Capture: The nineteenth-century landscape and wildlife in modernity.

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Antoine Traisnel (00:06):
Moirbridge approaches his animals with an
intent to capture. What he wantsto see is is really not animals
as discrete individuals and inthemselves and for themselves,
but really their movement. Whathe pursues are an invisible
economy of forces that is reallyshared by all animals. So for

(00:27):
him, the comprehension ofanimals is really less a
function of space, like it isfor Audubon, who goes out in
nature to take animals and bringthem back to culture, of the
nineteenth century US cultural

Narrator (00:43):
canon. It of the nineteenth century U. S.
Cultural canon. In aconversation that ranges from
references to Muybridge andAudubon, Poe and Hawthorne,
Whitman and Thoreau,environmental humanities and

(01:05):
biopolitics, Presentation andRepresentation, Capture and
Captivity.
Antoine Treysnol, author ofCAPTURE, joins Michelle Neely,
author of AgainstSustainability, in a lively and
rigorous discussion. Tresnel isassistant professor of English
and comparative literature atthe University of Michigan.
Neely is associate professor ofEnglish at Connecticut College.

(01:29):
This conversation was recordedin March 2021.

Michelle Neely (01:34):
Okay. Well, I'm really excited to get to talk
about capture.

Me too.

I absolutely loved your book as I've already
told you. So so to begin at thebeginning, you theorize the rise
of what you call the age ofcapture during the nineteenth
century. You're tracing theshift in representation, from
Audubon to Muybridge, fromhunting to capture. So I'm
wondering if you could justexplain a little bit about what
you're charting with that shift.

Yeah. Sure. So when I when I started thinking
about the place that animalsoccupy in the landscape of
nineteenth century America, I myquestion was, would it meant to
study animals or even to justrepresent animals at the very
moment when animals werereceding from everyday view like

(02:22):
never before? So so my questionwas quite, you know, simply, how
do you represent something thatis in the process of
disappearing? How do yourepresent animals at the
historical moment when animalswere being hunted and
slaughtered on a completelyunprecedented scale, when
natural habitats were beingviolently reconfigured to fit

(02:44):
settler colonial economicregimes, but also when species
extinction was no longer just anabstract scientific theory, but
had become an undisputableempirical reality.
And here, I'm thinking, forinstance, of of two emblematic,
you know, animals, for instance,emblematic of of The United

(03:06):
States, the passenger pigeon andthe bison, both of which occupy
an important place in my bookbecause they, were thought at
the beginning of the century tobe so numerous, as to be
inexhaustible, but both werehunted, respectively into
extinction and near extinctionin just the space of a few

(03:26):
decades. So, my my question wasreally to try to figure out a
way to account for thatparticular history of the
systemic disappearance ofanimals from the point of view
of representation. And hereimmediately, I thought you have
a little bit of a problem. Howdo you represent something, that
does not have a fixed presence,right, if representation is the

(03:50):
representation of something. So,my thesis was that what you need
is new apparatuses, newprotocols, new techniques for,
apprehending that fugitivereality, the animal, in the
moment of its disappearance.
My general argument is that thecentury's new kind of drive

(04:12):
interest in containing andarchiving animals introduced a
new visual regime. This is whatI call capture, in which animals
are rendered both known inadvance and yet utterly
unknowable. So there's, youknow, a kind of defining paradox
in my conception of capture. Andunder the new regime of vision

(04:34):
that I call capture, animalssimultaneously appear readily
available via technologies ofknowledge and control, and yet
at the same time, infinitelydistant, essentially fugitive,
always on the verge ofextinction or disappearance,
etcetera. What I try to do isis, theorize the, the

(04:55):
prototyping of this new regimeof capture in new, protocols of
scientific inquiry, in new,visual experimentations, but
also, in really the materialbiopolitical management of
animals as it was beingperfected but also contested and

(05:17):
how this also manifests in someof the century's most iconic
works.
So you've already mentionedAudubon and Moy Bridge, but I'm
also thinking about authors likeJames Fenimore Cooper, Edgar
Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Onething that you also briefly
mentioned is that I think aboutthe the shift from the hunt to

(05:40):
capture. And here I should saythat, what I try to do when I
try to to trace the advent ofwhat I call capture is use the
hunt as a particular paradigmthat helps us understand how a
certain way of apprehendinganimals, a certain form of
animal pursuit, you know, wastransformed into something else

(06:01):
over the course of the century.What what I do is basically try
to consider what happens to thehunt, both as a material
practice, but also as a culturaltrope over the course of the
century. And by tracing how it,itself tends to either be
promoted, you know, if we thinkculturally how the hunt becomes
really this sort of a perfecttrope for representing, you

(06:24):
know, the American, man, verymuch, you know, masculine
figure.
The hunt had this kind of rolein promulgating this, colonial
agenda that that naturalized theconversion of indigenous
subsistence habitats, into, youknow, things that were ready for
the taking, all the whilepresenting, this kind of manly

(06:48):
pursuit as some kind of archaicfigure that was destined to
disappear. So and here we canthink of how this, fed into the
trope of the vanishing American,and that's something that's
discussed by indigenous scholarslike Gerald Disner, etcetera.
What I try to show, basically,is that at stake in the

(07:09):
disappearance of the hunt, thisweird disappearance that also,
maintenance of this particularactivity is also, a kind of
profound epistemological andaesthetic shift in the
perception of animals.

The explanatory power of capture is so, so
evident in the book, and it itjust came through so clearly in
in, in what you just said. Imean, the the stakes to
biopolitics, the stakes forrepresentation are so clear and
powerful. But even just at thelevel of the visual and textual
readings, I mean, when I lookedat the table of contents, one of
my first reactions was, thiskind of delight that you were

(07:48):
working with these nineteenthcentury texts that center
animals in what are to me theseweird and wonderful ways, but
that I've always found the kindof critical attention that some
of these texts get a bitdissatisfying. So Hawthorne's
the Marble Fawn, Cooper's thePrairie are are two examples of
of texts where I feel like thethe the mode of accounting for,
animality in this text has neverfelt fully satisfying to me

(08:11):
before your book. But but sortof capture the book and the
concept just totally opens upboth of those novels, and then
invites all of these fascinatingpoints of comparison between
them.
You know, how visuality works ineach, how taxonomy features in
each. I mean, those are just twokind of quick examples of the
really original readings thatthe that the book offers.

(08:35):
Thinking about all of this mademe wonder just how you came to
capture as a concept. You know,was there a feeling of
dissatisfaction that you hadwith a particular theoretical
narrative? Was there somethingelse that provoked you in this
direction?

Thank thanks so much for the question, and
thanks also for being, such a aa generous reader. I'm I'm
really happy to hear that that'show you feel about I wouldn't
say that there was necessarily afeeling of dissatisfaction, but
I can say that I came to thesetexts with, I think, maybe a

(09:09):
different question, precisely asI was saying before, because I
was trying to think about almosta new species of animal, as
something that was in theprocess of disappearing. The the
origin story of this project isreally to be found in, like many
people in animal studies readingDerrida's The Animal That
Therefore I Am. So, I wasfascinated by his understanding,

(09:36):
description of this concept, theanimal, as this very weird,
chimerical being, that has thiskind of spectral and yet
completely enduring, you know,presence in our texts, in our
philosophy, in, Westernrepresentation. And and for

(09:58):
those who are not familiar, youknow, basically, Derrida calls,
the animal the he calls it acatchall concept, and something
that seems to be everywherepresent, almost
infrastructurally as somethingthat supports, Western liberal
discourses and yet consistentlysacrificed.

