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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:02.544)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Amber Jamila Musser, Professor of English at the City University of New York. And we're talking about her book, Between Shadows and Noise, Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined. She probably should have practiced situatedness. I still messed it up. But Dr. Musser, despite me not being able to say your book, welcome on the show. It's good to have you.
Amber Musser (00:29.166)
Thank you PJ, it is good to be here.
PJ (00:34.48)
So tell me a little bit why this book? What led you to this project?
Amber Musser (00:40.974)
So the book is actually a culmination of my other book. So this is my third one. And as I was writing, I kind of saw it as a trilogy. And so I feel very relieved and happy that the trilogy is done. Though I'm going to keep writing, but you know, different types of things. So my first book is called Sensational Flesh, Race, Power, and Masochism. And there I used masochism as...
a frame for thinking about different ways that people were talking about the feeling of, or their experiences of power. So for example, I talked about, or I looked at...
how France Menon used the word masochism to talk about colonialism and Simone de Beauvoir also used masochism to talk about feminism. And so the book was really ended up being an exploration of the way masochism stood in for thinking about subjectivity, sexuality, and sort of modernity basically and kind of that conglomeration. It wasn't really about masochism exactly per se, but it was like, why do people use this lens? And then from there, the end of that book was really one of the things that
realized was that race and gender kind of really interfere with this framework and make it hard for us to imagine the ways a black women can use or black women don't have access to the same discourse to talk about sexuality. But obviously they experience sexuality. So then I wrote Central Access, Queer Femininity and Brown Jeu Ressence, which looked at different frameworks and by using different works of art.
and different artists to think about expressivity of sexuality for women of color. And so I was like, happy with that. And then I was like, well, you know, it's kind of a slippery framework because a lot of these questions really depend on the perceiver. And so that's where Between Shadows and Noise comes in. And so I became really interested in questions of how do you pick up these kind of like other signals from people? What are different?
Amber Musser (02:48.894)
ways that we learn through the body. What are the ethics of being open to things that you don't understand? So that's kind of like where I ended up, right? So it's sort of far from where it started, but to me, it's still connected.
PJ (03:07.184)
There's a path tracing through there.
Amber Musser (03:08.939)
Yeah. Yeah.
PJ (03:11.472)
So, and forgive me, you know, I didn't go back through the other two books. When you talk about masochism, are we generally in the area of like, as you were talking about how it was applied and how this lens was applied, are we talking a little bit about like the internalizing of these oppressive frameworks?
Amber Musser (03:31.629)
Well, that was what was, so my background is in history of science, which I guess is probably where I should have started. So I've become very interested in how knowledge is transmitted and kind of the way it can mean different things to different people. So I was really strict about using the word masochism.
PJ (03:40.24)
No, no worries.
Amber Musser (03:56.429)
But a lot of what I was doing was fleshing out the different ways that people were using it. So it wasn't really necessarily about keeping like, masochism will always mean internalizing these thoughts about wanting to be dominated or wanting to experience pain or have to do with BDSM. But I was really interested in why people would use that word, given that, you know, it obviously has like a rich history in
both erotica and in psychiatry. So for me it was really that kind of mystery about what are they trying to say when they're using this word. So sometimes it comes up in things that you might call contextual and sometimes it feels, at least to me, like very... I was very...
surprised that France -Banon used the word masochism and he's using it not actually in the way that you would expect. He's not calling people who are colonized masochists, but he is calling people who colonize others masochists. Right, so it's like conventionally we would think about that. I mean if we were going to use one of those terms we would think like sadism.
But he was using the framework of masochism because he was arguing that they were feeling, it was their internalized guilt that made them act violently against others. But it was stemming from this idea, I know, it's a very convoluted thing, but.
PJ (05:30.96)
No, that makes... I am tracking with you. I just would not... That's why I asked, because I was like, no, no, it's the other way, which is always fun to discover that. So kind of what you're doing, is there anything connected to kind of like the genealogical method? Are you kind of mapping out like the linguistic semantic territory, the historical territory of a word?
Amber Musser (05:56.91)
I mean, what my real interest is is in sensation. And so thinking about the ways. So I mean, I am interested in the genealogical method, but I'm interested, I guess, in kind of like its breadth at every point. And.
there are certain words, like maschism is one of them, that I think just like can mean so many different things. So they're like denser with this possibility and denser with like these somatic attachments. Yeah, so one of the examples, so for me, part of it was not just kind of being like, okay, people use maschism differently. It was also aggregating those differences into.
PJ (06:25.36)
Yes.
Amber Musser (06:43.278)
kind of containers to be like, okay, so the way Fanon is talking about maschism is actually very similar to the way that...
anti -porn lesbian feminists are writing about masochism in the 1970s, and both of those depend on a binary view of power, where it's something that someone has and someone else does not, that it can't really be shared. And for me, that was a lot about the sensation of voyeurism and kind of like, so that was kind of a longer way of thinking about, okay, they're both using masochism, that puts me put them in conversation, and then I can use that to think about like what bodily feeling.
they're trying to get at by using masochism, right? Because it's like a theory of power, but it's also a theory of being in one's body.
PJ (07:30.32)
Hence the sensation which actually takes us to the third book if I'm not mistaken. So where does the name between shadows and noise come from?
Amber Musser (07:41.068)
So that was actually a lot of where the project started. I found it a very evocative phrase, and largely because it is, right? Largely because they, for me, they're both so difficult to fix, right? They both have such shifting meanings. And so I was really interested in...
PJ (07:48.912)
It is.
