Capture: The nineteenth-century landscape and wildlife in modernity.
Moirbridge approaches his animals with an intent to capture. What he wants to see is is really not animals as discrete individuals and in themselves and for themselves, but really their movement. What he pursues are an invisible economy of forces that is really shared by all animals. So for him, the comprehension of animals is really less a function of space, like it is for Audubon, who goes out in nature to take animals and bring them back to culture, of the nineteenth century US cultural
Narrator:canon. It of the nineteenth century U. S. Cultural canon. In a conversation that ranges from references to Muybridge and Audubon, Poe and Hawthorne, Whitman and Thoreau, environmental humanities and biopolitics, Presentation and Representation, Capture and Captivity.
Narrator:Antoine Treysnol, author of CAPTURE, joins Michelle Neely, author of Against Sustainability, in a lively and rigorous discussion. Tresnel is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Michigan. Neely is associate professor of English at Connecticut College. This conversation was recorded in March 2021.
Michelle Neely:Okay. Well, I'm really excited to get to talk about capture.
Antoine Traisnel:Me too.
Michelle Neely:I absolutely loved your book as I've already told you. So so to begin at the beginning, you theorize the rise of what you call the age of capture during the nineteenth century. You're tracing the shift in representation, from Audubon to Muybridge, from hunting to capture. So I'm wondering if you could just explain a little bit about what you're charting with that shift.
Antoine Traisnel:Yeah. Sure. So when I when I started thinking about the place that animals occupy in the landscape of nineteenth century America, I my question was, would it meant to study animals or even to just represent animals at the very moment when animals were receding from everyday view like never before? So so my question was quite, you know, simply, how do you represent something that is in the process of disappearing? How do you represent animals at the historical moment when animals were being hunted and slaughtered on a completely unprecedented scale, when natural habitats were being violently reconfigured to fit settler colonial economic regimes, but also when species extinction was no longer just an abstract scientific theory, but had become an undisputable empirical reality.
Antoine Traisnel:And here, I'm thinking, for instance, of of two emblematic, you know, animals, for instance, emblematic of of The United States, the passenger pigeon and the bison, both of which occupy an important place in my book because they, were thought at the beginning of the century to be so numerous, as to be inexhaustible, but both were hunted, respectively into extinction and near extinction in just the space of a few decades. So, my my question was really to try to figure out a way to account for that particular history of the systemic disappearance of animals from the point of view of representation. And here immediately, I thought you have a little bit of a problem. How do you represent something, that does not have a fixed presence, right, if representation is the representation of something. So, my thesis was that what you need is new apparatuses, new protocols, new techniques for, apprehending that fugitive reality, the animal, in the moment of its disappearance.
Antoine Traisnel:My general argument is that the century's new kind of drive interest in containing and archiving animals introduced a new visual regime. This is what I call capture, in which animals are rendered both known in advance and yet utterly unknowable. So there's, you know, a kind of defining paradox in my conception of capture. And under the new regime of vision that I call capture, animals simultaneously appear readily available via technologies of knowledge and control, and yet at the same time, infinitely distant, essentially fugitive, always on the verge of extinction or disappearance, etcetera. What I try to do is is, theorize the, the prototyping of this new regime of capture in new, protocols of scientific inquiry, in new, visual experimentations, but also, in really the material biopolitical management of animals as it was being perfected but also contested and how this also manifests in some of the century's most iconic works.
Antoine Traisnel:So you've already mentioned Audubon and Moy Bridge, but I'm also thinking about authors like James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne. One thing that you also briefly mentioned is that I think about the the shift from the hunt to capture. And here I should say that, what I try to do when I try to to trace the advent of what I call capture is use the hunt as a particular paradigm that helps us understand how a certain way of apprehending animals, a certain form of animal pursuit, you know, was transformed into something else over the course of the century. What what I do is basically try to consider what happens to the hunt, both as a material practice, but also as a cultural trope over the course of the century. And by tracing how it, itself tends to either be promoted, you know, if we think culturally how the hunt becomes really this sort of a perfect trope for representing, you know, the American, man, very much, you know, masculine figure.
Antoine Traisnel:The hunt had this kind of role in promulgating this, colonial agenda that that naturalized the conversion of indigenous subsistence habitats, into, you know, things that were ready for the taking, all the while presenting, this kind of manly pursuit as some kind of archaic figure that was destined to disappear. So and here we can think of how this, fed into the trope of the vanishing American, and that's something that's discussed by indigenous scholars like Gerald Disner, etcetera. What I try to show, basically, is that at stake in the disappearance of the hunt, this weird disappearance that also, maintenance of this particular activity is also, a kind of profound epistemological and aesthetic shift in the perception of animals.
Michelle Neely:The explanatory power of capture is so, so evident in the book, and it it just came through so clearly in in, in what you just said. I mean, the the stakes to biopolitics, the stakes for representation are so clear and powerful. But even just at the level of the visual and textual readings, I mean, when I looked at the table of contents, one of my first reactions was, this kind of delight that you were working with these nineteenth century texts that center animals in what are to me these weird and wonderful ways, but that I've always found the kind of critical attention that some of these texts get a bit dissatisfying. So Hawthorne's the Marble Fawn, Cooper's the Prairie are are two examples of of texts where I feel like the the the mode of accounting for, animality in this text has never felt fully satisfying to me before your book. But but sort of capture the book and the concept just totally opens up both of those novels, and then invites all of these fascinating points of comparison between them.
Michelle Neely:You know, how visuality works in each, how taxonomy features in each. I mean, those are just two kind of quick examples of the really original readings that the that the book offers. Thinking about all of this made me wonder just how you came to capture as a concept. You know, was there a feeling of dissatisfaction that you had with a particular theoretical narrative? Was there something else that provoked you in this direction?
Antoine Traisnel:Thank thanks so much for the question, and thanks also for being, such a a a generous reader. I'm I'm really happy to hear that that's how you feel about I wouldn't say that there was necessarily a feeling of dissatisfaction, but I can say that I came to these texts with, I think, maybe a different question, precisely as I was saying before, because I was trying to think about almost a new species of animal, as something that was in the process of disappearing. The the origin story of this project is really to be found in, like many people in animal studies reading Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am. So, I was fascinated by his understanding, description of this concept, the animal, as this very weird, chimerical being, that has this kind of spectral and yet completely enduring, you know, presence in our texts, in our philosophy, in, Western representation. And and for those who are not familiar, you know, basically, Derrida calls, the animal the he calls it a catchall concept, and something that seems to be everywhere present, almost infrastructurally as something that supports, Western liberal discourses and yet consistently sacrificed.
