Is aggression inevitable?

Episode Transcript
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Andrew Culp (00:03):
There are all these interesting elements that I
think the mainstream accountjust doesn't even look at.
Because you're able to work onthese multiple registers, it's
bringing in a much morecomplicated picture.

John Protevi (00:16):
Just as any social formation must channel its
desiring production, so must anysociost or any social formation
must channel its violence.

Hello. I'm Andrew Culp, the director of the
Aesthetics and Politics graduateprogram at California Institute
of the Arts. And I'm so excitedto be invited by John Protevi to
discuss his new book, Regimes ofViolence. For those not familiar
with John, he's publishedextensively, including a whole
series of books with Universityof Minnesota Press, including
political affect, life wornearth, edges of the state, and

(00:54):
now regimes of violence. Andhe's been teaching at Louisiana
State University as a professorof French studies and
philosophy.
So, John, thanks again. And whydon't you, give us a little
snapshot and overview of thebook and the project?

Okay. Well, thank you very much, Andrew. I'm
really glad to be here with you.And as we've mentioned a few
times, it's really great to havethe Doctor. Deleuze guy and me.
I'm kind of a joyous affirmationDeleuze guy, but I think we also
overlap much more than thosethat preliminary opposition
would let on. I think thereadership for the book is

(01:34):
really gonna be theory people. Ido intervene in debates in
evolutionary anthropology,mostly in this book. And in
previous books I've gotten intocognitive science and geography
in some other ways. So I do tryto look at the way in which
Dulas and Guattari, who are mymajor theoretical reference

(01:56):
points, how they can open updiscussion in ongoing debates in
specialist sciences.
But I'm obviously not aspecialist in any of those
things, but I do try to do myhomework and I do try to point
out the ways in which I amintervening into ongoing
debates. There are several thatkind of frame the book here. I
do want to intervene in a debatein evolutionary anthropology

(02:20):
around the existence andprevalence of war in early
hominin and or human socialformations. So there's a strong
school of thought that says thathuman altruism or the ability
for us to care about and tosacrifice for non kin comes with

(02:40):
a strong in group and out groupdivision where you're committed
to your tribe and alienated atbest or xenophobic towards
outsiders. And that's formed inan evolutionary framework of
rampant warfare.
So the way that you can getaltruism or self sacrifice,

(03:02):
which should have been weededout of the process, is that in a
warfare situation those tribesor those groups of people that
had a ratio of altruists toegoists would outcompete with
war being the selectionpressure, those groups which
were purely egoists. There'slots and lots of technical

(03:23):
debates about whether thatconstitutes group selection or
not, but it's a common way oflooking at our ancestry, our
human nature. So basically we'rethe descendants of victory and
warfare. Some of that victoryentailed a cultural process
whereby some of the people hadsacrificed themselves for the
victory and warfare. And that'show altruism comes from.

(03:44):
There's a minor, to use thedualism rhetoric term, there's a
minor science in the margins ofthat dominant paradigm that
calls into question whether, infact, our evolutionary
environment was one of rampant,intense, infrequent warfare.
There was a lot of discussionabout how to define warfare. I

(04:05):
tend to have a kind of strictdefinition of warfare that it's
anonymous group violence. Andthere's a series of arguments
why, if that's your definition,that there wasn't war as we
would now know it prior to aboutseven or 8,000 years ago. So
there's archeological arguments,there's ethnographic arguments,

(04:27):
and a number of things that Itry to get into.
But the book is called Regimesof Violence, so I'm not saying
that no one ever hurt anyoneelse in human history. What I am
saying is that it's not anevolutionary push towards
intergroup violence, but thatour human nature is open enough
or plastic enough or to useDullo's term multiplicitous

(04:51):
enough that conditions forcooperation were just as
prevalent, if not moreprevalent, for conditions of
warfare in the past. So thatwe're open to the ability to
create peaceful conditions if wecan arrange to do that.

Yeah, that's amazing. And so if we zoom back
a little bit, maybe the Lycians,a few of them might be
scratching their head andsaying, wow. Where is this
coming from? So some of it mightbe these big debates in
evolutionary psychology that youuse as a foil in this chapter,
maybe most famously, you know,where they say humanity is this
killer ape, and so they havethese primitive instincts that

(05:30):
drive everything. But also I'mthinking, what are some
philosophical concerns that youthink this connects to or other
fields that makes this like atruly interdisciplinary
intervention, even though you'remining these minor sources in
such a deep and important way?

Well, thank you. I think one of the things I'm most
interested in, so when I did mydive into cognitive science, I
took up the inactive school forFrancesca Varela and Evan
Thompson and Ziku DiPalo andHannes de Gaeder and a number of
people, is sometimes seen aspart of a 4Ea, embodied,

(06:07):
inactive, extended andaffective. I've always been
interested in the emotional sideof human life And I think that
connects with what the laws andquaternary call the libidinal
investment in the social field.I do have a chapter that's a
critique of ideas only or beliefcentered notion of ideology.
Criticize belief only or beliefcentered notions of ideology and

(06:31):
say that the real action is inpeople's desires.
So they constantly cite WilhelmReich, the masses were not
fooled, they wanted fascism. Wehave to discover the conditions
in which people want fascism.Duluthbertari tied that back to
Spinoza, which they called theSpinoza question, under what
conditions will men fight fortheir servitude as much as for

(06:52):
their liberation. When we talkabout affect, I do want to
resurrect or emphasize thepossibilities for joy. But joy
is very tricky, right?
Because you can have passivejoy. The Nazis and fascists are
overflowing with joy. If youlook at the January sixth
invasion of the capital, peoplewere having absolutely the time

(07:15):
of their lives. So try todistinguish between an active
joyous encounter which increasesthe potentials for increasing
positive affect on both sides ofthe equation. So I turn someone
on who can turn someone on sothat they can expand their
affective range, which meansthat they can be influenced by
and influence others in a widervariety of ways.

