How do contemporary art and theory contemplate the “bio” of biopolitics and bioart? One of the foremost theorists of posthumanism, Cary Wolfe argues for the reconceptualization of nature in art and theory to turn the idea of the relationship between the human and the planet upside down in his new book, ART AND POSTHUMANISM. This is the inaugural volume in the new series ART AFTER NATURE, edited by Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard. The series fosters multidisciplinarity, creatively engaging with new and alternative discourses at the intersection of art, science, and philosophy. It engages with the politics and contradictions of the Anthropocene in order to problematize disciplines such as animal studies, posthumanism, and speculative realism, through art writing and art making.
Cary Wolfe is Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University. Wolfe has written on a range of topics including debates in animal studies and posthumanism, has authored many books, and edits the Posthumanities series for University of Minnesota Press.
Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. Aloi is editor in chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.
Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, curator, and executive director of Green Lantern Press.
References in the episode include:
Foucault
Agamben
Derrida
Donna Haraway
Flusser
Jacob von Uexkull
Damien Hirst
Steve Baker
Gregory Bateson
Eija-Liisa Ahtila
Niklas Luhmann
Chapters
How do contemporary art and theory contemplate the “bio” of biopolitics and bioart? One of the foremost theorists of posthumanism, Cary Wolfe argues for the reconceptualization of nature in art and theory to turn the idea of the relationship between the human and the planet upside down in his new book, ART AND POSTHUMANISM. This is the inaugural volume in the new series ART AFTER NATURE, edited by Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard. The series fosters multidisciplinarity, creatively engaging with new and alternative discourses at the intersection of art, science, and philosophy. It engages with the politics and contradictions of the Anthropocene in order to problematize disciplines such as animal studies, posthumanism, and speculative realism, through art writing and art making.
Cary Wolfe is Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University. Wolfe has written on a range of topics including debates in animal studies and posthumanism, has authored many books, and edits the Posthumanities series for University of Minnesota Press.
Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. Aloi is editor in chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.
Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, curator, and executive director of Green Lantern Press.
References in the episode include:
Foucault
Agamben
Derrida
Donna Haraway
Flusser
Jacob von Uexkull
Damien Hirst
Steve Baker
Gregory Bateson
Eija-Liisa Ahtila
Niklas Luhmann
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.
Caroline Picard:
In some way, they're all trying to deconstruct this, like, blur between nature and culture. As being very distinct and discreet and reliable and consistent. And then I think that there's this kind of ongoing shell shock that that's not the case. And what do we do with that?
Giovanni Aloi:
I think animal studies had a very clear idea of what an animal was, and that sort of got in the way of seeing more questions in the way these questions probably deserved.
Cary Wolfe:
When an animal species leaves the world forever, what kind of event is that? You know, not not just ecologically, not just scientifically, but existentially, emotionally, you know, psychologically.
Giovanni Aloi:
I am Giovanni Aloy.
Caroline Picard:
And I'm Caroline Picard.
Giovanni Aloi:
And we're here today to celebrate and discuss a new book, Art and Posthumanism, Essays, Encounters, Conversations by posthumanist pioneer Carrie Wolf.
Caroline Picard:
Not only is this exciting because art and posthumanism collects decades of Wolf's writing about art, architecture, and posthumanist theory, but also because it's the inaugural publication of the Art After Nature series. A series of forthcoming books co edited by Giovanni and myself and published by the University of Minnesota Press. Here is the official abridged, but abridged description.
Giovanni Aloi:
Art after
Caroline Picard:
nature explores epistemological questions that emerge from the expanding environmental consciousness of the humanities. Authors featured in the series engage in the recent ontological turn, upending anthropocentrism in order to grapple with the dark ecological fluidity of nature cultures. Giovanni and I first conceived the series back in 2016 when it emerged from our shared interest in contemporary art and how the conception of the Anthropocene along with all of its iterations and rebukes has given rise to what we call a new genre in theory and practice. Giovanni is the editor of Antenna, the journal of nature and visual culture and the author of books on the subject of animals and plants and art. I am a writer, cartoonist, curator, and executive director of the Green Lantern Press.
Giovanni Aloi:
Thank you so much, Caroline. And on that note, I'd love to thank our series editor, Peter Martin, the director of University of Minnesota Press, Doug Armato, Maggie Sattler for making this possible as well as all the future podcasts that will emerge from the series and, everyone at University of Minnesota involved in the making of it. So let's introduce our guest for today, Carrie Wolfe. It is such a pleasure to have you here with us today. Carey Wolff currently teaches English at Rice University.