Antoine Traisnel:And and he basically says that it's it's, doomed to what he calls an interminable survival, right, in both our, yeah, our texts, but also I think, he's thinking about them materially. And my interest when I read Derrida was to try to basically periodize the emergence of this particular figure, this weird figure that the animal is. This is something that Nicole Shukin has already, you know, pointed out in her own reading of Derrida, which is this moment when Derrida seems to date, you know, or periodize the appearance of the animal, the emergence of this, of this figure somewhere around two hundred years ago. And, Shukin is, you know, saying, like, that's really interesting because it's also, the beginning of, you know, it it it sort of fits, Foucauldian periodization of the emergence of what he calls biopolitics, but also what Xuqin and other people have called biocapitalism. So, there seemed to be really this interesting way of making Derrida's concept resonate with a, material, political, economic, but also, I think, aesthetic, you know, history that, is something that I think his text could open up, but that he was not doing himself.
Antoine Traisnel:So, I went to what I knew, which is nineteenth century American literature and culture and visual culture, And I sort of, asked myself, could this particular lens, that Derrida offers us be a productive one to read some of the texts that you've mentioned? And I did find that there was really this, fascinating recurrence of these figures, these animal figures that are both there and not there, you know, in the text that you've mentioned, Hawthorne's the Barbauld Fawn, but also Cooper's the Prairie. Animals have these really, interesting roles that they play in the economy of the different stories, but also their representation is very much a problem for these authors. And so, I went a little bit from the theory down to the text, but really I tried to see if this particular theory had a bearing on these texts. And the answer for me is yes, but there is very much a lot of work to be done to make this particular concept that was also forged in a particular history, which for Derrida is very much the history of, continental philosophy and and Western thought, how it could be made to speak to a very different context, which is the settler colonial context of nineteenth century America.
Michelle Neely:One of the things that I, really loved about the book, is that in addition to the, the more kind of obvious way that the chapters are ordered and structured at the level of, developing the argument that we've been talking about, the argument of capture, There are also these subtle threads and through lines that are running through all of the chapters, that make for these really surprising moments in the argument and these connections, these across the chapters. And so one of these would be the grid, the way that the the grid appears in different different guises in different chapters. So Audubon's grid is distinct from yet related to Cooper's grid or Poe's grid or Muybridge's. So I was wondering if you could talk about just how the grid features in your argument?
Antoine Traisnel:Yes. Thanks for picking that up because I was fascinated by grids when I was reading this, and there were many more grids at some point in the writing of this manuscript. And and I had to so it played down a little bit because, it it was not necessarily the main focus of of the book. Grids are everywhere in nineteenth century, US culture and this is something that Rebecca Solnit already has, you know, pointed out in, her book on Muybridge, Rivers of Shadow. It's really a fascinating comment that she's making because she's here doing a little bit of what I'm trying to do, which is tie the grid of the Great Land Ordinance that made it possible for The US to colonize gigantic spaces without even having been there yet.
Antoine Traisnel:And I found that there was something really fascinating about this particular tool, this particular apparatus, that's the grid here was as, a tool of what I call land speculation, as something that helps you preemptively, you know, really capture a territory without even having been there yet. Right? Physically, that particular, omnipresence of the grid also has, you know, a bearing on how The US thought about itself as being extremely rational. It's the Cartesian grid, but also egalitarian. It seems to promise the same thing to everyone, with obviously covering the violence of the you know, removal, of the Native Americans that was actually necessary for settlers to go and and inhabit these different spaces.
Antoine Traisnel:But, it really is, this sort of, governmental, as well as, you know, and that's Rebecca's own it, mental logic that seemed to be governing, this, this this century. And as I was, you know, looking at these different figures or these different texts or images, I also saw grids everywhere. And I saw them sometimes as disappearing behind the images. So, that's for instance with Audubon, who used, grids and basically, squares behind the subjects, the birds that he would be painting, and then he would cover up, you know, these grids with, you know, with painted landscapes to Moirbridge, who at the end of the century actually made the grid very apparent. And when you look at his, work on animal locomotion, what's really interesting is that the landscape that Audubon was putting over his grid here has completely disappeared.
Antoine Traisnel:So it seems as if we have, both continuity but also a difference in how that particular way of apprehending animals, The grid, was used, so as as a particular technology. I mentioned Audubon and Muirbridge because I think they are very good examples of what I'm trying to argue, with the book here. They both have very different ways of approaching their animals. Even though they also both seem to partake in the same kind of archival epistemophilia, they both have these gigantic works that they work on. Audubon's is the birds of America that he publishes in the first half of the, the nineteenth century, so between 1827 and 1838, and in which he tries to really collect all of the feathered fauna of of The US.
Antoine Traisnel:And at the end, we have Muybridge who publishes, his massive animal locomotion. So again, a lot of animal pictures. So I think it's 1887, and there seems to be something really similar here. The sheer size of their enterprise, the sheer ambition of these two, also freshly, immigrated European men who come to The US to kind of collect, you know, everything. But as as I was saying before, you know, their animals are quite different.
Antoine Traisnel:Right? And that actually is a good way of also trying to understand what I mean by the shift from, the hunt regime to the capture regime. Audubon famously was an avid hunter, and hunting was, very much continuous with his painting practice. So he would, kill, you know, shoot most of the birds that he would be painting. And, on the other hand, Muybridge would be working with subjects, animal subjects, that had to be alive because what he was interested in was their motion, locomotion, and also that were already captive.
Antoine Traisnel:So he was working with, for instance, the, Philadelphia zoo or with, you know, horses, already domesticated animals. And and really what struck me was that on the one hand, Audubon perceives these specimens really with the eyes of a hunter. His birds are out there, you know, in the wild. He kills them in order to draw them. He focuses, first on their external appearance and he also presumes animals to be really knowable in terms of their taxonomic identity, which for him is visible to the human eye.
Antoine Traisnel:In contrast, Muybridge approaches his animals with a different intent, with an intent to capture. What he wants to see is really not animals as discrete individuals and in themselves and for themselves, but really their movement. What he pursues are an invisible economy of forces that is really shared by all animals. So, for him, the comprehension of animals is really less a function of space, like it is for Audubon, who goes out in nature to take animals and bring them back to culture, but rather a function of time. So in Muybridge, what I try to show is that space has become subordinated to an imminent principle of transformation and transience.
Antoine Traisnel:Right? So animals are really apprehended as they pass in passing. And here, there's a little bit of a pill on words on the passing also as animals really being understood as elusive, fugitive, but also on the verge of, of disappearing. Right? Kind of doomed to not be there.
Antoine Traisnel:And so there's almost this kind of frenzy to try to record something that he knows is not gonna be there for, very, very long.
Michelle Neely:In what you're saying, I was thinking a lot about the adaptability of the technique that or of the technology that that you were outlining and, and that also kind of connects with this other thread that I noticed, which was the way that you were tracing the adaptation of these hunting techniques into the kind of seemingly, but you're arguing not actually less violent objectives of capture. I'm thinking of the this strange and amazing gun camera, which, which comes up early in the introduction. I mean, even just which is exactly what it sounds like for people who can't see the image. It's it is a gun camera. And, and then, of course, there's this Morbidge's tripwire system.
