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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 (00:01.021)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Juwanna Jukan from Emerson College. She is an assistant professor who works in a multitude of fields, including theater and performance studies, media studies, and philosophy. And I think for anyone who's used to listening to this podcast, you know that is, I really enjoy those kinds of interdisciplinary approaches. We're talking about her book today.
Malicious Deceivers, Thinking Machines and Performative Objects. And I'm just really excited to talk about that today. Dr. Jhikan, wonderful to have you today.
IJ (00:38.846)
Thank you so much for the invitation. It's a pleasure to be here, greeting also to our listeners and to our viewers.
PJ (00:47.326)
So talk to us a little bit about why Malicious Deceivers? Why did you feel like this is a book that you need to write?
IJ (00:57.026)
I started working on this project when this notion of post-truth started to gain a lot of currency in the media. You may remember that in 2016 Oxford Dictionaries declared post-truth the word of the year and it was being thrown around quite a bit in the quote-unquote fake news media environment, right? And I felt quite uncomfortable with that.
and the way it was being used, how it was being defined. I was not the only one to be uncomfortable with it. Just to give you a bit of context, how did Oxford Dictionary define it? They defined it as relating to a set of circumstances where objective facts have more impact in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotions, appeals to personal belief. And I find that
definition and also the term itself, post-truth, right, which suggests that we're after truth, problematic. One, because it suggests that there was a time where this pristine, wonderful thing, pure, called truth actually existed, you know, presumably prior to 2016, that there was a time when objective facts
PJ (02:07.037)
Yeah
IJ (02:23.19)
prevailed in public opinion, in shaping public opinion. And of course there's a lot of debate and scholarship around even what does objectivity mean and how does that get established. So that was one issue with the notion. But secondly, I had a sense that our society is post truth in a much deeper sense than what this definition and the way the term was used was suggesting.
And as I said, I was definitely not the first one and not the only one to remark that. I'll give you just a few instances of some other thinkers that having articulated concerns and also more capacious views of post-truth that I engage with in the book. So there is a scholar by the name of Robert Mejia who wrote an article with his co-authors.
offering a post of a racial history of post-truth, right? The article is called White Lives, a racial history of post-truth, where the art he's making, and the authors are making the argument that white supremacy and structural racism are post-truth. And to say that post-truth started in 2016 is actually playing very well in a white supremacist kind of narrative. But there's also going
several decades back, someone like Guy de Borde, a French philosopher and filmmaker who writes the Society of the Spectacle. And it's a beautiful analysis of capitalism and how it's producing spectacles, right? And then closer to my own home, and there's also a personal component to this.
this investigation in the book, there's Vilain Flusser, a media philosopher, Vilain Flusser, who in 1989, right after the Romanian revolution happens, the televised Romanian revolution, there's a symposium in Budapest where they're trying to understand what exactly happened in Romania with this televised revolution and, you know, Vilain Flusser comes up and says, well, what just happened in Romania? And he interestingly says,
IJ (04:42.138)
off-off-Broadway, just imagine something like that happening in the United States, is the beginning of post-history. Of course, that term had been used. So post-history is related to post-truth, and I also have issues with that term, which I elaborate on in the book. And so that is the context in which the investigation emerged, and then there's a personal feeling, right, that
we're living in a system, in a reality that seems to have fakeness baked in it, that is grounded in fakeness and reproduces fakeness. And I had a feeling, you know, back home. I was born in communist Romania. I grew up in post-communism. And there was that feeling, and it was attributed to communism. Although...
This was a time when we were becoming capitalist and we said, oh, it's actually these communist mentalities, these communist institutions that are the trouble. And then I come to the US and still the same feeling, of course, in a different way. And of course, it's not surprising, because as I argue in the book, communism and capitalism are more related than maybe many people think about.
or understand, and they're both part of Western modernity and the Western narrative. And so what I do in the book is try to trace the genealogy of post-truth to better understand why it feels that we're living in a reality and system that's grounded on truth and fakeness and deceit. And I trace it all the way back to Descartes' philosophy, to Descartes' metaphysics.