Giovanni Aloi:
He has written on a range of topics from American poetry to bioethics, and he has been a significant voice in recent debates in animal studies and advocates a version of the posthumanist position. He is series editor of Minnesota Press's posthumanist series, and his books include animal rights, American culture, discourse of species, and the posthumanist theory, What is Posthumanism, and Before the Law, Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame, and most recently, Manifestly Hathaway. So thank you, Carrie, for being here with us today.
Cary Wolfe:
My pleasure. Thank you.
Giovanni Aloi:
I guess we could start from anywhere in in terms of the topics that you've covered. Start from a philosophical point of view or in a contemporary art, criticism. I think one of the interesting starting points for this conversation could be the relationship between posthumanism and animal studies since that's also the context in which I have come to know you and to know your work. So returning to the interview that opens your book for our series, My question is, what do you think of animal studies today in the broader context of posthumanism? And I think this interest sparks from having seen the trajectory of animal studies over time.
Giovanni Aloi:
You will remember the mid two thousands in which we could still hold conversations in small rooms and how it all exploded into arenas of animal study conferences with multiple, sessions at the same time. And I am interested in in a gathering a sense of where you think that that discipline is in the context of posthumanism especially.
Cary Wolfe:
That's yeah. Thanks. That's a that's a great question, and it's actually one that I am very actively working on right now. In fact, the most recent things I've written are about precisely this question, in a recent essay that it's had various titles and lectures and essay versions of it. But one title is, what the animal quote, unquote, can teach the Anthropocene.
Cary Wolfe:
To make a very long story short, my my argument in that piece is that the whole kind of economy of planned obsolescence in academic knowledge production, which produces fads. And of course, there are a lot of people who would say that I myself am one of those people. Right? With animal studies and posthumanism are kind of brands. One coming after the other, coming after the other, you know, after the animal, obviously it had to be plants.
Cary Wolfe:
And then after plants, it had to be, stones. And then after stones, it had to be objects, etcetera, etcetera. And this is kind of a sociological point I'm making about just how academic knowledge production works. You know, you could kind of see this coming, the kind of planned obsolescence and and predictable surpassing, if if you will, of of each of the previous moments in what's quote, unquote the latest thing. Because people ask me this as out of the post humanity series.
Cary Wolfe:
People ask me this kind of question all the time. Like, what's the latest thing? What's going on? What's gonna happen next year, etcetera? And that's, you know, one way that I answer the question is that it will certainly be something.
Cary Wolfe:
But I argue in this piece that I think the the idea that the question of the animal is kind of an obsolesced or maybe outmoded or outdated discourse on the way to object oriented ontology and focus on the Anthropocene and so on. I think is, mistaken, because one thing that I argue about that paying attention to the question of the animal forces you to do is to actually go back and think about in in scientific terms, in terms of theoretical biology, in terms of ecology, to really recognize the the real singularity and specificity of different forms of life, whether they're animals, plants, whatever. And to recognize how different living systems are from physical systems in terms of how they operate, the the qualitatively the modes of causality that are operative in living systems versus physical systems and so on, which really complicates attempts to assimilate questions of the living into the domain of physics. And it really complicates and throws into question, gestures toward what's been called flat ontology, whether you look at object oriented ontology or you look at the kind of work that say Bruno Latour does in actor network theory. And so my argument is that what paying attention to the question of the animal teaches the Anthropocene is that what we actually need is is not flat ontologies.
Cary Wolfe:
We need more jagged ontologies and and more attention to more uneven and discontinuous ontologies that feed back into the planetary system around Gaia, around climate change, around questions around the Anthropocene in very, very specific ways that are very, very different from how physical systems operate or how geological factors, enter into that equation. I think there are kinda two forces at work here. One is the the force that always is pushing us to come up with the next thing, the next coolest, you know, thing, whether it's posthumanism or anything else. And another force that that I think is more in a way deeply scholarly and less, corporate, you might say, unless a logic of liberal incorporation, institutionally speaking, That is a force that leads me to say, hang on a second. We're not done with this question.
Cary Wolfe:
Let's dwell here. And I think, Giovanni, this is part of what you've done in your work with plants to say, hang on a second. Let's let's tune in to the specificity of these different forms of life and how and why they matter, ethically, but also ecologically, environmentally. And also, let's think about what different practicing artists can tell us about the specificity and particularity of these different forms of life. To me, that's a job that's far from finished.
