Rev Left Radio - Cruel Optimism: Affect Theory and the Structure of Feeling

Episode Date: September 29, 2021

Maggie Doherty teaches writing at Harvard, where she earned her PhD in English. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the Nation, among other publications. She is also the author of The Equivalents: The Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960's. She joins Breht to discuss the work of Lauren Berlant, Affect Theory, our emotional landscapes in late capitalism, and much more! Follow her on Twitter @magsrdoherty Check out her interview on Open Source: https://radioopensource.org/into-the-feel-tank/     ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have Maggie Doherty on to talk about cruel optimism, affect theory, COVID and climate change, Buddhism, late capitalism, and her book The Equivalence, and much more. This is a really fascinating conversation. I heard Maggie actually on open source with Christopher Leiden, one of the, of I think the longest running podcasts in existence and knew just by listening to that interview that she would be a perfect fit for our show here. So if you like what you hear here, definitely go check out her interview.

And I'll open source with Christopher Leiden and get more of it. But it was a fascinating conversation and I know that a lot of you will really enjoy this and get a lot out of it. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Maggie Doherty. Enjoy it. I'm Maggie Dardy. I am a writer, teacher, and organizer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I'm so excited to talk today on the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. Absolutely, yeah. It's an honor to have you on the show. I actually came across to you, as we'll talk about in this interview from a recent interview you did on open source,

which I've been a long time listener of, and just listening to that overall discussion and your contributions to it. I thought you'd be a really interesting and a guest and a perfect fit for our show here. So really appreciate you coming on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Absolutely. So we're going to be talking about a lot of different stuff. But as I said, we can start off in this direction, which is what you talked about on open source with Christopher Leiden recently. Because on that show, you talked about being a sort of student of Lauren Berlant, the author of Cruel Optimism, among other things. So just to start off, can you talk about sort of who Lauren was and what's your relationship to them was. And I know, I don't know if you knew them

personally or not, but just take that question however you want. Sure. Yeah. So, so I unfortunately did not have the chance to get to know Lauren Brilliant personally. I met them very briefly at a conference once and was very intimidated because I thought they were so brilliant. But I did read a bunch of their literary scholarship and literary theory when I was in graduate school in English. And it really jump started my thinking, not just my sort of intellectual thinking about work and literature and, you know, some of the things that I was studying and writing about, but also just my life. I felt in a way that Berlant's work in her book, their book, Cruel Optimism was a diagnosis in some ways of what it was like being in graduate school

after the 2008 recession when it was very clear that jobs in academia were kind of gone and not coming back. And yet we were all still going through the motions of training and writing dissertations and applying for jobs and going to these workshops about how to interview for jobs and how to make yourself eligible for jobs. But at the same time, on some level, we knew that this kind of good academic life was no longer available to us, but we still stayed very attached to the fantasy of it, to the idea of it. And this is what Burlant writes about in cruel optimism about how and why we stay attached to, they call them objects, but to people, to relationships, to jobs, to foods, to things that don't really work.

for us that are actively preventing us from living better lives. And so when I read this book and when I read some of their other work in graduate school, I definitely had one of those sort of cartoonish light bulb moments where I felt like I suddenly was able to see my life, the world I lived in, the institution that I was embedded in in a really different light. That's wonderful, yeah. Incredibly interesting. I hadn't heard of Lauren before this interview and now I'm really interested in their work and affect theory more broadly. And that leads us well into this next question because their book Cruel Optimism is considered a work of affect theory. So can you just talk about what affect theory is and how Lauren applied it in cruel optimism? Yeah. So I think

maybe one way to think about this is the way that I first was taught to think about this idea of affect. So imagine you go into a room, you're going to a party, and you enter, you go, you ring the doorbell, you get into the house, and you realize that before you got to the party, something bad had happened. There had been a fight or maybe someone had said something really offensive or controversial that you didn't witness. You weren't at the party yet. But you walk into the room and you can sense in the air that something is in the air, I guess. You can feel that there's some anxiety maybe or some discomfort. And that is what theorists of affect call affect,

this kind of free-floating emotion that might be found in institution, it might be found in a community, it might be found in a relationship, but it's not necessarily like a feeling that you might have as an individual where, you know, someone offends you and you feel angry, it's more something that is collective.

It's a collective emotion. And it doesn't really sort of spring from anyone individual. It isn't really caused by anyone individual. But it is caused often by things that affect individuals, by structures, by the economy, by the global pandemic. You know, I think we really have a good sense of affect when we walk out in the street during lockdown and it just feels anxious out there. We go to a grocery store during lockdown. It feels anxious. That's a kind of affective experience. And so scholars

of affect theory really take this kind of collective emotional experience seriously. And many of them, Berlant included, understand it as springing from material conditions. So, and this feels to me or felt to me when I first encountered it like a really big deal. because I growing up had really seen emotional life as something that was sort of just personal in some way, something that was just about, you know, my life as an individual, my life in relationship to other individuals. But I didn't really think about my experiences of anxiety or depression or hopelessness or all of these feelings that I might have experienced as something that had to do with the material reality of the world or even the economic reality of the world. So affect theory makes this big intervention by saying, okay, we need to think about emotion as collective as something that is part of our social world as opposed to just our personal lives, as something that springs from material conditions that is often a function of economic reality and as something that can be politicized. I guess that's often kind of the third big move of some affect theorists, not all, but for Berlin certainly. that this is a way of understanding our political life.

It's a way of understanding the emotional aspect of our political life. And it's a way of mobilizing, getting people to understand that their emotional lives are not just personal, but are something that they can shift by shifting the reality of the world that they live in. Yeah, I particularly find this obviously incredibly interesting and important and prescient for the moment that we're in. And you mentioned going out into a public place and feeling the low-level constant anxiety of the pandemic and its constant sort of threat to you and your family's bodily health. I live in a deep red state where at least half the population is constantly unmasked and has been since day one with a hardcore right-wing billionaire governor who plays into the worst

instincts on the right, et cetera. And I have a wife right now who is in a high-risk pregnancy. And so, you know, like just going out into the world standing in line at a grocery store and somebody stands too close behind you, you know, you do feel like your hackles get raised. And even when you're not consciously aware of the emotion that you might be feeling, your body is. And, you know, I think a lot of us are going through anxiety or depression because of this and many other things in our society. But, you know, a lot of our society also tells us that anxiety and depression and feel. feelings of dread and despair are personal, you know, biochemical issues that you have to deal with through pills and therapy and individual options. But it's becoming clear and clearer to, I think,

more and more people that so much of the negative emotions that we experience are actually in some in some cases very rational and moreover our very rational responses to our environment right now. And I know no matter how much I meditate or exercise or eat and sleep well, I still feel feelings of dread and despair and anxiety. And it's very clear to me that those are social conditions that I'm operating in and not individual, you know, neurochemical imbalances or whatever. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I mean, I think you put that really well. And I think it's also important, right, that if these are collective social experiences, then the response has to be collective. So just as you said, you know, you can take super good care of your mental health and physical health.