(10:20):
And and he basically says thatit's it's, doomed to what he
calls an interminable survival,right, in both our, yeah, our
texts, but also I think, he'sthinking about them materially.
And my interest when I readDerrida was to try to basically

(10:40):
periodize the emergence of thisparticular figure, this weird
figure that the animal is. Thisis something that Nicole Shukin
has already, you know, pointedout in her own reading of
Derrida, which is this momentwhen Derrida seems to date, you
know, or periodize theappearance of the animal, the

(11:01):
emergence of this, of thisfigure somewhere around two
hundred years ago. And, Shukinis, you know, saying, like,
that's really interestingbecause it's also, the beginning
of, you know, it it it sort offits, Foucauldian periodization
of the emergence of what hecalls biopolitics, but also what

(11:25):
Xuqin and other people havecalled biocapitalism. So, there
seemed to be really thisinteresting way of making
Derrida's concept resonate witha, material, political,
economic, but also, I think,aesthetic, you know, history

(11:48):
that, is something that I thinkhis text could open up, but that
he was not doing himself.
So, I went to what I knew, whichis nineteenth century American
literature and culture andvisual culture, And I sort of,
asked myself, could thisparticular lens, that Derrida

(12:10):
offers us be a productive one toread some of the texts that
you've mentioned? And I did findthat there was really this,
fascinating recurrence of thesefigures, these animal figures
that are both there and notthere, you know, in the text
that you've mentioned,Hawthorne's the Barbauld Fawn,
but also Cooper's the Prairie.Animals have these really,

(12:33):
interesting roles that they playin the economy of the different
stories, but also theirrepresentation is very much a
problem for these authors. Andso, I went a little bit from the
theory down to the text, butreally I tried to see if this
particular theory had a bearingon these texts. And the answer

(12:53):
for me is yes, but there is verymuch a lot of work to be done to
make this particular conceptthat was also forged in a
particular history, which forDerrida is very much the history
of, continental philosophy andand Western thought, how it
could be made to speak to a verydifferent context, which is the

(13:15):
settler colonial context ofnineteenth century America.

One of the things that I, really loved
about the book, is that inaddition to the, the more kind
of obvious way that the chaptersare ordered and structured at
the level of, developing theargument that we've been talking
about, the argument of capture,There are also these subtle
threads and through lines thatare running through all of the
chapters, that make for thesereally surprising moments in the

(13:41):
argument and these connections,these across the chapters. And
so one of these would be thegrid, the way that the the grid
appears in different differentguises in different chapters. So
Audubon's grid is distinct fromyet related to Cooper's grid or
Poe's grid or Muybridge's. So Iwas wondering if you could talk
about just how the grid featuresin your argument?

Yes. Thanks for picking that up because I
was fascinated by grids when Iwas reading this, and there were
many more grids at some point inthe writing of this manuscript.
And and I had to so it playeddown a little bit because, it it
was not necessarily the mainfocus of of the book. Grids are

(14:22):
everywhere in nineteenthcentury, US culture and this is
something that Rebecca Solnitalready has, you know, pointed
out in, her book on Muybridge,Rivers of Shadow. It's really a
fascinating comment that she'smaking because she's here doing
a little bit of what I'm tryingto do, which is tie the grid of

(14:44):
the Great Land Ordinance thatmade it possible for The US to
colonize gigantic spaces withouteven having been there yet.
And I found that there wassomething really fascinating
about this particular tool, thisparticular apparatus, that's the
grid here was as, a tool of whatI call land speculation, as

(15:08):
something that helps youpreemptively, you know, really
capture a territory without evenhaving been there yet. Right?
Physically, that particular,omnipresence of the grid also
has, you know, a bearing on howThe US thought about itself as

(15:28):
being extremely rational. It'sthe Cartesian grid, but also
egalitarian. It seems to promisethe same thing to everyone, with
obviously covering the violenceof the you know, removal, of the
Native Americans that wasactually necessary for settlers
to go and and inhabit thesedifferent spaces.

(15:50):
But, it really is, this sort of,governmental, as well as, you
know, and that's Rebecca's ownit, mental logic that seemed to
be governing, this, this thiscentury. And as I was, you know,
looking at these differentfigures or these different texts

(16:10):
or images, I also saw gridseverywhere. And I saw them
sometimes as disappearing behindthe images. So, that's for
instance with Audubon, who used,grids and basically, squares
behind the subjects, the birdsthat he would be painting, and
then he would cover up, youknow, these grids with, you

(16:31):
know, with painted landscapes toMoirbridge, who at the end of
the century actually made thegrid very apparent. And when you
look at his, work on animallocomotion, what's really
interesting is that thelandscape that Audubon was
putting over his grid here hascompletely disappeared.
So it seems as if we have, bothcontinuity but also a difference

(16:55):
in how that particular way ofapprehending animals, The grid,
was used, so as as a particulartechnology. I mentioned Audubon
and Muirbridge because I thinkthey are very good examples of
what I'm trying to argue, withthe book here. They both have
very different ways ofapproaching their animals. Even

(17:18):
though they also both seem topartake in the same kind of
archival epistemophilia, theyboth have these gigantic works
that they work on. Audubon's isthe birds of America that he
publishes in the first half ofthe, the nineteenth century, so
between 1827 and 1838, and inwhich he tries to really collect

(17:41):
all of the feathered fauna of ofThe US.
And at the end, we haveMuybridge who publishes, his
massive animal locomotion. Soagain, a lot of animal pictures.
So I think it's 1887, and thereseems to be something really
similar here. The sheer size oftheir enterprise, the sheer

(18:02):
ambition of these two, alsofreshly, immigrated European men
who come to The US to kind ofcollect, you know, everything.
But as as I was saying before,you know, their animals are
quite different.
Right? And that actually is agood way of also trying to
understand what I mean by theshift from, the hunt regime to

(18:23):
the capture regime. Audubonfamously was an avid hunter, and
hunting was, very muchcontinuous with his painting
practice. So he would, kill, youknow, shoot most of the birds
that he would be painting. And,on the other hand, Muybridge
would be working with subjects,animal subjects, that had to be

(18:45):
alive because what he wasinterested in was their motion,
locomotion, and also that werealready captive.
So he was working with, forinstance, the, Philadelphia zoo
or with, you know, horses,already domesticated animals.
And and really what struck mewas that on the one hand,
Audubon perceives thesespecimens really with the eyes

(19:07):
of a hunter. His birds are outthere, you know, in the wild. He
kills them in order to drawthem. He focuses, first on their
external appearance and he alsopresumes animals to be really
knowable in terms of theirtaxonomic identity, which for
him is visible to the human eye.

(19:29):
In contrast, Muybridgeapproaches his animals with a
different intent, with an intentto capture. What he wants to see
is really not animals asdiscrete individuals and in
themselves and for themselves,but really their movement. What
he pursues are an invisibleeconomy of forces that is really

(19:50):
shared by all animals. So, forhim, the comprehension of
animals is really less afunction of space, like it is
for Audubon, who goes out innature to take animals and bring
them back to culture, but rathera function of time. So in
Muybridge, what I try to show isthat space has become

(20:12):
subordinated to an imminentprinciple of transformation and
transience.
Right? So animals are reallyapprehended as they pass in
passing. And here, there's alittle bit of a pill on words on
the passing also as animalsreally being understood as
elusive, fugitive, but also onthe verge of, of disappearing.

(20:35):
Right? Kind of doomed to not bethere.
And so there's almost this kindof frenzy to try to record
something that he knows is notgonna be there for, very, very
long.