Michelle Neely:For me, I was I was so, taken with the the link between, that you draw between Poe's urban detectives, you know, DuPont's famous logical technique and then the the tracking work of the hunter, how the how the one feeds into the other. I mean, that Poe chapter is just, like, so stunning. I'm sorry. I just yeah. I it's it it blew me away completely.
Michelle Neely:I I guess I'm wondering if you could talk about how characterizing the detective as a hunter kind of, changes our perception, not just of the murders in the room war, not just of the genre of detective fiction. I mean, that would be enough. But but, you know, your argument is so much bigger than that. Right? Like, the function of animality in the modern imaginary, you know, crime and criminality.
Michelle Neely:I mean, it just it touches on so many things. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that Poe chapter.
Antoine Traisnel:Yeah. I'm gonna try to do my best, but, thanks for for, you know, also picking up on on that. Really, what I'm I'm trying to argue is, not simply a a disappearance of the hunt, but as you're saying, like, more of a kind of a folding in of the hunt in in something else, right, in something, that also appears to be less violent because it it it has, subsumed the hunt under something, you know, different. The gun camera, if I can just come back to this very quickly before
Michelle Neely:I talk
Antoine Traisnel:about the quote, is this really fascinating invention that some guy at the end of the nineteenth century, you know, Benjamin Kilburn invented, because he wanted to have this this kind of like portable device that would enable him to continue hunting while knowing that hunting was very much a problem, you know, when people were becoming more and more aware that, it was actually a cause of extinction, that extinction could be manmade. And and really, this is not something that at the beginning of the century people ever, you know, were concerned with because the very concept of species extinction was not yet even, you know, a thing. Right? Or a barely starting to be a thing. It it it really starts with, the French scientist, Georges Cuvier, who really is the first one to really formalize extinction.
Antoine Traisnel:But very much there was this sense that, how do I continue doing what I love, which is shoot things, without really inflicting injury to, the objects that I so want to have. And and what I love is not just the object itself, which is already such a weird thing. It really is this accordion like camera on a gun. You know? So the object itself is very weird, but also the really bizarre, you know, ad, that says to its, you know, I I think we can assume white male audience, It's okay.
Antoine Traisnel:You can go and continue, you know, hunting. You can do this thing that you so much love, and and you can do it without being cruel. So I try to read, you know, the emergence of this new form of hunting, that pretends to, not do any kind of violence to its object or subject along the lines of what Foucault sees as the rise of a new form of power, which equals pastoral power. And this pastoral power would be much less obviously violent. It is very much violent, but instead of killing, putting to death, it's more let's die is the formulation that Foucault has.
Antoine Traisnel:So I was interested in in how, a form of power, and a form of a technique also of of knowing and controlling emerges in that particular moment that appears to be much less immediately violent, and yet is very much the continuation of hunting by other means. So Poe is really fascinating because, as we know, he's the inventor of a new genre or, actually, several new genres. I say that, and I can already hear people say, like, well, there are predecessors to, you know, Poe for thinking about the invention of the of the, you know, crime fiction or detective fiction. And I I I'm I'm aware that there are precursors, but we could, I think, easily agree that he's, very much associated with that kind of new form that the detective story is. I wanted to see who the detective was.
Antoine Traisnel:It it all started with this interesting insight that Walter Benjamin has in the arcades project that essentially, Poe's detective is a hunter in a different context, in a different setting. And he actually links, Dupin directly to Nadi Bumpo and to Cooper's Hunter, but, you know, he basically, shows us that that that something has happened. And what's happened is that the context, the background, is different. So I, you know, read very much the murders in a remorgue, with an eye to try to see, you know, who the detective was and how he was described, by Poe. And what is really fascinating, and that's something that, I had already written about a little bit with my friend, Tongam Ravindranathan, in a in a short book that was published in France A Few Years ago, what's really fascinating is that Poe actually cryptically describes, the detective as a hunter.
Antoine Traisnel:He tells us repeatedly that, the detective is the one who is never losing the scent of the murderer, or or the perpetrator, of, you know, the murderers in the remark. And this perpetrator is nowhere to be found by the police. So the police who here are sort of representatives of kind of Cartesian logic, just are completely confounded when they try to solve the the murders in the Remorgue because they have expectations. And their expectation, Dupin tells us, is that their suspect has to be a human. They, you know, try to understand what this particular suspect could have said, but DuPont, you know, will realize that, it actually could not have said anything because it doesn't speak, or what the motive was.
Antoine Traisnel:But Dupin realizes that there couldn't have been a rational motive behind the murders because it was not a rational being, that had committed this, this murder. Essentially, what Dupin shows is that there was no murders in the rumour. There was just, you know, some creature inflicting death to other creatures. And what is really fascinating is that Dupin has so often been read as this representative of of rationality, this hyperrational being, which he is to a degree, but, there is always, you know, behind his acumen, actually the sagacity of a hunter, of, this particular figure that complements or supplements his very logical knowledge with, the instinct and the techniques of someone who is able to smell the scent of his prey, essentially. And that has really fascinating bearings on what it means to go after or to criminalize someone.
Antoine Traisnel:And, the murders in the remogue also has often been read as a very interesting allegory of Black criminality, because the animal, the orangutan, who is the perpetrator, is portrayed in racist terms, but also is very much resonating with racist discourses at the time that we're animalizing racialized people. And it's interesting to see how this goes hand in hand with also an animalization. But this animalization is not just a dehumanizing, it's more there's no simple binary with Dupin, between human and animal, rather there's a kind of gradation. And what I try to show is that this very much works with new ways of understanding how racial hierarchies work at the time and and also with new forms of control that emerge, you know, in the moment. So, so, yeah, that that's very much, I think, how I try to think about the function of animality, in the in the modern imaginary as you were saying, you know, in, in this particular story.
Michelle Neely:I wanted to ask you also about about Moby Dick. It, I mean, in some ways, it's like the animal novel, right, of the nineteenth century. And it it's not a subject of one of the chapters, although it gets, you know, it's something that you think about substantially in a number of places in the book beginning with the introduction. But I'm I'm wondering how how Moby Dick helped you think about capture or or just, you know, if you could talk about some of the ways that you see capture evidenced in in Moby Dick?
Antoine Traisnel:Yeah. It's also the quintessential nineteenth century American novel for so many people. So there were so many reasons to study Moby Dick, and I think I found them a little daunting. Hence, I did not really devote, you know, a chapter or maybe for fear of having to have one book just about Moby Dick. I I just let it crop up every every now and then in the book, you know, mostly in the introduction, but I think there's several moments where the the whale kind of, like, reemerges and then, it's it's submerged.
Antoine Traisnel:Yeah. Exactly. Surfaces. But I I really was thinking about this text the whole time as I was writing on it. I was I was writing the the the the book, because I do think, that Melville is very, very attuned to what's happening to animals, you know, at the time, but also to the industries and and the techniques that surround these animals, as well as the epistemologies.