(07:37):
Being a joy guy, I don't want todeny that fascism is full of
joy. I think the difference isit's a kind of joy of being
taken up into a mass, themovement. So there's a
connection there with a kind ofFreud and Gustave Le Bon fear of
the crowd that intersects with areally wonderful book by Jeremy

(07:58):
Gilbert on collective politicsand how you can have collective
politics. There's transversal,to use the jargon, rather than
hierarchical or even just flatlyhorizontal. That also picks up
with another book that I reallyenjoy by Rodrigo Nunez called
Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal.
So I do think there areconnections with a lot of this

(08:18):
stuff towards political theoryor even activist stuff. One last
thing then I think that thechapter I have on marinage,
which is people fleeingenslavement. Marronage has been
taken up as a contemporary termfor temporary autonomous zones
and squatters and hackers and awide ranging range of

(08:43):
contemporary social formationexperimentation as well.

Yeah. That's wonderful. And I think that
gives a very synoptic overviewof a lot of the, say, greatest
hits that that come in the book.And it has four parts, and it
really opens with human natureand your intervention in human
nature there, which I think isabsolutely crucial for setting
up everything else. You know,part two is on political
psychology where you have these,like, two contrasting cases,

(09:10):
both Berserkers and Esprit deCorre, which began as essays a
bit ago, but you've updated andsort of deepened those
connections, and I reallyappreciate that.
The section you just mentionedon marinaj comes through a
political anthropology and acase for statification as a

(09:30):
concept. And then, you know, itends with those two events, the
capital invasion as well asCOVID nineteen. And so I I think
in that way, it feels likesocial theory written by someone
who really dug into theconnection to cognition or
other, sciences. But then, ofcourse, you're a philosopher by

(09:53):
training as well. So it it it'sreally this, excellent
interdisciplinary work that goesacross so many different
avenues.
And I think that that's maybesomething that makes, Deleuze
Inquiry maybe not completelyunique, but it picks up this
French philosophy of sciencetradition that maybe other
people departed from. They youknow, in the analytic tradition,

(10:17):
I think through philosophy ofmind or cognition, they've
always sort of kept the sciencespretty close. You know, maybe
philosophy isn't the queen ofthe sciences anymore, but it's
still in the mix. Whereas forother approaches, science is
really held at arm's length anda distance. So maybe just as
like a very big question, like,what do you see the connection

(10:40):
between philosophical inquiry oreven the social and political
questions and how the lesseanscan and should approach
scientific questions orscientific literatures?

Okay, well that's a big one. Let me start by going
into the specific thing abouthuman nature. The concept of
human nature has been usedeither as an exclusionary or
hierarchizing, if that's a word,a concept for a long, long time.
So I do use the dualism term ofmultiplicity when I talk about

(11:13):
human nature. And I also dothink that my entire career is a
kind of multiplicity where I tryto see ways in which these
things might possibly hangtogether.
Now I wrote this book, thechapters independently, but then
spent a lot of time trying toweave them together, not into a

(11:34):
coherent narrative, but Iusually use the image of an
overlapping or overlappingsheath of investigations. My
initial entry into all this wasreading Manuel de Landa years
and years ago. His book War inthe Age of Intelligent Machines
and also Thousand Years ofNonlinear History. So he

(11:56):
explicated what's called eithercomplexity theory or dynamic
systems theory. And so there'stranslation you can do of
Deleuze's terminology ofsingularity, for instance, is
like a turning point or athreshold or singularity in
dynamic systems terms.
So that was really my entry andthen I did get interested in the

(12:18):
inactive science thing of tryingto work against the notion of a
subject who represents the worldto him or herself in a kind of
picture capture representation.Nonetheless, that was Varela,
Thompson and Roche in TheEmbodied Mind, really try to
show the way in which cognitionshould best be modeled as an

(12:41):
organism navigating its world.And its world has to be both
salience, that has to meansomething to the thing. There
has to be valences that theworld shows up as a push or a
pull, as an attraction or arepulsion. So that got me
thinking then, well, did weevolve as human beings on this
inactive intellect and emotiontogether, affective valence and

(13:08):
salience and valence kind ofway.
What is the world that we'veconstructed? And that takes me
into Auntie Oedipus. It's a kindof mashup I think of Bataille's,
we've got to get rid of thisextra solar energy, Nietzsche,
rule to power, everybody'strying to make larger and larger
complexes, and Spinoza'snaturing nature. So each social

(13:34):
formation has to channel thisenergy because otherwise the
energy would just run smoothly,which for them would be no
society at all. So you have tohave some channeling.
So then I got to thinking, well,Delissa and Guattari call
libidinal investment in theassociates, in the ways in which
your society channels thisenergy, that sounds like it's at

(13:58):
least compatible with a beingwho has to live in a world in
which there's salience andvalence. Things have to matter
to it. So that got me thinkingabout human beings and how do we
evolve such that things matterto us, even when it's social
patterns or justice for thirdparties. So it's very well

