Jackie Wang

CD

It was a very trippy experience to read Alien Daughters and track your spiritual and emotional development alongside the trajectory of your political thought. While you were writing data-driven books with arguments, you yourself were in so much flux, experiencing a very unstable and non-linear process of formation. What does it feel like to put this new collection in the world that breaks the fourth wall of your academic persona, of that supposed certainty?

JW

I never really believed in the genre of academic writing, but at the same time, I can do it. And certainly most of Carceral Capitalism is written in the voice of a theorist, although I do have some autobiographical and poetic parts in that book as well. I had actually proposed publishing Alien Daughters before Carceral Capitalism, but Chris Kraus at Semiotext(e) thought, in terms of the trajectory of my career, "No, we have to do Carceral Capitalism first." Ultimately, I do think that was the right decision. But when I was putting the Alien Daughters book together, I did ask myself whether the book would destroy my credibility as an academic. Even though Carceral Capitalism has one foot in the academic world, and one foot in the activist and literary world, the book still has over 500 academic citations and people use it as an analytic. Carceral Capitalism launched my writing career, but also, it got me a job in the academy.

Sometimes I have ambivalence about this question of how I will be perceived, but ultimately I am constitutionally incapable of doing something other than what I want to do, simply because I'm supposed to do it. Sometimes I will agonize over a decision, but I can't do it any other way. I do think being vulnerable in your writing can be powerful in terms of connecting with readers. It's something I've always valued. Certainly when you're a professor or a teacher, you have to present this persona of being unflappable. I'm definitely not as hot of a mess as I used to be. I feel like this Alien Daughters book is very much written from a period where I was flailing a little bit, unsure of where I was going with my life. But there was also excitement in the unknowability of one's future, the experience of getting lost.

CD

There’s always this question as a writer, especially in nonfiction: what is my voice? These different registers you write in might actually allow you to explore and embody different personas within yourself. I was thinking about that in relation to gender, which is something you're explicitly working through in Alien Daughters. I thought, well, is being a political economist Jackie’s hard femme persona? And then, is being a poet…

JW

Soft femme…?

CD

Yes, how do you access different, gendered iterations of yourself depending on what genre you write in?

JW

I always joke, maybe I am intellectually very masculine.

CD

I think that's true.

JW

I have a lust for consuming technical information about political economy. Also, I'm a geopolitics nerd. I'm obsessed with reading the newspaper. I watch very long war documentaries, as a boomer dad would. So, I'm like, "Oh my God, maybe there's a part of me that's an old boomer man."

CD

Topics only. We only discuss topics.

JW

No feelings here, not in this house. No. I mean, I remember when I would go read the paper newspapers at the library during grad school. I was fighting exclusively with old men for the paper newspapers.

I do have this side of me that is cool, rational, capable of thinking through complex questions around political economy in a way that is almost completely devoid of subjectivity and completely structural. Carceral Capitalism kind of reveals how structural I am in my thinking. But I also have this writing persona that is very much in line with, I don't know, a kind of feminine writing... For me, that kind of writing is all about entering a certain lyrical or musical space and using my antennae to take in the vibrations around me or metabolize subjective experience. Thinking about the universe of emotions and what emotions give us access to. Maybe the Alien Daughters book is more representative of that lyrical persona.

CD

In the middle of the book, when you're living in Baltimore...is it okay when I say “you”? Sometimes we’re told not to assume that the narrator is the author.

JW

No, you can say you. It’s me.

CD

Okay, you were living in Baltimore, in this chaotic, garbage-strewn, collective leftist home, navigating a very formative and volatile relationship. Your domestic space was messy but super generative and inspiring. You write about a friend having a spare basement office at Johns Hopkins, which you turned into, like, a hamster nest for reading theory and philosophy. You went there and ate snacks, you lay quilts on the floor, all you did was read. You describe the office as a respite, where you can retreat from the world and consume information. A private, almost secret hideaway. The contradiction between your home and this hideout really stayed with me as a metaphor for how you organized your thinking and development.

