Chiara: Week five.

Dan-el: What a time!

Chiara: The university.

Dan-el: The university.

Chiara: I have the sense that we're getting closer to something like narrowing in on the center of the bullseye of the target or something like that like the, like the sights or these concentric rings that we're getting, we're narrowing in on something.

Dan-el: Crawling to the center. I mean, it is interesting to think about in terms of the progression of our course, its movement in terms of scales, and from the international to the natural to the polis. To think about cultural formations, and now the university. We do seem to be engaged in some kind of narrowing or some kind of winnowing or perhaps. What some of our readings bring out, and especially the FSM pamphlet, and Milton Harney, too, is that the university can be conceptualized is an extension of, as metonymic of certain national and supranational orders of governance and capital. And so perhaps we're actually not narrowing at all. But, I do think that you're right to sense that, with the readings this week, we are reaching the very heart of some of the concerns that have animated our own individuals, our collective forays into the space constituted by this class.

Chiara: Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, University from the Latin university class, it is aiming to be a microcosm and something that gathers up the whole of the universe in itself. So, there is a sense in which everything is everything is in everything. All the layers are implicated and brought to the floor and are playing out in the university. But, maybe it's just that it strikes closer to home. And so one thing I'm thinking about is you brought to my attention that there's this conflict currently playing out on Princeton's campus between the black liberation movement, the Black Justice League, and which wants to mandate anti-racist training and the POCC, I forgot what that one stands for.

Dan-el: The Princeton Open Campus Coalition.

Chiara: Right, which sees the anti-racism training as a form of indoctrination. And so it's much of what we read in the free speech, Free Speech Movement pamphlets and stuff like that, felt very live in terms of playing out in a new new conflict today, and maybe that's the sense in which it feels like it's narrowing in on something.

Dan-el: Mhm. Fully agreed. I found myself wondering as I made my way through the readings, whether there is a thread that links the FSM to the POCC. And how, to attend to some of the concerns that have been raised over the past few weeks, we can do justice to the local and sort of specific contingencies that are responsible for dictating the structure that these campus movements take and they're interrelatedness with broader societal concerns, while at the same time drawing attention to ruptures and continuity across time. And I hesitate, in part because of a concern that in the notes that we traded with each other that you had flagged by reference to FSM and to Mario Savio in particular, some of the movements of especially the, you know, '50s, '60s have been monumentalized, consumerized, made sites of nostalgia and in the process, both the force, sometimes the deliberately violent force of their critiques and the radical sharp edges of the mobilization that they sought to bring into being get whitewashed in all the senses of whitewash. And one consequence of that is that we tend to... we lose as a result sight of the complexities that made these movements what they were, and these complexities are sometimes troubling. I mean, we will we'll say more in a bit about how FSM sort of defined itself and how it adopted this identity that very much hinged on identifying its major movers and its main sort of subject class of concern as middle class youth. Well, yeah, middle class youth. But, in what what other categories of civic actors get faced or marginalized by a concerted attempt at raising to the forefront, centering, privileging in the interests of middle class youth, middle class white youth in many cases. So, there is, I think, this difficulty with making sense of the movements in their historical context And, you know, the legacies of these movements, the difficulty has to do precisely with the tendency to locate in the movements a source of nostalgic recreation, the golden era of activism. And that comes with all kinds of baggage.

