Jonathan Crary

KB

I know that you did undergrad at Columbia University in art history, and then you got your BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in film and photography. What drove you towards academia, versus developing an artistic practice? Or a path in film? Can you walk me through who you are now, and how you’ve ended up where you’re at?

JC

[Laughs.] Okay, that means going way back.  I grew up in various places in New England and had done a lot of art and writing in high school—painting, sculpture, photography and poetry. When I arrived at Columbia in the fall of 1968, I was hoping that I’d be able to continue some of this work. I registered for one of the few studio courses on-offer back then, reserved darkroom time in the student center, and joined the filmmaking club. But all of this was quickly overshadowed by the activism on campus which was following all the tumultuous events and Vietnam War protests of the previous spring. I soon joined Students for a Democratic Society, and became part of the freshman cadre that the current leadership wanted to nurture; there are two members of that group that I’ve remained in touch with to this day. At that moment, SDS was continuing to focus on Columbia’s racism in relation to the Harlem community, on the university’s complicity in military-related research and a linking of local issues with anti-imperialist struggles globally. The core politics were solidarity with Black liberation in the U.S. and wars of national liberation, in what was then-called the Third World. It was a time when radical filmmaking was used in organizing, and I saw many films by the Newsreel collective and first encountered things like Hour of the Furnaces, Far from Vietnam, Terra em Transe, and Battle of Algiers. Of course, I was doing a lot of things other than SDS—drugs, attending tons of live music, and connecting with some of the East Village counterculture. But radical politics and the friends I had made through it were my priority. Academics definitely took a back seat to most of what else I was doing, although I’m grateful I was able to take F. W. Dupee’s course on modern fiction and also a packed lecture course on early Marx given by Lucien Goldmann, who was a visiting professor at the time at Columbia a year before his death.

KB

Were you reading mostly Marxist and anti-imperialist texts? What ideas were radicalizing you?

JC

Well, a lot of us were actually reading Lenin. I remember contentious discussions about whether Left-wing communism: an infantile disorder contained anything relevant for the present moment, as strange as that might sound now. Also, things like Lin Piao’s “People’s War,” Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism, and Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology. Most people I knew read a lot, talked about it, and there were a bunch of books that most everyone was familiar with. I can give just a smattering of what I remember, like Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capitalism, Allen’s Black Awakening in Capitalist America, and William Hinton’s Fanshen. I read One Dimensional Man by Marcuse, books about the Cuban revolution like Karol’s Guerillas in Power, R.D. Laing’s Politics of Experience, Carlos Castenada, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, a lot of Fanon, Soul on Ice by Cleaver, Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism. I went through the Martha Quest novels of Doris Lessing, and this was also when I first read things like Philip K. Dick, Ishmael Reed and Crying of Lot 49, Cortazar’s Hopscotch, James Baldwin’s Another Country, Malraux’s Man’s Fate, Last Exit to Brooklyn, and so on. A big discovery for me was Kenneth Patchen’s Journal of Albion Moonlight. And then a lot of Zap and Marvel comics. There were also the many left-wing and counterculture publications: Tri-Continental magazine, produced in Cuba and distributed in like 80 countries, was something we looked at regularly as it gave an overview and updating of anti-imperialist struggles all over the world.

KB

How did it feel immersing yourself with these thinkers? Was there a feeling of belonging to a greater political network? What were the implications more broadly, beyond the immediate politics you were engaging on campus?

JC

Yes, very much so, even if it was just a general sense of interrelated insurgencies happening all around the world. Pushing back against the many distortions of what happened in late 1960s, Immanuel Wallerstein and others have no hesitation insisting that what happened then was a single revolution within the Western world-system; a watershed event that can’t be understood by focusing on its local or regional manifestations. The pervasive slogan, “two, three many Vietnams” was a contemporary expression of the interconnectedness of what was happening. Of course, the counter-revolution was underway in full force by the mid-70s, and the last 40 years have been marked by the non-stop assaults on any actual socialist or left politics. But to go back to your question about the sense of feeling part of something larger—it’s difficult to convey to someone today what was encompassed by the idea of “the movement.”  In spite of the often crazy factionalism of that time, there still was a belief that all the groups engaged in anti-imperialist activism were part of an overarching movement committed to common goals of radical systemic change. It’s easy today for some to be cynical, but for a period of time “the movement” constituted a powerful social reality.