Amber Musser (08:03.468)
trying to, and this is sort of going back to like this question of perception, right? So the idea of like what constitutes noise really depends on where you are sitting and what you're thinking about, you know, what your value system is, right? Like what makes you comfortable? What makes you uncomfortable? Do you want the noise to resolve into something that feels legible? Are you okay with just like having the noise exist? And then shadow kind of has a different set of connotations.
where it is also shifting. But there we tend to think about shadows in relation to that which has been kind of like, well, is less exposed to light, right? So that which has either been repressed or less consciously not visible, but sort of something that can make other things possible is generally like part of the system.
but it's undervalued. So there the question is less about legibility and much more about value. So for me, these kinds of two systems and thinking about them together, which is kind of why I get the between, was really about that type of openness to the unknown that I was trying to get at in the project.
PJ (09:21.072)
And forgive the maybe even a reference to internet culture here, but like when we talk about shadows, we're talking about kind of like that lurking, right? Is that a yes? Like.
Amber Musser (09:29.675)
Yes. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's what I like about, I mean, you know, it's like they have lots of different things.
PJ (09:39.216)
Yes, yes. And then even as you're talking about the different scene like noise and something that would be more legible, you can tell a lot about how people feel. Like, for instance, if they go to a soccer or football game, depending where you are, if someone says the roar of the crowd versus the noise of the crowd, like someone who says the noise of the crowd is not watching the game and would much rather be at home.
Like, someone says the roar of the crowd is excited to be there. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. OK.
Amber Musser (10:09.899)
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, and it's kind of one of those things because it's like sometimes you get projects where people are like excited about noise but want to reclaim it and be like, but there's something valuable in that like, and this isn't quite about that, right? It's not necessarily being like everything that we think is noisy, we need to like see in a different light. It's more just sticking with that, like, you know, what do you do when you want to repel?
PJ (10:44.752)
Yeah, so I see you kind of go through different works here, starting with us, which I have not seen. So you'll have to I know, I know. I did the to be honest, I think I've watched maybe one adult movie in the last in the last like year, maybe two in the last two years. So there's been a lot of reading, but not a lot of watching. So it is not a.
Amber Musser (11:03.117)
No.
PJ (11:12.432)
I loved Get Out, right? I did the popular thing and that came out before I had more children. So, that's just... Anyways, that's a whole other discussion. So I've always loved Jordan Peele's work. So why this movie and why this for chapter one?
Amber Musser (11:35.437)
I know those are good questions. I guess we should perhaps, I think part of why you're asking that is that one of the underlying themes of the book itself is it's not only interested in thinking about what constitutes shadows and what constitutes noise.
But because of that framework of situatedness and really thinking about like where, how, where we are and where we come from, like influences what we're, how we are perceiving things. A lot of the archive of the book is drawn through my own interest in finding the Caribbean in these other works of art, right? So the works of art themselves are not like necessarily from the Caribbean and it's not a book about the Caribbean, but it was a lot of it is me tracing.
saying like, I see a little bit of the Caribbean there. And us in that way is like super weird, because it is even though you haven't seen it, I'm sure you already are aware that it is not about the Caribbean. It is not does not really have links there. So in that way, it was.
It sort of either had to go first or last, you know, because it was an outlier in that kind of way. But I picked it because I really just couldn't stop thinking about it. I don't even know if I want to say that I like love it. It's not like I'm like, this is the most amazing movie I've ever seen in my life. But I think that there is a lot of really interesting work that Peale has kind of uncovered in relation to the way black femininity functions in
popular culture, which is to say that I think Peele has constructed black female protagonists that generate a lot of anxiety. And so for me, it was really interesting to see that movie and unpack some of the ways that he makes the audience feel that, right? And that a lot of what's fascinating to me about the movie, and I will not spoil things for you, but it doesn't get resolved. Like, you know, you have like, like get out, like sort of ends very triumphantly, but us, like you just sort of leave and you're like,
Amber Musser (13:41.055)
I'm not totally sure what to do. So that was kind of like one of the reasons why I was really drawn to the project itself. It also speaks a lot, one of the other currents that I'm interested in is the relationship between blackness and empire. And so it speaks very...
I wouldn't say directly, directly to that, but it has like oblique lines towards those forms of connection, which were good for me to set up the rest of the project. And then I guess like pragmatically, there were definitely places, because a lot of the book treats shadows and noise as kind of, I don't want to say metaphors, but not necessarily as actual.
the actual materiality of shadows and noise and the ways that we tend to think about them. But this actually does. There is a lot of noise. Like the sonic is like a really important framework for thinking about the project. And then also the the doppelgangers, at least I know, at least you know that, like the doppelgangers. Yeah, like they refer to themselves as shadow. So and there frequently are lots of shadows. So it gave me like also a very a way to start with the most concrete.
PJ (14:44.912)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Amber Musser (14:55.008)
and then kind of build my arguments and then move through the rest of the book.
PJ (15:01.456)
Yeah, that makes total sense. Yeah, I mean, and just as a personal note, I'm also, I don't enjoy horror movies either. So that's, like even as you're out, I'm like remembering the trailer and I'm like, yeah. I know it's probably a source of disappointment to some people, but I'm like, I'm not gonna watch it. That's gonna end.
Amber Musser (15:22.382)
I know. I mean, it's sometimes, you know, it's funny. For whatever reason, that's actually been the chapter that I talk the most about with this book, which is odd because in some ways it's like the least representative and it produces, it's interesting because it kind of, even just talking about it, it acts a lot of my argument.
about it, which is that people get like very uncomfortable. Like it transmits a lot of people are like, I hate horror. I don't know. I like, why are you going to make me watch this? Like, I'm like, you don't have to. I mean, you really don't have to watch it. You can still, I think, read and enjoy the arguments. It's because it's not I mean, it's it's an analysis of the film, but the stakes are sort of beyond the film. But yeah, it's yeah.
PJ (16:02.992)
Right. Right.
Right, right.