Cary Wolfe:
I just think it has to be reinserted back into, you know, whatever the dominant discourses are at the moment, the Anthropocene climate change, etcetera.
Giovanni Aloi:
Which is, I think, a fascinating point because this is what our series, right, Kieran, wants to do.
Cary Wolfe:
Yeah. Yeah.
Giovanni Aloi:
That's reassuring, Carrie.
Caroline Picard:
My sense is in some way, each of those, like, chapter headings or brands or, you know, pop quotes. In some way, they're all trying to deconstruct or think through this, like, blur between nature and culture. And how those two categories, we kind of inherited them in the West at least as being very distinct and discreet and reliable and consistent. And then I think that there's this kind of ongoing shell shock that that's not the case. And what do we do with that?
Caroline Picard:
I mean, I guess it's interesting that it seems like it has to permeate through these different focuses for us to digest them or something. But for me, that's also why it's very interesting to go back to art. Like, so somehow art has this capacity to, I don't know, make us just sit with the question potentially or would you agree with that?
Cary Wolfe:
Yeah. I mean, the word I would use here and this is how I think about editing the posthumanity series for Minnesota. It's in a way a kind of a dialectical project and a genealogical project in which new work enables you to go back and see previous work in a different way and identify different genealogical strands that now we can see and we couldn't have seen fifty years ago or twenty years ago led up to where we are now. A good example, I think, from the new book is the piece actually I wrote on Joseph Boyse. That piece literally would not have been possible until the development of what we now call call biopolitical thought.
Cary Wolfe:
Mhmm. You know, as as practiced by, you know, Foucault and Agamben and and Derrida and Donna Haraway and and other people. So, you know, that puts me in a position with that piece to go to look back over Boyce's body of work and to reconfigure it in a way that literally would not be possible without all the work that's happened over the past, you know, thirty or whatever years in biopolitical thought. Part of that project is written work and part of it is is work by artists. I think of it as just an ongoing as an ongoing conversation.
Cary Wolfe:
And I think the challenge with being a series editor, at least for me with posthumanities, but I think with you all as well with the new series is doing that genealogical work in ways that make it clear that just because something is new doesn't mean it's better or cooler or more interesting. It means it has to be put in conversation with work that we can now see. For example, the Jacob van Uxel text that we published in translation in the series, you know, that now we can see, wow, that's was, you know, published in the nineteen thirties, but is an incredibly experimental in a way kind of avant garde work of theoretical biology and philosophy. So that genealogical project to me is, is the bigger picture that I think scholars and artists and writers ought to try to think about inserting themselves into and it's what'll be left behind when they're gone.
Giovanni Aloi:
There's certainly, Carrie, I was thinking about what Caroline mentioned in the in the context of this repeating. It feels like, you know, what you carry outlined, the idea of animal studies moving into plant studies and stones became a focus. And then, of course, we have mushrooms who were like a massive, main phenomenon, seem to repropose a set of questions, let's say, that was at the core of animal studies. And these questions seem to be stretched in different directions that animals and not necessarily because animals couldn't address those questions. I think animal studies had a very clear idea of what an animal was.
Giovanni Aloi:
And that sort of got in the way of seeing or considering more questions in the way these questions probably deserved. And and I think, Caroline, that's probably perhaps where this kind of cyclicality seems also also to emerge. I certainly felt like I had to move away from animal studies in order to ask certain questions through plants because there was no reception, in animal studies. And I I think that that's interesting as well as it might be limiting that the discourse has to find a new target that somehow it's more extreme, less communicative, more cryptic so that we push ourselves further. There's something very charming and fascinating about that desire to move beyond.
Giovanni Aloi:
But there is also, I think, a question about the very nature and productivity of these conversations and where perhaps they they begin to spiral into circularities that limit the productivity of the discussion. But there's something interesting about this this relationship in the context of art more specifically. I have said many times that I I think you're one of the most interesting authors, working in posthumanism, animal studies, who's written about contemporary art. That's why Caroline and I were thrilled to be able to, put this book together with you for our series. And I can outline quickly why I think that's the case, but you will remember that in the mid two thousands, there was a moment in animal studies conferencing and publishing where this trend to focus on contemporary art that mistreated animals became a trend again.
Giovanni Aloi:
So talking about Marco Evaristi more than Adela Bessemet, Damien Hirst, they became targets. And the critique seemed, again, very circular. I think it brought to the fore a very interesting set of questions, ethical questions about animal rights, veganism, how can these bodies of knowledge feed into the conversation of posthumanism and animal studies? So there was productivity there, but there was also condemnation. I felt like contemporary art was just getting a bad name, and it was difficult to change that.