To go back to my personal narrative…in my sophomore year at Columbia, I continued to be involved in anti-war activities and support for political prisoners. In the fall of 1969, I was involved in organizing for a mass demonstration in support of the Fort Dix 38, who were GIs charged with insurrection and refusal of deployment to Vietnam. Then after the murder of Fred Hampton, I was active in the formation of the December 4th Movement, to support the Black Panther 21, who had been fraudulently incarcerated in NYC without bail. In the spring of 1970, the deaths of the Weather Underground members in the townhouse explosion and then the killings of demonstrators at Kent and Jackson State added to the sense of events accelerating in unforeseen directions. It was around this time that I decided to drop out of school and spend some time away from NYC. I had friends who had moved to the Bay Area and were involved in anti-war organizing out there. Once I arrived there, that new environment opened the idea of doing art-making in a more sustained way than I had done in New York. So I enrolled in summer classes at the SFAI. It was my first time in California and I was blown away by a new kind of light and space. I was pretty excited by the work I was making and by the ambience and pedagogy at the school, so by fall I applied to enroll full-time. I did some painting but soon gravitated to film and photography. One of the remarkable teachers I had there was John Collier Jr., who was an FSA (Farm Security Administration) photographer in the 1940s and then became one of the foundational figures in the field of visual anthropology. I can still remember, word-for-word, some of the piercing but encouraging comments he made about my work. Inspired by another teacher, Larry Jordan, my main focus became making animated films out of still photographs. Looking back, I realized that I was not cut out for all the collaborative elements of most narrative filmmaking, so for me there was a satisfying symmetry between the solitude of the darkroom and the solitude of working on an animation stand.

KB

Where in San Francisco were you living? Did you catch the end of the Beat Generation?

JC

It was more like the height of the Haight-Ashbury era, actually. [Laughs.] I lived in several different neighborhoods—first North Beach, then Noe Valley, and eventually the Mission. It was an amazingly affordable place at that point. It’s sad to think that it’s no longer capable of supporting the kinds of informal work and identities that were possible then. That’s partly why the Art Institute couldn’t survive…the impossibility of providing housing for students in what has become a ridiculously expensive city.

One of the ways I got to know the Bay Area was by regularly going to the many art house and repertory movie theaters that flourished back then, from the Surf way out by the ocean to the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. Along with the film production courses I was taking, I did a kind of self-education by seeing as many films, of all kinds, as I could fit into my schedule. At the same time, I started reading film history and criticism and used books like Sarris’s American Cinema with its rankings as a guide to what directors to prioritize. I’d also gotten a copy of the new translation of Godard’s film criticism which I went through exhaustively, noting all his yearly “ten best” lists as another sort of syllabus. Of course, this was before auteur theory had been discredited, but it was still a useful path for me to acquire a foundation of knowledge that I’ve built on ever since. I mention this because at that point I had yet to take an art history course, anywhere, and in my reading of film history I frequently came across names of painters that meant nothing to me. But the realization of my ignorance here was one of the factors that pushed me toward studying art history. During my last semester at SFAI one of the speakers in the visiting artist lecture series was Stan Brakhage. Obviously, I was at an impressionable age, but it was one of the most memorable talks I’ve ever heard. Speaking without notes or slides, Brakhage delivered a head-spinning set of reflections on vision and art making, with references to poetry, film, painting, philosophy, mythology, music, psychology, physiology and much more. It had the effect of lighting a fire under me, making me hungry to immerse myself in more reading and learning.

KB

What was the impetus in returning back to New York, then?