(14:18):
established in biology thatanimals will fight for their
kin. If you do a gene reductionthing, you're gonna pass on part
of your gene so you cansacrifice yourself or your
children or for people who areclosely related to you.
And that's certainly the casewith human beings. They will
fight more ferociously for theirkin than for non kin. But we

(14:40):
also fight for justice. We alsocare about justice. I've got all
these things bubbling away thatI'm trying to bring together.
So the mashup would be humanbeings involved as affective
creatures who care for thesocial patterns they're involved
in. And I think that goes reallydeep biologically because we
know that social isolation willcompletely screw up your

(15:03):
oxytocin levels, your serotoninlevels, your cortisol levels. So
it's as deep as possible that ifyou're not socially connected,
that you will suffer. I thinkthat's the way that human beings
evolved in a social frameworkthat will channel your desire

(15:23):
particular ways. When we get tocapitalism though, following de
Lisinquetari's thing inAntioedipus, we tend to write
down a lot of the previouscodes.
All that a solid melts into air,which Marx kind of celebrates as
an opportunity to get away fromthe Bishop doesn't have to
approve your startup companyanymore by seeing whether it

(15:44):
aligns with natural law. What anopportunity! I do think that De
Los Aquitari do share thatambivalent relationship to
capitalism that it does bydecoding. It offers
opportunities, but byimmediately recoding on private
property and re territorializingon the family, you end up owing

(16:05):
not gifts to your neighbors, asin what they call primitive
society, or tribute to theemperor in the imperial society,
but you owe your life to capitalbecause you have to work in
order to eat. And you owe aneternal debt of neurosis to your
family because your desire hasbeen territorialized into the
nuclear family.

(16:25):
Now it's very quick and there'slots of nuances. For me that's
an interesting way to try tofind a way that you can create
social conditions that wouldallow for experimentation. Dulce
and Quetzari use art in a veryextended sense to mean sports,
which is one of my chapters.

I mean, the impressive breadth of this
argument is something that Ithink people will find really
refreshing because we live insuch an era of hyper
specialization that big ideashave been left to Niall Ferguson
trying to justify, you know,empire or, you know, maybe the

(17:05):
Graber Wengrow book, which youworked through a bit. That's
that's really nice. But StevenPinker or even, you know, these
homo sapiens arguments that Ithink, by making them, like,
popular or easy to consume, theyreally don't challenge much
common sense, and they don'tgive a very sophisticated
picture. And so for you, I thinkthe ambition is where it starts,

(17:28):
and it's really refreshing. Andfor me, the thing that I see in
it that maybe, you don't see asclearly because you're working
from this this joyousperspective is also the line of
unbecoming.
I mean, right when you starttalking about capitalism, it's
like that's that's where itbecomes really important for
DNG. But, of course, in what isphilosophy, for them, there's

(17:52):
this absolute speed of thoughtthat is this deterritorializing
process, and you can sort ofreach into the transformative
power of the chaosmos. I thinkit definitely begins with this
materialist impulse that DNGalready start in Antietus by
saying that they're doing amaterial psychiatry, and they're
gonna look at someanthropological sources. You

(18:13):
know, of course, they're alsoleaning heavily on Marx himself,
who sort of promoted materialismas the only way to really do
transformative social thought.They combine it with Freud, who
maybe in a certain way alreadyhad a sort of materialism to it,
but it leans towards free anddetached libido by the time you
get to Marcuse or someone elsewho wants to find the the eros

(18:33):
tendency in, a libidinaleconomy.
Each one of your chapters playsin this sort of, like,
structure, and it's undoing alittle bit as well. Human
nature, affective ideology. Butthen the unbecoming sort of
really starts showing up withberserkers, right, where they
lose their mind and they go intothis state of amnesia. But then

(18:54):
the opposite of that that youpost to it is esprit de corps
where you sort of lose yourselfin the group as well, and you
sort of maintain your ownsingularity a bit. But it's
really this sort of, transindividuated formation of of the
nomad, at least in thousandplateaus.
And then in the anthropologysection, you know,
statification, which itself islike this hierarchy process. But

(19:18):
then marinage, it's the fleeaway from it. It's the undoing.
It's it's this disruption of,the settled calcified structure
of the state. And then withpolitical events, you know, I
don't know, it's a little bitmore complicated with the
capital invasion and then COVID,and you you treat this really
tragic case of a health workerwho passed.
So maybe I can provocatively askyou sort of you found the

(19:41):
structure, you find thedevelopment, where's the
unbecoming or where's thetransformation that's happening
in each one of these processesthat you find in the very
materialist circumstances?

Yeah, I mean, I have mainstream narratives that
I try to undercut. I'll give oneexample in the human nature
chapter. There's a curiousabsence of discussions of joy in
a lot of evolutionaryanthropology when it comes to
food sharing, right? So foodsharing is a resource variance
insurance. So if you kill awildebeest and it's too big to

(20:15):
eat among your small group, thenyou invite your neighbors over.
However, they never say it'sreally fun to have a barbecue.
It's just really striking. Sothat might be one of the places
that I kind of unravel it. Themainstream narrative does tend
to reduce things to survival andthat picks up the Nietzschean

(20:36):
thing about his critique ofDarwin, everything comes down to
a reactive survival thing.There's nothing about the sheer
exuberance of having fun.
There's a curious utilitariantwist to that too however
because as I do not think thatlife would have been worth
living for our ancestors werethey not able to find joy.

It just shows how far conversations of pre state
human life have moved the centerof gravity from structural
anthropology or even LeviStrauss in particular. I was
reading the old translation. Youknow, there's a new translation
of, wild thought.

Yeah.

