what happens in our space and what happens outside of it. I suppose and, Julian, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I think one of the things that surprised us is the arc, if it's a metaphor, is a metaphor with a lot of matter behind it.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
It keeps interjecting into our world. It keeps doing things. It might be made of thought, but it keeps materializing itself in ways that can be either destructive or productive depending on how you think about it. And the theorists that we read, the literature that's behind it, the creative thinking that helped us to imagine what an art can and cannot do really gave us a lot of traction for fueling what the possibilities are in the future.
Julian Yates:
I mean, it's interesting. We haven't had that conversation exactly, have we, in the sense that I mean, just sort of thinking about it now. If it's a if it's a metaphor, I'm not sure where it where it's transporting you to, or if it actually ever really arrives. Because one way of thinking about an Arkwright would be that it is really a a vehicle for getting you to a new place such that you think you are beyond something. When in fact, what's largely happened is that the reduced dimensions of the world you've set in motion have somewhat convincingly for the people on board actually simply become the world.
Julian Yates:
And so one of the things that I think is, for me, I think really important about the the arc as a figure is the way that the illusion of an outside as something that is disposed of is always an illusion. It's still there. The latest arc story that I've been watching is Silo, in which they said I'm not quite sure how they're going to manage the plot arc of that in the sense of once we actually discover what everybody knows and that is that the outside is actually just lovely apparently.
Steven Swarbrick:
I mean
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
that's such a spoiler, I'm not that far yet.
Julian Yates:
No, sorry. But what's that story going to do? So one of the things I think that I find constantly sort of different about the the arc as a figure is that it it wants to produce this sort of sense of exact dimensions, but at the same time, if you start to poke on the walls, it turns out they're spongy or someone's in them or, that there's always more there. We didn't consciously plan it as a as a kind of counter tropal figure in the terms that we were reading it like the cyborg or the, or companion species. But I do think that I mean, one of the things I'd say about all of those figures is that they're largely still contested even in the way they're staged.
Julian Yates:
I mean, the cyborg isn't for Haraway. It's an I mean, its trope is irony, and it's fairly neutral. It's contested. I mean, you know, in that wonderful Cyborg Manifesto, it's still very much a where are we on the sidewalk? What future will be imagined?
Julian Yates:
Will it be progressive? Will it be fascistic? Even the companion species. Sort of discourses that or or or readers that wanna turn those into necessarily positive progressive figures sort of you have to sort of forget the fact that, say, a companion species doesn't actually compute within human notions of sociality or community formation even. Your gut bacteria are a companion species with you or you are a companion species to them, you know, and they might have a party when you die.
Julian Yates:
But all of those figures are much less stable, I think, than once they start to get routinized in reading, and that's why I don't feel like we've moved beyond the cyborg. I don't feel like we've moved beyond the companion species or the multis you know, it they're all slightly different ways of staging a description and are fairly neutral, and I think the ark is similar.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
Also, an important and related destiny of the ark is to become the slave ship that applies the middle passage. So it is possible to find yourself on the ark reduced into cargo and to find your body transmuted into biomass and to be sold and have a a destiny that you did not want. And, you know, one of the chapters is about the arc in the African American imagination. What does the arc mean in the aftermath or in the wake, as Sharp calls it, of a nation that's built on the enslavement of a lot of people? What what do you do with that fact?
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
The the blueprint of the arc enabled the building of the slave ship.
Julian Yates:
Yeah. I think that's that should just be said again. Go and say it again.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
The building of the ark well, no. The imagination of the ark enabled building of the slave ship. That's one of its destinies. So it has terrible consequences, but then it also opens up some possibilities too, and we wanna acknowledge both.
Steven Swarbrick:
I think it's really helpful to think of these figures as as contestable figures, including the orc. Arc. And one of the things that I enjoyed so much about this book is that it for me, it really reanimated so much of what we've been talking about in terms of major influential figures like Donna Haraway with the Inco studies and and her massive contributions to the field as well as other techs and thinkers. I think that we need a whole another podcast to talk about TV and film representations of the arc, silo included, maybe once we are all caught up. I wanted to conclude by asking you a little bit about the many visual illustrations in this book.
Steven Swarbrick:
It's a it's a beautiful book, and one of the things that I think readers will be delighted by is that it includes authors' photographs. It includes many illustrations from medieval manuscripts, site specific images as well. I'm curious for each of you, is there a particular image from the book that is illustrative of the power of arc thinking as we have been talking about it, as you write about it?
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
It it is I mean, we we're so lucky in that the University of Minnesota allowed us to include 40 illustrations and many of them in color, and we were truly grateful for that. The one if I had to choose one, the one that really stays with me and helps me to frame the entire project is a medieval one. No. It's William de Braille's his Psalter where he decides he's going to depict something that's not in Genesis, which is all of the bodies layered at the bottom of the ocean as scalding water continues to pour down. And the bodies are so peaceful as piled up in the strata.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
The pitcher is gorgeous. It's the most vivid green. It's got gold leaf to it. Everything about it invites the eye, and then the eye comes and sees the embrace postmortem of the humans, the birds of the air, the animals of the land, everything the ark had to leave behind in order for a small community to be saved. And the fact that William de Braille's in the thirteenth century, he had to choose a limited number of illustrations to make of the flood, chose that moment that's not in Genesis to dwell on.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
Really sticks with me and seems to me an invitation to think about what the story leaves out.
Julian Yates:
And there's no arc in that image?
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
No arc at all.
Julian Yates:
And it is an archive of the dead, of what is theoretically outside the arc, but not outside his imagination. Or, you know, with the production of an image it now exists so the dead are being brought back or are there funding the production of the ark and you see similar things in in very differently timed images across the centuries. I mean I couldn't not sort of also just remark on the fact that if you want to play a game, you know, as you navigate your spaces around you, whether it be in New York or Minneapolis or wherever you are in the world, you know, you can play arc spotting, which I do. And that is and you'll start to sort of see references to Noah's Ark, and sometimes you'll walk into a a convenience store or a a dollar store, and you'll see a little bit of ironic retailing where people juxtapose a a jump into reading level two Noah's Ark book with a level three book of the story of the Titanic. And so one of the things that I really am committed to as a notion is that the Ark story is alive and well and constantly being reread and reenacted and examined and probed and asked hopeful questions all around us.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
So that illustration is one that Julian took in the wilds of retail spaces.
Steven Swarbrick:
I just found it one day.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
Yeah. He found it. He texted it to me. I was just like, that's in the book. It's so perfect that somebody juxtaposed the story of the arc with the story of the Titanic, and there they are sitting together.
Julian Yates:
And, also, it's a scene of reading or would be reading also, which is just absolutely fantastic. It's pedagogical in that, in a very highly uncertain way, in an anonymous way.
Steven Swarbrick:
Well, we began with whiskey, and I think we're gonna end with uncertainty. Jeffrey and Julian, this has been so much fun. Thank you for having this conversation with me today. I I think it's one that, like the arc narrative itself, could keep going. However, we are out of time.
Steven Swarbrick:
Listeners, Noah's archive, it's terrific. Please go out and get yourself a copy. Great seeing you both.
Jeffrey J. Cohen:
Steven, thank you so much.
Julian Yates:
Lovely to see you too. Thank you so much. Take care.