You can take super good care of your family. But in a way, if this is a problem that's not just facing you, but it's facing your neighbors, it's facing the people you live in community with. That affect of anxiety and dread and hopelessness is still out there, you know, no matter what you as an individual do. So that's, I think, where this way of thinking about our emotional lives and of our emotional lives in relation to our economic, lives is really helpful because it suggests that, yes, we should all, you know, or hopefully we have the capacity and the resources to take good care of ourselves and our loved ones. But there are also things that we have to do together collectively to address the situations that make so many of us receptive to these affects of emotion, I'm sorry, these affects of depression and anxiety and

these things that are facing all of us together. Yeah, definitely. I want to talk more about that, and I think we're going to talk about climate change in a second. But before that, I just kind of like to situate this theory in a broader ecosystem of theory. So how is this approach related to, say, psychoanalysis and Marxism? I think you might have hinted at the Marxism with, you know, taking material conditions and collective action seriously. But I'm just wondering where the tensions and any possible overlap are with affect theory and these other, you know, pretty big, you know, theories or theoretical approaches that are out there. Yeah, you know, I think it's not sort of, by any means, orthodox Marxist theory and, of course, you know, Marxist theory, especially in literary study, operates in a really particular way. I think it's helpful to think of it, especially of Burlant's work as a critique of capitalism that, and in many of their writing, they were very critical of capitalism, of the way capitalism shapes our relationships, of the way it shapes our emotional lives, with the way it shapes love, of the way, you know, it dictates all of these.

experiences that we have and could have really differently under a different different economic regime. And I think the sort of the capitalist element is also a historical kind of boundary for a lot of these thinkers that they're interested in what life feels like under what people sometimes call late capitalism. And obviously I know there's a ton of debate about whether we're living actually in late capitalism or post capitalism and I do not have the expertise to answer that question. But that it life feels a certain way right now. And it feels a certain way under a neoliberal, you know, government. It feels a certain way in a financialized economy. And that these, these aspects of

economic life have this bearing or shape in some way, the way we love each other, care for each other, care for ourselves, the way we experience life on an emotional level. Burlant was a deeply psychoanalytic thinker. It's one of the things that I really love about their work because I'm a fan of psychoanalytic thinking. But I think this idea of attachment is maybe one place to locate that thinking and also this idea of fantasy. So in cruel optimism, which we've talked about a little bit, you know, they're making the argument that attachment, you know, there's always a certain amount of optimism associated with attachment, that we attach to things kind of out of hope.

We attach to things out of desire. And there is this idea when we attach to something, whether it's a romantic partner or a new job or a particular idea about life, an idea about what a good life looks like. We carry hope in that attachment that we're going to be able to execute this idea we have about whatever it is that we've become attached to.

And, you know, optimism is good. And attachment is, you know, good and inevitable. We're going to bond with things and people and institutions and ideas and fantasies as we move through the world. But, and I think this is where psychoanalysis is useful, attachment isn't always good for us. So in cruel optimism, Burlant refers to some attachments as particularly problematic. And one example that they give is what some people would think of as the American dream. This idea that if you work hard and you follow the rules and you don't cause trouble and you don't break the law and you're basically a good citizen, you will be able to attain

a certain amount of material security for yourself and your family. you will have sufficient rest and leisure, you will make sufficient money, and you will be able to sort of have this potentially upward mobility, potentially just kind of stable life for yourself. And I think many of us, you know, and those of us on the left, know that this is not the reality for most people in this country, that this idea of the American dream or the sort of good life as it's been defined in the U.S. is not an offering.

anymore. But the, we, so many of us still feel attached to this fantasy, attached to this idea. And because we can't detach from it, we're in this, we're stuck in some ways. We're kind of stuck or paralyzed or repeating a bunch of things that, um, without sort of no, being able to free ourselves from a particular kind of cycle of behavior or repeating a bunch of the same mistakes or repeating a bunch of decisions and getting the same result. And this, I think, is something that emerges from psychoanalysis, this idea of repeating things compulsively, reenacting scenes from your childhood again and again throughout your life. But I think what Berlant is doing is connecting that psychoanalytic understanding of being

stuck or being attached or repeating things problematically to some of the economic conditions that make that attachment problematic or that make that repetition seem like the only option. So that's where I think this theory kind of bridges some anti-capitalist economic thinking and some of this more psychoanalytic thinking kind of brings both of them together in a very exciting way, I think. Yeah, really well said, and I love that intersection.

I think it's absolutely fascinating. And I think this is related to what you were just saying in that last answer. But the role that that desire plays in, I mean, in a capitalist consumer society as well as in much of psychoanalytic theory. And it's attachment to consumption. And I think you're touching on that with the American way of life. Also the attachment to the overall economic system of, you know, really a libertarian or neoliberal capitalism that is on every front showing us that it can no longer do what its basic promises.

And particularly with the climate crisis, we see that it's the very externalizing, hyper-consumptive sort of anarchy-of-the-market approach to an economic system that climate change and many other things are basically telling us what we can no longer continue with. But for Americans who have been told their entire lives that capitalism is synonymous with freedom and democracy like you really cannot you know pull those things apart from one another in the mind of the average American it seems like we're in a very sort of dire position with regards to climate change and tackling the crisis in the just and equitable ways that it really demands but also having this deep attachment psychologically to the very economic system that

has produced this monstrosity in the first place so i was just hoping that maybe you could say some words on climate change, particularly and how cruel optimism comes into play on that front. Yeah. I mean, I think, Brett, you said it, you said it really well yourself, that we're attached to an economic system that is actively working toward our destruction, right? So this is a definitional, you know, problematic attachment or in virulance words, you know, they write about how it's cruel optimism when you're attached to something that's going to prevent you're flourishing. So I think it's pretty clear that we will not flourish. in the next, you know, 50 years, 25 years,

if things continue to work as they do in our current economy. But, you know, it's really hard to imagine alternatives and it's really scary. You know, one thing, when I'm of the, often find myself in these classic intergenerational conversations with my parents who were these, you know, first members of their family to go to college

and really bought into this kind of meritocratic idea. that if you, you know, work hard and do the right thing, things are going to work out for you. And they have not completely worked out for my parents by any means. But when we talk about making these kind of big changes to the way that this country operates, the way that the global economy operates, my parents' question is always, well, what would we do instead, you know? And even if I have answers to those questions, you know, we were talking about health care the other day. And they were asking me, like, well, how would it work if we had a different health care system than we have now. And even when I have answers as someone who has thought, you know, a lot about