And for him, you know, symbolic life is just as
original and probably evenprehuman as anything else. And
there are other anthropologistswho occasionally get sort of
thrown into the mix. But whenyou read archaeology literature,
which is often where this stuffhappens in the sort of expanded
anthropological field, there arepeople who are very much natural

(21:39):
determinists. And so they havethis almost strict Darwinian
framework of which everything isabout survival and or
reproduction. And for the LeviStraussian stuff for a while, it
was like, well, sure, thosethings might be fulfilled, but
in the same way in which aFreudian or a Lacanian would say
that your needs are fulfilled,which is through a very
elliptical, socially mediatedprocess.

(22:02):
And so, you know, they focusedon things like marriage
prohibitions, which, of course,the classic line is, you know,
that you oblige more than youprohibit. It's really just this
impulse to have more exogamousand outgroup sort of relations.
You know, I was even readingsome of the older Marxist
anthropology on this, likeClaude Maisieux, and he talks
about how, you know, there'soften a prohibition of internal

(22:25):
clan consumption of meat for thehunt, where, you know, the
hunter themself don't get to eatthe thing that they capture.

Or at least they don't get to distribute it.

Sure. Yeah. And so there are all these interesting
elements that I think that themainstream account just doesn't
even look at. And so becauseyou're able to work on these
multiple registers, I think thatit's bringing in a much more
complicated picture than many ofthem are able to do. And so we
get to something like, I don'tknow, Berserker or Esprit de
Corre.

(22:56):
Do you wanna talk about them?Because I think they're such
important figures.

Yeah, yeah. No, so the Berserker has fascinated me
for a long time. It's amultiplicity. I think in my
reading of the anthropologicalliterature, following some of
the military science stuff thatI've read, it does seem to be
difficult except for a verysmall percentage of cold blooded
killers to kill at close range,hand to hand and in cold blood.

(23:24):
So for militaries to increasethe ability of their fighters to
engage in mortal combat have tofind ways to break the one on
one and have group solidarity,have to find ways to break the
distance.
So spears are easier thanknives, which are easier than
hands, and on and on to thepoint where you just press a

(23:47):
button. There's a veryinteresting turnaround with
drone pilots because they don'thave a killer be killed excuse,
and yet they can see close-uptheir victims.

And this is deterritorialization, right? In
the same way in which Delossays, Okay, when humans or
actually pre humans stop walkingon all fours, they have their
hands and suddenly they startusing technology. And so each
one of these is a sort of deterritorialization.

Yeah, but you get these twists and turns. The
other thing then, you have tohave distance, you have to have
group solidarity, you end upwith a lot of dehumanization,
and then you end up with ways toincite rage or the appropriate
level of rage. So for a hand tohand open field skirmishing, a
berserker rage is very effectiveas the Vikings showed, right?

(24:37):
You've so blown up your systemthat you're just tapping into a
mammalian prey reaction.Predators are cold compared to
berserkers.
Berserkers work themselves intoa way in which they become prey
so that they're lashing out,cornered prey, so they lash out
at anything that's close tothem. That's not a predator

(24:59):
thing, they're cool, calm andcollected. We could go back and
reread each of the kills in theIliad to see who was a berserker
and who was a predator. Thetwist, though, comes, you know,
in modern warfare, especially inthe American imperial regime of
violence, you don't wantberserkers. They're identified
and weeded out as early aspossible.
The famous SEAL Team Six, youdid not want any berserkers in

(25:22):
that because you had to be cooland collected and follow the
checklist. So berserkers are,again, it's a multiplicity.
They're not good in all forms ofwarfare, but they are good in
some forms of warfare. And thedanger is they could get
triggered even when you have ahighly trained military person
in the imperial regime ofviolence. So I do do a case
study of this guy inAfghanistan, Robert Bales, who

(25:43):
had a berserker reaction andkilled a bunch of villagers.
And it created a scandal becausewe were supposed to do hearts
and minds and counterinsurgencyand all sorts of things that
doesn't fit with berserking.Then the other side, so the
esprit de corps was close to myheart. I wanted to do something
about sports after forty yearsof being a philosopher. So I

(26:04):
looked at a wonderful goal inthe twenty eleven Women's World
Cup when Megan Rapinoe crossedthe ball to Abby Wambach and
they scored a wonderful goalafter 120 of awesome exertion.
So when I look at what was notnecessarily the escape from
subjectivity, but the way inwhich the joint effort also

(26:26):
produces a non utilitarian joy.
So to go back to chapter one,there is a way in which you can
give an adaptationist reading ofjoy that people who seem happy
will attract more mates. Butthat, I think, is kind of a
third party observation. So whenyou're together with people in a
second person relationship, youhave a shared joy in the efforts

(26:48):
that you're expending in thetraining and in the game. Sports
people often, almost always say,The thing I miss about being a
retired athlete is thecamaraderie, the shared exertion
of training. It's also fun toconnect with somebody and make
the pass that enables them toscore.
You're supporting theirrelational autonomy. I have to

(27:12):
make my own decision thatenables you to make your own
decisions. But the pass is whatlinks the two players together.
So you have to give the ball up.I mean, Messi and Maradona were
good enough to dribble the wholelength of the field.
Everyone else has to pass. Thepass constitutes the passer and
the receiver. It's the mediumthat creates the end points.

