Pretty Heady Stuff

Why does the nation trigger so much emotion in us? How does being from a specific country shape our understanding of identity, and when does it drift into dangerous territory? Maria Janion, one of Eastern Europe’s most profound and original intellectuals, explores this fine line, and Marta Figlerowicz unpacks the trajectory of her thinking for us in The Bad Child. Janion witnessed some of the most consequential events of the turbulent twentieth century: the rise of authoritarian nationalism in Poland, German occupation during World War II, Soviet control, and Poland’s uneasy integration into the West. As Western countries face their own nationalist resurgences, Figlerowicz believes that Maria Janion’s insights on political ontology are tools for helping us navigate our present chaos.Marta Figlerowicz teaches comparative literature at Yale University. She is a theorist of literature from the eighteenth century to the present and of contemporary visual media. Working in over ten languages, she studies how aesthetic objects depict and mediate interpersonal and transcultural communication. Her first two books, Flat Protagonists (2016) and Spaces of Feeling (2017) reflect on trans-personal and transcultural communication within the purview of literary studies. Her current book in progress, It Must Be Possible: Global Modernisms and the Problem of Transcultural Knowledge, offers an intellectual history of the entanglements of anthropology and comparative literature at the beginning of the twentieth century from the perspectives of ethnically, racially, or (geo)politically marginalized modernist writers. Alongside her academic writing, she comments on contemporary American and Eastern European literature, film, and politics in venues such as Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The Paris Review, and Boston Review. Figlerowicz was born in Poznan, Poland, and moved to the United States as a teenager. She obtained her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her doctorate from UC Berkeley. A member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, her research has also been sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two daughters.#philosophy #psychoanalysis #nationalism #theory #identitypolitics #race #belonging #territory #subjectivity #mariajanion #sovietunion #anticolonialism

Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. His most recent books include Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul, and the national bestseller Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia.His newest book, Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, talks about how the far right Conservative leader has enjoyed most of the advantages of the mainstream Canadian middle class. Yet he’s long been the angriest man on the political stage. Ripper charts Poilievre’s rise through the political system, from teenage volunteer to outspoken Opposition leader known for cutting soundbites and theatrics. Six weeks into the Covid pandemic, New York Times columnist David Brooks identified two types of Western politicians: rippers and weavers. Rippers, whether on the right or the left, see politics as war. They don’t care about the destruction that’s caused as they fight for power. Weavers are their opposite: people who try to fix things, who want to bring people together and try to build consensus. At the beginning of the pandemic, weavers seemed to be winning. Five years later, as Canada heads towards a pivotal election, that’s no longer the case. Across the border, a ripper is remaking the American government. And for the first time in its history, Canada has its own ripper poised to assume power.Bourrie shows how we arrived at this divisive moment in our history, one in which rippers are poised to capitalize on conflict. He shows how Poilievre and this new style of politics have gained so much ground—and warns of what it will cost us if they succeed.Bourrie shows how we arrived at this divisive moment in our history, one in which rippers are poised to capitalize on conflict. He shows how Poilievre and this new style of politics have gained so much ground—and warns of what it will cost us if they succeed.They don’t care about the destruction that’s caused as they fight for power. Weavers are their opposite: people who try to fix things, who want to bring people together and try to build consensus. At the beginning of the pandemic, weavers seemed to be winning. Five years later, as Canada heads towards a pivotal election, that’s no longer the case. Across the border, a ripper is remaking the American government. And for the first time in its history, Canada has its own ripper poised to assume power.

Mark Stoll teaches American environmental history and American religious history at Texas Tech, where he also serves as director of Environmental Studies. Stoll’s latest book is an environmental history of capitalism, Profit: An Environmental History (2022). From the publisher: "Profit — getting more out of something than you put into it — is the original genius of homo sapiens, who learned how to unleash the energy stored in wood, exploit the land, and refashion ecosystems. As civilization developed, we found more and more ways of extracting surplus value from the earth, often deploying brutally effective methods to discipline people to do the work needed.Historian Mark Stoll explains how capitalism supercharged this process and traces its many environmental consequences. The financial innovations of medieval Italy created trade networks that, with the European discovery of the Americas, made possible vast profits and sweeping cultural changes, to the detriment of millions of slaves and indigenous Americans; the industrial age united the world in trade and led to an energy revolution that changed lives everywhere. But when efficient production left society awash in goods, a new sort of capitalism, predicated on endless individual consumption, took its place.This story of incredible ingenuity and villainy begins in the Doge’s palace in medieval Venice and ends with Jeff Bezos aboard his own spacecraft. Mark Stoll’s revolutionary account places environmental factors at the heart of capitalism’s progress and reveals the long shadow of its terrible consequences."