Giovanni Aloi:
It became very present. So for instance, I wrote that paper animal studies elephants in the room as a extended editorial in antenna where I was calling out this hypocrisy of visibility and invisibility. We see the dead animal body in the gallery space or in reproduction, and we feel ethically prompted to respond, but we do not respond to processed animal materials that are included in in works of art. And I thought that was very problematic. Steve Baker opened his book, artist animal with the, chapter titled, can contemporary artists be trusted with animals, living or dead?
Giovanni Aloi:
Which I thought really, was, clear response to that climate. You know, we all felt this pressure. And your body of work, the way you address contemporary art, the the works you've chosen to speak, be as the works you have decided to ignore, I think says a lot about your positioning as a thinker in this context, but also says a lot about where you felt the priority was for the conversation and perhaps where the priority still lies. So I was wondering if you can talk about that process where you decide this is a work that's worthy writing about and this is why.
Cary Wolfe:
Well, that's a great kind of, thumbnail history of that moment, that I remember vividly as you do. For me, the quote unquote question of the animal has always been a subset and a sub problematic of the larger question of posthumanism. And the way that I kind of backed into seeing the question this way really goes back to the very beginnings of my career as a theorist and as an academic. It really goes back to Gregory Bateson's work actually that I read as an undergraduate in an anthropology class. The sort of systems theory framework, whether you're talking about social systems theory or ecological or biological systems theory, is a theoretical vocabulary that allows you to talk across, to go back to Caroline's point, what we historically have thought of is very different, ontological boundaries.
Cary Wolfe:
It gives you a way to talk about, you know, electronic, digital, and mechanical systems and living systems using the same theoretical framework. Now all of a sudden, we have a way to completely reconfigure what we have typically thought of in philosophy and and in culture as the biology versus technology divide. Now now we're able to see them as utterly and completely implicated with each other. In a way that later for me then, I was able to see what's going on also in deconstruction. This has become really clear in recent work in deconstruction around Derrida's life death seminars and all of the work that's been published, devoted to those seminars, to to really rethinking completely what the question of life quote unquote is and how it's related to the questions of of technology and technicity.
Cary Wolfe:
Once you reframe the question of the animal that way, you're already having, it seems to me, a very a very different kind of conversation in which the quote unquote animal is not put over here in its own box and isolated from the various kinds of technologies and and other sorts of nonliving systems in which it's implicated. It's always already implicated in those systems. And, of course, biopolitical thought, as we were talking about earlier, was then another discourse that became available for repositioning and reconfiguring the question of the animal as well. I got into all this as an animal rights activist. When I was a graduate student and then later when I was a beginning professor, I was very seriously involved in the animal rights movement.
Cary Wolfe:
I mean, like, in, you know, on television and in the newspapers. But it took me a long time to figure out how to take that ethical commitment and retool it in terms of an intellectual and theoretical and scholarly framework that I felt like would stand up to what was kind of state of the art theoretical discourse, in my area of of academia. Right? And that took a long time. It took into the nineties, for me to start kind of developing what would later sort of become called animal studies.
Cary Wolfe:
So how that feeds into the kind of art that I end up writing about is kind of a hard question to answer because a lot of the stuff I end up writing about art, some of it's very occasional. So Alyssa Atila, you know, my involvement in her work came because she had read What is Posthumanism, and she was having a big retrospective show in Finland and in Sweden. And she just got in touch with me and said, hey, I really like your work and I think you might have something interesting to say about my work. And I said, okay. You know, you know, whereas the Joseph Boyse piece, that's the piece I've been meaning to write for almost twenty years.
Cary Wolfe:
And it was because the Menil collection right down the street from me here in Houston had, along with the tape, the biggest Beuys retrospective in really ever in The United States, right after I moved to Houston almost twenty years ago. A light bulb went off in my head when I saw that show about Boyce's relationship to animality and disability as a framework for for really re understanding his work outside of a lot of the usual parameters that talking about Boyse gets caught up in. That made me say to myself, I'm gonna write something about this. It just took me almost twenty years to do. It's a little different with each project.
Cary Wolfe:
How my own framework for thinking about these questions dovetails with the particular artwork in question. A lot of art I don't like. It's and it's not that I'm a snob and it's not that I'm picky. I just like, I'll go to a gallery or I'll go to a museum and I'll just walk through and I'll be like, no, no, no, no. Wow.