And I look at how that's connected to capitalism, how it's connected to computation, how it's connected to what Heidegger called the modern world picture, the Western modern world picture, how it's a very impoverished world picture, you know, impoverished in the sense that the majority of the people on earth live in poverty and there are a few that have.
IJ (07:05.586)
inimaginable amount of wealth and also impoverished in the sense that there's a reduction of being. It's something that Heidegger actually talks about in his later essays on technology. A reduction in the dimensions of what is where beings, things of the world are asked, forced to deliver themselves in a particular way as resources to be used, to be exploited in the name of profit.
And I was also interested in alternative ways of world making, right? How do we make worlds in ways that are more capacious, more careful, more caring? And that's where I turned to theatricality and to performance, to art that is grounded in theatricality and in performance.
PJ (08:01.253)
Yeah, so it seems that you use quite a bit of Heidegger in your reading of Descartes, but the first thing I want to ask you about, I'd love to get back to that later, but the first thing I'd like to ask you about is kind of, if you don't mind, this personal history. You mentioned kind of in the foreword that the first thing you ever read was, like philosophically, was Descartes
PJ (08:31.725)
That's not just something that just pops off the shelf generally. Do you mind telling us the story of how did that come to be your first work? How did that end up in your hands?
IJ (08:42.846)
Yes, as I mentioned, I grew up in Romania, right? Post-communist Romania. So during communism, work like Descartes, work like Heidegger did not fit the paradigm of dialectical materialism, right? That was the norm, dialectical materialism was the norm. And so there were philosophers, for instance, who were interested in this German philosophy,
philosophy who were being pursued and surveilled by the secret police. And in the 90s, as I was growing up, there was this deep, deep respect for intellectuals who had been the resistance in communist times. And also in my circles, let me just put it like that. I don't want to generalize that in...
all of Romania, but definitely in what I was exposed to on TV in my circles, that idea of the intellectuals was very closely aligned with the philosopher. And then there was also this notion of needing to catch up with the West, which is something that I talk about quite a bit in my book. And one way of catching up with the West was to catch up with all this.
philosophy, right, that is grounding what quote unquote Western civilization might be understood as. I actually didn't realize that, you know, my turning to philosophy was actually a part of being part of, you know, part of this bigger narrative of catching up with the West until I started writing the book and starting to unearth, okay, why was I so drawn to the cart and can't and.
eighth grade, right? And trying to make sense of all these very sophisticated European philosophers. And there's a, you know, I had to come to the US and then be exposed to decolonial philosophy and feminist philosophy and Black thought to actually step back from it and realize that was also part of the baggage that I was internalizing as part of this.
IJ (11:08.286)
imperative to catch up with the West which was very present as I was growing up.
PJ (11:13.785)
Awesome, and I just, if you don't mind explaining, because I know, I get and guess a little bit what you're aiming at, but when you talked about, you came over and you had this feeling of fakeness, like this baked in fakeness, because of the communist institutions, right? It was blaming the communist institutions. Then you came over and you had the same feeling of fakeness, but different, but a different way. Can you explain?
what was the same and what was different? Like what do you mean it's the same feeling but in a different way?
IJ (11:49.662)
Yes, maybe I go a little deeper also in how I understand and unpack fakeness in the book, the way I understand it. And actually, I start theorizing in that way by going back to the CART's experiment or scenario of the malicious deceiver. That's where the title comes from. I can talk about it later if it's of interest. But I understand it in terms of
PJ (12:12.731)
Yes, please.
IJ (12:16.866)
the coming together of two things. One is deception, dissimulation, the concealing of something, pretending to be something that you're not. Then there's this other notion that's related, but different, simulation. There's a whole theoretical baggage that I can unload for you here on simulation if you're interested. I also call simulation
or offer performativity as a synonym for it. But basically I articulate post-truth in terms of this logic of dissimulation. It's a play on words where I put this in brackets to think about how deception and simulation come together to create fake realities, right? And so to come back to your question, in Romania,
in the communist times, the government and the state was the enemy. And there is what is called double thinking, something that I write about in the book, where you say one thing, right, and you think another because you have to. You have to save your life. You can't say anything that disturbs, that is not right in a totalitarian regime because you risk losing your life.