PJ (16:09.744)
Yeah, no, that's my brother loves horror. I'm sure he's seen it. He's a big film buff. And yeah, that's sorry that I don't know. I got into that personal side of it. I was like, I was just remembering as you were talking about like the doppelgangers in the shadows, I was like, yeah, that would definitely I'd be sitting there. I'm like, I'm 35 years old and I'm in my bed and I am definitely not scared. Definitely not. You know, like, anyway.
Amber Musser (16:19.726)
No, it does.
Amber Musser (16:35.472)
I mean, it's also, you know, it's like now I've watched that movie like eight times. You know, I've watched it so many times. But I think what's fascinating about it, and this is kind of like part of, you know, why I find it another object is like the trailer gives away the whole plot. Like nothing different. I mean, obviously the movie is much longer than the trailer, but like nothing different, different happens, right? Like, I mean, yes, there is information that gets revealed, but like,
PJ (16:40.688)
Right.
PJ (16:57.136)
Yes.
Amber Musser (17:04.272)
The premise is right there and the premise is like a very large part of the movie. But that's what makes it really interesting to think about like the way Peel has produced, well Peel and the actors have like produced this feeling, well using shadows and noise that like really make you feel this threat of black femininity. And like the specific, she's like a threat in the house, she's a threat from outside the house.
She is like either a socialist or she's, you know, this like imperial force. Like there's a lot of different things going on. And then what you also see in the trailer, which is kind of what became extremely fascinating to me is like that there's that young girl who keeps appearing. She sort of like sets off the narratively sets off the action for the whole the whole plot. But throughout the film, she like appears and appears and appears. So that also made me think a lot about kind of
what the cultural work of a young black girl is doing when she interrupts in that way, right? Because it's not, we don't quite see her like grow up. We just sort of see her and connect her to these adults. And so it's kind of like what is going on. So I found her like very, very fascinating. There was an original version of this where I was actually just going to talk about her in relation to the artist Betty Saar has this famous.
assemblage that's called Black Girl at the Window. And it's from 1969. And it's, SAR has really invested in tarot and esoteric knowledge and things like that. And so it's just this silhouette of this black girl with these different tarot cards and different things that have meaning for SAR. but that I was really drawn to like the parallel between like, they're both such opaque figures and just kind of being like, well, what is like, what are we trying to do with, with this black girl, you know?
PJ (19:05.456)
I probably should have started with this, but I did want to ask about what is sensation, situatedness. I listen to you say it, I've been practicing it here, I don't know, you know what, it's situatedness. No, still not. Okay, and the undisciplined. Okay, anyways. Where did those three terms come from?
Amber Musser (19:12.275)
Hehehehehe hehehe he
Yeah.
Amber Musser (19:26.834)
So sensation is definitely one that I've been working with through all of my writing, right? It's kind of like the thing that I'm most interested, I mean, well, that's a big claim. It's what I'm most excited about, especially for me, it's connected to the history of science and really thinking about the way our bodies contain knowledge and allow us to share knowledge. And for me, it's really thinking a lot about the ways that sensation contains all of that and gives us...
PJ (19:31.28)
Yes.
Amber Musser (19:56.69)
It's tricky because it presents like a writing challenge and just like an articulation challenge, like how do you talk about sensation? But I do want us to sort of try to get at that kind of knowledge and really acknowledge that it is there and present and as important as the verbal knowledge that we sort of more generally prioritize. And then.
situatedness is for me that's really coming from a long lineage of black feminism, which you know, I'm thinking a lot with theory in the flesh, which was coined by Gloria Alzandua and Sherry Moraga in this bridge called My Back, which is an anthology of women of color writing. But a lot of what they do there is sort of, you know, really get at the ways that what we know.
is about where we are. It's not quite about like the identities that we inhabit exactly, but it's just sort of that, you know, our experiences in the world have led us to these particular perspectives. And so we need, we can learn from each other from these perspectives. So for me, that, that kind of ethical imperative of situatedness and that acknowledgement that difference is a part of all of us and difference is something that we need to prioritize is like a big part of kind of the like why.
of this project, right, to sort of prioritize difference, which also means that even though I'm providing my own readings of different works of art, the goal is not to be like, this is the definitive reading of us or anything else, as much as to be like, this is my reading, you can have your reading. And the goal really is to just have a bunch of different readings and to sort of enlarge through difference what all of these things can mean rather than kind of like winnow down into just one thing.
And that brings me to the undisciplined, which I'm seeing as a lot of the ways that we've sort of general, we have been trained is, I see it a lot as the disciplining of the senses. It's kind of like, what are the things that matter? Like the visual has been given a lot of priority. The linguistic has been giving a lot of priority. So these kinds of things tend to dominate when we're looking at, when we are in front of something.
Amber Musser (22:15.154)
they organize our interpretation of them and they organize what we think of as being valuable. And so part of this project of thinking with the bodies that we all bring to things and the differences that those bodies contain is to work towards undisciplining and kind of allowing us to really sit in the unruliness that each of us can unlock within these different works of objects. And sort of like more generally, just sort of to open up to think about like, well, what are the different possible modes of...
of being and thinking with this material and just being and thinking in general.
PJ (22:51.248)
Is that intentionally ambiguous, the discipline, undisciplined, the idea of like there's a subject matter that is a discipline, but there's also, it takes discipline to, is it covering all that semantic range or is there one or the other that you prioritize?
Amber Musser (23:08.755)
Yeah, I mean, it is, unfortunately, it is trying to cover all of it. I mean, a lot of it. Yeah, I mean, I think some of it is. I know it's sort of like, yes, it's yes. But some of it is also connected to my interest in thinking about empire, right. And sort of like the long tale of empire in this project, largely because the ways that we've been given to prioritize different forms of knowledge.
PJ (23:15.536)
No, that's I like I love that kind of work. No, that's great. It's just to be clear. I'm not.