Chiara: Yeah, absolutely. As you know, I did my PhD at Berkeley. And so, I always remember this. So, we would get coffees and study Greek in the FSM cafe. And there's a small monument to the free speech on the school plaza, which is like a very small hole in the ground filled with dirt. And then there's a concrete circle around it. And on the circle, it says something like, you know, "This area and the air above it belong to no nation and no person." So, it's memorializing an absence. And as monuments go, I kind of prefer it to other sorts of monuments. But, the way that plays out in the culture of Berkeley's campus is that there's a repetition of the same repertoire of tactics. And so especially because of the cyclic nature of university life that you have, every year a new batch of first years, and every four years, those first years leave. And that sort of forgetting takes place, the shedding of historical memory, leaving that group really vulnerable to receiving mythology and folklore if they're not in touch with graduates who may have had similar tussles with the administration tried similar tactics. So, I was there when the Occupy Movement took off. And I remember being on the steps of school Plaza, which is where Mario Savio gave his speech that we read. And seeing, you know, there was a confrontation happening with protesters and police as these things unfold and hearing a journalist say something like, "Here we go again, you know, it's always the same old story." And at the time, being extremely outraged by that because it can feel so fresh, it can feel so urgent, and there is always that potentiality for the protests to tip over into something new and something that breaks out of the expected dance of protesters, police and administration, that triad structure with the journalists media frenzy around it. But, it was later I think I remembered it because I remembered that I had something to learn from that. And that replaying of the nostalgic scene. I was also struck by the privileging and centering of white middle class youth in the FSM movement, which was different already in what we read from Race Traitor, which I think is from the '90s, if I'm not mistaken, where they're thinking really differently about not just race, but about their relationship to the outside. So, this is what I was trying to work my way around to is, how do university movements see themselves and constitute themselves in relationship to political movements nationally. So, Mario Savio wants to say that the battleground in Mississippi is the same as a battleground at Berkeley. And there's a moment where that's true and he's tussling over due process and the right to have different kinds of political speech happen on Berkeley's campus, but then he also falls into sort of discourse about the desire of students to have meaningful lives. And I'm mixing a little his speech with the pamphlet that came right before it. In the Race Traitor activists, you see a different kind of relationship to the outside, I think, where they're talking to people in Chicago's Hyde Park, or the group from Austin is picketing the Texaco. And I think you see a little bit more groundedness and the external spaces that are not the university. So, I think maybe one thing to pull from this is a defining feature of university activist movements is what kind of relationship do they constitute with extra university forces?

Dan-el: I mean, that thought and the question that drives it has played repeatedly in the background And then, more recently, in the foreground of much of my day to day orientation towards my employer, Princeton, and its relationship with the greater Princeton community, the Mercer County community. It's also though, as I reflect on the readings, streaked through my sensemaking of other educational institutions, like you, I also did my PhD in the Bay. And that my PhD granting institution has a very vexed relationship with communities on the receiving end of structural violence, especially in East Palo Alto. But, it is a university that is plugged into the circuits of extravagant wealth that define the peninsula and the South Bay. And so thinking about the force and the consequences of student activism in the Bay Area, is for me, inseparable from the memories of my professionalization and my training into a discipline that, for the most part, had very little interface with the work of collective organization in the bay. Certainly there were those of us who were interested in forging coalitions and then doing the work of identifying and where possible, building up networks of mutual support, but it's, it's this it's deeply disquieting, in retrospect, to go over once professionalization and realize just how little conversation there was about these things, how not legible the work that some of us were doing in within the university and then sort of beyond the university, to seek out and for ourselves opportunities to participate in this coalition building and how not legible this was to some of our university mentors. This I think cuts in two directions. So, in the readings for this week, there is I mean, especially with Moulton and Harney, a sustained attempt at performing the kinds of critique that can help move, especially academics, towards making common mutual cause, or at the very least, recognizing themselves as cyborgs in knowledge production. And one of the questions that I came away with after circling through the readings a second time was that this the cultivation of this knowledge made possible and well in Harney's case, by the application of a very Marxist style of critique, and really by the sophisticated wielding of the factory analogy. The application of this critique can be a way of incentivizing coalition building, but I have wondered whether it is also prone to opening up a space for the stoking of resentments. And for this, I'm indebted to fair amount of thinking that's gone into the concept of psychological wages and what has been characterized, and some of the more recent literature inspired by Du Bois and by David Roediger, as the wages of whiteness. So, here it is, I think, not at all surprising that Paul Goodman and others stake such a claim to middle class whiteness. And I mean, in Goodman's case, as folks will see in the readings, this takes on up so shockingly direct manifestation, I mean, I made a point of typing out the quote to myself in full, you know, when Goodman's appearance in the NYRB middle class youth, according to him are the matrix void of the class and then parenthetically, negros, small farmers, the aged are rather outcast groups, their labor is not needed, and they are not wanted. So, here is... on one level it will be easy just to say this is sort of like obscenely wrong, but it's emblematic, possibly, of the limits of this kind of critique. I mean, I recognize that in saying this I'm getting closer and closer to say criticisms I leveled at friends who write for Jacobin and other publications, or who were enthusiastic Bernie supporters, who might faulted for relying too much on class as a heuristic of analysis, and attempting in the process to sideline race. But, in the more specifically in connection with the readings for this week, what I find so gripping is the possibility that coalition building can fragment, if it does not take into account the fact that the difference is weaponized evil as a site for the cultivation of resentment, even among people who notionally should be bound together by, you know, a kindred or shared sense of class solidarity.