And then there are all these demands that are placed on, for instance, in terms of productivity. There are these directives from the government that says this year you need to produce this much. And the numbers are extraordinary, right? And no one, I mean, there's an anecdote that I learned from my parents, the amount of beetroot that had to be...
planted, right? There was no territory. The territory of Romania was not enough for that kind of amount. So you have to invent, right? You have to perform all these realities that are fake to save your job, to save your life. And there's some anecdotes that I share in that interlude chapter, that's the chapter between the two parts where it is very autobiographical that
IJ (14:41.602)
shows that logic and part of it carried into the 90s, into the post-communist period. But then there was also the television that dominated the transition period in Romania. In fact, there are some Romanian scholars who call it the object symbol of the transition. The revolution was televised.
And some people even debate if it was a revolution or it was just a staged event with dead bodies. So the television really pervaded our lives. It's still extremely prominent. When I go home to my parents, the TV is on all the time. And it was our way or one of the ways in which we were connecting to the West, becoming of the West, catching up with the West, getting all these films that...
we didn't have in communist times because the TV program was extremely restricted to one or two hours a day. So all this particularly American media that was coming up. And that created a picture of the West that was beautiful. I think that motivated many people like myself, like my friends who went abroad to want to go abroad and experience that incredibly interesting, fascinating, ideal life that we didn't have. So...
Now to move it to coming here, there is an aspect that struck me when I came here, which is how pervasive capitalism is in every aspect of life. And how we're invaded with marketing messages that skew the truth in order to get us to buy things.
There's also an imperative to perform. There's a beautiful book in performance studies by John McKenzie called Perform or Else. It's actually from the Forbes Magazine. It was on the cover of Forbes Magazine a few decades ago. Perform or Else, right? You're losing your job. So there are all these expectations of productivity that are being placed on us that...
IJ (17:03.53)
we have to reach, which I've experienced from the time I was in undergrad, right, to being a professor and everyone is working so hard and trying to meet standards that maybe are not realistic or not healthy or definitely not conducive to human flourishing, but they're conducive to making multinational companies get more profit, for instance, right?
So these are some of the differences and some of the similarities, but I think I would need to go much deeper into the simulation and the simulation and the different case studies because my book is really focused on various case studies to unpack those further.
PJ (17:52.357)
Yeah, I'm glad that you said it because my day job is actually I run a marketing company with my wife. And so even as you were talking about this, one of the things we try to do is we try to actually back up the marketing, like the product to the marketing, because one of the biggest weaknesses of capitalism, or one of it, well, that's a kind way of saying it, one of the more pernicious things
is the fact that it relies on perceived value rather than value, right? And so this idea that, I mean, I'm not sponsored, okay, but like liquid death. Is it that much better than anything else? No, is the marketing way better? Yes, is it? And it's literally, but that's, you know, I'm sitting here and listening to you and I'm thinking about things like, you know, you're talking about performer else and academia is pervaded with this, but.
more and more people like, oh, now you need, especially with social media, you think that people talk about, like, you need to be more genuine to sell things. I think it's rather the opposite. Like everything's becoming about personal branding, right? Like literally it's invading our personalities. So it's really fascinating to hear you talk about this and that this idea of like performance and deception combined with simulation is really, really fascinating to me.
So if you want to dig further into simulation and dissimulation, are we in, and I'm gonna say his name wrong, but Baudrillard territory? Is this Baudrillard? Okay. Yeah, I do not know how to, like, pronunciation, I spend most of my time reading, and so, like, when I was five years old, I said, mom, the world is full of chaos instead of chaos. So I'm, it's never been my strong suit. But okay, so that helps me situate it a little bit, but.
IJ (19:27.926)
Baudrillard, uh-huh. Or at least it's hard. I don't speak French, so. Ha, ha.