JW

I wrote “Against Innocence” in that office. I had done a self-imposed retreat where I lived in the office for a few days and stockpiled it with Indian food that I got with my food stamps. I'm an introvert and I was in a completely all-consuming relationship and had absolutely no privacy in the punk house. The library has always been my sanctuary and this office was in the Johns Hopkins library, in the basement. There were no windows. It was very small, but having a space was basically all that I needed to be able to access my inner life and read and commune with writers. I have very vivid memories of nesting in this office. Once I even took mushrooms and was reading books as I was coming up. I remember reading Marguerite Duras and a book on the history of Jane, the Underground Abortion Collective. I was auditing classes at Hopkins, a Spinoza class, and a class on theorists of African national liberation. Reading has been the one consistent throughline in my life.

CD

I do think reading is a kind of altered state of consciousness. This office was basically your retreat room.

JW

Yeah, it was a monastic experience.

CD

It was your cave.

JW

I mean, reading is a drug. There are some sentences that act on my brain as a drug, like W.G. Sebald or Virginia Woolf. There are certain sentences that are just so psychedelic that when I read them, it's like I'm tripping.

CD

Have you ever wondered whether you are addicted to reading?

JW

I definitely know that I use reading the way some people use watching TV or entertainment. But for me, it’s a good vice. I do go through withdrawal when I don't get enough time or space to read. I also go through news withdrawal. I consume so much news, four hours of news a day.

CD

As far as addictions go, perhaps not the worst one, although…

JW

Well, people say it's not good to feel anxious about things you can't control. And a news addiction does feed anxiety specifically about things you have no control over whatsoever.

CD

In academic communities and radical political spaces, we supposedly cohere around a shared belief, a shared fight, a shared theoretical framework. Maybe from being therapized since I was quite young, I'm always wondering, "What's your damage? What really brought you here?" In other words, I assume that people are not just motivated by the beliefs they claim and espouse, but also by deep, internal psychic wounds that they want to heal, or play out.

In Alien Daughter, you write about, for lack of better words, traumatic experiences. You have a very nuanced way of engaging with the language of trauma, but you do write about this volatile relationship, suicide and addiction, the impact of incarceration and extreme sentencing on your family. So, I am tempted to ask… how did the things that happened to you shape your beliefs?

JW

It's interesting that we can't know certain counterfactuals about ourselves. If I had been placed in a completely normal family and had a completely normal upbringing, well, what the hell would I be like? Certainly we are fully a product of our experiences and we're shaped by our context. I definitely, from a young age, felt a sense of alienation. And I remember when I got the internet in middle school, feeling like, "Oh, there are other weirdos out there in the world. I'm not beholden to the mainstream culture around me." But I would say even before my brother's incarceration, I was still very invested in leftist anarchist politics. I became vegan when I was twelve years old, when I was in middle school. Kids called me a goth because they didn't know what emo was. I started listening to a lot of bands that were vegan, anti-war, and anarchist.

Then I became a library rat in high school. I would check out books on feminist theory, on anarchist theory. So certainly I always gravitated towards anarchist, feminist, queer, anti-capitalist, anti-racist politics. And it's been very consistent since I was a teenager, although my political analysis did evolve over time. But there are certain things that I think will always be consistent. I don't think, twenty years from now, I will say, you know what, capitalism isn't so bad.

CD

You’re not going to turn a corner on prisons?

JW

It’s not going to happen. The close contact that I've had with the carceral state, even just going into prisons to visit my brother and having to navigate that for the last two decades of my life, has really shaped my thinking around political questions. Carceral Capitalism was a sublimated way for me to work through the trauma around having a brother that was incarcerated.

The question of the relationship between trauma and politics is an interesting one that I feel some ambivalence around. I was very much a part of the generation which incubated a certain kind of Tumblr discourse that was politicizing trauma, which I think is useful because our personal traumas are structural in many ways. So understanding the ways in which our interpersonal relationships are mediated by patriarchy, misogyny, transphobia, racism, class…that's really useful. But I do wonder whether it is such a good idea to make trauma the center of political demands.