Chiara: So you said so much I want to pick up on, but I want to go back and ask you to break down a little bit more about the wages of whiteness, because that's sounds like something much more specific than privilege, or it sounds like you're talking about a direct system of rewards and pleasure. Can you tell me more behind what you mean by that? How you see that playing out?

Dan-el: Yeah, so this is this is an idea that owes its origins in its first formulation to Du Bois who had a trial balloon that in Black Reconstruction and other places, but it received some real amplification in the writings of David Roediger, who, in his work on reconstruction and its aftermath, had argued following and in some cases, deepening Du Bois' analysis that the crucial project, especially in the early 20th century, of building up and really solidifying the architecture of whiteness, was in getting lower class whites to buy into the idea that for all of the oppression that they faced, and for all of the impoverishment that racial capitalism doled out to them, they had one redeeming virtue, they were white and the others were not. And this the reason that the idea of psychological wages just caught on was because it was a way of attempting to work with the understanding that lower class whites were not receiving material wages, although I mean, interestingly enough, the deeper we get into the 20th century, the more the tools of the state come to be wielded on behalf of lower class whites, the starker the differentials in wealth that manifest especially in the aftermath of World War Two, the more tangible the relationship between the psychological wages of whiteness, and the material wage of whiteness becomes, right. So, in a sense, what was previously in the sort of spirit of this analysis to be understood as primarily psychological with little material benefits, becomes why, you know, the great era of redlining, as [inaudible 20:07] and others have pointed out, becomes a foundation for the redistribution of wealth in a profoundly racist and in a egalitarian way. And so that's when you start seeing the material wages, right. But yeah, this concept, I think has... it's not without its limitations, the notion of the psychological wage, but it has helped me better understand some of the fractures in the contemporary political landscape, some of the difficulties that have trailed, and really sort of insistently bedeviled efforts at coalition building. I don't know if for the benefit of elucidating that concept more clearly, it would be desirable to be more forthrightly psychoanalytic about it, and to sort of like really lay out with the aid of psychoanalysis like what may be playing out there. That will have its limitations, too look, I'm not saying that, like, you need to sharpen this concept by digging into Lacan. But, I think that it would be interesting to see what proponents of the psychological wage, as a heuristic, could do if they thought more and more about the psychic substrates of whiteness. But yeah, that's the rundown on a concept that as and why [inaudible 21:57] on Kathy Boudin and others that just came out, The Wages of Whites by Hari Kunzru has made clear. Still a concept that awards attention in our contemporary landscape.

Chiara: Yeah, it's interesting from an activist, I think the language of privilege has become so tired and really a way of ending a conversation rather than starting it. Whereas wages of whiteness provokes, I think, particularly an activist mentality of, well, if we're being... people are being paid to buy into the notion of whiteness, what's the countervailing force, and what would induce people to go on strike against whiteness, which is the thing that's has always appealed to me about Race Traitor, and I'm hearing a lot of resonances between David Rodieger and [inaudible 22:55] work there. But, I did have a question in the reading from Race Traitor about, it's on page five. "Race and racial thinking will exist as long as race is understood as an ontological category. That is, we believe that race is not a category to which we are chained by birth. Only when participation and whiteness is understood as an active choice, can we begin the real work of eliminating racial injustices." I'm on board so far. And then, "Abolishing whiteness is the only real way to translate the politics of race into the politics of class because it is only through dissolving the historically situated birth rights of American history that we can come to a fair, honest discussion of class and other issues of fairness." So, that I had a question about that you reminded me of when you were talking about the breakdown of coalitions and other ways on which some friends of yours might be privileged in class analysis over race analysis. So, the key phrase, again, is "Abolishing whiteness is the only real way to translate the politics of race into the politics of class." So, I guess the first question is, is that true? And then the second question is, is that desirable? Are we trying to translate the politics of race into the politics of class, because the politics of class is like the our language of politics. According to Aristotle it always comes back to this conflict between the rich and the poor. And so unless we can map or translate politics of race into those terms while retaining what's incommensurable, right, there's something to take up the... I don't know who got to the optional reading of Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, but it really was challenging and exciting thing and the place that they end there is in really wanting to insist on an ethic of incommensurability and it's... I'm wondering if something like that is at play for you when you're also thinking about the ways that the politics of race and class are operative now.