In what you're saying, I was thinking a lot
about the adaptability of thetechnique that or of the
technology that that you wereoutlining and, and that also
kind of connects with this otherthread that I noticed, which was
the way that you were tracingthe adaptation of these hunting
techniques into the kind ofseemingly, but you're arguing
not actually less violentobjectives of capture. I'm

(21:09):
thinking of the this strange andamazing gun camera, which, which
comes up early in theintroduction. I mean, even just
which is exactly what it soundslike for people who can't see
the image. It's it is a guncamera. And, and then, of
course, there's this Morbidge'stripwire system.
For me, I was I was so, takenwith the the link between, that

(21:32):
you draw between Poe's urbandetectives, you know, DuPont's
famous logical technique andthen the the tracking work of
the hunter, how the how the onefeeds into the other. I mean,
that Poe chapter is just, like,so stunning. I'm sorry. I just
yeah. I it's it it blew me awaycompletely.
I I guess I'm wondering if youcould talk about how

(21:54):
characterizing the detective asa hunter kind of, changes our
perception, not just of themurders in the room war, not
just of the genre of detectivefiction. I mean, that would be
enough. But but, you know, yourargument is so much bigger than
that. Right? Like, the functionof animality in the modern
imaginary, you know, crime andcriminality.

(22:15):
I mean, it just it touches on somany things. I'm wondering if
you could talk a little bitabout that Poe chapter.

Yeah. I'm gonna try to do my best, but,
thanks for for, you know, alsopicking up on on that. Really,
what I'm I'm trying to argue is,not simply a a disappearance of
the hunt, but as you're saying,like, more of a kind of a
folding in of the hunt in insomething else, right, in
something, that also appears tobe less violent because it it it

(22:44):
has, subsumed the hunt undersomething, you know, different.
The gun camera, if I can justcome back to this very quickly
before

I talk

about the quote, is this really
fascinating invention that someguy at the end of the nineteenth
century, you know, BenjaminKilburn invented, because he
wanted to have this this kind oflike portable device that would
enable him to continue huntingwhile knowing that hunting was

(23:15):
very much a problem, you know,when people were becoming more
and more aware that, it wasactually a cause of extinction,
that extinction could bemanmade. And and really, this is
not something that at thebeginning of the century people
ever, you know, were concernedwith because the very concept of
species extinction was not yeteven, you know, a thing. Right?

(23:38):
Or a barely starting to be athing. It it it really starts
with, the French scientist,Georges Cuvier, who really is
the first one to reallyformalize extinction.
But very much there was thissense that, how do I continue
doing what I love, which isshoot things, without really

(23:58):
inflicting injury to, theobjects that I so want to have.
And and what I love is not justthe object itself, which is
already such a weird thing. Itreally is this accordion like
camera on a gun. You know? Sothe object itself is very weird,
but also the really bizarre, youknow, ad, that says to its, you

(24:23):
know, I I think we can assumewhite male audience, It's okay.
You can go and continue, youknow, hunting. You can do this
thing that you so much love, andand you can do it without being
cruel. So I try to read, youknow, the emergence of this new
form of hunting, that pretendsto, not do any kind of violence

(24:44):
to its object or subject alongthe lines of what Foucault sees
as the rise of a new form ofpower, which equals pastoral
power. And this pastoral powerwould be much less obviously
violent. It is very muchviolent, but instead of killing,

(25:06):
putting to death, it's morelet's die is the formulation
that Foucault has.
So I was interested in in how, aform of power, and a form of a
technique also of of knowing andcontrolling emerges in that
particular moment that appearsto be much less immediately

(25:26):
violent, and yet is very muchthe continuation of hunting by
other means. So Poe is reallyfascinating because, as we know,
he's the inventor of a new genreor, actually, several new
genres. I say that, and I canalready hear people say, like,
well, there are predecessors to,you know, Poe for thinking about

(25:49):
the invention of the of the, youknow, crime fiction or detective
fiction. And I I I'm I'm awarethat there are precursors, but
we could, I think, easily agreethat he's, very much associated
with that kind of new form thatthe detective story is. I wanted

(26:09):
to see who the detective was.
It it all started with thisinteresting insight that Walter
Benjamin has in the arcadesproject that essentially, Poe's
detective is a hunter in adifferent context, in a
different setting. And heactually links, Dupin directly

(26:34):
to Nadi Bumpo and to Cooper'sHunter, but, you know, he
basically, shows us that thatthat something has happened. And
what's happened is that thecontext, the background, is
different. So I, you know, readvery much the murders in a
remorgue, with an eye to try tosee, you know, who the detective

(26:57):
was and how he was described, byPoe. And what is really
fascinating, and that'ssomething that, I had already
written about a little bit withmy friend, Tongam
Ravindranathan, in a in a shortbook that was published in
France A Few Years ago, what'sreally fascinating is that Poe
actually cryptically describes,the detective as a hunter.

(27:20):
He tells us repeatedly that, thedetective is the one who is
never losing the scent of themurderer, or or the perpetrator,
of, you know, the murderers inthe remark. And this perpetrator
is nowhere to be found by thepolice. So the police who here
are sort of representatives ofkind of Cartesian logic, just

(27:42):
are completely confounded whenthey try to solve the the
murders in the Remorgue becausethey have expectations. And
their expectation, Dupin tellsus, is that their suspect has to
be a human. They, you know, tryto understand what this
particular suspect could havesaid, but DuPont, you know, will

(28:05):
realize that, it actually couldnot have said anything because
it doesn't speak, or what themotive was.
But Dupin realizes that therecouldn't have been a rational
motive behind the murdersbecause it was not a rational
being, that had committed this,this murder. Essentially, what
Dupin shows is that there was nomurders in the rumour. There was

(28:28):
just, you know, some creatureinflicting death to other
creatures. And what is reallyfascinating is that Dupin has so
often been read as thisrepresentative of of
rationality, this hyperrationalbeing, which he is to a degree,
but, there is always, you know,behind his acumen, actually the

(28:52):
sagacity of a hunter, of, thisparticular figure that
complements or supplements hisvery logical knowledge with, the
instinct and the techniques ofsomeone who is able to smell the
scent of his prey, essentially.And that has really fascinating

(29:14):
bearings on what it means to goafter or to criminalize someone.
And, the murders in the remoguealso has often been read as a
very interesting allegory ofBlack criminality, because the
animal, the orangutan, who isthe perpetrator, is portrayed in

(29:37):
racist terms, but also is verymuch resonating with racist
discourses at the time thatwe're animalizing racialized
people. And it's interesting tosee how this goes hand in hand
with also an animalization. Butthis animalization is not just a

(29:57):
dehumanizing, it's more there'sno simple binary with Dupin,
between human and animal, ratherthere's a kind of gradation. And
what I try to show is that thisvery much works with new ways of
understanding how racialhierarchies work at the time and

(30:18):
and also with new forms ofcontrol that emerge, you know,
in the moment. So, so, yeah,that that's very much, I think,
how I try to think about thefunction of animality, in the in
the modern imaginary as you weresaying, you know, in, in this
particular story.

I wanted to ask you also about about Moby Dick.
It, I mean, in some ways, it'slike the animal novel, right, of
the nineteenth century. And itit's not a subject of one of the
chapters, although it gets, youknow, it's something that you
think about substantially in anumber of places in the book
beginning with the introduction.But I'm I'm wondering how how

(30:56):
Moby Dick helped you think aboutcapture or or just, you know, if
you could talk about some of theways that you see capture
evidenced in in Moby Dick?