Amber Musser (23:37.586)
are related to these processes of colonialization, which tell us like, you know, lines need to look like this, categories look like this, this looks like that, like all of those things are part of that. And so the undisciplining is in some ways not exactly, it's not equivalent to decolonization, but it is related to that mode of trying to like move outside those strict lines. But that's also sort of like why it's ambiguous, because it's not just like one particular discipline is like worse.
than or better than any other, it's just sort of like the general project of organizing knowledge. I know, I say as I wrote a book.
PJ (24:16.048)
Yeah, I think of that kind of, yeah, well, I think, I mean, I personally, I mean, that's part of the interdisciplinary side of things. A lot of my own work is on how philosophy and art interact. So this idea of polysemy in the use of undisciplined, I think is really cool. So don't apologize to me. Maybe there's someone else who takes issue with that, but I think that I really love that you did that.
This is just a, you know, nevermind. I need to stop doing this. I'm looking up how to say situation -ness. I can't, I don't even know what's wrong with my brain. I can't do it. Okay, I need to let that go and not be insecure. And you know what, sometimes, now I know how Benedict Cumberbatch feels when he says he can't say penguin. So, you know, this is the way that works. All right. It's okay. So, I.
Amber Musser (24:49.809)
Anyway.
Amber Musser (25:01.297)
They're just, yeah.
PJ (25:11.856)
As we talk about kind of, can you talk about what shango is and what is a spectacle of the spirit? This is chapter two for our audience. I realize I just kind of like, you're like, what? I'm like, we are following the structure of the book and I am just letting go of the arrogance that I can pronounce things and that's okay. So.
Amber Musser (25:20.656)
Yes, yes.
Amber Musser (25:31.825)
I mean, do you want me to give like a brief overview of all the objects and then go back to Shango? Or would you prefer to just start with go right into Shango?
PJ (25:42.96)
you can if you want to go over the objects, that's fine.
Amber Musser (25:46.545)
Okay, so the first chapter is us, and the first chapter ends with me meditating on the image, kind of in my mind's eye, of my mother as a young girl in the Caribbean, in St. Vincent. And then the second chapter sort of leads us more directly into the Caribbean with Shango, which is a dance piece that was choreographed by Catherine Dunham in the 40s.
And Dunham was a dancer and an anthropologist and also became indoctrinated into the voodoo tradition. And so Dunham based Shango on a version of a Shango, which is a Trinidadian religion, ritual. But the
Originally, the piece was performed as part of a like the last, I think the last, it's like, what is that called? The last number in a Broadway play that Dunham did. And it was kind of like interrupting the narrative, but sort of doing its own thing. And then later, Dunham performed it in repertoire with her dancers all across the world. So Shango is interesting because they're like full recordings of it do not exist.
So I was writing about this object that I have only seen tiny clip of one part of. I know the Ailey company has has done it since, but I have not seen that, nor have I seen. I kind of didn't want to see their recording because that was sort of not quite the point. But what I became really interested in was because Dunham became a voodoo initiates, so sort of new. So at the time that she was.
choreographing and conducting her anthropological research. She was not as involved in voodoo as she would become. But this means that the dance piece for me is like very, very slippery because it's a depiction of a ritual, but also done by someone who knows something about the ritual, but therefore has incentive to kind of cloak what is going on.
Amber Musser (28:06.387)
And then because it's being performed for predominantly white audiences who are seeing Dunham, which is to say like not outside of the circuit of people who would be at a voodoo ceremony more generally, that charge of sort of like that spectacleness has this like extra thing. So on the one hand, we can sense that like Dunham is making it more exotic for these audiences because that's what they want.
PJ (28:31.376)
Mm.
Amber Musser (28:32.979)
but also not presenting necessarily everything about what could be going on to preserve her own relationship or her own idea of authenticity around these particular rituals, right? So there's a lot of, so I became very interested in kind of like, what exactly, how can we locate authenticity in what Dunham is doing? Not that we,
not that the answer is that we have to and that there is one specific site of authenticity, but just that, you know, in some ways that was kind of like Dunham's desire as an anthropologist is to find authenticity. But then there's sort of like these layers of spectacle because of being a choreographer and a performer. And then there are also layers of spectacle to being someone who's on the inner circle of a religion who's sort of
not really supposed to be exposing that much about their religion elsewhere. And voodoo itself is notoriously impervious to representation. And so then there, as I was uncovering more into this and getting lost in the like, my God, is this, what is this, what's happening here? People were also arguing, Dunham has a memoir that's about her experiences with voodoo. And there she is like, I went to the ceremony and I didn't feel anything.
And then people are sort of like, well, did she or did she not? Maybe she thought that it was going to look a certain way, but it didn't. So she actually did experience it, but didn't know that she did because there's its own, I know there's like its own spectacle of spirit. So I got, yeah. So that's kind of like these circuits of just sort of like expectation versus like what that.
PJ (30:11.376)
Yeah.
Amber Musser (30:18.61)
That was part of what I was trying to get at. And then ultimately a lot of what I was thinking, you know, I was reading other things about people talking about other representations of voodoo ritual, not necessarily shango. And they were sort of saying, well, if you know, you know, you know, you can say it's a representation, but if you're really in it and your spirit feels called, it is authentic. So that totally, you know, upended the whole thing. But I was really interested in kind of the what is what can be made.
visible, what might it mean to feel that calling? What, you know, like those sorts of tensions that for me really reside like very deeply in the body. And I think Dunham herself is like a fascinating person around, you know, she herself grew up in Illinois with a French Canadian mother and an American father. And so, you know, it's very associated with Haiti, but it's not from, from there. And so just sort of like that.
PJ (31:14.896)
Right.
Amber Musser (31:15.857)
tension between insider and outsider and what does that mean in this context and sort of, you know, what is the role of spirit were all kinds of questions that I was I was interested in.