JC

I began to miss the stimulation of the city, and for a variety of reasons I decided to complete the BA degree that I had left unfinished at Columbia. This was 1974, and the mood on campus was very different, definitely depoliticized. The counter-revolution was already underway, marked by the violent overthrow of Allende in Chile. Unlike earlier, I now took my academic work seriously and completed the courses that gave me a BA. I had originally thought I was going to be a literature major, but now six years later, I chose art history, thinking that it could encompass and augment some of my new interests. And belatedly I began, in piecemeal fashion, to learn art history. The teacher from whom I learned the most then was Joseph Masheck, who later became editor of Artforum. I then began to have opportunities to write articles on art, film and culture for various publications. Around then, I’d reached the point of recognizing that my youthful efforts at writing poetry were never going to transition into anything other than mediocrity. But I could also feel that some of what I’d acquired trying to write poems was being relocated to my writing of prose. Rightly or wrongly, I began to imagine that a PhD program could be an environment in which I could grow my understanding of visual imagery and begin to stake out more substantial writing projects, including something book-length.

So by 1976 I was in an art history PhD program. Looking back, I was naïve about what I was getting into. Pretty quickly I discovered there was not a lot of interest in the directions that I hoped to pursue—for example, doing something on art and film. Also, most of the graduate research getting funded corresponded to the bland types of scholarship being published in The Art Bulletin in the 1960s and early 1970s. Like, regarding the problem of interpretation, I was reading Barthes’s S/Z and Nietzsche’s Gay Science, while for most in the department Panofsky was their reference point. The changes beginning to occur in the field elsewhere took a while to impact Columbia.

But one of the things that kept me there were the courses that I took or audited with faculty from other departments. There were two professors in particular, Edward Said and Sylvère Lotringer. As a graduate student I never had a mentor, in terms of a professor within my department that I worked closely with. But it would be hard to overestimate the importance of what I drew from the teaching and thinking of these two. I first read Discipline and Punish and Anti-Oedipus with Sylvère, and encountered Bataille, Artaud, Burroughs, Baudrillard and numerous others through him. Equally important, his seminars were open and informal in spite of the rigor of his presentations. Many people who participated were artists and writers from outside academia, like Manuel De Landa, who we later published with Zone Books, as well as Kathryn Bigelow who was at SFAI when I was there, the South African filmmaker Michael Oblowitz, and others. Of course, Sylvère was one of the founders of Semiotext(e), which had morphed from a post-structuralist academic journal into a provocative, counterculture publication. For a while it was run out of his small office in Philosophy Hall on a shoestring budget. He was a great facilitator, such as enlisting students to help; I was drawn in to be on the production staff of the “Schizo-Culture” issue.

KB

That’s one of my favorite issues! I had no idea you were editing it as a graduate student.

JC

It was massively influential. This was the same time that Semiotext(e) was publishing the little black books of contemporary French theory, and this hybrid of journal and book publishing was one of the models that was important during the formation of Zone. As I mentioned, I was also attending the lectures of Edward Said during the same years. He had a course called “Issues in Contemporary Critical Theory,” of which the content changed each time he offered it. One year it covered a range of writers that included Lukacs, Gramsci, Benjamin, Raymond Williams and Sartre. The next year it was devoted to Foucault and Derrida, and it was a kind of comparative evaluation of these two. Clearly, he had important reservations about them both, but he felt closer to Foucault around questions of power and knowledge. I remember him warning about “the danger of a Derridean orthodoxy” and about the fundamental ahistoricism of Derrida’s work. I should also mention that in my final semester as an undergrad I took Said’s course on “Modern British Literature,” certainly one of the high points of my Columbia education. I still have my notes from his lucid readings of George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf, and the poetry of Lawrence, Hopkins and Yeats. Hopkins had already been important for me but Said’s discussion of his work was revelatory and never been surpassed by anything I’ve read subsequently. Before we move on, I just want to note another thing I took away from his teaching: the importance he assigned to the work of Lukacs, especially the essays in History and Class Consciousness and Theory of the Novel. The reification essay became influential for me in many ways, especially after I began writing on Debord. There’s no question of Debord’s affiliation with Lukacs’s thought, and Society of the Spectacle has to be understood in terms of its place within this particular Marxist tradition. And, when a critic of 24/7 associated the book with the romantic anti-capitalism of early Lukacs, I wasn’t terribly bothered.