PJ (19:49.329)
Please, I'd love to hear you go into more detail about the simulation and dissimulation part.
IJ (19:56.994)
Can I go to the cart and talk a little bit about the malicious deceiver so I can illustrate where deception comes in and where simulation comes in. And then let's see where this goes. And maybe I can go into some of the, what I call the dissimulation machine and performative object that I look at in the book, which are software and AI, it's television, it's plastics. So,
PJ (19:58.873)
Yeah, yes, absolutely. The malicious deceiver, yes.
IJ (20:26.738)
Descartes is fascinating. I love his philosophy. And also, he is the one, not the only one, who created metaphysics, right, that has had an incredible impact on thinking, a very long-lasting impact. Now, what's the metaphysics, right? Metaphysics is interesting. It's about a fundamental nature of reality.
What's the fundamental nature of the world? And so Descartes has this project where he wants to find out what is the ultimate nature of reality, but also what can we know? What can we know for sure? How can we distinguish truth from falsity? Something that I'm extremely drawn to, one of the things that drew me to Descartes, back to your question earlier.
And he has this experiment of radical doubt, which is a tool that he uses to get to establish the basis of knowledge, the ultimate basis of knowledge, right? The experiment of radical doubt. So he says once in a lifetime every philosopher needs to undertake this project where he in his time would have been mostly he, he or she or they really doubt everything.
put everything into doubt in order to see what are those sayings that one has no occasion to doubt, that are clear and distinct. That's his criterion for truth. So as part of this experiment he doubts the senses, it's one of the grounding moves of the metaphysics, says well, the senses deceive so we can't trust them, goodbye senses. And then he goes further and he says well, not only the senses deceive but what if...
There's this scenario that is better known as the evil demon scenario. It's also the malicious deceiver, and I prefer that other formulation, the other translation of Descartes' original. So it says, pretend I have no body, I have no senses, and there's this malicious deceiver who is as strong as God, who is putting all the thoughts.
IJ (22:52.198)
into my head. Everything that I think comes from the malicious deceiver. I mean, this may seem familiar, maybe familiar to our listeners, because it's this thought experiment is the earlier version of the computer simulation thought experiment, right, which has hit the news when someone like Elon Musk says there's good chances we are living in a computer simulation, right? Where?
All our thoughts are being fed to us by a computer today in the card's time as the malicious deceiver. And it's very interesting, right, how he's trying to find out what is beyond deception. And then he creates the scenario with this grand deceiver. And then he says, I wish I had the exact quotation because it's fascinating, but I'll paraphrase.
Well, it's actually really difficult for me to believe in this malicious deceiver because it's a totally absurd scenario. So I have to pretend for some time, right? There's a pretend there's a, uh, to self deceive myself, to be able to entertain this incredible scenario. Uh, so there's the deception, right? There's the deception that, um, what the thoughts that are being
PJ (24:02.406)
Yes.
IJ (24:18.718)
fed to us the ideas are not ours, that they're not genuine. And then Descartes engages himself in self-deception. Why is that so important? Because this is actually how he establishes his whole metaphysics. So he says, okay, I don't have senses, I can't trust the senses, but they deceive. I have this malicious deceiver who's putting all the thoughts into my head. So
What can I know in that situation? Now observe, this very scenario is extremely problematic. First, it assumes that finding something that's beyond doubt is a criterion for truth. We can have issues with that. That is the criterion for truth. But two, how it's set up is very problematic. But then he says, okay, what I can know is that there is something that is doing the thinking.
This is in the meditations, by the way, the malicious deceiver, the evil demon. There's this very famous phrase that Descartes is known for, I think therefore I am, that was actually in the discourse. But a version of it is in the meditation and that's actually what Descartes asserts, like in this condition, all I can know is that there is a thinking, that there's thinking going on, there's something that is doing thinking.
observe. I cannot tell what the eye is. It's not this, you know, he says it's a very puzzling kind of eye. It's not this something that can be conceived by the imagination because I don't know what this eye is. It's just there's something performing, sinking, right? And then he has to go and say, okay, well, what about the world?