Ava Val is a comedian, actor, writer and musician based in Toronto. She’s made multiple appearances at Just For Laughs and The Halifax Comedy Festival, and recorded stand-up sets for CBC Gem, Crave TV, and CTV. She has a weekly podcast of her own called PodGis, which is a great place to get a taste of her high energy, clever comedy. Val released her debut special, So Brave, earlier in the year. The special coincided with what Val called her 3-year “hormoniversary,” or the third year she’d been taking hormones as part of an ongoing “mid-life crisis,” in her words: that “crisis” is, of course, the joyful but uncertain journey of trying to align one’s core gender identity with one’s outward gender presentation. In this conversation, we talk about how the trans community, and more specifically trans comedians, can equip themselves to contest and defy the hateful, ignorant transphobia that is surging alongside the rise of right populism. We also talk about why the theme of bravery has some connotations that aren’t particularly flattering, and the level of bravery required to stand on a stage and demand the attention of people who are there to laugh, but who also arrive, presumably, with some openness to the kind of comedic storytelling that challenges the audience as much as it amuses them. Val and I discuss what it means, in that moment of performance, to balance entertaining a crowd with being true to your sense of self and aware of your own vulnerability. I really respect Val’s radical honesty, which I told her the first time we spoke for the podcast. Now, with the special out, we were able to dig into the way she writes and structures the material, the relationship she has with the audience, and with comedy as a profession. I hope the conversation, like Val’s special, offers an access point for people that may not know about how awesome and original contemporary comedy in Canada can be, and especially for people that don’t yet have a sense of the ethics and politics of comedy that is deeply queer.

Jennifer Wickham is a filmmaker and a member of the Gidimt’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en people. In 2012, she moved home to defend her clan’s territory against multiple pipeline projects, and especially the aggression of Coastal GasLink. Her work on the documentary film Yintah is the main focus of our conversation. Yintah is about the Wet’suwet’en fight for sovereignty, and like some other documentaries that depict that fight, there is, in the film, a powerful dream of freedom for Indigenous people and an end to the war against nature. Yintah is now on Netflix (https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/8192...) after striking a deal with the streamer that will see it reach a broader audience. I was thinking about what it means to distribute a film like Yintah, which challenges the legitimacy of the Canadian state and Canadian law, on a platform like Netflix. The goal is strategic, of course: leverage the sites of power that are currently available. But the strategy is maybe more self-reflexive than it seems: in this interview, Jennifer talks about her conviction that people who identify as allies with the Indigenous nations that are resisting neocolonialism aren’t always conscious of what that declaration of solidarity means. From Wickham’s perspective, a more powerful and lasting movement of settler allyship would involve a more authentic commitment to collective survival and a sense of the sacrifices that entails. This film is beyond sobering. It exposes the continuum of tyranny imposed by the RCMP on Indigenous peoples. It demonstrates how corporate greed and the collusion of the state are creating a kind of asymmetrical war over the land itself, and energy, at a time when we understand better than ever that the only way to address the climate emergency is to leave oil and gas in the ground. Don’t develop it. Stop killing the Earth and the people who are most connected to it. I do have to acknowledge my own complicity as a white settler in Canada, and how even wanting to be correct on these issues, the desire to express solidarity in the right or best way, can work against decolonization because it gives us a sense that, at the discursive level anyway, we get it. Actions speak louder than words, and the direct action represented in Yintah is a source of inspiration for anyone that feels the battle against fossil capital is sisyphean.