Medicare for all and other ways of providing, providing health care as opposed to the system we have now, there's still this kind of real fear when I talk to my parents about, about, you know, doing something differently, doing something other than, as you said, what they've been told is the best way to do things. And so I think when it comes to climate change, imagining what our lives would look like if we were not a car dependent society. I think the car is a good example because people are often quite attached to their cars, right? Like they, their cars have, you know, meant something to them personally, even if now there are these objects that might be kind of damaging, damaging their future. It's really hard to think about how your life would work

without a car, given the society that we live in now because our society we live in is designed for cars. So you think about, well, how would I get to work? And how would I see my family? And how would my kid get home from school? And, you know, all of these questions come up. And, you know, part of the challenge, I think, of addressing climate change, but addressing, you know, any of these big problems is having the sort of the, I don't know whether it's the poise or the solidarity or just the ability to enter this space of uncertainty or enter this space of imagination. to detach from what we know from the kind of system that we have and that has felt like it's working for us, even if it's not actually working for us, but it feels like it's working for

us because we're getting from point A to point B and try to exist in this space of possibility in the space of uncertainty. I think that's really hard psychologically for people. I think it's really, really hard to imagine something different than what you've been told. to want and what you have felt yourself to want and what feels kind of sometimes like the only way that things could work. Climate change, I think, is a really big one in this respect. But I think this idea of imagining or allowing for some new possibility is a big challenge across the left in a bunch of different causes and a bunch of different organizing contexts. Yeah, I also think

there's, I think what you said is spot on. And I share like that. experience with talking to older members of my family as well, like well-intentioned, good-hearted, kind people, but they're sort of trapped in the box of, you know, Mark Fisher's capitalist realism, if you will. And there is this fear of change, and it's very human. And, you know, it's tied to loss aversion, like people would rather keep what little they have than gamble what little they have on the possibility of having more, but also the possibility of losing what they have. And I think that goes some length to explaining people's attention. attachment to their health insurance, which everybody hates, but to say, hey, we're going to take

that away from you, causes real fear. And I think sometimes on the left, specifically, you know, younger people in general, which tend to gravitate towards the left, I think, they don't really have an appreciation for this psychological element of humanity, this fear of change. And because we have a blind spot there, I think sometimes we don't adequately address that. We can come up with all the rational answers, but on so many levels, this fear of change is visceral, it's emotional, sometimes it's subconscious, and I think we have a lot of work to do, trying to get through to people by taking that psychological fear seriously. I'm not exactly sure how to do that, but maybe being less patronizing and having some understanding of that reality could set us on the right

path. Do you have any ideas about how to tear down that barrier? No, it's such a good question, and I think you're right. It's scary. It is just scary. I mean, I think this is why Burlance metaphor and example of leaving a what I think they call a non-reciprocal relationship, just a relationship that's not really working. I mean, I think a lot of us can understand viscerally the fear of that, the fear of leaving a person that you've been with for a really long time, but that you know that being in a relationship with this person is not ultimately going to lead to your your sort of peace and happiness and well-being. That's a terrifying experience for so many people. And I think that that same fear is often fault in these other contexts. I mean, I think what you said

about being less patronizing or not even trying to persuade necessarily through reason is an important, those are two important points. And I, you know, can say in my experience as a union organizer, the thing that I always, you know, among a few things that I try to remember is to be compassionate. And so listening to people's fears and validating them and trying to connect with them on that emotional level is a huge part of my job and not just saying, you know, well, actually, it's in your best interest to have a union represent you and here's why. But to sort of hear them say, I, I feel really scared about changing the way that my job operates.

You know, right now my job, oh, it's not perfect. My job's not perfect, but a lot of it's working really well. And you're talking about this big, scary unknown, and then how would my job work? And what if something bad happened? And what if my supervisor was, you know, mad at me? And what if they, you know, I spoke to someone two days ago who said, oh, you know, I think they would just eliminate my job if we unionized. And I feel like part of my job as an organizer is to really, really,

hear that fear and validate that and say, you know, that totally makes sense why you would worry about that. And that must be really uncomfortable to think about, to think about, you know, that as a consequence. And then

to, you know, this sort of takes us back to this idea of collectivity and moving away from the individual and to say, you know, in this conversation with this particular worker, to say what we're imagining is that you wouldn't go through that experience alone,

that we would all be with you and we would have your back. And if during the campaign you experienced pushback or retaliation, we wouldn't leave you. We'd be right there. And that, you know, I think these things have to kind of go hand in hand, this idea of you're not alone and this idea of there's a big scary change that needs to happen. Yeah, absolutely. Well said, especially in the context of,

union organizing, like dealing with individual people and their individual fears, leading with compassion is certainly a step in the right direction. You know, I'm thinking about climate change really quick before we move on as well. Yeah. The individualization of the climate problem, like, you know, it's like you need to cut down on your energy use. You can walk to work, et cetera. We now know that that was actually a strategy of the fossil fuel industry to shift the

burden away from their industry onto individual sort of consumers. And we can see that that's a sort of cynical attempt on their part to put the blame away from themselves. But I still have this affective dimension of my life where because I know sort of obsessively have studied climate change and know it so well, I know exactly, you know, the science behind greenhouse gases, know the trajectories, know the different degrees and what they what they portend. I have this deepening sense of despair going about my normal life. Like, you know, driving my car to pick up my kids, I, you know, go and stand outside the building for my first grader to come out of his class and I just look around it.

All these SUVs just lined up around the block waiting for these kids, just idling, running, and, you know, every time I throw away a piece of plastic, everything is plastic wrapped in America, it seems. Single-use plastics. You know, I use it for three seconds, throw it in the trash can. I just have this overwhelming sense of despair. I know that the things that I'm individually doing aren't contributing really to the problem. Like if me and everybody I know were to be raptured tomorrow and never do another carbon footprint, the problem would not have any significant dent in it whatsoever. But I still have this emotional sort of purgatory, it feels like, where I am still contributing to a way of life, almost by necessity, of course,

but with all the knowledge that comes with where that way of life ultimately leads, and particularly for my kids and their future. And I just don't really know how to square that circle, if you will. Do you have any thoughts on that individual sense of helplessness in the face of such a global catastrophe such as climate change? Yeah, I mean, my gosh, I, I, I, I, you know, hear your despair, and I feel it too. I think it's really hard to pay any attention and not feel that kind of fear and despair.

I mean, I think it's complicated, right? Because it's not that individual consumers are responsible for climate change. As you just said, this is not sort of the right framework to think about it. But it is also true that what we're in. imagining is a situation where individuals don't have to drive their cars everywhere and don't have to, you know, use single-use plastic or, you know, don't have to consume in the particular way that a lot of us feel we have to now or have become accustomed to or become habituated to. And so I think it's not necessarily holding individuals responsible to say that as part of

addressing the climate crisis, our behaviors will have to change. I think the idea is that they will change in part by other changes happening that facilitate these choices, right? So if we have better public transit, you know, so I live in the greater Boston area and one of our, there's a mayoral race right now. And one of the candidates wants to make the subway system we have free. that's part of her platform. And so that's the kind of change that I think makes it so that individuals don't have to drive or, you know, makes public transit a more appealing and available option for a lot of people. Many, you know, many people are already taking public transit just by necessity. But, you know, if you have the bus and the subway free, that's a huge deal.