What is the world? Like there's something that's doing thinking. Thinking is taking place. It's a mind, right? That is divorced from the senses. Here's the mind-body divide. What can we say about a world out there? And so he has to say, this scenario really cannot be disproved. He cannot disprove it. He has to say, well, there is a good God. There is this good Christian God, right? That does not allow
IJ (26:43.138)
cannot allow for such omnipotent deception. And this God created mathematics. And basically all I can know about the world is whatever is within the purview of mathematics. And so there's a voiding that's going on here. And here's where the simulation comes in, which is really a reconstruction of the world, right? The world is being reconstructed and it's an extremely impoverished picture because
All history is gone, all sense experience is gone, all lived experience is gone. There's this abstract eye that's doing the thinking and the world that is modeled mathematically. Here's actually the connection to both computation and to capitalism, right? Because in this metaphysics, right? The only real world, right? The only thing that I can lay claim to as being real is the world.
as formulated in mathematical terms. What does computation do? Really, to model the world computationally, you have to find a mathematical function for that. You have to translate it into numbers. And I mean, with capitalism, that connection is more complex, but mathematics is part of it. Sorry, you want to jump in?
PJ (28:02.729)
Yeah, well, I just wanted to make sure that I'm tracking with you. So I mean, one way of thinking about it would be that the world can only be quantified if there can be no quality, right? Even quality has to be quantified. Like, it's not that something can feel a certain way, it has to be on a scale of one to 10. Like, and then what it does is it shears off and reduces what's really happening into these kind of neat figures, like.
constantly looking to quantify things. Is that another way of talking about this?
IJ (28:37.042)
Yes, I wouldn't say that that's what the card is writing, but that is where I'm going with it in the book. As a critique of capitalism, yes, but yeah, I think you're right, it's whatever, there's no place for quality. Actually, there's a term that...
PJ (28:45.749)
Okay. I jumped too far ahead. Sorry.
IJ (29:00.778)
the cards use, he says, this is the world as if it were a machine. It's also a mechanistic view, actually. He holds the mechanistic view of the world. So, yes, there's.
PJ (29:11.389)
And that's the movement, and that becomes what we see a lot of the movement of like, history needs to become a science, right? So the only way it can survive is as a science. I remember reading in grad school, theology needs to become a science, which is kind of amusing, right? Like you look at these, it's like literally, yeah, sorry, go ahead. I just...
IJ (29:31.666)
No, it's very interesting that you say that. This is actually not something that I elaborate on in the book, because there's a lot of other things that I do. But I do use and I engage with the thought of a philosopher and economist called Alfred Zorn-Rettl. The book is called Intellectual and Manual Labor. I use his thinking to make the connection between Descartes and capitalism.
IJ (30:01.522)
there is this deep correspondence between what he calls epistemology, modern epistemology and capitalistic exchange, that what they share is real abstraction. He uses this term of real abstraction and the elements of real abstraction from capitalism are to be found, interestingly, not in any philosophy of capitalism.
But in the modern epistemology, science, right? Going back to Galileo, Descartes, Kant and others. Alfred Zorn-Riddle doesn't really engage so much with Descartes, I'm doing all that work to show how actually those elements of real abstraction that we find in capitalistic exchange are also in the Cartesian metaphysics. So interesting that you brought science up.
Again, not something that I engage with a book. I engage with engineering when I talk about plastics as a Cartesian object. If you're interested in that, I can also elaborate. But definitely there's a connection between the two. And the card himself was engaged in all this scientific work, building lenses, the telescope and the microscope were all blowing up at that time.
I can also talk about why his metaphysics looks like that, right? It's because the microscope and the telescope are now really changing the view of the world. You suddenly see that there's all this life that you cannot see with your senses. And so this is, I argue, this is not something that I have too much space to elaborate on in the book, but.
it's why the card has to make the move that he makes, say, well, the sense is deceived, because look, all of a sudden the telescope and the microscope have revealed to us all these dimensions that we were never aware of by our senses. And so his metaphysics is divorced, right? I mean, it seems to be divorced from the science. In fact, they're very complimentary, but he says, I'm gonna remove everything sensory from my metaphysics. Yes.