Dan-el: No, I had genuine, I have genuine difficulty with parts of our reading from Race Traitor. The difficulty originated in my worry that a few steps were being skipped in analysis. So, for one, as your question is brought into direct focus, it's not obvious why you would need to translate the politics of race into the politics of class. I mean, in the previous wage, you know, they talk a lot... moving from the question, how can you abolish whiteness? They make the case with the historical construction of race and for clarifying the historical destruction of race by clarifying their understanding of white spaces, and how these are discursively constituted. I mean, we'll talk about sort of... We could use the language of discourse, I think the language of discourse is problematic, though, because they're not only talking about discourse. And, in fact, it's not clear that they have a sort of fully worked out technology of discourse. But, you know, when they start--

Chiara: I mean, it's a propaganda pamphlet, it's not [inaudible 26:41]

Dan-el: Yeah, of course. I mean, I'm not gonna knock them for that. But, it's... in reading a piece, I kept returning to a work that I love, and I tried to cite as often as possible, Karen and Barbara Fields' Racecraft. And what I appreciate about Racecraft is that even in the coining of Racecraft, Karern and Barbara Fields make a point to emphasize that there is something almost magical about how this works, right. And like the magic in order to be decomposed fully does require this sort of like, very methodical analysis. So, you have to start by thinking about the relationship between colorism and race, between skin color and race. So, this is a trap that many people fall into, including folks who are in public context, keen to equate race with pigmentation. But, as the writers in Race Traitor make clear, even though they talk about skin color, race is not reducible to skin color, because race is an ontological proposition. This is... it gets us now to the material on page five. So, how does it come into being ontologically? This is something that, you know, understandably, because it's a pamphlet, they gloss over, like, they're not going to go into extended historical and phenomenological analyses of how race comes into being. But, they understand that race, in addition to having this ontological dimension, also has this material... And now we get to the aspect of their formulation that is from on page five that from what you quoted earlier, it has an economic dimension to it. It is therefore capable of and deserving of scrutiny from an economic vantage point, ideally one that would critique racial capitalism. And so this would be where the project of abolishing whiteness goes. But, and now I turn directly to the question you raised, it is not clear that's such a feat of translation of the kind that they summon as necessary, is one that needs to be undertaken if you assume that race and class are coextensive, and possibly even sort of share the same substance with each other. So, if it's a matter of discourse, then I can see why then I can see why it's important to engage in this act of translation, right? So, you would say, well, we have this discourse about race, and it has this very specific political manifestation. We have a discourse about class and it has also has a political manifestation. And we need some kind of bridge... some way of bridging between the two. But, if it turns out that race and racial thinking as ontological categories are also at the same time class categories, then it would seem that we need like a slightly different procedure of analysis. And if there is, for the reasons you pointed out, something like incommensurability, according to which you couldn't do this work of translation, because we're dealing with like, functionally discontinuous ontological phenomena, then why bother with it? Exactly. So I mean, this is where I start getting perplexed. But, I take the aspiration as meaningful, like I understand and agree with the authors of the piece that the game is to abolish whiteness. Where I think we would, you know, we would disagree is in theorizing both the ontogeny of this gap between race and class. I suspect we will also disagree on how to approach the relationship of race and class as comeasurables. And I think here I would want to play up the point that, you know, I do think racial capitalism is a thing and that like, we can talk about racial capitalism, but that we... in attempting to enact this kind of translation, we all too readily fall into the trap of reading races one to one with class. And so at that point, it may very well be, if for no other reason, then for the benefits of collective action, advisable to proceed as if the two require discussion on their own separate terms.