And that's going to help, you know, people move away from a car culture. But then I do think there is a kind of tricky emotional dimension. And this is where this idea of attachment and imagining other ways of life comes in because just when the public transit becomes free doesn't necessarily mean that everyone is ready and willing to make the leap away from the car, right? So there will be some emotional complication to that change. And so that's not necessarily saying, you person driving a car, you are the reason that the climate is degrading, but it is to say that, you know, as we collectively make these changes to facilitate,

you know, a different way of life and to mitigate the climate crisis, we will, as individuals as people living our lives, have to also change some of our behaviors. And I think just sort of starting to become comfortable with that idea or starting to imagine that possibility does feel kind of like part of this in some way. Yeah, totally. There is this pre-figure element psychologically to trying to do whatever you can in your life, given what you know know to be coming to try to prefigure the ways of living and being insofar as you can that will be necessary in the future due to the climate crisis. And I think that can be a proactive and helpful way to deal with some of the emotional elements of the climate crisis without

necessarily falling into the trap of individualizing the problem and its solution. So, yeah, certainly worth thinking about. But another aspect of this approach that I'm really curious about and listening to you talk about Lauren's work and your ideas surrounding it really got me thinking is how it can be applied to comprehending the far right. Because I have this sense that the psychology and affective elements intrinsic to Trumpism and to current iterations of like neo-fascism more broadly sort of needs to be properly understood by those of us on the liberatory left. So I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on this front. I'm leaving the question very open.

You can take it in any direction that you see fit. Sure. Well, so I think you've probably heard us discuss this on open source, an article that Berlant wrote for the new inquiry in the run-up to Trump's election as president, where she talked about part of the emotional appeal of Trump or why Trump was so appealing to so many Americans. and she, you know, she, I don't know if she actually said this line, but the basic just was something like, it's emotional, stupid, you know, it's not, it's not that he's, you know, has any ideas. It's not that, it's not even that people think, oh, if he's president, he's going to

make my life better. That wasn't, you know, her, their argument about, about his appeal. But it was instead that what Trump showed was a kind of freedom that was really appealing and a freedom to take his messy emotional life and just voice all of it. So all, you know, and this is, we're going back a little to the psychoanalytic way of thinking here that, you know, in all of us, in all of us, even, even us good liberatory leftists, we have a lot of kind of messy sentiments. You know, we go, we go by someone and we think, God, I just hate that person. You know, I really, and then if we were to pause and we would say, well, of course, I don't hate them, you know, sometimes they annoy me, but I know that they're basically a good person,

you know, but in that kind of, in our unconscious, in our sort of almost, you know, I'm giving words to sort of unconscious feelings, we have these kind of violent, aggressive, you know, very un-socialally acceptable feelings. And Trump just says all of them. He just takes these things that are the mess of internal life and puts them out there. And he does it without shame and without fear of being, you know, reprimanded. And when he is reprimanded, he responds with that same kind of freedom. He insults people and, you know, has these creative, insulting nicknames for anyone who's ever sort of spoken ill of him.

And that is, I mean, that's a very, very appealing vision, I think. I think even, you know, for people who are who don't hold Trump's politics, I think even on an emotional level, seeing someone be that free and that comfortable with themselves in Burlant's argument can be, can be appealing. And so she, they sort of go on to to argue that for a certain segment of, um, American society that has been told in various ways that they don't matter or don't matter in a particular way or that their ideas don't matter or that their experiences don't matter. Trump is great because, in Burlant's words, he gives this message that internal lives matter. You know, your internal life matters. And so I think, you know, in a kind of simple way,

this is just an argument about taking emotions really seriously in politics and, you know, not sort of imagining that people are going to be won over by arguments or by rational thinking or by telling them that certain policies or ideas are in their best interest. And that's not necessarily a new idea. I think a lot of us are aware that, and, you know, a given politician's appeal is primarily emotional as opposed to, you know, rational. But I think, you know, this argument about Trump specifically was you know was quite smart because it was talking about you know

to some Trump is so repulsive and I even wonder and Burland doesn't go on to talk about this in the article but I even wonder if that repulsion is kind of the other side of the coin you know for people for whom Trump is so appealing because it's like yes just say take all the all the shirt of you know shameful feelings you have and just put them out there that there are some people who are

who are going to react defensively against that and be like, oh, my gosh, I don't even want to know that I have shameful thoughts. I don't even want to know that I have aggression. I don't even want to know that I ever have any of these, you know, less than admirable thoughts or feeling. So, you know, get it away. Get it away. You know, I never want to think about it. And that, yeah, that's a very sort of, you know, again, psychoanalytic way of thinking about an object, right? Like either bring it close to me or get it away. I never want to see about, see, it again. So I don't know that this accounts necessarily for, for all of, you know, there are so many different kind of permutations of the far right and of, you know, there are different kind of factions and different goals and priorities. And I am certainly not an expert in this political scene. But I guess what I do take from Berlin's work, especially thinking about Trump and Trump's appeal and maybe the lack of appeal of the Democratic Party, I think this idea that, you know, it kind of goes back in a way to what we're talking about with organizing and compassion and recognizing people's emotional experiences, people's fears, people's emotional lives, that that is

going to be to be part of politics and pure argument about what's good for someone or not good for someone is, you know, not really going to ever convince anyone to, you know, vote in a different way or do anything other than what they're already inclined to do. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's really insightful. And, you know, Trump has been called America's id. And it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, sort of visceral emotional dimension to Trump's appeal that a lot of people on the left, I mean,

especially I think like technocratic liberals in the wake of his election, I mean, I mean, I mean, it's, it's sort of back. trying to figure it out and they constantly attempted to retreat into this appeal to rationality missing the fact that so much of his appeal was precisely in its irrationality. And I think there's something fundamentally exhilarating about open irrationality that is at the core of fascism more broadly. I think that's perhaps another topic for another day. But I certainly also, I also sort of deeply resonate with your point about we all have these. feelings in us. I mean, this is sort of a psychoanalytic point broadly of like these,

these more base emotions and feelings we have get sublimated into other things. And I remember just like recently going on, you know, I was going on an airplane and it was obviously everybody has to wear their mask. And of course, there's always going to be one person on there that just wants to push the boundaries and not do it. Or, you know, this guy was like sitting a few rows in front of me wearing a mask down underneath his mouth and nose. Like, you know, everybody else was being an adult and wearing their mask. And he's just making a point of not doing it. And, yeah, I just felt this feeling of aggression and, like, you know, your inner dialogue starts going.