Cary Wolfe:
That's really interesting. I gravitate to works of art or don't in like very definite ways.
Caroline Picard:
I guess I think that's the way art should reach us kind of. I mean, there is something really personal and surprising about that kind of con I mean, I feel like it's contact or it's an encounter. It's there's the you know, when objects can kind of ignite your interest. It makes me think too just for me when I was reading the galleys again, preparation for the interview, I was thinking about what your experience has been like collecting this writing that occurred over a long period of time. Like, what things are consistent, what things have changed, what you might have edited for this collection from these exist existing texts to maybe solidify your position or feeling about art.
Caroline Picard:
I mean, maybe there is other presumably, there's other articles that you were like, oh, that doesn't make sense in this collection. So what was that process like? And what have you learned about art or thought about art while assembling this writing of yours?
Cary Wolfe:
What I found over the years is a lot of the reason that I get invited to talk about art and architecture is that I don't know anything about it. So in the sense that that's not my training. When I go back and read art criticism, like when I was writing the Joseph Boyce piece, this was really, really palpable, you know, to me. When you go back and read a lot of the, criticism about Boyce's work and career, you know, a lot of it was just not that useful to me because it was coming out of a different kind of training and it was gravitating toward different aspects of the work for which those people maybe there were high stakes. And what's the relationship of Boyce's early drawings to, you know, this earlier, you know, German artist or something.
Cary Wolfe:
That's not how I was coming at the work really at all. I think what's happened over the years and what enabled this book to come together is that because I don't have a background in art history, even though I've been really deeply involved with and engaged with art since I was a student, the first term paper I ever wrote was actually about William de Kooning's, women's series when I was like a freshman in college, like, 20 page term paper about that. Abstract expressionism is actually what got me into art when I was in high school. I just became completely smitten with it. This is probably a familiar story.
Cary Wolfe:
I wanted the book to be organized in a way in which the threads that connect different pieces kind of became clearer. So it became clear to me in work and and putting the book together that, oh, some of these works are really about the question of the animal. Some are really framed by how kind of systems theoretical discourse has enabled me to see these artworks and frame their meaning in a particular way. And then some, you know, really are about the bio political. And how the bio political problematic cuts across species lines and connects human and non human life in very specific ways that we can see within the biopolitical framework that we couldn't otherwise.
Cary Wolfe:
So a lot of what I was trying to do in the book, I think, was aside from just kinda getting all this work together under one roof, was to identify some of those through lines that connect one piece to the next. And then within that, there's sort of, you know, there's sort of light motifs, you know, like extinction and how some contemporary artists have have thought about it in their in their installation work. And trying to understand what kind of event is extinction and what happens when when a when a animal species leaves the world forever. What kind of event is that? You know, not not just ecologically, not just scientifically, but existentially, emotionally, you know, psychologically.
Cary Wolfe:
The artist I'm I'm writing about around extinction in the book just have an enormous amount to teach us in terms of how multilayered and how resonant that question is.
Caroline Picard:
I feel like the question of extinction is maybe a more complicated permutation of this theme. But I do feel like, and Giovanni had said this earlier too, that there's something about visibility and invisibility that I think is very prominent also in your book thematically. And I feel like there's this quote that comes up a few times from it. I think it is it Nicholas Lumen, where he says that art makes visible it's not even makes visible the invisible. It, like, makes visible that there are invisible things, which seems like a really interesting thesis or premise for what art can do.
Caroline Picard:
And, also, I think, you know, related to the Diller and Scoffito also this idea that, what does it mean to produce a building that is not a building?
Cary Wolfe:
Right. Right. Well, our Tree City with Coolhaus and Mau, the radicality of rejecting the quote unquote realm officially known as architecture.
Caroline Picard:
Yeah. Totally.
Cary Wolfe:
And and we're gonna refuse to do buildings. That's the project. Right? You know So it's on rock. Yeah.
Cary Wolfe:
Yeah. You know, but but that's because in both of those instances, you're dealing with architects who think about architecture as if it's conceptual art. You know, so Dillard Scofidio and if you look at their history of work and not just buildings, you know, really the problematic is a problematic of what's the conceptual frame, what's the conceptual spine, you know, for this project. And then then it's like, well, okay. Then maybe we need a building, maybe we don't.
Cary Wolfe:
Yeah. We'll see. It's complicated in architecture because, you know, there's a lot of money involved and people have to make a living and all that. But to come back to your point about Lumen, I think Art is a Social System is a great book. It's a hard book like all of Luhmann's work, but it helps you to understand, I think, much more specifically the role that art can play in what I've often called non propositional conceptualization of particular problematics.