PJ (32:25.361)
Yeah, so my background is philosophical hermeneutics. So that connection between that kind of critique of from Heidegger, from Descartes to Heidegger, a lot of my work's in Gottem and Ricor, and so Gottem really pulls out. So that, I, anyways, sorry, I'm nerding out a little bit, but yeah, that's, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Actually, I really do wanna hear this and I wanna be.
IJ (32:28.608)
Mm-hmm.
IJ (32:39.086)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (32:49.869)
I think it's a great plug for your book because I don't think we have time to talk about all the things you've mentioned. I would love to talk about it, but we don't have time. I want to hear about plastics as a Cartesian object. That sounds fascinating to me.
IJ (33:01.578)
Yes. Okay, so what is so interesting about plastics? How I get to it is through the logic of the simulation. And I say it's a Cartesian object, sorry, it's a performative object with Cartesian flavors. It's a very synthetic plastic. We're just talking about synthetic plastic here. All right, plastics, if you think about it, is the...
material substance of our world now through its pervasiveness from microplastics that are tainting, nanoplastics that are tainting everything from the air to the water that we're drinking to the plastic that is visible that is in the oceans choking the and the all the life there.
And it's a very interesting kind of object or material, right? It's a material that has both deception and simulation built into it. So, simulation, how? Well, it was designed, right? And of course, with this, what we call plastics is an incredible, encompasses an incredible amount of very different things. But what they have in common is this,
kind of engineering. There was a term that was, I came across in my research in one of the newspapers, I think it was from the 50s or 60s, in molecules made to measure. And it's engineering to create materials that mimic, imitate natural materials. So take nylon, one of the first synthetic fibers.
imitates the silk molecule. Or there was this influx of plastics in the 90s in Romania, which was meant to replace, for instance, all these glasses and plates made of plastic, which are great because they're durable, right? And they're meant to replace glass, which is not durable. But it's also a kind of, and there's quite a bit of writing about this that I draw on,
IJ (35:19.406)
I want to acknowledge that there is quite a bit of writing that I'm drawing from here to try to understand plastic. It's also this very troubling kind of material, right, in the sense that it refuses to degrade. It's not biodegradable. It takes ages, right? It can take more than many lifetimes, human lifetimes, for it to degrade. And then it refuses to interact with plastic.
the environment and the way in which all the other materials interact with each other. And so I analyze how, and then there's something very interesting too about it, which is that it's the material for money, right? Both for money in terms of credit, the credit card, which used to be called plastic, right? You charge everything to plastic, enabling these circles and circles of debt. And money...
In Romania, for instance, what used to be paper money is made of plastic because it's durable, right? You need something that doesn't degrade as paper would, for instance. So, it's a very intriguing kind of material and it has, it's emerged through imitation, right? Imitation of natural materials. It entails simulation where there's the simulation of a
as I gave the example, nylon simulates silk, but it's a completely new and different, more durable and very problematic kind of material in terms of its toxicity, in terms of the pollution. And it separates, if you look at a lot of things, if not all things in the natural world, there's this interconnectedness.
There's this movement towards interconnectedness and interdependency, whereas plastics doesn't do that in any ways, right? And it's also the, I look at it as an object symbol of consumerism, it's very interesting in terms of thinking about disposability, particularly disposable plastics, which I say symbol because it helps us.
IJ (37:42.526)
If we're thinking through plastics, it helps us think through this bigger issue that we're encountering in society of planned obsolescence, of creating things for single use or for a very short span of time, so that we can always be buying more and more and more. So I look at it also as a kind of a metaphor or symbol to try to understand bigger phenomena that are part of what I called earlier the fakeness of the reality, right, where we are always
compelled to be buying more and throw away as soon as possible everything that we've bought.