Yeah. It's also the quintessential
nineteenth century Americannovel for so many people. So
there were so many reasons tostudy Moby Dick, and I think I
found them a little daunting.Hence, I did not really devote,
you know, a chapter or maybe forfear of having to have one book
just about Moby Dick. I I justlet it crop up every every now

(31:30):
and then in the book, you know,mostly in the introduction, but
I think there's several momentswhere the the whale kind of,
like, reemerges and then, it'sit's submerged.
Yeah. Exactly. Surfaces. But I Ireally was thinking about this
text the whole time as I waswriting on it. I was I was

(31:50):
writing the the the the book,because I do think, that
Melville is very, very attunedto what's happening to animals,
you know, at the time, but alsoto the industries and and the
techniques that surround theseanimals, as well as the
epistemologies.

(32:10):
Right? The the ways of knowingthem also, we're in the process
of being transformed. And and Ithink, really, Melville was
very, very attentive to that. Soin the introduction, I just have
a very short reading of MobyDick, and and that really,
hinges around his title and theuse of the of the oar in, Moby

(32:34):
Dick or the whale because I feltthat there was a tension there,
a tension between the individualanimal or, the species. Right?
Moby Dick, the single whitewhale after which Ahab is or the
whale as this kind of alreadygeneralized, the massified,

(32:55):
animal, the animal maybe asopposed to a singular animal.
And I attached the first MobyDick to Ahab, who for me,
epitomizes the logic of the huntthat is very interested in
pursuing the single animal thatin that case also can be granted
a name. And on the other hand, Ipaired Ahab or contrasted his

(33:20):
pursuit to, another pair ofhunters who we are told no
longer hunt, who are Peleg andBildad. So Peleg and Bildad are
these former whale hunters whonow no longer do the work, but
outsource it to other people. Sothey very much embody, kind of
like capitalist, you know,figures that let others, you

(33:43):
know, do the work.
But they also interestingly workfor shareholders, so they're not
even their own people in a way.Right? And they are not
interested in this singleanimal. In fact, that is more of
an impediment to theirenterprise because what they're
interested in is accumulating asmuch whale mass as possible. And
so I think that here, the whaleis very much what they're after

(34:07):
and in their pursuit, which, youknow, knows no end because you
can always accumulate and youknow that well because that's
also what you discussed in inyour book.

Mhmm.

They very much represent still a form of
hunting, but a hunting that sortof disavows those that it
employs in order to do its work.And and that's where I see, a
form of a subsumption of thework done by Ahab, but mostly by
his crew, and therefore, youknow, all these people working,

(34:40):
you know, under Ahab, in in alltheir, you know, diversity, as
as really being kind of, takenup by a different kind of logic,
which is this, capitalist logicof ceaseless, endless,
accumulation that that I callcapture. Sorry. I needed to
finish my sentence. Yeah.

No. I was for some when you were talking, I
was kind of picturing too the,the form that the animal comes
back to I mean, in a way, we digthe animal. It does not come
back to shore. But, in theory,you know, the the sort of what
you were saying, at thebeginning about the kind of
spectral nature of the animal,like, the the the sort of,
transformation of the whale intothese, like, casks of oil, sort

(35:20):
of, you know, down in the hold.I don't know.
Anyway, I was thinking aboutthis.

Yeah. Which yeah. You're absolutely right.
Which also, I think, makes it,ever present, but, also
disappeared, right, in this, orpresent in this non visible way,
in our in the very structure,you know, of our of our lives.
Right?

And Right. Which Melville thinks about. Right? In
the whale that the the whale isa dish. He's like your your
candles, your your pens, yourobjects, the material objects of
your lives.
Right?

Absolutely. Yes.

I wanted to ask you about the about the end,
where the book ends. I reallyloved that this okay. On the one
hand, this is a book that'sabout the dire consequences of
the rise of capture. But I lovedthat you ended on this note of,
to quote you, you know, tryingto glimpse the ethical
imperative that emerges out ofthis devastation. And so I

(36:12):
wondered if you could just talkabout where you see room for for
ethical action or or responseunder capture and also why it
was important to you to end thebook on that note.

It's it's something that I wish I had
developed more, but I try inevery chapter and and, you know,
more importantly toward the endto make space for thinking about
what capture also makespossible. I'm very aware that

(36:43):
what I'm I'm tracing is a, a amaster narrative really in the
in the most literal sense andtherefore something that is
indeed a story of devastation,of mass extinction, of
disappearance. So I do not wantto romanticize that history. At
the same time, I also am awarethat resistance is also often,

(37:06):
forged within the terms ofdominant discourses and
strategies. I also think thatwhat we're witnessing with
CAPTURE is not just the thecapture of the world, but very
much a a a transformation andepistemic shift that, also
allows for a different way ofinteracting with animals.

(37:30):
And one thing you know, maybeone way of, you know,
responding, which might be alsoa cop out, but one way of
responding to your to yourquestion, I often think of the
the role that a thinker likeJeremy Bentham plays in in
contemporary theory. On the onehand, I think we all associate
Bentham with the Panopticon andwith, what, Foucault has done

(37:55):
with him. And so he becomes thearchitect of our modern
surveillance society, very muchnot a very happy role to play
for Bentham. But interestingly,in animal studies, he also has
this sort of very importantfoundational role as someone

(38:15):
who, as Derrida says in TheAnimal that, therefore I am,
changed the entire question ofthe animal. And so famously,
Bentham asked that maybe thequestion we should ask is not
can they think or can theyreason, but can they suffer?
Derrida does this, you know,beautiful reading of this can

(38:36):
they suffer, which, in in Frenchis, using the, the verb pouvoir,
which is is the modal for can.I'm not gonna do an entire
reading of that, but I justwanna say that he he sees in in
the way in which, Bentham asksthis particular question. He
sees the transformation of thefield and really the possibility

(38:59):
of asking different questionsand asking questions around what
it means to ask whether someoneor something can suffer, has
this particular power, which forhim is also a power of the power
ness, a power of the one who ispassive or suffering. So, I do
think that from the very samecrucible in a way, we have

(39:23):
different things, you know, andI was trying to do justice to to
them, both the story of ofdevastation and at the same
time, the, ethical possibilitiesthat emerge out of that very,
story.

I would, I would love to talk to you about
Bentham sometime. Not not thisis not the time, but I, I'm so
fascinated by that, can theysuffer passage, because he says
a lot of other reallyinteresting things in that
passage that no one ever talksabout. Like, if they're being
eaten were all, you know, we wecan eat such of them as we as we
please. Anyway, okay. What Iactually wanna ask you, is

(39:58):
something just a little moreopen ended.
I would say that that the bookor you have a kind of, like,
genius for the paradigmaticexample. Right? There are so
many moments. I mean, the guncamera was just, like, the first
example, you know, I don't know,two pages in where I went, oh,
my gosh. He must have been soexcited when he found this.
It's

it's I I was.

Illustrates the the argument so perfectly.
Right? Like, it's so on thenose. But there were so many
moments like that. And so I'mwondering if you have a favorite
moment.
Was there was there a part ofthe book that was especially
kind of exciting to write or ora moment in the research that
that just was like, yes, this iscoming together? Or or even just
something that, you know, youfelt provoked by or that shifted

(40:39):
your own thinking about, kindof, animality.