But during this time I was completing my required course work in the Art History department, and certainly built up my knowledge of different historical fields, especially 19th century. This was when I got to know Meyer Schapiro, who had emeritus status but was still doing some teaching and I took his signature lecture course on the sociology of art. Through our first conversations it came up that he had connections to the art high school I had gone to in Vermont. It had been founded in the 1930s on vaguely Deweyan (John Dewey) and socialist principles, and it was where his son was a student in the 1950s. Since Schapiro knew the original leadership of the school from leftist circles in NYC, he was responsible for helping several artists he knew to get jobs there. One of these was the Spanish painter and Republican exile Fernando Gerassi. Through his intervention, both Gerassi and his wife Stepha were hired to teach at the school in the late 1940s and they were still there when I was a student in the 1960s. I can’t say I got to know Schapiro well, but he clearly appreciated that I had learned from these friends of his from an earlier era. On a number of occasions, we had long conversations in his spacious office that was in a different building from the department, and it became obvious to me that he had a chilly relationship with the senior art history faculty at that time. And it was because of him that I had the opportunity to attend the faculty seminar at which his legendary encounter with Derrida took place in the fall of 1977. I certainly wasn’t familiar enough then with Heidegger to closely follow Derrida’s critique of Schapiro’s Van Gogh essay, “The Still Life as a Personal Object,” but what struck me on another level that evening was the personal contrast between the two—Derrida’s smug condescension versus the dignified courtesy of Schapiro’s responses.

KB

Was this when you segued into publishing with starting Zone Books? Or after you were editing at Semiotext(e)? How does that figure into the timeline?

JC

Zone started a little bit later. After I completed my orals, I taught in the Core Curriculum at Columbia and then part time at SVA for a year. I was continuing to regularly write criticism, including for Artforum, Art in America, Arts, Flash Art, and Domus. It was a time when I had doubts whether I would ever find support for writing a dissertation, and I was thinking about other pathways, other spaces for my work. Then the offer for a full-time adjunct position at UCSD came up, and I took it. The two years I spent out there in San Diego, my thinking opened up in a number of new directions. The Visual Arts department there was a huge change from Columbia Art History, just as La Jolla couldn’t have been more unlike the Upper West Side. The department was started in the mid-70s and it was an unusual bringing-together of major artists, most of whom were still there when I arrived. Probably foremost in defining the place was Allan Kaprow and I’d already participated in one of his scripted group pieces in New York. Also there was the poet and critic David Antin who I’d met a couple of times previously and I’d written a catalog essay on an Eleanor Antin exhibition. New to me were people like computer artist Harold Cohen, environmentalists Helen and Newton Harrison, the film theorist Stan Lawder, and the amazing cinematographer Babette Mangolte. I became especially close with and formed lasting friendships with the painter and film critic Manny Farber and the filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, who’d been Godard’s collaborator in the early 70s. I learned a lot through my proximity to all of these people, and one of things I enjoyed about this department was the irrelevance of whether one was an art historian or an artist. We were engaged in many of the same conversations, and there were often energizing exchanges between what were very different practices.

It was when I got back to New York that Zone began to take shape. There were originally four of us and we’d met doing graduate work at Columbia, but we’d also known each other through things going on downtown in and around the art world. What brought us together was a shared frustration at the limitations on the kind of work possible within individual disciplines—whether it was art history, comp lit or philosophy. So we were thinking of a journal that would be transdisciplinary, for which new objects of inquiry could be engaged from a plurality of viewpoints. Certainly Semiotext(e) was influential for us, but there were other things we liked, such as the journal Traverses which was published out of the Pompidou Center. We originally thought Zone would be a quarterly, but quickly realized that none of us were suited to the many demands of this compact time frame. So instead of a journal, we called it “a serial publication of ideas in contemporary culture.”  The six issues of Zone were incredibly labor-intensive and exhausting to produce, so the move to doing more traditional book publishing was inevitable. Our first book, Foucault/Blanchot, came out just two years after the first issue of Zone. And we’re still at it. Our 40th anniversary is next year. It’s not quite as much fun now that so much work and communication is online. For a long time we had an office in the Cable Building at Broadway and Houston, where there was always a lot happening, people coming and going, but the internet has killed all the sociality intrinsic to that kind of shared physical space.