Like, I hate this asshole. Like, screw him. And then I try to realize just how ultimately self-defeating that was just to sit there and stew in my own resentment. And so, you know, there's this Buddhist sort of mantra that won chance to others. like, may you be happy, may you be safe, may you be free from suffering, and trying to catch myself when I'm in those particularly dark, resentful moods, and then whatever the, whoever the object of that disdain happens to be applying that mantra to them and seeing if I can cultivate compassion, even for somebody who I'm sort of, you know, in a knee-jerk way, repulsed by,

I think is at the very least an interesting exercise and has been something that I try to do because it really doesn't feel good to be locked in this state of hating your neighbor or going off on these fantasies about how this person must be the worst person on earth because in this moment they're not, you know, doing a thing that I think that they should be doing. So I don't know, it's a very complicated situation. I mean, you know, I think that's, I think that's very beautiful and very, um, very impressive. But I also wonder, you know, if, if for someone else, if hating their neighbor might feel kind of good. Right? Like there's some, you know, I, I am, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm thinking of some, you know, some experiences where sometimes it feels good to indulge in that

kind of aggression or that kind of violent emotion. And, you know, I think if, if, I think part of you had to go back, go back to Trump's appeal that he performs that indulgence of aggressive feeling that, you know, so many other politicians would say, oh, you know, would think to themselves, well, I can't say this about, about someone else, because it's. sort of too much. It sits over the top. I'm going to look like a fool. And he just does. And I think there is, in a way that kind of licenses the indulgence of aggressive feeling in some people or some people sort of respond to that or it resonates with them. And, you know, I don't mean, I, you know, I certainly, I don't think that lasting happiness and lasting peace

is achieved that way by any means. But I do think, in a way, this takes us back to climate change. I do think that in the present moment, indulging one's, you know, aggression or violence, and this happens both, you know, on the left and on the right for sure, can feel really satisfying and can feel, feel kind of just good, feel nice. But of course, the question is, like, what are the long-term consequences of that, both for you and for the society that you live in? And this is, you know, this is where I think we do come back to the climate that, you know, indulging in current pleasure or in current satisfaction or in current sort of delight of some kind, the delightful indulgence of your desire, having your desire immediately gratified

can lead to this sort of dissatisfaction and discomfort down the road. And that's, you know, that's always a challenge for people figuring out what, how to postpone or dismiss short-term gratification in the interest of some long-term, more sustainable happiness. Yeah, completely. Yeah, there's a sense of feeling superior that comes with hating somebody or indulging in those feelings. And, you know, I also think that there's this dimension in American politics and probably global politics more broadly is of like this, I don't know, this hatred of the other, of your neighbor, of, you know, seeing everybody through your political prism, you know, neighbors turning on.

neighbors, family turning on family. It is kind of convenient for the status quo. And I don't know if this is a conscious strategy employed by those with wealth and power, but it's certainly advantageous to them to sort of shift your critical eye away from those with power and wealth and those who actually make the decisions in our society and actually turn that toward the person standing next to you, your coworker, your uncle, or, you know, whoever it may be. And I think we have to sort of break the fever on this in one way or another of this, you know, hating the people around you sort of feeling. And in the height of the Trump era, there was this, on the left and the right, this sensation of like, you know, especially in the most heated moments, like everybody you look at, which side are you on?

And you just sort of judge by maybe how they're behaving, whether or not they're wearing a mask, how they're dressed, what sort of side of the political spectrum that they are on and then sort of indulging in the fantasy of how that must be a bad person because this, this and this. And I think that is incredibly corrosive to a society. We're going to have to come together despite our differences if we have any chance of facing the climate crisis. And I think that politicians will continue to play into this hating your neighbor thing because it serves their purpose.

It's really good for mainstream media to tune in and get worked. up about and it continues the status quo rolling on. So I think whenever we feel those feelings in ourselves, we should be very, very suspicious of them and use our awareness to sort of, you know, strip them of their, of their most, you know, sharp edges, if you will. Yeah. No, I think that's that's really, that's really wise. And I think the challenge is always, you know, I think anger, anger can be great for mobilizing, right? That I think, you know, a lot of people get angry for very good reasons because their job sucks or because, you know, their boss sucks or they're, you know, they can't sort of, you know, make a sustainable and secure life for themselves and

their family. And the question, I guess, is how, or maybe I sort of think about two questions associated with this, which is like, one, how do you direct that anger toward its proper object, which is sort of what you're saying, right? Like, how do you, how do you not be angry at your neighbor who, you think has it easier than you in some way or if you're just that's just the proximate person you know that's the person you see so you think all right that's the person I'm mad at how do you redirect that anger toward you know the owners of the means of production or toward the you know Jeff Bezos's of the world and then how do you not let the anger sort of I think this is what you're saying in a way about your relationship to, you know, detachment or to be able to

recognize your feeling but not get caught up in it and to be able to shift your relationship to the thing or the person that has caused that feeling. How do you not let the anger that you maybe righteously feel, um, corrode to use your word, your assessment of, of the right strategy or your ability to actually do work, right? Like, I think that this is just something that I think a lot about in organizing wanting to say, yes, like, you have every right to be upset about this. This is valid, yes. And now we need to get to work. And we can't just be angry. We can't just sit here, I don't know, tweeting or whatever, whatever it is that we want to do to vent our anger. We actually have to do some things that are going to address the problem.

women are actually going to, you know, build power and put us in a position to win against the people or at the institution that we're actually mad at our employer or, you know, whatever it is. So it's a delicate operation or there's a little bit of a back and forth, I think, between the emotion and the actual kind of work that needs to be done. Yeah, for sure, for sure. And it is worth stating because you mentioned Twitter that these big social media platforms are algorithmically inclined to play into your absolute worst base feelings and exacerbate them. And so taking some time away from that and just like, you know, organizing instead of, you know, screaming online is huge for a bunch of reasons. But one of them is that you're brought back down to earth. You talk to people that are

regular human beings dealing with regular life issues and you don't get swept up in this hyper-emotive ideology silo effect of hating everybody that's not exactly in your exact position. politically, et cetera. So being suspicious of those big tech platforms, I think, is important here, too. Yeah, that's probably a good warning for sure. So sort of attached

to this right wing stuff, I've for a long time argued that there's this sort of, there seems to be the subconscious death drive on the American right. I think the mainstreaming of conspiratorialism, like the self-defeating anti-mask and anti-vax positions,

their continued climate denialism, although maybe it's shifted a little bit from outright denial to more subtle forms of denial. But they all seem to be, you know, if we're going off a cliff, let's hit the gas instead of the break. And I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on the role of the death drive on the right and maybe also within America and capitalism itself. Yeah, I mean, that's a great question and a great way of thinking about it. Um, you know, I'm not, I'm not a Freudian expert by any means, but if I, you know, I guess when I think of the death drive, there's an aspect to it where the, it's in the pursuit of pleasure that you're moving toward death. If I, if I remember correctly, that it's, it's, you know, it's not simply, I'm out to destroy or I'm, I'm going, I want to burn it all down. It's sometimes I want to feel really good. I mean, and, and this is as we were talking about, like, I want to feel really good, can be aggressive. I want to feel really good by being aggressive. I want to feel really good by being cruel. But, you know, sometimes,