Yeah. There there were really I mean, I
think, as you know, everyonewho's, you know, who's gone
through this long project, youhave really moments of despair
where you're like, am I makingany sense? Is that thing really,
like, cohering into something?And then there also these
magical moments where thingsseem to actually, come together

(41:03):
really magically. So the the thegun camera was one such example.
And and they seem sometimes likethey actually are the origin of
the project because they work sowell. But, you know, they often
or sometimes really come,belatedly and and make things
work in a particular way.Really, I I should think more

(41:24):
about it, but off the top of myhead, I would say maybe two
things, you know, I was reallyexcited about. The first was to
try to think of Michel Foucaultbecause I very much use the
biopolitics as a frame forthinking about the animal
question. So trying to thinkabout how Foucault himself can
help us, you know, think of thatand and really trying to read,

(41:47):
the order of things as opposedto maybe the the Foucault of
reference for people who dobiopolitics, which is, you know,
later.
But going back to this earlything and try to see that that
animals really are very muchpresent, you know, in in a very
weird way in in what he saysabout the transition from
natural history to biology. Andthat's again, that idea that

(42:12):
there is something maybepositive, however flimsily
positive, he pays attention tothe new powers, he says, that
animals gain in the nineteenthcentury. So that was really kind
of an intriguing, moment to methat I felt really drawn to and
wanted to unpack. And I think interms of finds, I was really

(42:38):
fascinated by Hawthorne's TheMarble Fondue. I had already
written a book on Hawthorne.
And for those who don't know,there's this weird elusive
character of a fawn who might ormight not have pointy ears that
would be the way in which hiscompanions could determine
whether he is a human or ananimal. And I as I was reading

(43:03):
Darwin's, The Descent of Man,the very first example that
Darwin uses is pointy ears totalk about, you know, the, the
possible ancestry. And it waswritten ten years after
Hawthorne's book. So it itreally was, you know there's no
question of influence, but morethis kind of, like, weird moment
of coincidence that I was reallyfascinated by. So, I was really

(43:28):
curious how that could be read.
These are moments that wereparticularly interesting and fun
to think about and write about.

That's great. That Darwin yeah. That Darwin
moment is amazing. I also wantedto ask you how you think about
the relationship between yourargument, in CAPTURE and, the
environmental humanities. Imean, I, you know, I came away
from this book feeling like thisshould be required reading for
anyone in the field of Right?
It's it's so again, as I'vealready said, the just the the

(44:02):
explanatory power of CAPTURE isso evident. But but then there's
sometimes this I don't wanna sayrift, but it the the it feels as
if the two fields don't alwaystalk to each other. So I'm I'm
just wondering how you thinkabout the relationship of
CAPTURE to the kind of workthat's being done or the
conversations that are happeningin, the environmental

(44:22):
humanities?

Well, I mean, I I think that I should ask you
to answer this question, becausewe first met at an animal
studies panel at a conference.Right? Yeah. And so we were both
working on animal studies later,but then when I read your book
last summer, AgainstSustainability, which is so

(44:44):
brilliant and I've recommendedit to many people already, It
very much still talks about nonhuman animals, human animal
relations, issues likeextinction that are not
specifically about animals, butvery much so. It is very much
framed as an intervention inenvironmental humanities.
Right? So so maybe I should askyou to, think because I think

(45:08):
you've probably thought moreabout this question, like, how
you yourself made the transitionfrom animal studies to
environmental humanities, if ifthat's the right word, or, how
you see these two fields maybedialoguing or or not. Right? I'm
I'm curious to hear yourthoughts on that.

One of the reasons that I found CAPTURE so
compelling was that there's thisI think it's Ursula Heizer talks
about how there's thisuncomfortable relationship
between, activists who do animalrights work and activists who
work on behalf of animals, inthe environmental movement
because animal rights activistsare are advocating on, at the

(45:50):
level of, like, individualanimals or animals who are
understood as distinctindividuals. Whereas, you know,
environmentalists are advocatingat, you know, the level of
species. Right? And so oftenthen they're they're willing to
make different choices, or theythey see the ethical imperative
as playing out quitedifferently. There has to be a
way to sort of, like, talkacross these, these registers.

(46:14):
Right? And to think across theseregisters, and I think, you
know, CAPTURE felt like a way tokind of, think across some of
these registers. And I thinkthere are moments in in my
project where I where I was alsotrying to think across these
registers or or I mean, one ofthe things that Moby Dick does
occasionally is think acrossthose registers, I think, or at

(46:35):
least give us an invitation tosort of recognize these
different registers.

Yeah. I I would completely agree that I
think that Moby Dick is sofascinating, I think, because it
it it holds different lines ofpossibility. You know, it holds
them throughout the narrative,sometimes more or less, but it
it makes it possible to thinkthem as not necessarily
canceling one another, but asmaybe surviving alongside each

(47:04):
other, sometimes beingentangled, sometimes being more
distant. But, yeah, you'recompletely right. I think about
this tension in the two fieldsand the ways in which maybe
there's also a value insometimes thinking about the
individual animal withoutsubsuming it under the register
of the species.
So maybe it's also a question ofpragmatic, use, which, you know,

(47:25):
is, I think, a great moment forus to start talking more about
your book because you're verymuch, you know, interested in in
these questions. And I think youvery much have this interest in
in ethics and in in use and in,what we can do and also what we
can do with literature. So maybeI can start by saying that one
of the things that really struckme the most when I first read

(47:47):
your book was the brilliantsimplicity of your thesis. I
mean, and you say itimmediately. So it's it's it's
we've not just inheritedproblems from the nineteenth
century, most famously maybe thedamages caused by the industrial
revolution or many other things,but we've also inherited
problematic solutions likerecycling, preservation, zero

(48:10):
waste practices, all of whichpartake in the in the larger
logic of sustainability, which,you say is often uncritically
adopted in environmentaldiscourses today.
So when I say it's a simplethesis, I do not mean to say
that it's obvious because it'snot at all, and that's what your
book is about. It's it's verycounterintuitive. So so maybe

(48:35):
you can, say a few words aboutwhy ostensibly uncontroversial
practices like recycling andpreservation are are
problematic.

I think I might distinguish a little bit
between, like, practices andparadigms in my answer because
some of the practices of thesethings on balance have maybe
been helpful or at least sort ofcould in theory. But as
paradigms, I see them to beblunt as environmental fantasies
that are just totally complicitin the problems that they
supposedly address. Becausethey're, they're ultimately

(49:08):
involved in sustaining thesystems that are causing these
problems in the first place.Right? So, you know, recycling,
it it makes unlimited consumerappetite seem harmless.
It it promises that, you know,the earth or the recycling
industry can just absorb endlessamounts of our waste and make it
pure and and useful again. And,you know, Whitman in the book is

(49:29):
my kind of poetic prophet ofthis. Right? He's the he's the
poet of compost, but then, youknow, this material recycling is
the twin of omnivorous appetitein this poetic environment.
There's this great moment inthis compost that people who've
tried to think about Whitman asa kind of environmental poet
always turn to where, he getskind of nervous that maybe the

(49:51):
Earth actually can't absorb allof our waste and, what he refers
to as our sour dead.
But but then it's just it'salmost immediately that that
moment of nervousness, thatintuition, that there that maybe
there's some limit to what wecan consume is is dismissed
through the celebration of themagic of material recycling, the
magic of compost. And so, youknow, ultimately, consumption

(50:14):
without limit is just totallyexonerated. He's in conversation
in the chapter with the thetwentieth century poet Lucille
Clifton, who I read as justtotally self consciously
rewriting many aspects ofWhitman, but this aspect in
particular. I mean, for forClifton, there's no consequence
free consumption. There's justthere's always consequences, you

(50:34):
know, for for generations, forfor always.
Right? So that means there arealways limits. But, of course,
Whitman is is the one whocaptures our contemporary
zeitgeist. Right? And I guess inthe in the larger sense, what
I'm arguing is that theseparadigms are, you know, they're
responding to the particulars ofthis anthropogenic environmental

(50:55):
damage without actuallyaddressing the root causes.
Right? And so they theseparadigms maintain continuity
with the sources of ourenvironmental problems. So, you
know, the the big systems,capitalism's growth imperatives,
settler colonial extractivism,all that all that good stuff.
They're they're continuous withthem. They don't interrupt them.