KB

I know that Bruce Mau was involved in Zone’s original concept design. How did he get acquainted with you all at the press?

JC

Bruce was a friend of one of the original members of the group, and at the time he was a young designer in Toronto. And obviously, bringing him into the project at the beginning was incredibly fortuitous. He had a unique understanding of the book as a physical object and he was also a collaborator in how we shaped the intellectual direction of the press.  It's difficult to imagine how Zone would have fared without his contribution. He was our designer for over fifteen years, but since his departure there’s been genuine continuity with Julie Fry, who had worked at Bruce Mau Design.

KB

I’m also curious, given your dedication to theory and much of your career being theory-centric, how do you feel about it now? What does theory mean to you today, versus in the 70s and 80s, when it was a newer structure of thinking and critique?

JC

That’s a big question, and I’m not sure I can give a satisfying response. I’ve already talked about some of the things that impacted me in the late 70s and 80s, but I was always partial to those thinkers who defamiliarized things—who mixed things up as opposed to those who wanted some kind of intelligibility devoid of ambiguity. Like, my eyes would glaze over if I came across a Klein group diagram in a text, or other facades of methodological rigor. Also, for me a work could be valuable as theory regardless of how one categorized it. Like, what exactly were the books of Bataille or Pierre Clastres, or some of Alexander Kluge’s later writings?  Nonetheless, there’s no question of how crucial Foucault was for me then, as he was for many of my peers. Techniques of the Observer is indebted to what I learned from his books, especially from The Order of Things. His schema of distinct epistemic regimes motivated me to map out the specific historical discontinuity around discourses on human vision that I presented. I considered what I was doing then to be a historical project, and I was receptive to whatever theory was relevant for this. Jameson inevitably became important for me. I had read Prison House of Language earlier, but The Political Unconscious had a big impact on me. In the depoliticized academia of the 1980s, his book was a claim for the indispensability of a Marxist analysis. He was one of the few thinkers for whom the repression of a utopian imagination and the loss of collective social experience were essential objects of theoretical reflection. Hayden White was also relevant, with his insistence that historical explanation was never the product of a supposedly objective standpoint. He used Marx and Nietzsche to show that historical accounts were shaped by the specific narrative form used by the writer. In particular, I connected with White’s essay “The Burden of History.”  I read it for the first time probably around 1980. But it had been written in 1966, amid the political counterculture of that moment, which may be one reason why it resonated so strongly with me. It’s a devastating take-down by a young academic of the intellectual constraints of his own discipline, but what stood out for me was his proposal that historians should consider borrowing from the arts, even deploying non-discursive means, whether visual, multi-media or performative, to convey their insights. That is, he proposed radically novel ways of  “doing history.” I imagined how the polemical thrust of this text might be relocated to a critique of art history and to expanded possibilities of formats for my own work, but it was 15 years too late. As to the second part of your question, it’s pretty evident that we’re in a very different political and social environment. The humanities are in the process of either elimination or repackaging into revenue-generating digital enterprises. Much of the “theory” that’s been promoted over the last 15 years is increasingly parallel with market-based patterns of branding and perpetual novelty-production. I think one of the problems is the inadequacy of so many existing models of theorizing in relation to what we’re confronting in the present. The unthinkability of some possible outcomes has the effect of short-circuiting and rendering inoperative some of our usually reliable intellectual assumptions.

KB

In your work, there’s a sense of a collage-type construction, something that reads like a full and variegated body of research. You’re pulling from so many different sources—whether that be theory, art, science, or literature—which feels like a much more grounded, or holistic, way to express your ideas.