(27:32):
That's the trans individuationbit. That was not quite self
indulgent, but for me to writethat sports chapter because it's
been a huge part of my life.
And I was really glad to be ableto bring some philosophy to bear
on it.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I know sports is such a
great example, too. In someways, it's a sublimation of
conflict or even war. And so itactually fits quite well with
Berserker.
And I think the interesting partabout Berserker two, especially
if you bring it back to DNG'ssort of metaphysics, is that,
you know, for them, war isn'talways negative, especially when

(28:09):
it's used as an anti state forceamong nonstate peoples in order
to disaccumulate power. And so,you know, it's not this simple
idea of just like a pacifistwho's saying, you know,
berserkers are this thing weneed to be really worried about,
but also the professionalizedmilitary. It's it becomes, you

(28:30):
know, a really complex sort ofschema, I guess. And I'm just
struck that in our politicalmoment, institutions are
becoming challenged from thissort of like unrestrained,
excessive politics. And thatpeople who are professional
civil servants or professionallong term federal agency

(28:52):
workers, professional militarygenerals, it was like the
incoming political officials donot have the proper constitution
or they don't have the propermood.
And, you know, we see politicalrallies acting like nothing that
we've ever seen before. But Ithink you already find this in
the capital invasion chapter inwhich you're really trying to
figure out, you know, what wasgoing on there? Actually

(29:14):
happened? What did it look like?Doesn't fit what we usually
think of as the pretty buttonedup idea of what American
politics focusing on procedureand process and these voting.
And maybe there's a littlelobbying going on or something,
but it's usually within a prettyexpected regime where, you know,
you can just read a coupleheadlines and feel like you know
what's going on. But it's likethe Financial Times might

(29:36):
actually not have a better readof the situation sometimes now
because things have gotten sodifferent. You know, it's not
just this like veryfunctionalist material base
anymore.

I mean, in one sense, it's going back to canes
and animal spirits and the stockmarket is an emotional weather
report to kind of mishmash TomWaits in there. I might be one
of the few people who have putTom Waits and John Maynard
Keynes in the same sentence. Oneof the things that certainly has
come back to Duluth andGuattari, they talk about the

(30:07):
voluptuous waves of libidinalinvestment that flow across the
stock market. One of the ones inwhich they say that even the
most disadvantaged creature getsa thrill at the waves of capital
that are moving around theplanet, which is kind of true
because I remember before I evenhad any investments, feeling
good when the TV news would say,hey, the stock market's up. Side

(30:31):
note, of the greatest tricks ofcapitalism is to make
professionals dependent upon thestock market for their
retirement.
I know a lot more aboutinvestments now than I ever
thought I would have to. NowCOVID, yes, I think that those
things come together because ofdebt and the way in which
picking up a really nice book byLisa Atkins called The Time of

(30:51):
Money, she emphasizes now thatpeople really are working, not
paycheck to paycheck becausethey don't consume their
paycheck, they're working inorder to have a paycheck that
they can then present ascollateral for credit, which
they actually live on thecredit. So companies aren't

(31:12):
interested in you paying offyour bill every month, they want
the ongoing debt. So thatconnects back to debt as to
Luzincottari's main thing withdebt in primitive society debt
to the emperor, debt tocapitalism, this is a refinement
of that. So we are responsiblethen for financing our own lives
through taking on debt.

(31:34):
And then we were maderesponsible for making our own
virus risk assessments. So theone particular case that I
looked at, a woman namedShabanta White Ballard, but she
had the balance going to work ina nursing home full of COVID
patients, her viral risk withher financial risk. If she

(31:54):
didn't have the paycheck thatenables her to pay off the
minimum amount to keep hercredit running, then there would
have been a financialcatastrophe for her house. And
so that was a double bind and Itried to look at what in
cognitive science is called thepredictive brain thesis or the
predictive processing wherebywe're constantly making

(32:15):
predictions and then sensoryinformation is a reduction in
the error of the prediction thatwe make. And that is said to
save us the time and effort bymaking these predictions of
getting real world feedback.
You can run a hypothetical. Whenyou're in a no win situation
you're caught in a loop ofpredicting a future that you

(32:36):
cannot possibly get out of,right? Because it's a double
bond. And that itself has adeleterious wearing
physiological effects becauseone of the ways in which that
actually works is there is anumber of neurotransmitters that
lower the synapse levels so youcan think faster and harder but

(32:57):
that actually wears you out.Especially in at least picking
up the thesis of weathering byArlene Geronimus who talks about
what's called the telomere,telomere which is the end of
your chromosomes and each timeyou have a cell division it

(33:19):
protects the interior coatingpart of the chromosome.
That gets worn down and there isan accelerated wearing down or
an accelerated aging her claimis for people in racialized and
gendered subject positions inAmerican society. So it may have
been the case that this personwho was a person of color, a

(33:45):
woman of color in her 40s, mayhave already been affected by
American racism to the pointwhere physiologically her
resistance might have beenlessened but it's impossible to
know what the length of yourtelomeres are. You can't reflect

(34:08):
on that so that doesn't reallyfeed into her calculations. So
you end up in this kind ofruminating state, constantly
going over the scenarios, do Ihave enough risk, what am I
risking by going to work, whatam I risking by not having
enough to pay my debts andthere's no wind for that and
that itself wears you out. Sothat was kind of horrible double

(34:32):
bind that I tried to see thatshe and many other people who
were deemed essential workerseither had to go to work or risk
losing their jobs.

And that's one of the great shames of the American
way of life and the health caresystem in particular, that, you
know, we get a pretty consistentnumber, like between 1998 and
2020, there are over a millionwhat they call excess deaths of
African Americans due to avariety of factors around
inadequate health care accessand other really unfortunate

(35:04):
structural causes.