Cary Wolfe:
You mentioned one great formulation of lumens and and and another from art as a social system is that art reenters the difference between perception or consciousness and communication into the communication of art. The point is communication and art happens in a completely different way because the speed of perception and communication is asynchronous. So art kinda activates perception and consciousness, which is constantly out running communication, which is linear. Right? And communications ability to really say what's going on.
Cary Wolfe:
And meanwhile, you're having the experience of the artwork. Right? So that asynchronicity and that difference is used. The difference between perception and communication is used by artwork in a way that's completely different from all the other social systems. And all the other social systems according to Lumen, the difference between perception and communication is a problem for communication that communication tries to solve.
Cary Wolfe:
So perception and consciousness is is noise basically. And it gets in the way of meaning. But in art, it's not noise. It's how art makes its meaning in a very specific way. Right?
Cary Wolfe:
Mhmm. So now, you know, now we're having kind of a different conversation And and another version of it, Caroline, as you pointed out is how to how to talk about the invisible without falling back into the familiar discourse of the sublime or the ineffable. How to talk about the invisible to put it in Derrida's language in such a way that the invisible is not something that's invisible just because in principle, it is visible and you just haven't seen it yet. But it's invisible because it is fundamentally fundamentally, constitutively invisible. And then the question is, what is art's relationship to that and how is that relationship special in a way that's different from other social systems?
Giovanni Aloi:
There's something interesting in the context of visibility and invisibility. And again, returning to your choice of artworks in in the book and more broadly across your career, I'm thinking about choices involving the presence of the animal body in the gallery space, which you don't seem to have defaulted to or or focused on, but then your item focus on biopolitics that's in your writing. So there there's almost like a surprise factor where some of us turned our attention to the ethical question of that material presence, physical presence in the gallery space, but you seem to have addressed that question through completely different means across your body of work. Is there a deliberate decision not to take on the animal body as in materially or or even the living animal in the gallery space, I guess?
Cary Wolfe:
Well, yes. It is deliberate in the sense that, you know, you have to back back up and and to the question of, well, what what do you think ethics is? But for me, ethics is very clearly framed by how, sort of contemporary post structuralist theory and deconstruction understands it, which is it's framed fundamentally by the question of the undecidable and confronting what Derrida calls the ordeal of the undecidable in any particular ethical situation. So it's true that we all walk around, you know, tacitly with something in our back pocket that's kind of a list of what we think is okay to do and not to do. And the liberal justice tradition and ethics would have you apply that list very rigorously in each and every instance.
Cary Wolfe:
The foundations of animal rights philosophy and and and ethics and animal rights philosophy really come out of two different versions of that. One is Tom Reagan's kind of Neo Kantian version built around what he calls what what's a biographical being. And the others Peter Singer's utilitarian position in animal liberation. But what conjoins them is that you propositionally derive what's okay to do and not do based on certain kinds of characteristics of living beings. And then you go out in the world and you apply that in every instance, especially when there are compelling vested interest involved.
Cary Wolfe:
What I just said would constitute the opposite of the ethical problematic in deconstruction and post structuralism. Because, I mean, the example I've often used with students is like, look, I can give you a long list of reasons that is bad to kill marine mammals that have to do with their, capacities, their intelligence, their emotional and social bonds, so on and so forth. Long, long list of why it's bad to kill marine mammals. But does that give me the right to walk into an Inuit community and say to everybody in that community, well, I know that you've been living this way for a thousand years, but I'm I'm coming over here from this thing called the university back here in, you know, the rich industrialized democracies. And we've decided that what you're doing is wrong, so you're gonna have to stop.
Cary Wolfe:
And if you don't stop, you're a bad person. Right? So when you put it that way, what what you've exemplified is kind of, you know, you have to confront the relationship between your list of what you think is right and wrong and the in principle, inexhaustible concreteness of the context in which you are trying to apply, if you will, that formula for what's right and wrong. And and and Derrida's ideas that the ethical moment is precisely about that collision between that list that you have and the and the specificity of the situation in which it's activated. You know, to a lot of people that sounds like a cop out, but then I just point out, well, if you look at people's ethical behavior in the in the real world, that's actually that's a more accurate description of it.