Is there a way in which this can displace material demands? Is there a way in which it can reify individual and personal feelings? I don't know. You can have sensitivity trainings in the workplace, but that doesn't address the deeper structural issues. And you can see the way that the university has taken up the politics of trauma to neutralize more radical demands for redistribution. So I am a little bit internally conflicted about the discourse that I was a part of propagating in the Tumblr moment.

CD

For some years I worked with grassroots abolitionist organizations in California, supporting organizing by incarcerated people. At organizing meetings there was a standard ice-breaker, that I'm sure you've encountered: What’s your name, what are your pronouns, and what brings you to the work? Generally, formerly incarcerated people or people with incarcerated family members explained their participation through biography. “I was in prison” or “my daughter is in prison.”

Then the highly educated, often white people, whom we called “not directly impacted,” generally said something like, “I'm here because I believe that all of our liberation is bound up in one another.” I could sit in the room as a highly educated person and give an ideological reason for my presence without offering any biographical explanation. No one like me ever said, “I’m here because I hold an inherent feeling of alienation, because I inexplicably identify with the experience of containment, because my life has circled around questions of harm and culpability, because I believe my intrinsic worth only lies in my capacity to help.” Just to throw out a litany of possible reasons a person would, in addition to their beliefs about collective liberation, come to political work around the abolition of police and prisons. There wasn’t a shared expectation across experiences to disclose some kind of biographical justification.

JW

I definitely have confronted people in the publishing world who want me to write a memoir about my brother's incarceration. There really is what you might call a first-person industrial complex around the commodification of trauma. I think it puts people who are marginalized in a tough spot because there's a demand for transparency always placed on you. And this comes with implicit aesthetic demands as well. So you have to write this legible trauma porn for a white audience and it's very frustrating. I mean, the question of standpoint epistemology, whether having an experience makes you an authority on a particular topic, is a complex question…

I do feel internally conflicted about this because people can use trauma defensively to frame themselves as victims and therefore shut down any criticisms. Or to get carte blanche in a space to harm other people because of one's marginalized subject position. So it's very fraught and it's something that I felt very internally conflicted about in myself.

CD

Well, when we're a part of a community that offers an intervention into how we think about experience or identity, we don't always know the way that work will be assimilated into dominant culture.

JW

Yes, I know. But I have no regrets. The issue of your words being taken up and assimilated into the dominant culture in a way that feels counter to your personal project is something I've also thought about in my work. Over the years I’ve had countless arguments with people in my anti-capitalist/leftist scene about the need to make gender, race, and sexuality a part of the analysis.

I was always fighting with people who dismissed it as “identity politics.” But some of the things that they were saying about the dangers of what they dismissed as identity politics did come to pass in terms of the commodification of identity. And I don't think that delegitimizes thinking about race, gender, sexuality. But there are DEI grifters who have promoted this neoliberal discourse around race and representation. We ultimately don't have control over how the dominant culture tries to neutralize radical politics through selective incorporation. But we should expect that they're going to do it.

CD

I hope when you return to having a punk band, you call it DEI Grifters.

JW

I know, right?

CD

You qualify your obsession with mysticism as recent, but reading about the period of your life when you were, as you put it, lost and flailing, you seemed completely obsessed with the pursuit of divine experience. When you were dumpster diving, biking around the country, living on a few dollars a day, you seemed driven by an intense hunger to feel, vividly and purely. So was this mystical bend always present in you? Has the path become clearer to you now that you explicitly read and engage with mystical thought and practice?

JW

There is a ten-year latency period from when I begin an obsession to when I realize I'm in it and perhaps working towards something. So even during that hot mess period you're referring to, I was reading a lot of mystics. I was reading mostly the women Christian mystics, but also I was reading a lot of Clarice Lispector whom I think of as a mystical writer. Early on I routed it through my interest in psychoanalytic theory, which is why my first official writing on mysticism was the Oceanic Feeling essay. Writers like the Jewish psychoanalyst Michael Eigen talks about mysticism and the blissful state as a kind of manic defense against pain. So I always found the pain-bliss dialectic very fascinating. And this is something that I've been thinking about a lot as I've been reading the Sufi mystics, for whom becoming a point of pain is part of the path. You need to go through a state of brokenness in order to get anywhere on the spiritual path. It’s that state of brokenness that is akin to a kind of thirst or hunger for the divine.