and I think this is the sort of tragedy of it or the pathos of it is that the person pursuing the death drive does not know that they are pursuing death. And I think, you know, not to take it to too dark a place, but this can be, this can be seen around some of the anti-vax stuff, right? That's for some people, this is, it's not, in this case, I don't think it's quite a pursuit of pleasure, but it's I want to protect my family. Like, I don't want, I don't want to do something like at the vaccine that I think is going to risk or harm my family. And so, so I think one of the, you know, I guess to go back to climate change, what we were talking about, about shifting our consumer society, you know, I think we see in a way the, the death drive in operation where it's, it's

thinking, you know, well, it gives me so much pleasure to, I don't know, to get food from all around the world all the time. This is just a stray example, right? To be able to go to the grocery store and to buy, you know, any kind of fruit or vegetable I want or to buy any kind of packaged fruit I want. I walk into the grocery store and I take pleasure in the amount of choices that are available to me and that I indulge those choices. I buy the food I want from all corners of the grocery.

globe and that that keeps the demand up for those supply change. It keeps that particular, you know, global agriculture in operation, which is leading ultimately to my death by continuing this kind of climate degradation. So that's, and that's where I think as we've been talking about so much during this conversation, things get hard. And this takes us right back to cruel optimism and to these kind of attachments that we have that are not good for us and the challenge of of understanding that what feels really good in that moment which is having my my choices at the grocery store choosing exactly what I want having it fit exactly my sort of whims of the moment and you know not having to think about the consequences of these choices figuring out or understanding that that is an action

I am taking against myself, even though it feels like I am choosing for myself, that's really hard, you know, just to kind of get emotionally. And as we've been saying, this is not to say that someone, you know, buying a mango in the grocery store is responsible for climate change by any means, but just that this, this idea of the death drive that you bring up, I think is so hard to fully get our heads around in some way because it feels like pleasure in the moment. It feels like pleasure. It feels like freedom. It feels sometimes almost like taking care of ourselves by getting, getting this thing that we feel like we want or we need or we crave or we would be injured in some way not to have.

And so this is where we get back to this idea of having to imagine other ways of caring for ourselves, of experiencing pleasure, of, you know, experiencing beauty or whatever it is that we feel like we're achieved. in these more problematic transactions, but moving away from actions and behaviors and global systems that are actively leading us toward some kind of destruction. So yeah, I think you're totally right to bring up the death drive as kind of instrumental to everything

that's happening here. And how we get out of that does have to, you know, in some way be to recognize, I don't know, I think to recognize what we're getting out of these things, whatever these behaviors or transactions, whatever it is. What are we getting? We're getting something. We wouldn't be doing it if we weren't getting something out of it. And to imagine sort of other ways that we can be gratified, I guess. Yeah, completely. And I mean, I think it's well known that there's obvious, I think, you know,

you bringing up the pleasure aspect of the death drive is really important because with you talking about conspiratorialism, we've long known that conspiratorialism lends to its believer, a sense of like being in on a secret truth, a sense of like, I know and others don't. And that can be in and of itself pleasurable. And I often sometimes think, you know, like the old cliche ignorance is bliss. I was talking to my wife the other day. I was like some conservatives in my family are so certain that the COVID is really not that big of a deal.

And that climate change honestly is not a big deal whatsoever. That there's almost like this day-to-day. careless, carefreeness that they can enjoy that has been completely robbed from me and millions of other people who take these problems seriously. And so I think you're incredibly on point to point out the pleasure aspect of turning away. Because to really fully, I mean, on a lower level, understand the pandemic is real, but on a higher level that the climate crisis is real. And that's going to completely shape our futures in negative ways is incredibly hurtful, it's painful

and to find any way to be able to rationalize your way out of that, to turn away from it, I think yeah, there's pleasure in that, for sure, although ultimately, as you said, the long-term consequences are eventually going to show up at your front

door. If you can bury your head in the sand and tell that very moment, you're going to be maybe a little bit more happy on that journey to the crisis itself. I don't know. Hopefully. Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, this is, you know, this is why I do think psychoanalysis is such a helpful way of thinking about things because, you know, what you said is right. We all have these defenses that we, that we activate when things are scary or challenging or, you know, I think scary is kind of, you know, if something is scary, we have our mind, our beautiful, nimble mind has ways of getting rid of it, you know, whether, yeah, what you said, rationalizing, denying, just denying, right?

just denying these things, COVID isn't real. Climate change is a hoax, whatever. Like, that's something that, you know, the mind is really well equipped to do. And so I think, you know, that's part of what psychoanalytic thought has given us is a way of understanding, you know, what we might think of as defenses or we might think of as reactions, right? The kind of reactivity we have when something comes toward us that we do not want, that we do not want because it's going to mess with our, our,

enjoyment with our peace, with our tranquility, with our comfort, we react in a variety of ways. And so I think that, you know, and this is what I think is great about Berlant's work and their engagement with psychoanalysis is being able to name and recognize and understand what you're doing, what you're experiencing as defense, as reaction, as irrational, not to say irrational and therefore dumb or irrational and therefore, you know, you're an idiot. It's and therefore, yes, you are human, you are an irrational creature that defends itself against threats, against things that feel threatening. And I think it's that recognition that might lead us to imagine other ways of behaving or other ways that we might respond to threat.

Yeah, and when you mentioned that there's this level of awareness that can come into play when you're feeling those emotions, when we're talking about psychoanalysis broadly or just, you know, affect theory, you've certainly made me think about. it is its relationship to Buddhism and this is obviously for longtime listeners of the show something I'm incredibly interested in. I've been practicing, you know, Buddhist meditation and studying Buddhist philosophy my entire adult life. And for me, there's like, with a meditation practice, there's this, you know, increasing intimacy with and clarity about my own emotional reactions. I've developed the capacity to feel emotions as sensations in the body rather

than letting my thoughts run away with them and build sandcastles in my imagination, which just perpetuate the negative feelings, et cetera, or, you know, attempt to escape or repress those uncomfortable emotions in the myriad ways that humans do. I know you mentioned that you have a sitting practice yourself. So just in the broad purview of this entire conversation, what do you think Buddhism and meditation can possibly offer us in this broader context? Oh, man, that's such a good question. You know, it sounds like you have a much more sophisticated practice than I do.