PJ (38:20.121)
Yeah, one of the first major critiques of Descartes was Jean-Baptiste Vico. And what his critique was, there's a lot of value in Descartes' system, but you can't teach it to children. Like children can't build up from little abstracted blocks to, they need to be taught all at once, like what's right and what's wrong, right? There's no real ethics to this. And it's still to this day, it's one of the best critiques. I was like,
I've seen other ones and that one just really sticks with me probably because I have five kids But like I'm not gonna sit down and like if you try a you know Even if a kid asks like eight different why questions they're like you by the time you answer the eighth one They're not paying attention anymore. So you can't do a Cartesian like build up these little bricks And I actually had written it down when you met before you mentioned it because I could see where you're going
IJ (38:51.35)
Yes.
PJ (39:15.053)
is that there's this Cartesian rejection of time, right? Abstraction cannot really deal well with time, like this idea of history. And so this idea of what plastic really is, it's like it has to be as durable as possible because in the real world, like real world, I mean, you know, but like in nature, things decay, right? And then they get reused again.
And that was actually the way that humans worked with things. They found new ways to use things, right? You know, like, um, try it, like, uh, I do, I bake sourdough. And so the starter, uh, you know, they tell you, well, you can throw it out or you can make pancakes. And my oldest girl loves sourdough pancakes. I make them in the morning instead of throwing out like this leftover starter. And it, that's an older method of using things. Whereas instead it's like, uh,
IJ (39:52.403)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (40:11.973)
Even the things that we consider trash in our current consumerist culture are things that have to endure. The trash has to endure too, which is really odd when you think about it. It's like, I don't need this anymore, but it's gonna be around well past my great grandkids' lives. And so, yeah, I love the, and I assume this is what you mean by, in some ways, using performativity to critique what's going on.
that the concreteness and embodiment of what you're critiquing, it just makes a lot of sense to me. So one, thank you, this has been really, really fascinating. Can you talk a little bit more about how, I mean, a lot of this has been the bad news, right? Like plastic, generally bad news. What's the good news? How do we deal, how can performativity help us move past dissimulation and simulation?
IJ (41:07.678)
Yes, that's a great question. A point of clarification. I think the way there are scholars who have theorized performativity more broadly than I have, and what I do in the book is I use it as an equivalent of simulation. So it's this reduction of the world, but there is performance. I make this difference between performativity and performance. And I actually, yes.
PJ (41:12.509)
Yes.
PJ (41:27.471)
Okay.
PJ (41:34.203)
Ah.
IJ (41:36.314)
But that's not to say that there aren't scholars who have used this much more capacious understanding of performativity. And in fact, as a philosopher, as someone who studied philosophy, you know, you have to define your terms and then you work with those terms. But it's not to say that terms don't have other meanings or can be used in other ways. So
PJ (41:57.041)
So performance, performance is what you think saves us from dissimulation and simulation. Ah!
IJ (42:02.994)
Yes, and in particular, yes, theatrical performance. I spend a lot of time thinking about theatricality and not to say that's the only one. That's not at all the case. And I should say this in the book, I'm very interested in this idea of a politics of location. And the way I've constructed the book is by taking responsibility for my social location. That's why I did, actually I'm...
channeling here a philosopher called Naomi Schemann who said we have to start taking responsibility for social location in our philosophical work so we don't pretend right that we're these abstract things and that what we're saying is universal and that we're just one voice in a conversation and that's what I am doing and I just want to be clear when I'm talking about the really redeeming and the positive side of theatricality and
theater performance is not that this is the only thing. This is one thing that I'm very interested in as a theater maker, as well as a performance scholar. So part of what is so important about that is the embodiment aspect that you mentioned, where I'm interested in ways of sense-making and of making worlds that are more generous, right? And that are grounded in embodiment and that
are making space in a concrete way for this multiplicity of temporalities and multiplicity of histories and lived experience. And I engage with different kinds of artists who work in different media. So it's not just theater. And I'll give you an example. For instance, we just talked about plastic. In that chapter, I turned to this beautiful, beautiful film by Chris Jordan called Albatross.