Yeah, I mean, it's one of the things I really
appreciate in your work. You domention and talk to Liz about
the shame at being human thatLewis and Pozzare talked about
in What is Philosophy?

And, you know, if I'm remembering correctly, it's
a reference to Primo Levi on thesort of shame of being a
survivor of a great catastrophelike the camps and the
Holocaust. And, you know, thereare all kinds of catastrophes
we've lived through since thatwe have to come to grips with
the fact that we've survived,but maybe for reasons that
weren't available to others andthat that's a deep social

(35:39):
question. I'm also reminded oftwo references. There's these
very brief and crypticreferences to the work of De
Bruinhof in Doles and Gottari'swork about the function of
money. And I think it's beenrepublished by Verso recently.
And while it's not exactly thesame, I think it's very close to
this finance and monetary creditsystem that you were talking

(36:01):
about, where it's not evenpeople's salary that is most
significant. They're living offmoney and credit instead.

Well, there's one person I would mention here. I
do not think he's published toomuch in English, but it's a
French philosopher named QuentinBader. He has a magnificent 800
page French thesis, PhD thesis,on Dulos and Guattari's use of
social science. So he's a realexpert on all three sections of

(36:33):
Auntie Oedipus and theanthropological and economic
economists that they use.

His book review of James E. Scott's Against the
Grain is really excellent.

Yeah. Yeah. So let's come back to the
statification thing if we could.I do try to look at what they
say about capture, which is theway in which a society has to
equal out, this is the imperialsociety, to equal out
heterogeneous activities aslabor, has to equal out land

(37:05):
productivity as rent and as toequal out exchange capacities as
money and tax. So this is awhole complicated thing there.
But that presupposes a primaryviolence of what Marx calls
primitive accumulation whichdualism could generalize to say

(37:25):
that whenever there's capture,whenever there's a state that
imposes its form of life on nonstate peoples there's going to
be primitive accumulation andthat's a prior violence. So that
connects up with Benjamin andthe divine violence stuff and
also Derrida. But what I alwayswanted to see in both of those

(37:47):
is that as soon as there's astate, there's people running
from the state and then that'sthe Marinaj and that's one of
Scott's things. So that makes itreally complicated multiplicity
because geography has to figurein. How close are you to the
imperial center?
That means it's less costly forthe imperial center to send its

(38:09):
tax collectors and its armies.The further you are away, not
just in distance but the closeryou are to the hills, that means
it's more difficult for statepursuing troops or infantry or
cavalry to follow you. So theold advice of run for the hills

(38:30):
is absolutely literally true. Sothe twist that brings the two
things together I think is thatthe Maroons in establishing
themselves in a place close tothe state because they're not
anti state but they want anindependence from the state so
that they can pry upon the stateif they need to, or trade with
the state, or even have a treatywith the state. But they have to

(38:53):
do that in such a way that itwould impose an unacceptable
cost on the pursuers, the statepursuers, to actually come in
and bring them back.
The epigraph for the Marinagechapter is from the American
black radical George Jackson. Imay be running, but all the
while I'll be looking for astick, a defensible position,

(39:14):
which those in Guzzari manglesslightly by saying I'll be
looking for a gun. That'sbecause of the translation, the
French translation of the churchsection. So the final turn of
the thing is that sometimesMaroons I think might themselves
come back and conquer the stateand stay in the state. So in

(39:35):
Toluca Quartari's Antioppus theymake a lot about Nietzsche's
line about, they come as if fromnowhere, they're too hostile and
foreign even to be hated, theyarrive as with lightning and
take over the state.
I don't see why that couldn'talso be Maroons who've grown up,

(39:56):
honed their fighting skills,lived a non state life and then
found the weakness in the statethat they're attacking in order
to be free and thought, well,why don't we just stay and
ourselves become state form,become the state form except
we'll be at the top, not ourancestors at the bottom who ran

(40:19):
away, but we'll come back and dothat. There's very little
evidence of that kind of thingbut I think it fits the
framework that the Lewis andQuechua lay out and it does
connect with what Scott saidabout the non state peoples who
are in constant interaction withthe state. And in fact, both of
them are co dependent. The stateneeds the non state people for

(40:41):
the raw materials and the jewelsand the slaves that the non
state people can capture andbring into the state as well. So
it's quite a big multiplicity, Itry to distinguish different
regimes of violence.
The primary regime of violenceof statification which installs
capture such that theft becomesa crime against the state and

(41:05):
the police will go after thatbut that's only after the
primitive accumulation or theprimary violence. And the
Maroons have their own form ofregime of violence. They're very
unforgiving of deserters.They're also a little suspicious
of people that they captured inone of their periodic raids and

(41:26):
would capture them. They neededto go through a seasoning
process or an acclimationprocess of living free for
several years before they wouldbe trusted.
They were kept as kind ofhousehold servants whereas they
were very accepting of peoplewho actually ran away
themselves. So that was the kindof proof that you wanted to live

(41:46):
free was that you got there tothe Maroon community whereas if
you had to go in and you had tobe taken there on a raid, you
had to prove yourself. So that'sa regime of violence there.