(51:16):
They don't resist them. And sothey're perpetuating the
problems to which theyapparently respond.

That's so interesting and fascinating to
think about how, yeah, certainlogics, can accommodate harmful
logics without seeming soharmful themselves. So I I
really find that reallyfascinating. And and and, I'll
have a question, I think, aboutWhitman after because it's
obviously really interesting tothink of him as and you've

(51:45):
you've you've distinguishedbetween practices and paradigms,
which I think is so helpful alsoto think about, exemplarity, you
know, choosing we've chosenchosen, you know, Whitman as as
the kind of prophet, you said,for a certain epoch. And and so

(52:06):
I'll have questions about whatexactly that means to also the
field of literary history orliterary criticism because
that's really fascinating. Butfirst, so if being against
sustainability, is iscounterintuitive, it's it's both
because sustainability is,highly compatible with settler

(52:29):
capitalism, but also you'reshowing because it's deeply
inscribed in the dominant, UScultural imaginary.
This is why you also you youlook at how nineteenth century
texts have, contributed to ourvalorization of certain
practices or paradigms, I shouldsay, by selling us what you call
pastoral fantasies. So I thinkyou've already given a little

(52:52):
bit of an example of what onesuch pastoral fantasies with
Whitman. But can you say alittle bit more and and maybe
give another example?

Sure. Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm using pastoral in
the in the, in the book in theRaymond Williams sense of, like,
not just an idealized version oflife in the middle landscape,
but also a version of that thatthat always exists somewhere in
the in the past. Right? It's,Williams points out that the
golden age is always somehow ageneration or two earlier no
matter when you're looking.

(53:21):
Right? Whether it's, like, thetwentieth century or ancient
Rome, it's and he calls it likean escalator into the past.
Right? So the pastoral as a sortof nostalgic ahistorical
fantasy. It's funny how howbooks come together.
I mean, I had the chaptersbefore I had, in some ways, the,
the frame. But the frame wassomething that I was thinking

(53:41):
about in this background way,actually, before I really even
started the project because oneof my sort of research areas is
food studies. And, you know, wayback when I when I was a grad
student writing a dissertationwhere I was I was writing a
chapter about, nineteenthcentury vegetarianism and I
started researching thenineteenth century food reformer
Sylvester Graham, the the guythat the graham cracker is named

(54:03):
after. And I oh my gosh. I hewrote this, like, 1,200 page
science of human life, which ismostly, you know, now dis
disproven.
Like, it's just, like, pages of,like, theories of digestion
before people understanddigestion. I think I might be,
like, the only person alivewho's read all of it. But, I
mean, there there were really,like, fascinating things in

(54:24):
there. And and one of them thatreally jumped out to me is
someone who's, you know, beeninterested in kind of
contemporary food reform writingand and media was that he's
already complaining in theeighteen thirties about all of
these problems of industrialfood that according to pretty
much all contemporary US FoodReformers only, you know, begins

(54:44):
supposedly in the wake of WorldWar two or according to a few
people, maybe, like, around1900. But then I'm reading this
book and here's Sylvester Grahamin, like, the eighteen thirties
complaining that, you know, cowsare not being grass fed.
They're being confined in stallsand they're fed with grain. This
is making them sick. They'rebeing slaughtered when they're
sick. They're being fed to anunsuspecting public who doesn't

(55:07):
realize that their diet ismaking them sick. Or he's
writing about all theseadditives, you know, like bread
and cheese and other, and otherproducts have, have all these
things being added to them tomake them look more appealing,
so they sell better.
But then they're they're makingconsumers sick. So it's just
like all these classic problemsof industrial food are there in

(55:28):
the eighteen thirties. Right?And they're not supposed to be
according to sort of all of thecontemporary food sustainability
conversation.

Yeah. It it's usually more like a twentieth
century, you know, I we thinkthat that really starts with,
agribusiness and and factoryfarming, so twentieth century
phenomenon. But so tracing itback to early nineteenth century
is fascinating.

Yeah. And, I mean, and so, because this is
something that was already justan interest, I started doing all
of this research that hadnothing to do with my
dissertation or anything I wasworking on. Or I just started
doing this archival research on,sort of, animal agriculture and
animal slaughter in thenineteenth century. And I, you
know, I found, like, dairyfarmers experimenting with

(56:13):
mechanization, of dairies, like,you know, machines for milking
cows in the 1820s. As I pushedback further, there, you know,
it was like colonial New Englandfarmers are raising beef for a
transatlantic meat market.
And so just, just this notionthat, you know, American farmers
were somehow balancing theselike, environmental and human

(56:34):
health and ethicalconsiderations perfectly in
these earlier periods, you know,that they weren't driven by a
desire to to maximize theirtheir animal capital. It just
does not hold up, right, to toscrutiny. So for just kind of
years, I was revolving this thissense in the back of my mind. I
thought I would write somethingseparate about it that, you
know, like, if we want a betterfood system, you know, we can't

(56:54):
go back to the nineteenthcentury or the eighteenth
century or whatever. Thoseearlier practices were, you
know, totally continuous withour current food system.
Right? Our current food systemis a is a culmination, not a
divergence from what camebefore. So for me, it was like
from there that I startedthinking a lot about kind of how
pastoral fantasies turn out tobe this, like, the idea that

(57:16):
what we the the the thing thatwe need is sort of waiting for
us. Often in the nineteenthcentury is the is the thing you
hear. They they turn out to bethis kind of useful litmus test
by which to judge environmentalparadigms.
Right? So so to the extent thata paradigm is constricted by
pastoralism, I came to feel likeit just can't be future oriented
or, you know, transformative inany real way. Like, in instead,

(57:39):
it's just gonna contribute tothe perpetuation of the status
quo.

That is so fascinating. And, also, it's
really interesting to see thatalready these things that we
think are contemporary issueswere sensed as issues and
therefore came along with their,you know, antidotes. Right? Kind
of baked in the the the problem.So that's really, really cool.
I have a question about, youknow, your use of of of

(58:05):
literature in the book. Theauthors that you invoke are not
necessarily the most obviouscandidates for thinking about
the environment. And I mean thatas a compliment. Right? It's,
more surprising, right?
Less the ones that might wemight expect. And and we've
already talked about, Whitman.And I I here wanna think a

(58:27):
little bit more about this trulyamazing chapter on Whitman,
where you read his, insatiableand famously insatiable appetite
as a kind of perversecelebration of endless
consumption that, justifiesitself, you know, is made
sustainable, you could say, byportraying nature as a site of
infinite renewal. So, in a way,Whitman gives us license to

(58:52):
consume without end. And yourproject basically looks back at
some of the most celebrated, butalso some less celebrated and
more obscure nineteenth centurytexts, and reevaluate them in
light of our currentenvironmental crises.
So I was wondering, like, howdifficult was it for you to read

(59:15):
our cherished authors, you know,like Melvin and Whitman against
the dominant grain, ofcelebration and to show
precisely that they are part ofthe problem, so to speak. And
and and this is not a reductive,you know, reading in any way.
It's more to try to inscribethem in a kind of, like, a
larger logic. So so I guess I'masking because I wonder whether

(59:39):
part of you resisted thesereadings, because I'm guessing
that, you know, trained as anAmericanist as you were, you
were also you had attachments toto these texts?