JC

I think from early on I had some sense of the insufficiency of a single or predefined vantage point. When I first encountered Deleuze and Guattari’s  Thousand Plateaus, what impressed me was its sheer heterogeneity. In addition to being a kind of toolbox of their provisional concepts, like rhizome, war machine, smooth/striated, etcetera, there was an equally important layer of the book, which was its citational apparatus—the footnotes—which displayed the astonishing range of books, from almost every conceivable genre or field, that had contributed to their thinking. And the breadth of their reading has remained exemplary for me. Obviously I’ve never approached the range of what they consumed, but reading widely rather than narrowly has always been my chosen path. And some inflection points in my thinking have been from books I came across by accident, often when roaming through once open stacks of libraries that are now mostly inaccessible or “offsite.” My tendency as an academic has been to resist specialization when possible. Something John Berger wrote in one of his later books has stuck with me: he said “political thought is that which refuses the conclusions of the specialized disciplines.” Especially now, I think it’s an essential admonition.

KB

Do you feel that specialization in the humanities is a model that’s now outdated? Or that the pendulum has swung the other way, further towards specialization?

JC

It’s pretty clear that the humanities, especially on a macro level, are in big trouble. They are increasingly incompatible with the financialized aims of the neoliberal university, except as a kind of window-dressing. As far as the kind of research that’s getting supported now, I don’t really know enough to weigh in on this. However, it’s obvious that the shrinking job market in full-time, non-adjunct positions is pushing graduate students to do whatever work reflects the content of job descriptions.

KB

Right. And relatedly, there’s a real breadth of style and subject matter in your published works. For all their originality, Techniques of the Observer and Suspensions of Perception are academic art historical texts that rely on traditional models of research. And you make a distinct pivot with 24/7 and Scorched Earth into politics and technology, as well as a different approach to prose. What was that decision process like? What was your thinking during that pivot?

JC

It’s a good question, and it’s something that I’ve thought back on. What are the unforeseen events that cause a swerve in one’s own self-understanding and in one’s goals? After Techniques, I began to think of it as the first part of a trilogy that would be a contribution to a history of modern Western visual culture. With Techniques of the Observer, I was basically looking at Europe from 1780 to around 1840. Then with Suspensions of Perception, I was looking at the 1870s to about 1910, foregrounding the problem of attention which I’d briefly sketched out in Techniques. As I was finishing writing that book, I was starting to think of what would be the next volume of this trilogy, so to speak. People would ask me what I was working on next, and I’d say, “Well, it’s going to be my book about television.” It wasn’t really ever going to be that. [Laughs.] It got to be a joke among my friends but that became my default answer for what I was actually thinking about—which was a constellation of social and technological configurations in the mid 20th century. Some of the essays from those years collected in my recent Tricks of the Light give a suggestion of what that book might have been.

KB

Did you feel a sense of urgency in writing about these changes? I’m thinking about how you wrote Scorched Earth in alignment with a tradition of social pamphleteering.

JC

Yes. I was feeling an increasing urgency about contemporary social and political developments, including Occupy Wall Street and its aftermath, but I didn’t immediately have an outline for how I would engage them. There was a point when I knew I would do something different from an academic text, that there wasn’t going to be a corresponding follow-up to Suspensions of Perception. I was continuing to think about new kinds of projects, while I was writing various shorter pieces and articles and giving talks, and it was amid these that the ideas for 24/7 took shape.

One source was the painting Regulus by Turner, whose title refers to the Roman general who was captured by the Carthaginians during the Punic Wars. Shockingly, part of his punishment, prior to execution, consisted of having his eyelids cut off. But all that’s represented in the painting is a harbor scene with a radiant sun in the center of the image. Turner intended that the spectator of the painting occupy the position of this doomed soldier who is being forced to stare at the sun, which will blind him without the protection of the eyelid. At the same time, I thought about the illustration I chose for the cover of Techniques of the Observer, which depicts a patient undergoing an ocular medical procedure, whose eyelids are being held open by a device. Obviously they are two very different kinds of images, but both are about subjection to involuntary exposure, whether through physical violence or technical procedures. And both are from the late 1830s.  I began thinking about the vulnerability of an individual who is deprived of the ability to shut off the outside world, to shut out illumination. So that’s where some of the ideas for 24/7 emerged. I understood the opening and closing of the eyelid as a figure for the rhythm between night and day, between waking and sleep. And it was a short step from there to focus on the refusal of sleep, on the wounding or damaging of sleep, and the ways that capitalist modernity demanded non-stop temporalities and ubiquitous visibility. It was an important moment for me, because, as the book progressed, I recognized that I was working with a different sort of prose. My writing was pointing in a new direction compared to what I had been doing. And after the book was published, and eventually over 20 foreign translations, I had the experience of hearing from kinds of readers that I had never really heard from before.