Antoine Traisnel:Right? The the ways of knowing them also, we're in the process of being transformed. And and I think, really, Melville was very, very attentive to that. So in the introduction, I just have a very short reading of Moby Dick, and and that really, hinges around his title and the use of the of the oar in, Moby Dick or the whale because I felt that there was a tension there, a tension between the individual animal or, the species. Right?
Antoine Traisnel:Moby Dick, the single white whale after which Ahab is or the whale as this kind of already generalized, the massified, animal, the animal maybe as opposed to a singular animal. And I attached the first Moby Dick to Ahab, who for me, epitomizes the logic of the hunt that is very interested in pursuing the single animal that in that case also can be granted a name. And on the other hand, I paired Ahab or contrasted his pursuit to, another pair of hunters who we are told no longer hunt, who are Peleg and Bildad. So Peleg and Bildad are these former whale hunters who now no longer do the work, but outsource it to other people. So they very much embody, kind of like capitalist, you know, figures that let others, you know, do the work.
Antoine Traisnel:But they also interestingly work for shareholders, so they're not even their own people in a way. Right? And they are not interested in this single animal. In fact, that is more of an impediment to their enterprise because what they're interested in is accumulating as much whale mass as possible. And so I think that here, the whale is very much what they're after and in their pursuit, which, you know, knows no end because you can always accumulate and you know that well because that's also what you discussed in in your book.
Michelle Neely:Mhmm.
Antoine Traisnel:They very much represent still a form of hunting, but a hunting that sort of disavows those that it employs in order to do its work. And and that's where I see, a form of a subsumption of the work done by Ahab, but mostly by his crew, and therefore, you know, all these people working, you know, under Ahab, in in all their, you know, diversity, as as really being kind of, taken up by a different kind of logic, which is this, capitalist logic of ceaseless, endless, accumulation that that I call capture. Sorry. I needed to finish my sentence. Yeah.
Michelle Neely:No. I was for some when you were talking, I was kind of picturing too the, the form that the animal comes back to I mean, in a way, we dig the animal. It does not come back to shore. But, in theory, you know, the the sort of what you were saying, at the beginning about the kind of spectral nature of the animal, like, the the the sort of, transformation of the whale into these, like, casks of oil, sort of, you know, down in the hold. I don't know.
Michelle Neely:Anyway, I was thinking about this.
Antoine Traisnel:Yeah. Which yeah. You're absolutely right. Which also, I think, makes it, ever present, but, also disappeared, right, in this, or present in this non visible way, in our in the very structure, you know, of our of our lives. Right?
Michelle Neely:And Right. Which Melville thinks about. Right? In the whale that the the whale is a dish. He's like your your candles, your your pens, your objects, the material objects of your lives.
Michelle Neely:Right?
Antoine Traisnel:Absolutely. Yes.
Michelle Neely:I wanted to ask you about the about the end, where the book ends. I really loved that this okay. On the one hand, this is a book that's about the dire consequences of the rise of capture. But I loved that you ended on this note of, to quote you, you know, trying to glimpse the ethical imperative that emerges out of this devastation. And so I wondered if you could just talk about where you see room for for ethical action or or response under capture and also why it was important to you to end the book on that note.
Antoine Traisnel:It's it's something that I wish I had developed more, but I try in every chapter and and, you know, more importantly toward the end to make space for thinking about what capture also makes possible. I'm very aware that what I'm I'm tracing is a, a a master narrative really in the in the most literal sense and therefore something that is indeed a story of devastation, of mass extinction, of disappearance. So I do not want to romanticize that history. At the same time, I also am aware that resistance is also often, forged within the terms of dominant discourses and strategies. I also think that what we're witnessing with CAPTURE is not just the the capture of the world, but very much a a a transformation and epistemic shift that, also allows for a different way of interacting with animals.
Antoine Traisnel:And one thing you know, maybe one way of, you know, responding, which might be also a cop out, but one way of responding to your to your question, I often think of the the role that a thinker like Jeremy Bentham plays in in contemporary theory. On the one hand, I think we all associate Bentham with the Panopticon and with, what, Foucault has done with him. And so he becomes the architect of our modern surveillance society, very much not a very happy role to play for Bentham. But interestingly, in animal studies, he also has this sort of very important foundational role as someone who, as Derrida says in The Animal that, therefore I am, changed the entire question of the animal. And so famously, Bentham asked that maybe the question we should ask is not can they think or can they reason, but can they suffer?
Antoine Traisnel:Derrida does this, you know, beautiful reading of this can they suffer, which, in in French is, using the, the verb pouvoir, which is is the modal for can. I'm not gonna do an entire reading of that, but I just wanna say that he he sees in in the way in which, Bentham asks this particular question. He sees the transformation of the field and really the possibility of asking different questions and asking questions around what it means to ask whether someone or something can suffer, has this particular power, which for him is also a power of the power ness, a power of the one who is passive or suffering. So, I do think that from the very same crucible in a way, we have different things, you know, and I was trying to do justice to to them, both the story of of devastation and at the same time, the, ethical possibilities that emerge out of that very, story.
Michelle Neely:I would, I would love to talk to you about Bentham sometime. Not not this is not the time, but I, I'm so fascinated by that, can they suffer passage, because he says a lot of other really interesting things in that passage that no one ever talks about. Like, if they're being eaten were all, you know, we we can eat such of them as we as we please. Anyway, okay. What I actually wanna ask you, is something just a little more open ended.
Michelle Neely:I would say that that the book or you have a kind of, like, genius for the paradigmatic example. Right? There are so many moments. I mean, the gun camera was just, like, the first example, you know, I don't know, two pages in where I went, oh, my gosh. He must have been so excited when he found this.
Michelle Neely:It's
Antoine Traisnel:it's I I was.
Michelle Neely:Illustrates the the argument so perfectly. Right? Like, it's so on the nose. But there were so many moments like that. And so I'm wondering if you have a favorite moment.
Michelle Neely:Was there was there a part of the book that was especially kind of exciting to write or or a moment in the research that that just was like, yes, this is coming together? Or or even just something that, you know, you felt provoked by or that shifted your own thinking about, kind of, animality.
Antoine Traisnel:Yeah. There there were really I mean, I think, as you know, everyone who's, you know, who's gone through this long project, you have really moments of despair where you're like, am I making any sense? Is that thing really, like, cohering into something? And then there also these magical moments where things seem to actually, come together really magically. So the the the gun camera was one such example.
Antoine Traisnel:And and they seem sometimes like they actually are the origin of the project because they work so well. But, you know, they often or sometimes really come, belatedly and and make things work in a particular way. Really, I I should think more about it, but off the top of my head, I would say maybe two things, you know, I was really excited about. The first was to try to think of Michel Foucault because I very much use the biopolitics as a frame for thinking about the animal question. So trying to think about how Foucault himself can help us, you know, think of that and and really trying to read, the order of things as opposed to maybe the the Foucault of reference for people who do biopolitics, which is, you know, later.