This is such a great question. I mean, I think
that things really opened upwhen I hit the point in the
project where I was kind ofreading for and thinking about
paradigms. Like, it that made meopen to these counterintuitive
or or uncomfortable readings ofparticular figures or texts. The
end result is definitely thatthere are arguments in the book

(01:00:10):
that I felt kind of personallyprovoked or goaded by, which I
loved, actually. Like, I lovedfeeling like writing myself into
places where I felt provoked.
And my last chapter is actually,for me, the chapter I felt most
kind of unsettled by the theradical pet keeping chapter,
interestingly. But I I mean, Ithink the thing that I worried

(01:00:31):
about a little bit more waswhether the kind of widespread
veneration that's felt for someof these figures, and and
Whitman is the perfect example,might prevent readers from being
open to my arguments. Right? Iworried a lot. I mean, I really
agonized over the having theWhitman chapter come first.
The the book is organized inthis dialogic way, so in the
end, I I I couldn't make adifferent choice. I had to have

(01:00:53):
the Whitman chapter come first,but I I just I kept picturing in
my mind someone throwing thebook down in disgust because
that's not how they wanna readWhitman. Like, they don't wanna
they wanna see Whitman that way.But it also works the other way.
Right?
I mean, the people love to hateThoreau. Right? Because he's one
of the figures in my joyfulfrugality chapter. Right? And
people love to hate his anticonsumerism.

(01:01:13):
They love to kind of, like, youknow, rage at, his hypocrisy.
And he's just, like, such anenraging killjoy for so many
people. Right? So to so to havehim be a figure in, in one of
the chapters of thecounterintuitive alternative
paradigms, was also felt dicey.So so it's the figures, but then
it's actually also theparadigms.
Like, who wants to hear thatthere's something wrong with

(01:01:35):
preservation as an environmentalethic? I mean, there was an, an
early reader of of mypreservation chapter. I was
really upset by the argument,actually. And I I I went him
over eventually, but, but, yeah,it's it's it's a thing, to
unravel a little bit some ofthese cherished figures and
ideals. At the at the end of theday, like, I hope I succeed in

(01:01:58):
in recasting the texts and theand the paradigms and, like,
locating them more solidlywithin the kind of cultural and
environmental history that,like, opens them up in the way
that I'm that I'm arguing.
But, actually, is this somethingthat you worried about? And and,
I mean, did you feel like yourobjects were already sort of
sufficiently compromised, or didor did you worry about

Antoine Traisnel (01:02:17):
this? Oh, that's a a good question. I I
don't know that I worried thatmuch because I don't think I I
have I think a little bit lessthis attachment. But,
interestingly, the thing that Ihave the most pushback against
is Moby Dick. I think because itreally is this, you know, you

(01:02:39):
have so many people who, youknow, want to say that the
particular reading I've justoffered before, which I always
say, you know, is just one ofthe possible lines along which I
think we could read Moby Dick astracing this particular
transformation while also payingattention to other things.
Because I say there is thisstory of bio capitalism in Moby

(01:03:04):
Dick. It feels as if the wholebook is indicted in that
particular reading. And I get alot of, concerned eyebrows that
I'm being a little reductivereductive if I'm reading. Well,
at least that's how I'minterpreting this. So maybe I'm
just also internalizing, youknow, people's expectations.
I don't think I have as, Ithink, counterintuitive

(01:03:26):
statements as as yours, whichis, again, what what is so
powerful and and is what'sreally so interesting is to open
up, you know, one particulartext and and really try to read
it alongside a different historyor a history that might have

(01:03:48):
come into more salient today,right? When thinking
environmentally about theenvironment is not a thing of
today, but we look at thingsquite differently. Right? So,
yeah, I think I might have beena little less exposed to that
type of reaction. But speakingof that, I'm also interested in

(01:04:08):
how you structure your bookbecause you also think about
very much this kind ofretrospective gaze, right, this
reevaluation of certain, authorsand certain texts.
As I was saying earlier, youknow, very attentive to to
problems and also problematicsolutions, but you're also, and

(01:04:28):
that's, really so fascinating,pairing every, you know, problem
with, you know, a form ofalternative, a, what you call
transformative solutions. Right?So, models for mitigating
unrestricted consumerism, forenvisioning, you know, different
ways of living and inhabitingthe world, in your radical pet

(01:04:49):
keeping chapter, fostering, youknow, different, economies of
relations between humans andnonhumans. And and you find some
of these models in contemporaryliterature, and you've already
mentioned Lucille Clifton, butyou also have AS Byatt and and
others there, Louis Erdrich. Butyou also go back in time, and so

(01:05:10):
you mentioned Thoreau, you alsohave Dickinson and Hannah Craft.
So for you, it's not that peopledidn't know in the nineteenth
century and that were justbelatedly kind of awakened to
issues that we just couldn't seebefore. And and I find that also
extremely powerful even thoughyou also show that these are

(01:05:30):
minoritarian sites ofpossibility. Right? You're also
showing that they were,marginalized. Was finding these
kind of non dominant models away for you to call the bluff on
a certain narrative of of theAnthropocene?
You know, like, oh, we couldn'tknow, but now we we are awakened
to what we've done, and we'retrying to to fix it. How did you

(01:05:53):
think of of that, the way inwhich you make, you know, texts
of, the nineteenth centuryresonate with contemporary
texts?

Michelle Neely (01:06:00):
Yeah. I love this question. I I'm I'm
teaching a class right now thatI often teach on on literatures
of the Anthropocene, and I Ilove those moments when students
go, oh, wait. They did know.Right?
Like, it's it's I think I thinkit's so tempting, and yet it's
such a kind of, like, damaging,disproving idea the disproving
idea that if that if we knowbetter, we'll do better. Right?

(01:06:22):
Like, oh, they just didn't know.Right? And so, of course, one,
you know, one way around that isto go back and look and say,
like, oh, yeah.
They did know and and they didit anyway. Right? Also, maybe
more importantly, there wereother voices and other choices
and other ways of living thatwere imagined and enacted even
at the moment of the emergenceof, you know, these problems and
and paradigms that we're stillliving with. Right? And and

(01:06:44):
that's important in terms ofjust, like, provoking our
imagination and provoking oursense of the possible.
Right? Something I was thinkingabout a lot as I was working on
the book was just that the thetimeline that we're operating on
is so short now. Right? I mean,just like ten years maybe to
turn this ship around, you know?In some ways, the the biggest

(01:07:05):
objection to paradigms likesustainability is just that the
timeline doesn't work.
I mean, the sustainability is aparadigm in my argument, like
never works, right? It was nevergonna work. But it's all about
this idea that you can sort ofincrementally tinker with
aspects of capitalism and so on,and, like, somehow we'll get

(01:07:29):
there. Right? But, like Mhmm.
If we've got eight or ten years,that timeline just doesn't work.
So I had this this strong senseof, like, like, change is scary.
Right? Transformation is scary.How do we figure out how to
embrace that and how to how todo so in a way where we don't
just get stuck in new kind of,binding static, paradigms,

(01:07:49):
right, that that are nothelpful.
And so that's where I wasthinking about, what I what I
called, like, mean timeenvironmental ethics. The idea
that that there might be theseparadigms that are not for all
times in all places, but thatthat could help move mainstream
US environmental culture, like,forward in the here and now.
Right? Could could provoke usout of our sort of status quo

(01:08:10):
and make something elsepossible. And then when we need
new paradigms, you know, we wemaybe find new paradigms.
So that was where the dialogicstructure kind of came in like
this. I had the sense that Iwant I want to not just say,
like, this doesn't work, but Iwant to say, here's another
approach to the same problemthat if not perfect. Right? I

(01:08:30):
mean, neither of my alternativesare, ever suggested to be, like,
ideal or perfect, but they I'marguing that they're not
compromised beyond utility inthe in the way that the the one
that they're paired with is. Andthey're these other paradigms
are more likely to promote sortof like pleasure and justice and
flourishing multi speciescommunities, right?