Mine really comes out of my asana practice, which is much easier for me than sitting. And I think it's especially challenging because I think as someone who loves to think and loves to follow thoughts, meditation is really hard for me because, you know, in the rest of my life, I'm, you know, thoughts are thoughts or something that I want to sort of move toward and so being able to sort of just sit and watch and let be is is super super challenging so uh well done on for for you for being for being able to uh to have that really robust um practice well i certainly don't want to overstate it but go ahead no no i'm or any or any kind of you know consistent practice i guess i should i should say is is uh is really yeah really wonderful. But, you know, I think maybe one way to think about it. I mean, I think, you know, to go back to something we were talking a little bit about before, just because problems are

collective doesn't mean that individuals, you know, would be in error to take action to help themselves or those close to them. You know, I think we were talking before about depression and anxiety and how, you know, these can maybe sometimes better be understood as collective experiences. But I don't think that we would then say, well, individual suffering, you know, should not seek therapy. So, so I think, you know, what you've described and what you were describing as well on the airplane, it does seem that when you're, you know, living in these really disruptive moments like we're living in now and you know probably honestly like people have been living in kind of forever practices of whatever kind of kind that help you live

are great and especially if those practices are things that move you toward peace or equanimity as opposed to practices that maybe are compensatory in some way you know not to sort of obviously there are moments where we're really what you need to. is to, you know, go, go buy a new dress or something like that. Like, sometimes that's, that's legitimately what you need. I'm thinking about buying a new dress because I have not bought a new dress in a very long time. And, you know, there are moments where I'm like, it would be really nice to go buy a new dress.

But I think if your vision of, to use a word that's talked, you know, bandied around a lot, sort of sometimes in, in correctly, you know, self-care, if your vision of that is completely bound up with some of the systems that we've been talking about, like, you know, the sort of, it's completely bound up with a capitalist economy. It's completely bound up with really sort of problematic supply chains and consumption practices. If that's the only way you know or that you've been exposed to to kind of deal with

some of the disruption that you're experiencing, you know, you go, you go to work and your work is terrible. And then, you know, you compensate for that by, you. drinking or you compensate for that by buying something, then you're kind of caught up in this pretty difficult system. And so I think what you've described practices like meditation or, you know, there's tons of other, I think, practices that people find that help them step outside of that, that sort of exchange or that kind of more transactional place and give them other ways of achieving, you know, comfort or peace or pleasure, you know,

maybe it's taking a walk outdoors, right? It doesn't always have to be something necessarily as formalized, I think, as a meditation practice. I think those can be really, really helpful and really sustaining. And I think it takes us back a little bit to what we've, you know, pleasure is kind of been a theme of this conversation. What is, what does pleasure do for us? where do we seek it? How does seeking pleasure actually harm us or sort of move us toward a destructive place? It seems, I don't know that you would probably call your meditation practice a pleasure,

but I wonder if it doesn't give you a different relationship to pleasures or give you a different relationship to pleasure seeking. I mean, maybe I'll just ask you that. Like, does it change the way you think about gratifying desire or, you know, taking pleasure in things? Absolutely. Yeah, I think it shows me with with increasing clarity how so much of what I take to be pleasure is often, you know, repressed discomfort that leads in negative ways. So, you know, if for me pleasure, because so much of my life and, you know, I don't want to get too deep into it, but, you know, family of addiction and stuff, lots of addicts in my family, it's shown me that the things I take to be pleasure are actually things that I do in the short term to alleviate suffering that the thing that I'm

trying to cover it up with only leads to more of. And so, you know, it's not always the easiest thing to just stop doing those things, but it helps me see it. And being able to see it is often the first step in meaningfully addressing them. And then on the other side, it reorients what I take to be pleasure. So when I'm really keeping up with my practice and really taking it seriously, I get, I get so much pleasure out of the tiniest things. I get pleasure of the sun shining through my window and casting light and shadow on the floor. I get pleasure from going outside and feeling the heat of the sun on my skin, the glint of

sun off the trees, you know, little bugs in the ground. Like even just sitting in a chair and stopping my inner dialogue and falling into the sensations of my body, that can be immensely pleasurable. And so it's really reoriented my conception of what real pleasure is and how so much of not just me, but I think people in general take to be pleasure is really are escaping displeasure and creating more of that displeasure via the way that we attempt to pursue pleasure, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And not to be like too conspiratorial about it, but we are those appetites are engineered enough quite often, right? know, the appetites for food or drink or other forms of consumption. And, you know, what you describe is really beautiful. And in some of my, you know, I think my own process of discovering those

things, which has come, you know, in a bunch of different ways and through different relationships with people who have that kind of awareness and being kind of open, open to that. You know, my partner has been really great at teaching me to be in nature. And that has been a very kind of meaningful thing for me. But sort of in, you know, I've had these thoughts sometimes of, you know, why was this kept from me or why wasn't I taught to that all of this was right here

that this the you know what you're describing this the sensations or awareness of other experiences of beauty or comfort you know they're all right here kind of just just free and available why why wasn't I made aware of this

earlier on and then I think well no one's going to profit from that no one's going to profit from my enjoying you know, looking at the birds outside my window, right? They're going to profit from me being on Twitter. They're going to profit from me buying, you know, a bunch of new dresses, right? So that's, you know, that's what we're up against. And I think, you know, we both you and I are sort of acknowledging in different ways that

none of this is easy, you know, that this is all kind of swimming, swimming upstream in some way to be relating to the world in some of the ways that we've described, that this is, you know, you're up against pretty powerful industries that really want you to have that. kind of escapist behavior and to have those kind of compensatory behaviors. And, you know, it just, it takes a lot of practice and it takes a lot of, you know, courage in some ways to step away from that. Yeah, definitely. And I'm far, you know, I'm still a work in progress for sure. But the thing that you mentioned about nature, I think that is one thing that everybody can do pretty easily, which is just make some time every day if possible, but every week, you know,

more likely to just get out into nature and just be among it by yourself. Like the therapeutic, psychological, emotional benefits of spending regular time out in the natural world, I think are huge and this deep sense of like wanting to protect it, wanting to act in its defense naturally sort of begins to bubble up when you spend enough time in nature. And, you know, I think, you know, if you don't want to get into meditation or some of these practices seem to esoteric just spending good time in nature. And if you're a parent, taking your kids out to spend time in nature and developing that love in them, I think is one of our surest defenses against the destruction of the biosphere. Because people that really love nature,

specifically indigenous people who conceptualize themselves as part of nature, like inextractable from it, are on the front lines fighting against extractive industries and colonialism and capitalism, which are destroying the earth. And that's not a coincidence. The more separate from nature you feel yourself to be, the easier it is to destroy it as something other than yourself. And so reuniting with it and cultivating that intimacy with it, I think is something we could all do. And it benefits us and hopefully it'll benefit the world down the line. Yeah, that's wonderful. That's really well put. So I know we're coming up on a time limit here, but I want to shift years a little bit before we end, and I just want to, you know, say that you come out of the world of literature.