Antoine Traisnel:But going back to this early thing and try to see that that animals really are very much present, you know, in in a very weird way in in what he says about the transition from natural history to biology. And that's again, that idea that there is something maybe positive, however flimsily positive, he pays attention to the new powers, he says, that animals gain in the nineteenth century. So that was really kind of an intriguing, moment to me that I felt really drawn to and wanted to unpack. And I think in terms of finds, I was really fascinated by Hawthorne's The Marble Fondue. I had already written a book on Hawthorne.
Antoine Traisnel:And for those who don't know, there's this weird elusive character of a fawn who might or might not have pointy ears that would be the way in which his companions could determine whether he is a human or an animal. And I as I was reading Darwin's, The Descent of Man, the very first example that Darwin uses is pointy ears to talk about, you know, the, the possible ancestry. And it was written ten years after Hawthorne's book. So it it really was, you know there's no question of influence, but more this kind of, like, weird moment of coincidence that I was really fascinated by. So, I was really curious how that could be read.
Antoine Traisnel:These are moments that were particularly interesting and fun to think about and write about.
Michelle Neely:That's great. That Darwin yeah. That Darwin moment is amazing. I also wanted to ask you how you think about the relationship between your argument, in CAPTURE and, the environmental humanities. I mean, I, you know, I came away from this book feeling like this should be required reading for anyone in the field of Right?
Michelle Neely:It's it's so again, as I've already said, the just the the explanatory power of CAPTURE is so evident. But but then there's sometimes this I don't wanna say rift, but it the the it feels as if the two fields don't always talk to each other. So I'm I'm just wondering how you think about the relationship of CAPTURE to the kind of work that's being done or the conversations that are happening in, the environmental humanities?
Antoine Traisnel:Well, I mean, I I think that I should ask you to answer this question, because we first met at an animal studies panel at a conference. Right? Yeah. And so we were both working on animal studies later, but then when I read your book last summer, Against Sustainability, which is so brilliant and I've recommended it to many people already, It very much still talks about non human animals, human animal relations, issues like extinction that are not specifically about animals, but very much so. It is very much framed as an intervention in environmental humanities.
Antoine Traisnel:Right? So so maybe I should ask you to, think because I think you've probably thought more about this question, like, how you yourself made the transition from animal studies to environmental humanities, if if that's the right word, or, how you see these two fields maybe dialoguing or or not. Right? I'm I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that.
Michelle Neely:One of the reasons that I found CAPTURE so compelling was that there's this I think it's Ursula Heizer talks about how there's this uncomfortable relationship between, activists who do animal rights work and activists who work on behalf of animals, in the environmental movement because animal rights activists are are advocating on, at the level of, like, individual animals or animals who are understood as distinct individuals. Whereas, you know, environmentalists are advocating at, you know, the level of species. Right? And so often then they're they're willing to make different choices, or they they see the ethical imperative as playing out quite differently. There has to be a way to sort of, like, talk across these, these registers.
Michelle Neely:Right? And to think across these registers, and I think, you know, CAPTURE felt like a way to kind of, think across some of these registers. And I think there are moments in in my project where I where I was also trying to think across these registers or or I mean, one of the things that Moby Dick does occasionally is think across those registers, I think, or at least give us an invitation to sort of recognize these different registers.
Antoine Traisnel:Yeah. I I would completely agree that I think that Moby Dick is so fascinating, I think, because it it it holds different lines of possibility. You know, it holds them throughout the narrative, sometimes more or less, but it it makes it possible to think them as not necessarily canceling one another, but as maybe surviving alongside each other, sometimes being entangled, sometimes being more distant. But, yeah, you're completely right. I think about this tension in the two fields and the ways in which maybe there's also a value in sometimes thinking about the individual animal without subsuming it under the register of the species.
Antoine Traisnel:So maybe it's also a question of pragmatic, use, which, you know, is, I think, a great moment for us to start talking more about your book because you're very much, you know, interested in in these questions. And I think you very much have this interest in in ethics and in in use and in, what we can do and also what we can do with literature. So maybe I can start by saying that one of the things that really struck me the most when I first read your book was the brilliant simplicity of your thesis. I mean, and you say it immediately. So it's it's it's we've not just inherited problems from the nineteenth century, most famously maybe the damages caused by the industrial revolution or many other things, but we've also inherited problematic solutions like recycling, preservation, zero waste practices, all of which partake in the in the larger logic of sustainability, which, you say is often uncritically adopted in environmental discourses today.
Antoine Traisnel:So when I say it's a simple thesis, I do not mean to say that it's obvious because it's not at all, and that's what your book is about. It's it's very counterintuitive. So so maybe you can, say a few words about why ostensibly uncontroversial practices like recycling and preservation are are problematic.
Michelle Neely:I think I might distinguish a little bit between, like, practices and paradigms in my answer because some of the practices of these things on balance have maybe been helpful or at least sort of could in theory. But as paradigms, I see them to be blunt as environmental fantasies that are just totally complicit in the problems that they supposedly address. Because they're, they're ultimately involved in sustaining the systems that are causing these problems in the first place. Right? So, you know, recycling, it it makes unlimited consumer appetite seem harmless.
Michelle Neely:It it promises that, you know, the earth or the recycling industry can just absorb endless amounts of our waste and make it pure and and useful again. And, you know, Whitman in the book is my kind of poetic prophet of this. Right? He's the he's the poet of compost, but then, you know, this material recycling is the twin of omnivorous appetite in this poetic environment. There's this great moment in this compost that people who've tried to think about Whitman as a kind of environmental poet always turn to where, he gets kind of nervous that maybe the Earth actually can't absorb all of our waste and, what he refers to as our sour dead.
Michelle Neely:But but then it's just it's almost immediately that that moment of nervousness, that intuition, that there that maybe there's some limit to what we can consume is is dismissed through the celebration of the magic of material recycling, the magic of compost. And so, you know, ultimately, consumption without limit is just totally exonerated. He's in conversation in the chapter with the the twentieth century poet Lucille Clifton, who I read as just totally self consciously rewriting many aspects of Whitman, but this aspect in particular. I mean, for for Clifton, there's no consequence free consumption. There's just there's always consequences, you know, for for generations, for for always.
Michelle Neely:Right? So that means there are always limits. But, of course, Whitman is is the one who captures our contemporary zeitgeist. Right? And I guess in the in the larger sense, what I'm arguing is that these paradigms are, you know, they're responding to the particulars of this anthropogenic environmental damage without actually addressing the root causes.
Michelle Neely:Right? And so they these paradigms maintain continuity with the sources of our environmental problems. So, you know, the the big systems, capitalism's growth imperatives, settler colonial extractivism, all that all that good stuff. They're they're continuous with them. They don't interrupt them.
Michelle Neely:They don't resist them. And so they're perpetuating the problems to which they apparently respond.