CD

On page 268 you talk about PTSD and severe depression, this deep, deep wish to stop suffering. A very relatable passage to me. There's a part where you write, in italics, anything, I'll try anything. What you're saying is, I'll try anything to get better. I'll try anything to heal. I'll try anything to stop suffering.

I honed in on that phrase and thought about it in the context of mystical tradition and mystical practice. If you take that phrase out of context—anything, I'll try anything—it speaks to a kind of radical openness to experience. It’s very connected to the pain-bliss dialectic. On the one hand you're saying anything, I'll try anything from the perspective of wanting to elevate beyond your own pain. But then this totalizing pain has also created within you a surrender to anything-ness, which is also oneness.

JW

I 100% agree with you. This is how I've been thinking about it, too. When you're in that state of brokenness, then you can be invaded by the divine. And that's certainly what I've experienced. For the Sufis, affliction does serve the function of shattering the ego. This is also the point at which I think personal writing can actually be its inverse, because by being so honest about humiliation you're actually letting go of the ego in some kind of perverse way.

I was having this thought when I was walking through a parking lot the other day. Probably I'd gotten out of the gym or something. Gym revelation. I had a flashback to the state that I used to be in when I was so desperate. And then I immediately thought that my attachment to holding myself together now is actually going to be my biggest impediment. When you have something to lose or if you have some kind of health or balance that you're trying to maintain, you develop this kind of defensive posture. You don't want to let things in that are going to disturb your equilibrium.

So maybe I’m relating to that state of brokenness differently now. I’m thinking about the spiritual potential of a state of brokenness. I've been reading a lot of Simone Weil, who writes about suffering in this way. And there's an untranslated Persian Sufi mystic text by Attar, who wrote The Conference of the Birds, called The Book of Affliction. I can't read this text, but I've been reading all the secondary literature on it. And there are lots of resonances between what Attar is saying about affliction and what Simone Weil says in terms of suffering being a way to detach yourself from your ego.

CD

The trauma of so-called mental illness leads us to create—or, has led me to create—very rigid containment strategies to prevent against suffering, against a return to suffering. But perhaps that rigidity is its own kind of suffering.

JW

Exactly.

CD

I've kept that state of suffering at bay through the rigidity of sobriety, of exercise, of diet, of regimentation, of deprivation. There is always this fear that if the container is punctured, I will be subsumed by the former state of chaos.

I don't drink or do drugs much anymore, but in my experience being on lots of drugs was a vivid microcosm of aspects of the everyday pain-bliss dichotomy. I would have a moment of incredible euphoria and connection with everyone around me, then it would rapidly turn and I would feel profoundly alone, scared, horrified, and miserable. When I felt good I was terrified the pleasure was going to end, and when I felt bad I was terrified the pain would never end. So, the veil between pain and bliss is….

JW

Very thin.

CD

They're the same. One always fades into the other.

JW

It's tricky because I live in absolute dread of relapsing and this is a shadow that is always looming over my existence and lurking behind every thought. Like, "Oh, what if I relapse? Oh, my God." I almost feel like I'll wake up one day and my life will just be a pile of rubble. So I live in fear of relapsing, but I also feel incredible ambivalence about reaching a state of health, balance, and equilibrium. Because I totally feel you on this point that you made about feeling frozen and rigid as a response to the fear of things falling apart. And that can make you organize your life such that you avoid intense experience. There's a way in which you're not fully in your life when you're afraid to let things in that can unsettle you.

I feel like I gave something up by healing myself. But at the same time, I also don't want to go back there. There was a sense of urgency that emanated from that state of desperation and a kind of potency to the writing that I did in that moment. You can't really fake it, when you're writing from a state of total desperation. I wasn't ever able to finish anything, though, when I was depressed. So, maybe the writing was better, but I was incapable of completing any project.

CD

Writing to make essential sense of one’s life, to survive, produces very different results than simply doing one’s job.

JW

Pain gives you a sense of existential urgency. It's a jolt to the system.