And I used to be much more into, like, fiction myself, trying to write it and also just reading it constantly. But lately, it's sort of gone away in favor of nonfiction for whatever reason. But I just want to, like, present you this question. You can take it however you want. But what can literature offer us today in these anxiety-ridden and uncertain times? Oh, man. What a sort of important and challenging question. I'm going to be a little cheeky and say that I think it's important to recognize that there are some things literature cannot offer us because sometimes I think that there's an expectation. And I, you know, I'm so, I'm a literary critic. I'm constantly writing book reviews and criticism. I'm constantly reading book reviews and criticism. So I'm a little bit, you know, in these kind of narrow conversing. where everyone's reading and reviewing the same novel and fighting about it. You know, it can be kind of silly, but it can also be kind of fun when a much of people care about the thing that you care about. And sometimes, you know, I've noticed, especially in the last few years, there is often a desire from readers and from critics that novels should be doing kind of political work.

That, you know, literature should be doing political work. and that a book that represents something that we object to politically or morally is therefore a bad book. And I don't know that this is maybe the most helpful way to think about what literature can do. I'm not, I certainly would never say that literature can't affect social or political change because I think we have a wonderful long history in this country and across the world of activist writers who have used poetry and, and drama and fiction and essays and memoir to actually have real sort of meaningful political impacts. But I think having that be sort of what we go to literature for and what we expect it to do can lead to a lot of frustration and disappointment, I would say. That, you know, there's someone once said that art is amoral. And I don't know that that's always true,

but I think there needs to be that possibility or there needs to be room for art to explore moral and political issues without necessarily instructing on them or without sort of actually sort of imagining that it is intervening in them. So again, you know, this is not to say that activist literature, you know,

I'm even thinking just because we've been talking about climate change. I'm thinking, you know, Kim Stanley Robinson, like great, great writer on sort of climate issues and that, you know, I think that is kind of a form of, you know, social and political work, although I don't know that we would say, right, that reading one of those novels is a way to work toward mitigating the climate crisis, that these are sort of different things. So I guess, you know, for me, what what literature does and what I can sort of do in this moment, I think kind of goes back to a couple of the things you and I have been talking about. So one thing it was just, we were just talking about is, is beauty and pleasure. And I think for me, kind of the reason I'm, I'm in this line of work and I stay in, it has to do with my finding those things in literature, feeling kind of moved by literature or feeling kind of a kind of aesthetic pleasure, aesthetic awe of someone else's creation is really important. And, you know,

obviously sometimes I have to purchase a book or something so there's some consumer element to it but it's I do think the the pleasure of reading is different maybe from the pleasure of buying a new dress although I'm sure someone else who sees fashion as an as an aesthetic realm might might think differently about it so I think that's one thing that's one thing it can do and I guess I guess the other thing is what we've been talking about about awareness right awareness and understanding and recognition and the ability to sort of step back from emotional experience and just kind of look at it. And I do think that is something that literature lets us do in the sort of mediation

of reading about experience, reading about a particular experience that's being captured in a poem or a play or a novel, and allowing us just to kind of witness it and to kind of dig into it and become absorbed in it and then step back from it and think about it. I do think it facilitates this kind of awareness that we've been talking about. And I think cultivating that awareness is, is just a sort of, it's a nice tool. You know, and so whether, whether you're achieving it through meditation or through walks in the woods or, you know, undergoing psychoanalysis, I do think, you know, reading, reading can be a part of that, that process of better awareness and understanding. So, so that's what it offers me. I think it can offer, offer other things maybe to other

people. Yeah, and Noel said, there's a very unique pleasure that comes with reading a really engrossing work of fiction that is really hard to compare to anything else. My daughter is, you know, breaking into her teen years, and she's really developing this love of reading fiction, and I encourage the hell out of it, and I love to see that blossom within her. Kim Stanley Robinson, of course, is a previous guest here on Rev. So if you want to... Oh, great. He's a wonderful person and a great person to talk to. People are interested in that. Go check it out. but I know we're up on a time limit here so I just have one more question before I let you go

and I would love to have you back on to just talk about this work but you are the author of the equivalence the story of art, female friendship and liberation in the 1960s can you briefly just talk about that work of yours and sort of what it's about for people out there that might be interested?

Sure, so it is a group biography of, well, I guess that's one way of categorizing it It's the story of a circle of women, five women artists and writers who met in 1960 or in the early 1960s here in Cambridge at the Radcliffe Institute for Independence Study, which was a program run by Radcliffe College, the sister college of Harvard, that was designed to bring women who had family commitments of some kind, but who also had intellectual or creative ambitions, and give them a fellowship basically. So office space, a stipend, you know, access to Harvard's resources and some time, two years to do their work. And so the book is the story of this circle of friends and their artistic collaborations. But it's also kind of the story of this particular moment in history right before the women's liberation movement really kicks off and gathers a lot of steam in the mid-1960s and kind of coming out of the 1950s, which was this era of real cultural conservatism in the U.S. kind of during, uh, in the middle of, of the Cold War. Um, you know, so it's, it's about art. It's about, uh, you know, community. It's about feminist history. And it's, you know, it's an interesting moment, I think for, or the reason, the reason I found it interesting is because I, I am, I am always sort of curious about these moments pre-revolution, kind of. So,

before everything shifts or before a certain something shifts. And so what was interesting in writing the book is realizing or coming to better understand, you know, just how much organizing and discussion and, you know, creativity around feminism and motherhood and women and all of the things that we sometimes associate with the, what we think of as, you know, second wave feminism later, later in 1960s, early 1970s, how this was going on all the time, you know, it's always, I should, I should sort of know this, right, as a, as someone with some interest in history that, you know, what we think about as happening at these fixed dates is usually happening kind of constantly and in different parts

of society. And there's usually a much longer trajectory than, than we're aware of. So, so that's the book. So if, you know, people are interested in women's history and feminist history might be of interest. Absolutely. I know my listeners are. And I would love to have you back on and talk more in depth about that. I'll link to it in the show and so people can find it easily. And you're right. It's, you know, we look back through history and think of these acute moments of uprising or protest or revolution even. But often that acute focus loses the often decades of prelude that led up to those eruptions and these longer processes that take place. And so this is, I think, a work in that general vein. And we, as I say, we very well may be

in something like that period now where we're sort of gathering the forces and what happens in the next 10, 20 years, very well might pleasantly surprise us. You know, humanity might rise to the challenge, as it were, and we'll look back on this period of time in a very different way than we might otherwise. But... I hope so. Yeah, with all that said, Maggie, it was an absolute pleasure to talk to you. I would love to have you back on to talk about anything else. There's lots of threads we put on the table. We couldn't follow up on fully, but I love to have you back on. But before I let you go, can you please let listeners know where they can find you in your work online? Sure.

So I have a pretty bad website, frankly, that is one of the first hit that you come up if you Google me. And I am on, unfortunately, I am on Twitter. So that is another place you can find me. And I usually am mostly sharing things I write. So, you know, not too many ventings of spleen that you'll have. to wade through. Wonderful. Well, I'll link to all that in the show notes as well so people can find you easier. Thank you so much, Maggie. I really appreciate you coming on. Thanks so much. This was really fun.