Yeah. I mean, to talk about that final turn that
you mentioned in which a nonstate people might actually
return to settle the state. Ifyou do the very long history of
state formation, this isactually common in a number of
instances. To use one that'sclose to, you know, the
Luzengaturi's heart, The citystate of Ur in the Sumerian

(42:23):
empire, we're thinking circaabout 2,000 BC, but it had been
around for maybe about fifteenhundred years prior to that as
well. There's the final fall ofSumer, and there's even a lament
for it and everything.
And they'd fought off somenomadic people from the what is

(42:43):
now the Southeastern Mountainsof Turkey where they got their
wood and cedar. But the peoplefrom the Northeast that
eventually, helped contribute totheir nomads, who are the Martu,
themselves were a nomadicraiding people. And after you
have the fall of Ur, in partthey're the the Elamites too who

(43:04):
are, like, from Iran. But, oncethe Martu, like, conquered the
the cities, they settle them andlive in them for themselves for
quite a while and then becomesort of institutionalized. Or,
like, there's a whole series ofrulers in the ancient Egyptian
empire who were from foreignregions.
They conquer, And instead ofimposing their own culture on

(43:27):
it, they assimilate intoEgyptian culture. So there you
know, all these, like, fun notfun. Fun's not the right word
here. There are all these,unexpected and curious examples.
And I think that that's what'sso important about returning
this material because there'ssuch a hegemony of a modern and

(43:48):
liberal jurisprudence approachto how social and political
change happens.
And it imagines that it happensby rotating who's in office and
gets to set policy.Occasionally, it's by some
unexpected people from belowseizing the institutions and
then and turning it to theiradvantage. But the maroon gives

(44:09):
us a completely different schemafor political transformation,
and that it's one first of justsubtraction or elimination. You
know? It sort of starves thebeast as it were.
But then you're right. I mean,it's not always normatively
good. People can reestablish astate and perhaps even a more
brutal one in the process. Theother thing about this different

(44:29):
political schema is, you know, Dand G are sort of ironically
playing on Henry Louis Morgan's,anthropology that was then, you
know, obviously quitecomplicated, way too
evolutionary in its path,deterministic. And then when
Engels got ahold of it, underthe influence of social

(44:51):
Darwinism, creates a verychallenging framework that its
basic ideas that, you know,there's a history to the
creation of the family, privateproperty and the states.
And then all three of those willhave to be challenged and
undermined for a successfulsocialist or even ideally, you
know, communist transformation.But then all of the methodology

(45:13):
behind it has been underminedsince. And so I think you take a
really helpful path that justdispenses with trying to have a
tortured reworking of it andfinds a much more productive
political avenue.

Well, thank you. That's yeah, I mean, the first
thing we have to do is get awayfrom any, progressivism,
depending on how horrific youpaint the state of nature. In
Hobbes or merely just a badbusiness environment, as with
Locke, the only rational movereally is to join civil society
is to sign the social contractand either delegate to the

(45:51):
sovereign or become part of thesovereign or at least have a
limited sovereign. We know allthe permutations of that. But
that neglects the fact thatspecifically slaves are encasted
as the outside within the socialcontract, right?
They're not covered, they're notcitizens, they don't sign the
contract, but they're castedwithin it as the outside that

(46:14):
could be killed with impunitythen we could move to the
necropolitics and bembe and awhole bunch of other stuff like
that. So of course the slavewants to escape. The only
rational move for an enslavedperson is to flee that territory
governed by that social contractand run for the hills. You just

(46:36):
have to use the economicprinciple of the revealed
preferences to see that whenpeople run away from the state,
they're showing their positionwithin the so called social
contract. It's better in thewoods.
There's a wonderful article byDaniel Lubin called Hobbesian
Slavery in which he talks aboutthe way in which the right to

(46:56):
rebellion is one of theinalienable rights if you're put
in a position in which your lifeis not worth living. They are
still in a state of nature henceall means are open to them of
recourse so that an enslavedperson cannot commit a murder
because they're in the state ofnature and murder is only a

(47:17):
crime in a civil society. SoHobbes along this reading is
really very interesting.Enslaved people cannot murder
their captors. They can killthem in order to escape but
because they're not part of thesocial contract, they're not
bound by the civil societybecause they never agreed to it

(47:39):
and hence, you know, so that's aregime of violence that includes
killing, but not murder.
So that's one of the things whenuse the big framework of regime
of violence. I'm not a badRousseau reader in the sense
that people think that Rousseausaid that the state of nature
was nice or something. Shedoesn't really say that. The

(48:03):
first part of the discourse oninequality is probably a
hypothetical of what would havebeen necessary in order to
produce human beings and humanbeings only appear in the
beginning of the second part ofthe discourse on inequality and
there there's plenty of violencethere. But it's just as any

(48:24):
social formation must channelits desiring production, so must
any socius or any socialformation must channel its
violence.
Within a slave holding societyyou are granted impunity in
rendering violent acts againstslaves and the thing that makes

(48:46):
the whole system tremble is theslave who kills the master. So
it's regulated in that way aspart of what provokes response.
Having a regime of violencedoesn't mean that it's a free
for all. You can't have free foralls. Any social formation has
to regulate.
Desiring production, which youcan cash out in terms of who

(49:08):
gets to hook up with who, whogets to eat what, who gets free
time in order to make things,who has to owe a certain amount
to somebody else and who gets tohit who.