PJ (31:27.44)
Yeah, absolutely. Forgive me, around what time did Shango come out? Like what year? Or rough what? Well, I mean, what decade? Are we talking like seven? Late 40s? Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, and that definitely was gonna give us very different, a very different kind of spectacle than if it was out in the 70s, if it was out in the 80s, 90s, if it was out today.
Amber Musser (31:33.65)
in I know I was like I need to look at the book late late late 40s no no no yeah yeah
PJ (31:56.968)
Yeah, I mean, of course there's going to be this pressure to exoticize it, right? And that's really... Go ahead.
Amber Musser (31:59.538)
Yeah.
Amber Musser (32:05.17)
Yeah, well, yeah. I was gonna say, I mean, and like in that specific context of like Jim Crow America, right? The status of black people who were not from America was like much more exoticized and eroticized than black people from America, right? So there were like lots of different layers about like who the spectacle is appealing toward. And at that same time, I...
the US is actually like very involved in, it has a military base in Trinidad, right? So there are these like other Imperial connections that are not necessarily, again, super explicit, but are I think part of that story. And within Trinidad, there's a whole, I don't want to say anxiety, but there, well, yeah, anxiety about black female sexuality being, I don't want to say corrupted, but basically like the soldiers taking the Trinidadian women.
And so a lot of what Dunham's show was trying to do is to be like black female sexuality. But people were like, no, this is not. We are not happy with that. So it's a very there's like lots of different kinds of things happening.
PJ (33:19.664)
Yeah, and as you're coming at it from a history of science background, it seems like it's important that Dunham was also an anthropologist, right? Like she is passing on a form of knowledge through art, but there is a scientific bent to that, that she is doing an anthropologist's work. Is that?
part of the reason why that's so fascinating to you and so important in this book.
Amber Musser (33:49.362)
Yes, yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, exactly. It's just sort of, you know, that she's I mean, she's existing at a lot of the tensions that I'm interested in exploring. She's sort of like wanting to make this embodied knowledge rational. And, you know, like you can read her her notes and you can read like some of things have been published where she's really talking about these rituals. But then there's the tension between that and then her as a participant. And so there's that kind of question about sort of like what does
you know, how involved you get, like when you get involved, like what does that do to the knowledge? Like what kind of, you know, what is the end result? And I mean, I think it's very telling that even though she does have a degree in anthropology, she obviously went forward more in dance, right? And then at some point was just, you know, she didn't, she didn't complete her master's thesis, I don't believe. And so what she, I mean, she did all the research for it, but she didn't write it up.
PJ (34:43.408)
okay.
Amber Musser (34:48.657)
but still persisted in performing and translating the knowledge that way.
PJ (34:56.048)
It's a little bit of a leap, but there's some similarities. I just interviewed Dr. Adri Cousero. I don't know if you know that name. And so she is an anthropologist and an ethnographer who works with trauma, specifically like political asylum seekers. But she wrote her book Trauma Mantras as prose poems. Because she found...
Amber Musser (35:22.769)
PJ (35:25.972)
that the scientific kind of language could not capture what was really going on. And that actually leads me to my next question to you, which is, what do you see as valuable about the personal in this kind of academic work? Because you put a lot of yourself in here, right? And so you feel like that's important. Why is that important?
Amber Musser (35:46.417)
Yeah.
Amber Musser (35:50.386)
I mean, it's sort of twofold. I mean, one, it felt like there was no way that I could really make an argument about the importance of situatedness and sort of like who and where one is and comes from without putting myself in there as well.
You know, because then it just becomes very, I mean, as I just sort of demonstrating, it just becomes abstract, like very quickly and sort of loses. You're like, well, what does that mean? Who cares? Right. It's sort of it is important to the story that the reader know that my mother is from the Caribbean. Right. Otherwise, it just sort of becomes like this is a very weird archive. Like, why did you do this? Why are you noticing this? I will say that it's it was a very tricky balance because I.
wanted to have that information there to help the book cohere and to sort of reinforce my argument that what I was seeing, because I think it becomes clearer like, okay, you can see like, I know this about her, this makes sense to me that she's seeing this and balancing it with the like, it's not an autobiography, right? Like there's personal information, but it's not, there's not really like,
they're not many events. It's not about like, and this is how I became who I am or this, you know, this type of thing. And so it was very tricky to kind of balance that out because I think people get very people are very seduced by fine by voyeurism and like really want to know like, here's somebody telling me about their life. Like, I wonder what happens like, you know, becomes so trying to find put it in in a way that it didn't overwhelm the.
academic arguments that I wanted to make was also like a really tricky thing. So it's, it's more like there's a lot in the very beginning in the introduction where I'm sort of like, this is, you know, where I come from. And there's a lot in the conclusion. But the rest of it, it's kind of just like, more little snippets to kind of help give context, but especially deep context, not only to the situatedness, but also to the sensations, right? Because a lot of the time, like the Dunham chapter,
Amber Musser (38:02.642)
I haven't really mentioned it yet, but so in addition to being about spirituality, the bodily orientation that I'm thinking about is about fascia. And so there was kind of like no real way to talk about, you know, the experience of like the knots in my fascia without talking about the knots in my fascia and without sort of giving some kind of qualitative like, yes, I experienced them in this way. And these are the emotions that come with that and that.
But that's not like a long, dre history of things. It's not like when I was four, I had this and then, but it's just enough to sort of give some to anchor the project in the body as well. But there was, you know, there is that tension with like not wanting people to be like, my God, and then what? What happened? Yeah.
PJ (38:53.424)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, no, no, I'm making a point. Can you stop asking me about my medical history now? That was just to illustrate, yeah. So the first point, the first thing that you're talking about with that is the response to situatedness. I think I might have actually said it right that time. And so the second one.
Amber Musser (39:01.104)
Yeah.
Amber Musser (39:11.952)
Yeah, yeah, I think you do, yeah.