Antoine Traisnel:That's so interesting and fascinating to think about how, yeah, certain logics, can accommodate harmful logics without seeming so harmful themselves. So I I really find that really fascinating. And and and, I'll have a question, I think, about Whitman after because it's obviously really interesting to think of him as and you've you've you've distinguished between practices and paradigms, which I think is so helpful also to think about, exemplarity, you know, choosing we've chosen chosen, you know, Whitman as as the kind of prophet, you said, for a certain epoch. And and so I'll have questions about what exactly that means to also the field of literary history or literary criticism because that's really fascinating. But first, so if being against sustainability, is is counterintuitive, it's it's both because sustainability is, highly compatible with settler capitalism, but also you're showing because it's deeply inscribed in the dominant, US cultural imaginary.
Antoine Traisnel:This is why you also you you look at how nineteenth century texts have, contributed to our valorization of certain practices or paradigms, I should say, by selling us what you call pastoral fantasies. So I think you've already given a little bit of an example of what one such pastoral fantasies with Whitman. But can you say a little bit more and and maybe give another example?
Michelle Neely:Sure. Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm using pastoral in the in the, in the book in the Raymond Williams sense of, like, not just an idealized version of life in the middle landscape, but also a version of that that that always exists somewhere in the in the past. Right? It's, Williams points out that the golden age is always somehow a generation or two earlier no matter when you're looking.
Michelle Neely:Right? Whether it's, like, the twentieth century or ancient Rome, it's and he calls it like an escalator into the past. Right? So the pastoral as a sort of nostalgic ahistorical fantasy. It's funny how how books come together.
Michelle Neely:I mean, I had the chapters before I had, in some ways, the, the frame. But the frame was something that I was thinking about in this background way, actually, before I really even started the project because one of my sort of research areas is food studies. And, you know, way back when I when I was a grad student writing a dissertation where I was I was writing a chapter about, nineteenth century vegetarianism and I started researching the nineteenth century food reformer Sylvester Graham, the the guy that the graham cracker is named after. And I oh my gosh. I he wrote this, like, 1,200 page science of human life, which is mostly, you know, now dis disproven.
Michelle Neely:Like, it's just, like, pages of, like, theories of digestion before people understand digestion. I think I might be, like, the only person alive who's read all of it. But, I mean, there there were really, like, fascinating things in there. And and one of them that really jumped out to me is someone who's, you know, been interested in kind of contemporary food reform writing and and media was that he's already complaining in the eighteen thirties about all of these problems of industrial food that according to pretty much all contemporary US Food Reformers only, you know, begins supposedly in the wake of World War two or according to a few people, maybe, like, around 1900. But then I'm reading this book and here's Sylvester Graham in, like, the eighteen thirties complaining that, you know, cows are not being grass fed.
Michelle Neely:They're being confined in stalls and they're fed with grain. This is making them sick. They're being slaughtered when they're sick. They're being fed to an unsuspecting public who doesn't realize that their diet is making them sick. Or he's writing about all these additives, you know, like bread and cheese and other, and other products have, have all these things being added to them to make them look more appealing, so they sell better.
Michelle Neely:But then they're they're making consumers sick. So it's just like all these classic problems of industrial food are there in the eighteen thirties. Right? And they're not supposed to be according to sort of all of the contemporary food sustainability conversation.
Antoine Traisnel:Yeah. It it's usually more like a twentieth century, you know, I we think that that really starts with, agribusiness and and factory farming, so twentieth century phenomenon. But so tracing it back to early nineteenth century is fascinating.
Michelle Neely:Yeah. And, I mean, and so, because this is something that was already just an interest, I started doing all of this research that had nothing to do with my dissertation or anything I was working on. Or I just started doing this archival research on, sort of, animal agriculture and animal slaughter in the nineteenth century. And I, you know, I found, like, dairy farmers experimenting with mechanization, of dairies, like, you know, machines for milking cows in the 1820s. As I pushed back further, there, you know, it was like colonial New England farmers are raising beef for a transatlantic meat market.
Michelle Neely:And so just, just this notion that, you know, American farmers were somehow balancing these like, environmental and human health and ethical considerations perfectly in these earlier periods, you know, that they weren't driven by a desire to to maximize their their animal capital. It just does not hold up, right, to to scrutiny. So for just kind of years, I was revolving this this sense in the back of my mind. I thought I would write something separate about it that, you know, like, if we want a better food system, you know, we can't go back to the nineteenth century or the eighteenth century or whatever. Those earlier practices were, you know, totally continuous with our current food system.
Michelle Neely:Right? Our current food system is a is a culmination, not a divergence from what came before. So for me, it was like from there that I started thinking a lot about kind of how pastoral fantasies turn out to be this, like, the idea that what we the the the thing that we need is sort of waiting for us. Often in the nineteenth century is the is the thing you hear. They they turn out to be this kind of useful litmus test by which to judge environmental paradigms.
Michelle Neely:Right? So so to the extent that a paradigm is constricted by pastoralism, I came to feel like it just can't be future oriented or, you know, transformative in any real way. Like, in instead, it's just gonna contribute to the perpetuation of the status quo.
Antoine Traisnel:That is so fascinating. And, also, it's really interesting to see that already these things that we think are contemporary issues were sensed as issues and therefore came along with their, you know, antidotes. Right? Kind of baked in the the the problem. So that's really, really cool.
Antoine Traisnel:I have a question about, you know, your use of of of literature in the book. The authors that you invoke are not necessarily the most obvious candidates for thinking about the environment. And I mean that as a compliment. Right? It's, more surprising, right?
Antoine Traisnel:Less the ones that might we might expect. And and we've already talked about, Whitman. And I I here wanna think a little bit more about this truly amazing chapter on Whitman, where you read his, insatiable and famously insatiable appetite as a kind of perverse celebration of endless consumption that, justifies itself, you know, is made sustainable, you could say, by portraying nature as a site of infinite renewal. So, in a way, Whitman gives us license to consume without end. And your project basically looks back at some of the most celebrated, but also some less celebrated and more obscure nineteenth century texts, and reevaluate them in light of our current environmental crises.
Antoine Traisnel:So I was wondering, like, how difficult was it for you to read our cherished authors, you know, like Melvin and Whitman against the dominant grain, of celebration and to show precisely that they are part of the problem, so to speak. And and and this is not a reductive, you know, reading in any way. It's more to try to inscribe them in a kind of, like, a larger logic. So so I guess I'm asking because I wonder whether part of you resisted these readings, because I'm guessing that, you know, trained as an Americanist as you were, you were also you had attachments to to these texts?
Michelle Neely:This is such a great question. I mean, I think that things really opened up when I hit the point in the project where I was kind of reading for and thinking about paradigms. Like, it that made me open to these counterintuitive or or uncomfortable readings of particular figures or texts. The end result is definitely that there are arguments in the book that I felt kind of personally provoked or goaded by, which I loved, actually. Like, I loved feeling like writing myself into places where I felt provoked.