And, you know, speaking of insult and injury,
one of my favorite dimensions ofnon state people's lives too is
the organized use of insult or,you know, heckling in order to
disaccumulate power as well.Someone is getting a little too
powerful or a little tooindependent or something like
that, then, boy, do they get,all the insults heaped on them

(49:42):
until they're taken down a few,notches in the in the the social
ranking. So maybe thinkingabout, you know, the thing that
makes the system tremble in aslave owning society is, you
know, the slave who strikesback, and that's why it's so
deeply regulated. It also makesme think, you know, the way to
get away with it is to do it andthen disappear or have this
basis outside of it, which, youknow, at least to me, brings

(50:06):
back the the darkness of thedark deliz or the unintelligible
or the space of the outside. Youknow?
But for you, maybe it leads usto the conclusion on the
joyousness as well. So maybe wecan, have you give your final
case for the joy, which, by theway, just if, you know, people
are listening at home, I alwayssay that it's an asymmetric

(50:28):
contrast from the joy. It's notmeant to be some sort of
complete opposite. You know,there is a space for joy in the
darkness, maybe even a joydivision. But, you know, John,
give us your case for the joy.

Well, I mean, I set the whole thing up by saying
it's ambivalent. There's allsorts of passive joy. I do try
to run this when there was aline that you cannot have active
sadness, right, because anactive relationship is going to
build up your power. Your powermeans your ability to be
affected and to affect others.So insofar as you understand

(51:04):
your contribution to anencounter, that is an
amplification of, it's anexpression of your power and
amplification of your affectivespread and that cannot be sad as
he says.
But you can have passive joy andthat's the danger of being swept

(51:28):
away by the mob or whatever. Sowhile I don't accept Le Bon's
phobia about all crowds and allmobs. I am worried about crowds
and mobs.

So in conclusion, tie this to anti fascism. So
maybe this is the culminatingpoint on that too.

So I've always been really struck by Foucault's
preface to the Englishtranslation published by
University of Minnesota Press ofAnti Oedipus. And there he has
some wonderful things warningto, we must defeat the desires
described as the fascism in usall, our hearts, in our everyday

(52:10):
behavior, the fascism thatcauses us to love power, to
desire the very thing thatdominates and exploits us.
Foucault continues by saying, Bemultiple, not totalizing, never
terrorize your readers, neverclaim to have found the pure
order, be joyous, do not thinkone has to be sad to be
militant, do not become enamoredof power. I do then distinguish

(52:35):
active joy from passive joy inthe spinacist connection. So the
passive joy comes from beingtaken up outside yourself into
the mob transfixed by theleader.
But active joy is in a networksituation in which you turn on
someone who enables them to turnon other people. So let me read

(52:57):
this here. I propose an ethicalstandard. Does the encounter
produce repeatable, mutuallyactive joyous affect in enacting
positive care and cooperation?And then I do end up saying
something like, we're at aturning point, an inflection
point with regard to thechallenge to liberalism posed by

(53:19):
the worldwide turn to fascismand the question of whether we
can reform liberalism in ademocratic socialist manner,
quickly enough and radicallyenough to enable us to deal with

(53:40):
climate change, massincarceration, debt servitude,
both of the third world and ofthe mass of people in The United
States, or do we have toinstitute a revolution regime of
violence against the fascismthat we see a raid against us?

(54:00):
That's not up for me to decide,that will be decided in the
streets or if we last longenough in 2026 and 2028 in the
next two presidential elections.But we're not going to get there
as long as the Harris, Biden,Obama wing of the Democratic
party insists on being moreafraid of losing their donors

(54:22):
than of losing an election. Sofinal thing, American regime of
violence has been hit with alightning bolt by Luigi Magione,
who assassinated in a classicpropaganda of the deed direct
action right from 1900. He shota CEO on the streets of
Manhattan, is that going toshock and galvanize the American

(54:46):
people enough to pressure thedemocratic party? I kind of
doubt it because everythingwe've seen so far has either
been kind of Alexandria OcasioCortez saying something like,
you know, this is not to justifythe murder, but I understand
where he's coming from, which isfine.
You have to distinguishexplanation from justification.

(55:07):
But that was an event whosereverberations through the
American political system andits ability to capture those
events and encapsulate them andrender them neutral or whether
it will reverberate around. Butthere's a lot of scared
establishment folks. It's astructure, You can kill the CEO,

(55:28):
there's a new CEO in place butit's not to justify it but it
has to be explained and in orderto understand I do think you
have to have at least someability to enter the world of
the perpetrator of the deed inorder to find out his
motivations.

Yeah, right before you ended, I was thinking maybe
we're in a Timothy Leary orMalcolm X situation and either
turn on, tune in, drop out, orby any means necessary. But now
I'm hearing echoes of LucyGonzales Parsons, whose husband
was executed as one of theHaymarket martyrs in Chicago.

(56:03):
Her famous words, let everydirty, lousy tramp arm himself
with a revolver and knife andlay in wait in the steps of the
palaces of the rich and stab orshoot the owners as they come
out. You know, maybe it's not1887 again, but it is a point in
which this new Gilded Age,there's a new version of
fascism, and something's gonnachange and hopefully for the

(56:26):
better.

Yep. Yeah. Yep.

Well, thanks, John. I mean, your book's gonna be a
wonderful resource in helpingthink about this moment, other
ones in the past, but hopefullysome new and more interesting or
at least creative anti fascistones in the future. And I invite
everyone to please check out thebook.

Thank you very much, Andrew. And no, I'm
looking forward to theconversations that I hope will
be sparked by this book.

Yeah. Thanks, Maggie and everyone else at
University of Minnesota Pressfor making this possible and all
the wonderful work that they do.

Yes, 100%. We can't do it without a lot of
help.

Narrator (57:04):
This has been a University of Minnesota Press
production. The book Regimes ofViolence toward a political
anthropology by John Protivi isavailable from University of
Minnesota Press. Thank you forlistening.

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