And I read it through the lens of a theatrical performance, the film. It's a beautiful film that is looking at plastic pollution on this island in the middle of the Pacific, Midway, this island called Midway, where albatrosses have been found. As Chris says, all of them have plastic in them. The good news is they're not all dying from them, but many are dying. And...
IJ (44:27.838)
It's an incredibly moving film, one because it's showing us a global problem in a very concrete, in a very specific location, right? So it's something extremely concrete. Here are these albatrosses on Midway, thousands of miles away from any inhabited territory or any inhabited land.
And here's all these plastics that's washing off the shores from all these different parts of the world and gets indested by albatrosses who die because of that. And it's really a meditation on consumerism and it's a meditation on how we've become not so attentive and attuned to...
other beings and how we fear death and in fearing death we're perpetuating violence and on the habits that we're all engaging in that perpetuate consumerism and it's very beautiful it's embodied. Chris the filmmaker is part of this film and he is also reflecting on what it means to hold these albatrosses literally in your hand as they're dying.
PJ (45:50.557)
Mm-hmm.
IJ (45:51.778)
It's an incredibly moving film, I'm just giving you an example. So there's this embodied dimension. There's this staging and framing. I use here the definition by Samuel Weber of theatricality, who says theatricality is this problematic process of staging, framing, situating something, right, in a way that enables us to relate to it at an emotional level, at an intellectual level.
that moves us inside, it's not just this abstraction. We get bombarded with these numbers, number of plastic, you know, number of bottles that get thrown away every day. And what does that mean? It's abstract. How do we make it concrete so we can feel it, so it can move us to action? And then there's also about imagination. Can we exercise our muscle of imagination to imagine alternatives? So there's this...
beautiful piece by Pinar Yoldas that I engage with, Ecosystem of Excess, where she says, well, what if life began now in our plastic soup that the oceans are? And she creates these, what I call theatrical objects that are these specimens that have the ability to metabolize and digest plastics.
So it's also exercising our imagination and how do we relate to this kind of things.
PJ (47:24.969)
I actually, I mean, maybe you're already aware of this. I think they, I just saw a thing. They just came out with some mushrooms that are actually able to do that. Yeah. Which I was like, I'm probably, yeah. Anyways, yeah. Even as you're talking here, you know, I think of the way that war is so much better captured in art than in numbers, right? Like World War I, the death toll is.
IJ (47:34.774)
Yeah.
PJ (47:54.097)
we use words like catastrophic, right? But you read something like all is quiet on the Western front. And it's like, it does something like it communicates in the same way that an albatross dying in your hands is considerably different from being like, well, we have, you know.
IJ (47:56.5)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (48:12.121)
whatever, you know, like we have a trash ball in the Pacific. So that makes, yeah, it's very helpful. Thank you. As we, you know, I want to be considerate of your time as we kind of close out here, what is something that you would ask our audience to meditate on for the next week after listening to this episode?
IJ (48:16.555)
Mm-hmm.
IJ (48:39.562)
You mentioned this is something that I hold in my thoughts quite a bit, this idea of how do things exist in nature? How do they exist in nature in terms of the interdependency, but also in terms of the circularity of nature? I'm very interested in this idea of the circular economy, something that I actually do teach in my classes in the business of creative enterprises at Emerson.
IJ (49:11.538)
What can we learn from nature? That is one thing. And then what can we learn from by moving away from a pedestal of abstraction, right? When we're engaging with the world. And it can be small, engaging with that neighbor who has a totally different political ideology than I have, who I consider to be an enemy because we disagree at that level.
when we remove ourselves from this pedestal of abstraction and engage in a way that's more grounded in our polar being, as embodied beings, as being who have histories, who are who we are because of the different experiences that we've had in life. How do we honor that as we engage with nature, as we engage with other human beings, as we engage with ourselves?
PJ (50:10.105)
What a beautiful summary and a great call to action. Dr. Jhikan, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. Thank you.
IJ (50:20.47)
It's been great chatting with you, PJ. Thank you so much for the invitation.