Robert Neubauer studies the media strategies of Canadian environmental and pro-resource extraction social movements, with a focus on populist discourse and public mobilization around proposed energy infrastructure. He is currently a Post-doctoral Researcher and Limited Term Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Victoria, where he teaches on contemporary media studies and climate politics. In this episode, Robert and I chat about how an effective communication strategy for rallying the public in support of climate action really needs to validate the public’s concerns about things like affordability and health care, while also emphasizing the urgency of the climate crisis. The way we do that, he says, is to create an effective political “container.” I get the sense that the phrase “a big tent” applies here. I’ve been hearing from a lot of people that expanding the tent, when it comes to transformative changes to infrastructure and to our lifestyles, implies the need to communicate the everyday benefits of climate action, while also being realistic with audiences about the severity of the risks we face. If we fall short in our efforts to convince folks that a radical reset is required – so, if we can’t figure out a way to undermine the cultural importance of the automobile, for example – then we’re in even more serious trouble than the science tells us we are. That’s because a creeping fatalism is forcing a lot of people to court the idea that it’s too late. Neubauer says that nihilism is potentially more dangerous than far right populism. Robert unpacks the idea of petro-populism here, which is still a concept that I struggle with a bit. I find Neubauer’s way of bringing this idea into conversation with the notion of “cultural capital” really helpful. Robert uses this famous idea from Pierre Bourdieu’s work to talk about how petro-populism expresses itself and how it has secured such a prominent place culturally and politically. Neubauer gives us a way of critiquing the propaganda of petro-populists like Ezra Levant, whose ability to manipulate a sense of pride and feelings of national belonging have proven to be remarkably effective. In response to the pull of nostalgia and easy answers, the Left can’t focus on its standard techniques of shaming and allyship. Robert feels like these are now simplistic strategies that go nowhere. Resisting the stunting effects of facile forms of solidarity or public shaming is all about accepting real responsibility for the work of decolonization. The constraints of a carbon-intensive society make it hard to imagine any alternative to the way things are, but things are changing nonetheless. As companies with skin in the carbon game realize they need to aggressively brand fossil fuels as an integral part of our lives to maintain their normalized status, the climate movement is positioning itself to counter with a totally different relationship to energy.

Allie Rougeot is a climate justice activist and program manager at Environmental Defence Canada where she advocates for a just energy transition. As a speaker and facilitator, Allie talks to people about the escalating climate crisis and the solutions we can use to fight the emergency. In this conversation, we discuss the path she took to doing this work. Allie says it really started with working in support of refugees and in defense of human rights. The way this influences her approach to climate action is fascinating. It has given her unique insights on the challenge of crafting popular climate policies, ensuring that they’re equitable and fair, and a powerful sense that, because “climate change will create a threat to everything that makes our lives possible,” we are called to resuscitate our struggling democracies in the interest of forcing the system to actually support social life. I resonated most with her feelings of anger as she searches for climate justice. The way Allie puts it is that she is “driven by anger, more even than hope,” and this is because of the “knowing” destruction and suffering being perpetuated by the fossil fuel industry. In her words: “mass suffering was [and is] enabled by… a handful of people that will not bear the consequences.” There’s an emphasis throughout this conversation on how we can incorporate knowledge of the way the project of colonization sought to extract resources and annex Indigenous land. We see the continuation of this plunder today with the environmental obscenity of the Alberta tar sands and the tailings ponds, which represent the largest impoundment of toxic waste on the planet. This sprawling sea of poison is unequivocally an act of environmental racism. Rather than allowing these realities to overwhelm us, though, Allie says that we need to take our feelings of anger and urgency and use them as a turning point. Unfettered energy consumption is creating planet-wrecking carbon bombs and adverse health effects. This needs to be linked, now, with a rejection of extractivism as a worldview.

Catherine Abreu is a world-renowned climate campaigner whose work focuses on creating coalitions to take real action on climate change. She is the founder and executive director of Destination Zero, which—to quote their website—”partners with networks and other non-profits seeking to expand their work on climate justice, with a particular focus on accelerating the global transition away from fossil fuel dependence.” Catherine was appointed as one of the advisors to Canada’s Net-Zero Advisory Body in early 2021. She also serves on the strategic advisory committee for the Global Gas and Oil Network and the steering committee of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. Destination Zero has been foundational to the creation of the important Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, as well. In this conversation we talk about Abreu’s experience of COP28, the health of our democracies and whether they’re up to the task of accomplishing the massive and mandatory shift to clean energy. We look at the culpability of Canada in the climate crisis and the level of responsibility that culpability therefore requires as we move into a future that is likely to be environmentally very unpredictable and dangerous. How can the climate movement gain more traction? How have we kept fighting in spite of so many setbacks and blockades produced by private industry and governments? Part of it, I think, is a sense that the struggle is just and it is urgent. As some of us wait on incremental change to repair -relations to the Earth, others--like Catherine--keep pushing for an ecologically rational disruption of the system that could create a series of chain reactions and ultimately the kind of lasting change we’ve been told is absolutely necessary to protect the world from anthropogenic climate change.