(01:08:51):
The the the stuff that we want.And even just at the level of
the chapter, kind of also havingthis dialogic structure, right?
Each chapter has kind of atleast two figures. So, you know,
as you said, it's like, littlewomen and Lucille Clifton are
talking to each other, andGeorge Catlin and Louise Erdrich
are talking to each other, andHannah Crafts and Harriet Wilson
are talking to each other. Andand hopefully, you know, all of

(01:09:13):
this is, like, producing thatunsettling and dislodging of the
status quo that I was after.

Also, how you end the book, right, in your
coda, you're interested in also,just the same way I think that
you're, rejecting the narrativeaccording to which
sustainability used to be goodor could be good, but, you know,
it's been co opted, so we needto get it back. And you're,
like, you know, saying that, no.There's something that's deeply

(01:09:42):
troubling because it has thisprofound allegiance to
continuity, as you say. And andtherefore, it's always gonna be
a foreclosure of of change or ordeep radical transformation. And
you are interested in reclaiminga form of deeper, more radical
transformation, which you alsocall utopia, right, at the end.

(01:10:05):
So there is very much thisdesire to work from the
impossible or what seems to beimpossible, what seems to be,
like, unrealistic in a way. So Ireally I really do love the way
in which you're working asalmost a, sorry, a contrarian.
I'm gonna call you a contrarian,but someone who's like, yeah.
Your investment is all messedup. Let's, let's let's, you

(01:10:27):
know, rethink, all these things.
So, I was curious. Do you haveyourself a favorite passage in
your own, book or a moment thatfor you was also particularly
surprising as you were writing?

I think the the I don't know that favorite would
be exactly the right way tocharacterize it, but the last
chapter, the Harriet Wilson andHannah Crafts chapter made me
really uncomfortable. Theargument that pet keeping might
be, even radical pet keepingmight be a kind of environmental
paradigm for for thinking aboutmulti species community in the

(01:11:06):
anthropocene makes me reallyuncomfortable. And yet I felt,
convinced by it. I felt thatthere was, like, something
there. Obviously, I did.
It's it's my last chapter. But,and so so, I mean, I think that
argument I I I think there, too,I mean, just the not just
vitality, but the, like,essential to me, place of black

(01:11:28):
feminism in my sense ofenvironmental thought, the
environmental humanities, isalso kind of another reason that
that chapter was reallyinteresting for me. It was just,
it was it was both kind of likemy conclusion was, for me at
least, a little bit distressing,in terms of conservation

(01:11:48):
dependent species and all ofthat stuff, but the but but that
piece of the chapter felt reallyright. But then the the coda,
it's funny what you said about,like, where a book ends, it must
always feel like you wished youhad more time. I wished I'd had
more time to sort of explore theutopianism that I come to in the
coda.

(01:12:09):
And that may well be my nextproject. But I think

Oh, that was my next question. So that's
perfect.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I was just gonna say that
I was, I really liked thinkingabout and it's another thing
that I just had been revolvingfor years, the the Langston
Hughes poem, Let America BeAmerica Again. And that's part
of the coda and just the thekind of temporality, that that
that poem articulates, and theway that that it's kind of about

(01:12:36):
looking back in order to inorder to disrupt the status quo
in the present so that somethingdifferent and, more equitable
and and radical can be built. Imean, I think that really, like,
encapsulates where the booklands.

Nice. So, yeah, I I really love this
unwavering insistence that youhave on, thinking together
social and racial justice with,environmental justice, or
environmental justice having tobe in thinkable even without,
social, racial, gender genderjustice. So do you already have

(01:13:11):
a next project? I know this isalways a tricky question. So,
can you tell us more about whereyou think you're gonna go after,
sustainability?

I mean, I think I wanna keep thinking about this
critical utopianism that thethat the book ends with, which
is a sort of not utopia as akind of, like, blueprint, for
for the future, but, as, anenergy or or a force or really a
critical orientation that isdisruptive of the status quo.

(01:13:42):
And so there's there's a anessay that I recently finished,
for an edited collection that'sabout Thoreau again and and and
this kind of, sort of utopianexperimentation. But it also
looks at B. F. Skinner's Waldentwo, which deeply weird, but
deeply weird deeply weird novel,and and sort of, you know,

(01:14:03):
thinking about utopianism inthat way.
I know I wanna think more about,Octavia Butler's Parable of the
Sower. I mean, I think if thereare these sort of texts that,
that that launch a next project,like, that's really it's just a
book I've been teaching since Istarted teaching, and the my
relationship to it has changedso much over the years. And I

(01:14:23):
find myself, just thinking aboutit more and more lately. And
it's it's just really powerfulattempts to, to reckon with
change and to, to sort ofcenter, our relationship with
change. So that's something I'mthinking about a lot.
And I'm I'm also working onsomething about Emerson and and
climate grief. I don't know.What's where where are you going

(01:14:45):
next? I mean, do you feel like,you you have a next project that
is, that is really growing outof CAPTURE, or do you see
yourself moving in a in a newdirection?

I think I have it's starting to have a better
idea where I wanna go after. Andthe more I think about it, the
more I see that it's related tocapture. But, in the meantime, I
also wrote something on Thoreau,and I think we want to apologize
to everyone who's listening forpiling on. But, that has to do

(01:15:17):
with more thinking about theenvironment and plants. And so I
keep thinking, you know, in interms of of biopolitics, but
here I'm more interested inwhether plants, and the vegetal,
have a place in biopoliticalthought.
And I essentially try to readThoreau as, almost offering,

(01:15:39):
counterpoint to, Foucault'spastoral power with something
like pasture power, likethinking about plants, thinking
about the milieu on which, youknow, the the the flock to use,
you know, Foucault's notion ofof of pastoral power, the flock
grazes, you know, you need thispasture. And and Foucault does
not really think so much aboutthe background for pastoral

(01:16:01):
power. So I've been thinkingabout that and, therefore, a lot
about seeds. So you're thinkingabout Octavia Butler's parable
of the sower, so it makes methink about that. And I can
imagine that your relationshipto it changes when, California
is on fire so regularly.

Although in fairness, it was even when I
first started teaching it.California is kind of always on
fire.

True. True. True. It just seems like more
and more dire.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, next is is gonna, I think,
try to think about reallycontemporary sites of archiving
for after the apocalypse. AndI'm interested in these kind of
transnational global projectslike the seed vault, which is
also sometimes called theDoomsday Vault that's in Norway,

(01:16:50):
where all the seeds of the worldare kind of held, you know,
categorized and preserved, youknow, just for the potential
moment in the future when theymight be of use. And and I find
that really interesting becausethese are kind of, modern arcs
for a future that we might notbe a part of. And I think that

(01:17:12):
there's all sorts of weird,interesting things going on
there, transnationalcollaborations, but also
biopolitical decisions, what tokeep, what not to keep, how to,
you know, counter and things.
So I want to do something aroundthese new projects because
there's a few out there thatkeep certain things, I want to

(01:17:34):
say, maybe in captivity or in aform of stasis, while also it
being the living that is beingpreserved. Right? So it's this
kind of like antithesis that Ithink is also at the center of
capture. It's how to preservesomething, you know, alive and
and without killing it fully,without and and there is an

(01:17:56):
interesting tension that I willwant to explore, I think, in my
next, larger project.

Wow. I cannot wait to read that. That sounds
fantastic.

That's wait. Very, very nice. Well, the same.
Let's, have another podcastchat, as soon as these are are
done.

Absolutely. Well, well, thank you so much
for, for this fascinatingconversation and, and and for
your book.

Thank you so much, Michelle. And, thank you
so much for everything, theconversation and the book.

Narrator (01:18:28):
For more information about CAPTURE, including how to
read it for free online, visitz.umn.edu/CAPTUREbook.

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