Michelle Neely:And my last chapter is actually, for me, the chapter I felt most kind of unsettled by the the radical pet keeping chapter, interestingly. But I I mean, I think the thing that I worried about a little bit more was whether the kind of widespread veneration that's felt for some of these figures, and and Whitman is the perfect example, might prevent readers from being open to my arguments. Right? I worried a lot. I mean, I really agonized over the having the Whitman chapter come first.
Michelle Neely:The the book is organized in this dialogic way, so in the end, I I I couldn't make a different choice. I had to have the Whitman chapter come first, but I I just I kept picturing in my mind someone throwing the book down in disgust because that's not how they wanna read Whitman. Like, they don't wanna they wanna see Whitman that way. But it also works the other way. Right?
Michelle Neely:I mean, the people love to hate Thoreau. Right? Because he's one of the figures in my joyful frugality chapter. Right? And people love to hate his anti consumerism.
Michelle Neely:They love to kind of, like, you know, rage at, his hypocrisy. And he's just, like, such an enraging killjoy for so many people. Right? So to so to have him be a figure in, in one of the chapters of the counterintuitive alternative paradigms, was also felt dicey. So so it's the figures, but then it's actually also the paradigms.
Michelle Neely:Like, who wants to hear that there's something wrong with preservation as an environmental ethic? I mean, there was an, an early reader of of my preservation chapter. I was really upset by the argument, actually. And I I I went him over eventually, but, but, yeah, it's it's it's a thing, to unravel a little bit some of these cherished figures and ideals. At the at the end of the day, like, I hope I succeed in in recasting the texts and the and the paradigms and, like, locating them more solidly within the kind of cultural and environmental history that, like, opens them up in the way that I'm that I'm arguing.
Michelle Neely:But, actually, is this something that you worried about? And and, I mean, did you feel like your objects were already sort of sufficiently compromised, or did or did you worry about
Antoine Traisnel:this? Oh, that's a a good question. I I don't know that I worried that much because I don't think I I have I think a little bit less this attachment. But, interestingly, the thing that I have the most pushback against is Moby Dick. I think because it really is this, you know, you have so many people who, you know, want to say that the particular reading I've just offered before, which I always say, you know, is just one of the possible lines along which I think we could read Moby Dick as tracing this particular transformation while also paying attention to other things.
Antoine Traisnel:Because I say there is this story of bio capitalism in Moby Dick. It feels as if the whole book is indicted in that particular reading. And I get a lot of, concerned eyebrows that I'm being a little reductive reductive if I'm reading. Well, at least that's how I'm interpreting this. So maybe I'm just also internalizing, you know, people's expectations.
Antoine Traisnel:I don't think I have as, I think, counterintuitive statements as as yours, which is, again, what what is so powerful and and is what's really so interesting is to open up, you know, one particular text and and really try to read it alongside a different history or a history that might have come into more salient today, right? When thinking environmentally about the environment is not a thing of today, but we look at things quite differently. Right? So, yeah, I think I might have been a little less exposed to that type of reaction. But speaking of that, I'm also interested in how you structure your book because you also think about very much this kind of retrospective gaze, right, this reevaluation of certain, authors and certain texts.
Antoine Traisnel:As I was saying earlier, you know, very attentive to to problems and also problematic solutions, but you're also, and that's, really so fascinating, pairing every, you know, problem with, you know, a form of alternative, a, what you call transformative solutions. Right? So, models for mitigating unrestricted consumerism, for envisioning, you know, different ways of living and inhabiting the world, in your radical pet keeping chapter, fostering, you know, different, economies of relations between humans and nonhumans. And and you find some of these models in contemporary literature, and you've already mentioned Lucille Clifton, but you also have AS Byatt and and others there, Louis Erdrich. But you also go back in time, and so you mentioned Thoreau, you also have Dickinson and Hannah Craft.
Antoine Traisnel:So for you, it's not that people didn't know in the nineteenth century and that were just belatedly kind of awakened to issues that we just couldn't see before. And and I find that also extremely powerful even though you also show that these are minoritarian sites of possibility. Right? You're also showing that they were, marginalized. Was finding these kind of non dominant models a way for you to call the bluff on a certain narrative of of the Anthropocene?
Antoine Traisnel:You know, like, oh, we couldn't know, but now we we are awakened to what we've done, and we're trying to to fix it. How did you think of of that, the way in which you make, you know, texts of, the nineteenth century resonate with contemporary texts?
Michelle Neely:Yeah. I love this question. I I'm I'm teaching a class right now that I often teach on on literatures of the Anthropocene, and I I love those moments when students go, oh, wait. They did know. Right?
Michelle Neely:Like, it's it's I think I think it's so tempting, and yet it's such a kind of, like, damaging, disproving idea the disproving idea that if that if we know better, we'll do better. Right? Like, oh, they just didn't know. Right? And so, of course, one, you know, one way around that is to go back and look and say, like, oh, yeah.
Michelle Neely:They did know and and they did it anyway. Right? Also, maybe more importantly, there were other voices and other choices and other ways of living that were imagined and enacted even at the moment of the emergence of, you know, these problems and and paradigms that we're still living with. Right? And and that's important in terms of just, like, provoking our imagination and provoking our sense of the possible.
Michelle Neely:Right? Something I was thinking about a lot as I was working on the book was just that the the timeline that we're operating on is so short now. Right? I mean, just like ten years maybe to turn this ship around, you know? In some ways, the the biggest objection to paradigms like sustainability is just that the timeline doesn't work.
Michelle Neely:I mean, the sustainability is a paradigm in my argument, like never works, right? It was never gonna work. But it's all about this idea that you can sort of incrementally tinker with aspects of capitalism and so on, and, like, somehow we'll get there. Right? But, like Mhmm.
Michelle Neely:If we've got eight or ten years, that timeline just doesn't work. So I had this this strong sense of, like, like, change is scary. Right? Transformation is scary. How do we figure out how to embrace that and how to how to do so in a way where we don't just get stuck in new kind of, binding static, paradigms, right, that that are not helpful.
Michelle Neely:And so that's where I was thinking about, what I what I called, like, mean time environmental ethics. The idea that that there might be these paradigms that are not for all times in all places, but that that could help move mainstream US environmental culture, like, forward in the here and now. Right? Could could provoke us out of our sort of status quo and make something else possible. And then when we need new paradigms, you know, we we maybe find new paradigms.
Michelle Neely:So that was where the dialogic structure kind of came in like this. I had the sense that I want I want to not just say, like, this doesn't work, but I want to say, here's another approach to the same problem that if not perfect. Right? I mean, neither of my alternatives are, ever suggested to be, like, ideal or perfect, but they I'm arguing that they're not compromised beyond utility in the in the way that the the one that they're paired with is. And they're these other paradigms are more likely to promote sort of like pleasure and justice and flourishing multi species communities, right?
Michelle Neely:The the the stuff that we want. And even just at the level of the chapter, kind of also having this dialogic structure, right? Each chapter has kind of at least two figures. So, you know, as you said, it's like, little women and Lucille Clifton are talking to each other, and George Catlin and Louise Erdrich are talking to each other, and Hannah Crafts and Harriet Wilson are talking to each other. And and hopefully, you know, all of this is, like, producing that unsettling and dislodging of the status quo that I was after.