Cary Wolfe:
You know, people do the best they can by confronting the context in which they're trying to do the right thing, rather than consistently applying some some lists that they have in their back pocket about what's okay to do and not do. If what you really wanna do is save the lives of non human animals, you should be out in the world trying to do something about factory farming and about toxicity testing on animals and biomedical research and a million other, you know, things that are a shorter distance between two points if that's what you're really concerned with. That's coming out of my deep background as an activist going back to how I got into all of this. You know? There's lots of different slices of the pie, right, that we all need to be working on.
Cary Wolfe:
And what I realized is that, you know, a lot of people can go door to door as an activist and hand out leaflets, but not that many people can write the kind of stuff that I write for the audiences I write it for about the relationship between ethics and non human life and philosophy and theory and and biopolitics and so on. So that's that's something I can contribute. You know, a lot of artist activists would say the same thing.
Giovanni Aloi:
There's an interesting connection, I think, between these ethical question and the broader concern of posthumanism as in the we of posthumanism. And I'm sure you're, very much involved in that in that question. It it's it's just, like, become the baseline of what can be said from going forward about posthumanism. I was wondering what is your kinda sense of the critique of posthumanism? I asked this because I think more than ever before, I sense an unease, especially with some artists, to be classified as posthumanist or to be associated too closely with posthumanism.
Giovanni Aloi:
And I I initially have found that surprising. And in time, I think it's a phenomenon I I've experienced over the past three to four years, more more specifically. In time, I have come to understand more clearly where the unease lies. I'm thinking about the exclusionism of posthumanism over time, the critiques of, Sylvia Wynter, for instance, and the humanist praxis, how it's being, used in contemporary discourses that find posthumanism to elitist, in the context of, BIPOC scholars as well as indigenous knowledge. So I don't know whether I'm right or not, but I feel like posthumanist scholars and and those who are working with posthumanist ideas in the arts feel more aware of these complications and the need, the urgency of addressing certain questions, revolving around the the real productivity of posthumanism in the time we live in.
Giovanni Aloi:
And I think a lot of what we have experienced during the past three years from the rise of social justice and a heightened understanding of the crisis that are the ecological crisis and how that impacts social justice is creating a new gravitational pull around which posthumanism seems to be reorienting itself. Or let's say there seems to be, an imperative to reorient certain conversations and certain standpoints as well. But I was wondering what your your perception is.
Cary Wolfe:
I think part of it, and this is actually something I've tried to push back against myself, in manifestly Haraway, for example, but but lots of other places. I think part of it is that you might say official post humanism as a kind of a a logo, a discourse, whatever, you know, has traditionally been identified at least institutionally as kind of a kind of a white European project, but within that kind of a comp lit sort of project coming out of, you know, comp lit discourses in the eighties and nineties. You know, and as I said in manifestly Haraway, one of the reasons that I wanted to do that project and one of my intentions in doing that project was really to make the same point about canonical biopolitical thought. I I wanted to point out that look, Donna Haraway was was quote unquote doing biopolitics and doing biopolitical thought before anybody called it that. And a set of very important essays going all the way back to the, you know, eighties.
Cary Wolfe:
And that's important to point out because the canonical lineage of canonical biopolitical thinkers are basically white male European philosophers. Right? Foucault, Agamben, etcetera. Rewriting that kind of genealogy was important to me with regard to what what she calls the politics of citation, which, is a phrase she was using actually with regard to Lynn Margolis and how and how Lynn was kind of written out of the mainstream story of contemporary, biology even though she's a very important figure in it. So that politics of citation I think is is is really really important.
Cary Wolfe:
And one of the reasons I've kinda always kept my distance a little bit from the canonical more sort of, you know, comp lit European post structuralist form of that discourse. For me, that's never really been the genealogy. I mean, as I've said many times, you know, at the end of the day as a theorist and as a philosopher, I'm basically a pragmatist in a very, very serious way going all the way back to people like Emerson and coming up through James and and Rorty and and those sorts of thinkers. So for me, posthumanism is about, not maintaining a certain kind of discourse. It's actually about developing a set of tools that can help you think and deal with problems like on the ground.
Cary Wolfe:
So for me, one of those big problems was the utter necessity to realize that when we're thinking about life, quote, unquote, the traditional philosophical distinction between the human and the animal is worse than a blunt instrument. It's complete nonsense to try to organize our thinking about about life on the planet by putting homo sapiens over here and every other form of life that is not homo sapiens over here. And that's why the various theoretical tools that I was talking about earlier enable you to have a different kind of conversation about what is the relationship between human and non human life in all of its diversity, in all of its forms. I've kinda always said, if you accept within that discourse that there is no natural body, Then for me, it's immediately obvious that if you're serious about, quote, unquote, the question of the animal, then you're automatically committed to taking for granted that there are no natural bodies, that all bodies are in some fundamental sense queer, to use the discourse we've inherited from queer theory. And it automatically commits you to understanding that race, just like species, is worse than a blunt instrument for understanding the specificity of the diversity of forms of life on the planet.