But Scorched Earth came out of a realization a few years later that the arguments I made in 24/7 needed to be stronger, given the intensifying effects of global warming and the social consequences of mandatory immersion in the nullity of the internet. I wanted to make a more sweeping critique of the intertwined erosion of civil society and ecosystems. My goal was to show how the internet complex inexorably disfigures our perception and our sensory capacities for knowing and bonding with others. For me, this meant shifting in some way to another rhetorical model. As you noted, I reference the tradition of the political pamphlet and there are features of that tradition that I emulated: provocation, rejection of moderation, and so on. But the typical pamphlet, historically speaking, is something much shorter than the 140 pages of Scorched Earth, so I was doing something a bit different. As I was starting to write the book, I was clear about one thing. Over the last 15 years there have been thousands of books and articles critical of the various aspects of social media and the internet. However, these thousands of seemingly “critical” texts have one thing in common: after detailing various harmful impacts of network technologies, they inevitably will conclude by proposing remedial measures that will somehow make our online lives less toxic. They all are based on the unquestioned assumption that the internet is permanently installed on the planet, here to stay, that we basically only have one recourse, which is making minor tweaks and adjustments to our mandatory subjection to these systems. But I was determined not to add another book to this mountain of intrinsically reformist texts. I wanted this book to be an affirmation of refusal, of negation, and I didn’t want my language to be diluted by some performance of objectivity. The bourgeois mandate “to present both sides” divests language of its insurgent force. I tried to give a relentlessness to my prose, to avoid any digressions or qualifications. And of course I knew that the book was going to be polarizing.

KB

Polarizing in what sense?

JC

I deliberately didn’t offer any middle ground, and I was challenging the technology which so many people delusionally see as an essential vehicle for whatever they desire or hope to achieve and which for corporations are indispensable for most everything they do. What was most meaningful for me were the emails I got, thanking me for writing the book. What I heard repeatedly was some form of “this is very much what I’ve been thinking and I’m glad to know I’m not alone.”  I was gratified that the book could help to validate people’s own intuitions and hopes in the face of the overwhelming barrage of media messages that refute and deride them.

KB

This reminds me of that passage where you talk about Martin Buber—you say, “His work lies not in the degree of its originality, but in the clarity with which it articulates what is intuitively known or apprehended by many. It has the familiarity and epiphanic force of the commonplace.” And that I feel you enact this very thing in Scorched Earth—there are these ambient social and political ideas that we all somewhat understand, or can at least sense, but it takes a decisive and singular voice to articulate it.

JC

I’m not really preoccupied with some elitist model of originality. What I’ve done is bring together familiar or known phenomena but draw them into a plural and previously unseen configuration. One of the other things I did was including a lot of proper names. I wanted to provide readers with a resource, a bridge to some of the thinkers who’ve nourished my work. There are recent widely read figures like Bernard Stiegler, Franco Berardi, Silvia Federici, Vandana Shiva, David Graeber and so on, but also Roberto Unger, Hans Jonas, David Abram, the Marxist theorist Robert Kurz, Philipe Descola, and others. And earlier thinkers such as Gunther Anders, Simone Weil, Joseph Gabel, Karl Mannheim, the zoologist Adolf Portmann, and Husserl. Buber remains important for me for numerous reasons, such as his experience of the failed German Revolution and his close friendship with the socialist and anarchist Gustav Landauer. From that same milieu, Rosa Luxembourg was equally significant and my notion of “scorched earth” comes directly from her work, from her reframing of Marx. She shows how capitalism doesn’t just make labor precarious, but that it ruins the social and material conditions on which life itself depends, and that this is not a byproduct of the system but is its goal. And she conveys this in a way that’s more wrenching than Marx.