Antoine Traisnel:Also, how you end the book, right, in your coda, you're interested in also, just the same way I think that you're, rejecting the narrative according to which sustainability used to be good or could be good, but, you know, it's been co opted, so we need to get it back. And you're, like, you know, saying that, no. There's something that's deeply troubling because it has this profound allegiance to continuity, as you say. And and therefore, it's always gonna be a foreclosure of of change or or deep radical transformation. And you are interested in reclaiming a form of deeper, more radical transformation, which you also call utopia, right, at the end.
Antoine Traisnel:So there is very much this desire to work from the impossible or what seems to be impossible, what seems to be, like, unrealistic in a way. So I really I really do love the way in which you're working as almost a, sorry, a contrarian. I'm gonna call you a contrarian, but someone who's like, yeah. Your investment is all messed up. Let's, let's let's, you know, rethink, all these things.
Antoine Traisnel:So, I was curious. Do you have yourself a favorite passage in your own, book or a moment that for you was also particularly surprising as you were writing?
Michelle Neely:I think the the I don't know that favorite would be exactly the right way to characterize it, but the last chapter, the Harriet Wilson and Hannah Crafts chapter made me really uncomfortable. The argument that pet keeping might be, even radical pet keeping might be a kind of environmental paradigm for for thinking about multi species community in the anthropocene makes me really uncomfortable. And yet I felt, convinced by it. I felt that there was, like, something there. Obviously, I did.
Michelle Neely:It's it's my last chapter. But, and so so, I mean, I think that argument I I I think there, too, I mean, just the not just vitality, but the, like, essential to me, place of black feminism in my sense of environmental thought, the environmental humanities, is also kind of another reason that that chapter was really interesting for me. It was just, it was it was both kind of like my conclusion was, for me at least, a little bit distressing, in terms of conservation dependent species and all of that stuff, but the but but that piece of the chapter felt really right. But then the the coda, it's funny what you said about, like, where a book ends, it must always feel like you wished you had more time. I wished I'd had more time to sort of explore the utopianism that I come to in the coda.
Michelle Neely:And that may well be my next project. But I think
Antoine Traisnel:Oh, that was my next question. So that's perfect.
Michelle Neely:Yeah. Well, I mean, I was just gonna say that I was, I really liked thinking about and it's another thing that I just had been revolving for years, the the Langston Hughes poem, Let America Be America Again. And that's part of the coda and just the the kind of temporality, that that that poem articulates, and the way that that it's kind of about looking back in order to in order to disrupt the status quo in the present so that something different and, more equitable and and radical can be built. I mean, I think that really, like, encapsulates where the book lands.
Antoine Traisnel:Nice. So, yeah, I I really love this unwavering insistence that you have on, thinking together social and racial justice with, environmental justice, or environmental justice having to be in thinkable even without, social, racial, gender gender justice. So do you already have a next project? I know this is always a tricky question. So, can you tell us more about where you think you're gonna go after, sustainability?
Michelle Neely:I mean, I think I wanna keep thinking about this critical utopianism that the that the book ends with, which is a sort of not utopia as a kind of, like, blueprint, for for the future, but, as, an energy or or a force or really a critical orientation that is disruptive of the status quo. And so there's there's a an essay that I recently finished, for an edited collection that's about Thoreau again and and and this kind of, sort of utopian experimentation. But it also looks at B. F. Skinner's Walden two, which deeply weird, but deeply weird deeply weird novel, and and sort of, you know, thinking about utopianism in that way.
Michelle Neely:I know I wanna think more about, Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. I mean, I think if there are these sort of texts that, that that launch a next project, like, that's really it's just a book I've been teaching since I started teaching, and the my relationship to it has changed so much over the years. And I find myself, just thinking about it more and more lately. And it's it's just really powerful attempts to, to reckon with change and to, to sort of center, our relationship with change. So that's something I'm thinking about a lot.
Michelle Neely:And I'm I'm also working on something about Emerson and and climate grief. I don't know. What's where where are you going next? I mean, do you feel like, you you have a next project that is, that is really growing out of CAPTURE, or do you see yourself moving in a in a new direction?
Antoine Traisnel:I think I have it's starting to have a better idea where I wanna go after. And the more I think about it, the more I see that it's related to capture. But, in the meantime, I also wrote something on Thoreau, and I think we want to apologize to everyone who's listening for piling on. But, that has to do with more thinking about the environment and plants. And so I keep thinking, you know, in in terms of of biopolitics, but here I'm more interested in whether plants, and the vegetal, have a place in biopolitical thought.
Antoine Traisnel:And I essentially try to read Thoreau as, almost offering, counterpoint to, Foucault's pastoral power with something like pasture power, like thinking about plants, thinking about the milieu on which, you know, the the the flock to use, you know, Foucault's notion of of of pastoral power, the flock grazes, you know, you need this pasture. And and Foucault does not really think so much about the background for pastoral power. So I've been thinking about that and, therefore, a lot about seeds. So you're thinking about Octavia Butler's parable of the sower, so it makes me think about that. And I can imagine that your relationship to it changes when, California is on fire so regularly.
Michelle Neely:Although in fairness, it was even when I first started teaching it. California is kind of always on fire.
Antoine Traisnel:True. True. True. It just seems like more and more dire.
Michelle Neely:Yeah.
Antoine Traisnel:Yeah. So, yeah, next is is gonna, I think, try to think about really contemporary sites of archiving for after the apocalypse. And I'm interested in these kind of transnational global projects like the seed vault, which is also sometimes called the Doomsday Vault that's in Norway, where all the seeds of the world are kind of held, you know, categorized and preserved, you know, just for the potential moment in the future when they might be of use. And and I find that really interesting because these are kind of, modern arcs for a future that we might not be a part of. And I think that there's all sorts of weird, interesting things going on there, transnational collaborations, but also biopolitical decisions, what to keep, what not to keep, how to, you know, counter and things.
Antoine Traisnel:So I want to do something around these new projects because there's a few out there that keep certain things, I want to say, maybe in captivity or in a form of stasis, while also it being the living that is being preserved. Right? So it's this kind of like antithesis that I think is also at the center of capture. It's how to preserve something, you know, alive and and without killing it fully, without and and there is an interesting tension that I will want to explore, I think, in my next, larger project.
Michelle Neely:Wow. I cannot wait to read that. That sounds fantastic.
Antoine Traisnel:That's wait. Very, very nice. Well, the same. Let's, have another podcast chat, as soon as these are are done.
Michelle Neely:Absolutely. Well, well, thank you so much for, for this fascinating conversation and, and and for your book.
Antoine Traisnel:Thank you so much, Michelle. And, thank you so much for everything, the conversation and the book.
Narrator:For more information about CAPTURE, including how to read it for free online, visit z.umn.edu/CAPTUREbook.