PJ (39:17.808)
Was the second thing that you're talking about is that you were trying to avoid voyeurism or is there, did I miss the second, the second reason why?
Amber Musser (39:24.08)
Well, the second is also just that it's really hard to talk about sensation in the abstract without going to like the, you know, like actually giving bodily examples.
PJ (39:38.608)
So there has to be some kind of, are we in the realm generally of phenomenology? You have to have some kind of first -person account when you're talking about sensation. I understand there's specific ways you do phenomenology, but this idea of the first -person structure, if that.
Amber Musser (39:48.624)
Yeah, yeah. I mean it's tricky, yeah.
Amber Musser (40:00.303)
Yes, yeah. Well, to give, you know, because a lot of what I want to emphasize is, you know, the way bodies know. And if part of what I'm arguing is that like bodies transmit information in the way that you feel, right, like both sensation through sensation and through emotion, there's no real way to do that to sort of be like, I'm in front of I can't just say like, I'm in front of this object.
And I have feelings. That would be so... I don't think that would work. That wouldn't be very satisfying. So I had to really kind of describe and then also excavate a little bit around the feelings that I was having. Yeah.
PJ (40:28.784)
Yeah.
PJ (40:48.56)
I've read stuff like that where it's like I had feeling one and then feeling one came through these kinds of and it's like, can you just tell me like I can't envision what you're talking about, please? It's interesting how this dovetails with a lot of my own work in philosophical hermeneutics as we talk about the way I was just.
recently reading Charles Taylor, he's talking about Pierre Bordeaux and the way that knowledge is carried in the body. And I was talking to a friend of mine who I was trying to make a point about something and he was a very good baseball player. And I was like, you understand that if you go up to hit a baseball, the knowledge is in your hands. And you know this because if you try to teach someone how to hit a baseball, you'd have to stop and think about what is in your hands. The language isn't there, it's in and...
Amber Musser (41:40.59)
Mm -hmm.
PJ (41:41.648)
And that's kind of that, I think Bordeaux has that whole book, The Logic of Practice. Does he show up kind of, is he like, would he be alongside your work? Does that?
Amber Musser (41:54.735)
Yeah, I mean, that's actually a really great interlocutor. Yeah, I mean, he specifically does not show up. But that's partially, it's kind of complicated, partially because it was, because of like the political framing that I'm going for. But absolutely, what he's saying about Happy To is like very similar to what I'm saying about situatedness.
PJ (42:04.016)
right right right right
Amber Musser (42:24.206)
I think I'm trying to not just sort of, well, I mean, I think he's sort of more interested in like broadening out and kind of being like, all of these people will then produce the same kinds, you know, will like have similar like reach for this. I mean, I feel like I literally showed up once to something with a friend of mine from grad school and we were wearing the same very niche outfit.
And I was like, this is wild. But it was exactly that. I mean, I was like, yes. And so I think, I guess, in distinguishing what I'm doing, because that's definitely very, very related, but it's less about trying to trace what the commonalities might be and more, I guess, trying to see what the vectors of connection given that might be. So it's less about like,
PJ (42:52.784)
Yes, yes.
Amber Musser (43:22.031)
how all the people I went to grad school with might have, or not all, but you know, certain ones of them and I might have things in common and more just sort of like, okay, I have had this experience so that when I see this work of art, this can be a point of connection for me, right? Or like, because I've had this experience, my, I mean, and so for me, the history of science part also comes in in terms of like, I've had this experience, this means that my view,
of the world, right? Like during the pandemic, I took a lot of herbalism classes, I don't know, because I was like Zoom and making this an option. And so I was like, you know, yeah. And so I was like, well, because of that, when I see like the tamarind in the Titus Kaffar sculpture, I'm really interested in like what healing properties it has.
PJ (43:59.856)
Everyone picked up a hobby during the pandemic. Yeah, that's sorry, go ahead. Yeah.
Amber Musser (44:16.078)
Right? So it's not just like, but somebody else who doesn't have that particular, you know, or I'm also drawn to the tamarin because my mother is from the Caribbean. Right. So like those things are going to influence like what that work of what jumps out at me, like what I'm sensing and then also how I'm interpreting it. Right. And so that's why it's kind of it's like related, but different from the from habitus.
PJ (44:44.24)
Yeah, please, that was not intended in any way to be a critique. This is me trying to put your work in a, if we think of these as constellations, where does your work fit in the sky? Obviously, it's very different.
Amber Musser (44:46.51)
No!
Amber Musser (44:55.183)
Yeah, no, I think that was a great. No, well, and I mean, I would say like in that way, I mean, I am actually very influenced by French philosophy. So I think like the Bourdieu makes a lot of sense. I do talk a little bit about Jacques Rancière in the thing, partially because, you know, related to Habitus, like he has all of that work on the disciplining of the senses and like the senses communists and like that part of the task of education is to be like.
we are all paying attention to the same things, which we can see how that, I'm not gonna say that that feeds into the have -gotoos, but how it's also alongside in these particular ways. And then we even have the Foucault and genealogy also is akin to kind of, which is to say these are all questions about the relationship between epistemology and ontology. And I think we're just sort of articulating them.
to different ends, to slightly different ends, but I think I would put as, I can see that as like the common thread.
PJ (46:01.232)
Yeah, I'm not gonna lie. I was a little bit, this happens to me a lot in this show, but I was rebuked because I have Rancie on my shelf, but I have not read him yet. So I saw it and I was like, dang it. I knew I needed to read that. Too late, okay. But, and I'm fine with this, that we're not gonna be able to get through all your book because that's why people should go and read your excellent book, right? But I would like to talk about, because I love cooking.