Cary Wolfe:
For me, the kind of posthumanism that I practice dovetailing deconstruction and systems theory is a great tool for thinking about the specificity of environmental racism. So, but I but I think that pushback that you were identifying in your question, Jumanne, I think that pushback does come from how some of the more official institutional forms of so called posthumanism have have been identified.
Caroline Picard:
I think it also makes me think about something else you bring up periodically, the sort of animal or, like, the human on one side and the rest of the the living world on the other. I mean, at least one very prominent version of that can be traced back to, like, biblical thought and, you know, and this is what you you talk about. Thou shall not kill just not humans. You know? And that's, like, a huge condition.
Caroline Picard:
But so I wonder if there's some way where that approach might map on very easily to, like, early white European settlers who, like, came to America. And we're kind of identifying the world in these categories. And I think that that's, like, a moment that you identify really clearly, the sort of horror of, you know, other indigenous populations witnessing this, like, incredibly violent behavior.
Cary Wolfe:
Right. Right. What while themselves being simultaneously, quote, unquote, animalized, which is the oldest biopolitical discursive trick in the book for making certain populations to borrow a phrase, killable but not murderable. What one of the things that drew me to biopolitical thought was the realization that you can't just have one set of terms, you need two sets of terms. So one set of terms is human animal.
Cary Wolfe:
Let's just say traditionally. But the other set of terms is membership in the community versus bare life. And the relationship between those two sets of terms dovetails in very very important ways and and in in a very unpredictable ways that just talking about the question of the animal will not allow you to make any headway on. So something I talk about in before the law, there are millions and millions and millions and millions of companion animals in The United States, for example, who have access to clean drinking water and healthy food and medical care, veterinary care, and shelter, and so on. In ways that millions and millions and millions and millions of the world's human population don't have.
Cary Wolfe:
And it's not in spite of the fact that my dog lying here on her dog bed. It's not in spite of the fact that she's an animal. It's because she's an animal. And it's because I like having a multi species household and I'm in a position to do so and to take care of her. She's a member of my community.
Cary Wolfe:
So at that point, the distinction between human and nonhuman animal is really not gonna get the job done in terms of being able to explain those kind of phenomena. And of course, the flip side is the animalization and not just discursively, but in many other ways of indigenous populations that have made it okay to kill them historically. So that's where the biopolitical frame, I think, as my own work developed became an important added ingredient for me to the larger problematic of posthumanism.
Giovanni Aloi:
It's great. Really interesting set set of considerations.
Caroline Picard:
I have one last, but just for fun, like, what are things that you've seen or read that you're really excited about?
Cary Wolfe:
Recently?
Caroline Picard:
Yeah. In the middle of this, like, crazy pandemic related to our conversation.
Cary Wolfe:
A lot of my energy recently has actually been toward, creative projects. I started off as a poet actually and had to decide whether to do an MFA or a PhD. So and I've been writing off and on sporadically. So I just finished a big book of poetry that's now under submission to a few different publishers. And then I'm working on a new project that started off as a, kind of an artist statement and companion essay for a photo triptych project based on a clear cut site in Colorado.
Cary Wolfe:
But then the essay, since I'm so long winded as you've already discovered, the essay turned into a short book called Ecology slash Ecography, Heidegger's Hut, Three Displacements. But more generally, I just think my my energy now is devoted more to kind of hybrid creative critical practice. A lot of the stuff I'm reading and seeing right now is because it's framed by working on those projects.
Caroline Picard:
That makes a lot of sense.
Cary Wolfe:
Some of it's about the history of the forest service, you know. Some of it's about a deep dive back into Heidegger and Paul Ceylon and Ceylon's visit to Heidegger's hut in the Black Forest.
Giovanni Aloi:
But thank you so much, Carrie, for being with us today. It's been great to have the opportunity to launch your new book for the Art After Nature series, and, we hope to, continue this conversation some other time.
Cary Wolfe:
No. No. Thanks for having me. I'm I'm really excited to see the series. I'm really excited to see it at Minnesota, and it's gonna be worth keeping an eye on.