KB

I was listening to a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show that you’re cited in, on “attention fracking” and the attention economy. He’s interviewing the Princeton historian Graham Burnett, and there’s a specific moment where they discussed the validity of a moral panic about technology. And they say that even though moral panics can come off as a bit histrionic, they’ve historically been correct, even though the world doesn’t “end”—Klein points out how past panics about the negative impacts of advertising, mass entertainment, and social media saturation have generally all become true.

I was thinking about how people of my generation are now implementing very small actions of refusal because they’re experiencing the validity of this panic, and are buying flip phones, joining running clubs, or seeking in-person forms of community. Given your thesis in Scorched Earth on essentially rejecting the internet, I’m curious if you think these actions are at all significant?

JC

They’re very significant, but what’s important is to imagine and build ways in which they could coalesce into something transformative, into new, provisional kinds of social solidarities. Obviously, this is one of the daunting tasks of our present…how to build even tentative pathways to a livable and non-oppressive social world, because it requires abandoning all the ways in which we’ve been trained to function as isolated individuals in a marketplace of limited possibilities and futures. There’s been fifty years of counter-revolution during which so many of the social underpinnings of radical collective action have been eliminated and what remains of class-based politics is demonized as “populism.” And, as many have shown, the elites have ceaselessly promoted innocuous forms of single-issue activism.

KB

Going back to your emphasis on subjectivity—I find it proves to be a much more powerful text, given the radical nature of the content in Scorched Earth and its rejection of the internet as a means for social reform. You cite Silvia Federici in her thinking on the commons, using this to foreground your idea that there can’t be a digital commons. It must, instead, exist outside these systems. In what ways do you think we could develop this praxis of refusal, realistically?

JC

As people like Silvia and Kristin Ross have shown, there are many places where this is happening, especially in the Global South, and we just don’t often hear about it. One example close at hand that I know is the Woodbine collective in Ridgewood, Queens. They’re organized around the politics of autonomy and mutual support, and they’ve developed many programs of outreach in that neighborhood. And there are similar things in other parts of the city. As government social services continue to degrade or disappear, collectives like this will become more essential, and they prefigure forms of community yet to emerge.

KB

Okay, last one. At this point, it’s somewhat understood that we’re in this moment where market logic, and market value, have become synonymous for our own structuring of moral values—“neoliberalism” has become the de facto shorthand in this sense. On what can one depend on at this time? How does one create meaning, despite having to exist within these structures?

JC

It's a really difficult question to answer, because how one responds to it is so important. Let me start by saying that parts of Scorched Earth are already out of date. When the book went to press, the idea that there would soon be a devastating land war on the European continent or that there would be a genocidal assault on the population of Gaza, supported by the U.S. and conducted in full view of a mostly indifferent world, was not imaginable. Also, the corporate and state control of information networks has now gone well beyond censorship and exclusion into planned forms of derangement. The so-called information war now is less about advancing one particular set of messages over others than of making this space so scrambled and unusable that the intelligible communication on which any shared social project depends is effectively rendered impossible. At the same time, the hyperbolic and fraudulent promotion of AI has had a related set of dispiriting consequences. But the deeper reality is that the United States, as the global hegemon, is in an irreversible downward spiral. And the new techno-feudalism, with its debt serfdom, is destroying so many of the long-standing supports of U.S. civil society. Yet history shows us that phases of imperial decline are often filled with creativity, hope and the emergence of new social and cultural possibilities. All the Mad Max scenarios of the future are toxic products of a late capitalist culture industry, designed to terrify people into acquiescing to the actually existing savagery of the present.

KB

I feel like it’s a continual return to the Gramscian adage—pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

JC

I think you’re right. I mean, his words have lost none of their relevance. As he said of his own moment, we too are in an “interregnum,” an in-between time when the ruling powers have lost the consent of the governed, and must resort to more violent or coercive measures. This is what Gramsci called “the time of the monsters,” that we have to outlast if there’s going to be the possibility of a livable world.