Talk to me about tamarind and the uses of tamarind. I actually just made a, and we won't talk about the, I say this as naively as possible, following a recipe on YouTube, a Sri Lankan fish curry. Like I realized that that's very, that feels very colonizing, like just randomly, yeah. But, and it was fun. It was fun to, like, I mean, had to dig through the grocery store to find tamarind paste. Like, that's not something, like you have to go hunting for that, right?
Amber Musser (46:30.542)
yes.
Amber Musser (46:44.654)
Ooh. You know what?
PJ (46:59.664)
I'm in central Florida, it's publics, right? It's not like, anyways. But, so what are the uses of tamarind and how, yeah.
Amber Musser (47:11.213)
Yeah, I love that you did that partially because it echoes my own experience of cooking with tamarind, which is also mediated through a screen, but like Zoom call, not YouTube. And I similarly was like, I don't know where I'm gonna find it, but I did. It worked out, but so as I was saying, right? So I became really interested in this Titus Kafar sculpture.
PJ (47:22.032)
Yes. Right. Right.
PJ (47:29.584)
Yeah.
I tried!
Amber Musser (47:40.686)
which he describes as the bust of George Washington on its side, on a slab of marble. It's a very distorted bust, but inside there's rum, lime, tamarind, and molasses, quart. And the sculpture is called A Pillow for Fragile Fictions. I was like, this is so fascinating. There's sort of a straightforward reading, which puts it in conversation with...
because we know it's a bust of George Washington with this enslaved man named Tom that Washington exchanged for those quantities. So that was like one place to go. And I was like, you know, cool. But as I was saying before, right, I was really intrigued by the presence of tamarind, partially because for as long as I could remember, my mother has been like, my favorite candies are tamarind balls. I love them. And I was like, okay. I had always been like, I don't know about this.
you know, it was a little, it was just like a little too tart for me. And then, but I was still thinking with this tamarind and then another pandemic hobby on zoom was this friend of mine did cooking classes for us and so she is Pakistani, but she cooks like a lot of different South Asian cuisine. And so one of the dishes was this Burmese curry and that was the first time that we used tamarind and I was just like,
PJ (48:47.184)
Yes.
PJ (48:51.376)
okay.
Amber Musser (49:05.744)
my God, I know. Like now I understand what this flavor is. And I could. So it was very cool to see like, like feel in my body like, OK, this is when you add the tamarind. This is what it does because I tasted it before I tasted it after. I was like, OK, I know this. And to put that in conversation, because, as I said, like at the same time, I was doing these pandemic herbalism classes and to put that in conversation to be like, that is such a complex.
flavor, but like it must be doing there must be some like, you know, herbal mechanism that's also happening. And I became really interested in teasing out the possibility. Like, I don't think tamarind is not it's not like the most pertinent herbal remedy. Like, I'm not going to say like, go out and everybody have tamarind and you're going to feel great. I mean, it tastes good, but it's not like that. But it led me down this kind of way to think about.
the possibilities of people using this tamarind in food during the time of enslavement, because it's grown in a lot of tropical countries alongside sugar cane, right? And contrasting the way sugar is linked with so much death and speed and modernity and all of these things. And tamarind, which is like a much smaller crop, is like a flavoring agent, but also can stimulate ideas of, or can stimulate digestion.
because it is like a little bitter. That's what I'm saying. It's not if you really want to simulate digestion and have like daffodil leaves, but not like not tamarind. But it led me into really this kind of, I would say, imaginary place of thinking with the possibilities for rest and sort of locating in that kafar sculpture tamarind as this kind of like resistive agent, right? Like because it suggested these like cooking possibilities.
Because I feel like no one really cooks with tamarind unless you're a tropical cook, because like what, you know, you probably don't have access to it or the knowledge of exactly what to do with it. But that it also had these qualities. So for me, that was like a fun way of kind of putting it together to really think about like, it's.
Amber Musser (51:17.425)
I mean, you can't really see the whole liquid. It's not like you can differentiate the tamarind, but to really think about the thing that's like it's there, but its meaning is like so embedded in the ways that we like know our bodies and know what these things are. And then, you know, it kind of like unfurls in these so many possible ways, but they're all they're like contained within the sculpture, but like also not at all visible in it. Yeah, so that was my that was my cooking thing.
PJ (51:48.112)
Yeah, I mean, but what's I've done a good amount of work with just I do a lot of cooking. I cook for the family. So we have nine people in our house. So it's a lot of cooking. Right. And even from a health perspective, just you want to have a variety that you eat. And what's really fascinating to me, even as we're talking about the imperial tendencies, the imperialist problems.
is that we have now global access to food, but we are eating less variety. Whereas if we ate local, we eat more diverse because of the mechanisms that go into that. And that's one of those things like, we feel like, you feel like you have to explain that tamarind is not this cure -all, but it is good. And among a bunch of other things, it's good. I don't know if that...
Amber Musser (52:47.632)
Yeah.
PJ (52:47.92)
That's kind of a half -formed thought, but go ahead.
Amber Musser (52:51.312)
No, I mean, absolutely. Well, that was I mean, there was so many one of the sort of like weird fringe benefits of doing it wasn't like I was learning these things for the book. But knowing that I was interested in thinking a lot about.
different types of embodied knowledge really freed me up to just sort of be like, I'll just take a class in this, or I'll just explore this and see. Because obviously you don't know what you're going to learn. I mean, I learned how to cook, but I feel like more I learned how to taste and how to think about food in a different kind of way. And then with the herbalism also, I mean, one of the major tenets is eat a lot of different kinds of things, exactly as you were saying. And just sort of just that.
PJ (53:34.288)
Right, right.
Amber Musser (53:37.538)
the ways that these different types of knowledge like really reorient your your mode of being in the world, right? Like that's, I think the like one of the other underlying political frames for this project is just sort of like there are so many ways to be in the world and we've just been kind of like narrowed down into or disciplined into like one particular way that is not necessarily especially healthy or you know, but just sort of to kind of broaden.
out those things in whatever ways that we can is part of it, right? So cooking different foods is part of it. I think, you know, this access, thinking about like what spirituality means and sort of like what the, you know, what the limits are between the self and other, like I think those are also really important parts of it. I think, I mean, I got really interested, I mean, because there are a few different elements of spirituality throughout.
the book, right? I talk a lot about like the chakra system and Chinese traditional medicine, as well as voodoo. But just sort of all of these ways, like they, they shift how you are in the world. And they also, for my purposes, right, like also shift, like, what it means to be a body. And like, when we say bodily knowledge, like that really,
we tend to think about it as like, okay, like my muscles and my, you know, like all my brain, mind connection. But if you really take our in these systems, like it actually means very different, you know, it's not, your body doesn't quite end there, right? Or like, it's not quite in those ways. So I was really interested in that dimension as well.
PJ (55:18.544)
Forgive me, it might be a silly example, but I think as you talked about at the beginning, valuing difference, and you're talking about these different ways of being, and the baseline for our culture is commoditization. My aunt, who's a nurse, heard that turmeric was really good for you, and she drank so much. And so immediately, instead of, she drank so much, she actually got turmeric poisoning. I didn't know you could do this. She actually got sick.
And so, and that's like, but it's this kind of idea that we have this, which I didn't, again, yeah, that was odd. I didn't know that was possible. But that's exactly the sort of idea that's like, this is good for me. I'm just going to like, it's just an equation. It's just a, I think in your description, even you talk about over determined parameters. You're like, this is good for me. Therefore I can just drink as much as I want and it will, I'll just get better. And it's like, no, it's this whole,
Amber Musser (56:03.791)
Yeah.
PJ (56:17.52)
intertwined system where we can value difference because you can't get everything just from the turmeric, right? I know that's a little bit silly, but like, I mean, that's like, I think a very clear example what you're talking about.
Amber Musser (56:25.135)
Yeah.
Amber Musser (56:31.119)
Mm -hmm, no, I think that that's, yeah, I think you're totally right. Yeah, yeah, and I mean, I, well, and I think in a few, no, no, no, and I mean, I think, I think it's right in a few ways, right? So, I mean, it's exactly like, the answer is not to sort of sub out something that is unhealthy and just sub in one other thing, right? Like, that's not, the point is, right, like, of one of the things that was like really,
PJ (56:37.008)
Okay, that's what makes it so attractive. Okay.
Amber Musser (56:57.039)
I'm definitely not trying to generalize across all the different frames of knowledge that I was looking at, partially, you know, because that would be not the point. No. But I will say the ways that people are approaching balance and sort of like what constitutes it's I mean, I think there's always a theory of balance and like what it is to be well placed in in health.
PJ (57:05.936)
That wouldn't be valuing difference, yes.
Amber Musser (57:26.863)
right, like, or in in space, like, spirits, all these different things. And like what that means varies. But I think that that concept of balance is not very American right now. But it's just it's just but it's sort of like realizing. Yeah, well, no, but then but if you think about like what that really means, it's also so, yes, it's about balance, but it's also about like really seeing the way people are entangled with like.
PJ (57:38.748)
Yeah, it happened for a while, I'd say, but yeah, it was. Sorry. Go ahead.
Amber Musser (57:56.403)
the spaces around them, like the environment, their environments, the other people, other types of thoughts, right? Like that. And that's also part of difference is like having access to all of these things. But it is also a really different framework from this idea of like being a contained being towards really. I mean, I think the what people are using now is kind of like this framework of the ecological, which I don't quite use in the book, but it feel it's like of a part of kind of understanding.
PJ (58:13.2)
Mm.
Amber Musser (58:25.551)
being as like porous and you know, because it's like, once you understand that porosity, that's where you can get towards like, well, what might balance mean, right? That it's not, you can't just like add in turmeric. You have to like, something also, you know, it's funny because that, that same friend, she, who taught me how to cook, like she gave me a bunch of, anyway, lots of the recipes that she gave me have a lot of turmeric, but she definitely was just like, you know,
PJ (58:38.224)
You're right.
Amber Musser (58:54.575)
If you're taking any blood thinners, do not use this because turmeric is also an anti -inflammatory. So like, it was not just, even though turmeric was good, it was not always good.
PJ (59:02.864)
Yeah. Yes. Right. Right. Right. I mean, that's just basic toxicology too, right? Like it's like, it's all in the dosage. man. You've been very patient with me today with my mispronunciations and I don't know what it is, but I'm all over the place today. So one, thank you for coming on today. I want to be respectful of your time. But if I could ask you one last question for our audience, besides reading your book, which they should and get to.
all the rest of the chapters that we didn't even get to touch on. What is something that you would ask from our audience just to think on, to meditate on as they go about their week after listening to this episode?
Amber Musser (59:50.191)
I think, you know, I guess going back to this idea of balance, like they're two, I guess like two concrete outputs that I think are useful from the book. And one is the idea of attunement and just sort of like thinking, which I think really means just kind of trying to pay attention to sort of like where you are and when you are and.
PJ (59:58.352)
Hmm.
Amber Musser (01:00:17.647)
not necessarily judging it, but just sort of like being in that space. And I think then for me, the related thing is this idea of the body place, which is kind of that like we don't just end at the bodies, but we are part of these broader things. And so I think kind of like the more if we can keep thinking of ourselves as in these like expansive, not like egoic, but just like expansive and enmeshed beings. I do think that that leads to.
a gentler orientation toward the world and sort of a different set of priorities. So I feel like that's my takeaway.
PJ (01:00:57.232)
Yeah, that's wonderful. That's really encouraging. I think we could definitely use a gentler orientation to the world. Dr. Musser, thank you so much for coming on today.
Amber Musser (01:01:05.871)
Thank you so much for having me. This is great.