Chiara: Yes. And it's as though... I'm still thinking with your wages of whiteness, because it's as though each type of analysis may offer tools for understanding the other. So, abolishing whiteness, I take to mean, making it necessary that people actively choose to be white instead of just that's the default, whatever. So, if that's the case, then what would and if people aren't being paid in wages of whiteness to participate in, I get to one, white people get to be materially and psychically... a bit distasteful to articulate this ideology. But, what I'm trying to drive towards is that by taking wages, a term of analysis from the class struggle, and thinking about it in terms of race, the wages of whiteness, then you see that what the abolition of whiteness people are arguing for is they're saying that we could pay you something better than the wages of whiteness, we are paying you the possibility of conceiving yourself again as a human being in a new way. And that's what would tempt people to surrender this freedom not to think about race. And I think that's also a freedom that's hopefully understood in economic terms. Think about how much brainspace racial stress takes up. To ask people, white people, to give up that freedom of not having to think about race at every single moment. What could you pay them with? And I think this idea of, well, you wouldn't have to see yourself in such... how did they put it? If we're talking about themselves as human beings instead of as whites. And then that raises the stakes for those who wish to cling to whiteness. So, I think that those cross pollination of the discourses is potentially something that's really helpful. But, some of this is pointing up to me the... or it's raising a question for me about the usefulness of the factory metaphor that both Savio, FSM, and then [inaudible 35:30] Harney come back to. It's like people can't not want to think about the university in terms of the factory metaphor, and yes this is a place where I'm like, "Well, how do we bring a racial thinking about racial politics into the factory metaphor of the university?" Or is this an example of a moment when bringing class analysis to the study of the university erases race? I think that there's... one question I kept asking myself is this something that always sits uneasily with me about thinking about the university as a factory, and I don't think that that's just that administrators see it more as a... see students as consumers. That's one aspect of it that the factory model doesn't really capture. But, maybe this is another aspect of it, maybe it's a sense that the factory model doesn't capture the way that difference is made into a resource at the university while keeping it within permitted bounds and comfortable with the image of the university that it wants to promote.

Dan-el: Yeah, I mean, I wonder if the best way of strengthening the use of the analogy is do what would [inaudible 37:08] Harney invite us to do and to scale up the frame of analysis even more, right? So, we might think, for example of how factories and late stage in industrial capitalism recruit their laborers, where they recruit their laborers from, to what degree these recruitment patterns are driven by the patterning and overlays of migratory flows and racial configurations as the two mutually define and redefine each other. Where these factories are placed when the ecological impacts of their placements are... how they extract resources from the communities in which they're placed? And to where those resources get funneled? Right. So, if the analogy is to work, you know, it has its virtues as an analogy. It is because it forces us to expand the frame of reference by repositioning the university in a nexus, in the ecology of extractive social relations. And so that has important implications for how we read into and through some of the evasions or gaps in [inaudible 38:46] and Harney, you know, where our staff, for example, and their account where our contract staff? Where are seasonal laborers? And the answer to that question, I think vitally depends on how we purpose the analogy in ways that go beyond what they do with it. I think, to the answer of where the laborers are, where the most precarious employees of the university are. We've entered the answer that they are in the communities that are being exploited by the university. And their racial characteristics exist in direct dialogue with the extractive and exploitative practices of the university. And so this has a profound bearing on, you know, the standing Princeton's place in Mercer County for example, but we can generalize this to encompass other universities. I believe that Ivy League plus, the public flagships, in each case the factory analogy would invite us to pursue a much more searing account of the interrelatedness of the university and mechanisms of resource extraction, but also mechanisms of people management. So, here's where I think that the bureaucratic insight is important to universities in the business of managing people. And if we were to take [inaudible 40:42] and Harney further, we would say that this is done in a very fordist way. So, that's, I think, what's inviting and appealing about the analogy. But, there was something you had remarked earlier that I wanted briefly to touch on in sort of thinking, again, about how race and class play alongside and against each other in the various readings for this week, we could entertain more intensively and extensively... I think a camera just got dropped off. I think the baby monitor has dropped off. And the relationship of the university to questions of reparative and distributive justice. And to that end, we could think both about things like reparations and about things like divestment.

Chiara: Yeah.

Dan-el: In abolishing whiteness, and in following the appeal to dissolve the historically situated birthrights of American history, as [inaudible 42:13] state, are we to think of dissolving of the wealth that is concentrated in universities, in predominantly white institutions? How do you go about dissolving that wealth? How do you go about redistributing that wealth? And what kinds of collective action would be necessary to make that come into being?

Chiara: Yeah, what you're saying reminds me of a line from the [inaudible 42:49] article, where they remind us that all sorts of imperialist wars are often concealing this basic war against indigenous people. And they helped me travel this distance between reading Fanon and his understanding of decolonization as the structure of the the natives and against the colonists and the struggle over the land, against something different, which is settler colonialism where the settlers are here to stay. And what's radical about this article is that they insist on this possibility that I think has been completely muted, which is repatriation of indigenous lands. And it's a different situation than the ones that Fanon describes and analyzes in Algeria, because we're talking about what is now a minority population, indigenous people are .9% of the population in the US and restoring sovereignty to them, and how can we imagine that? How can we imagine that future? And they're really insistent that they don't have to be accountable to questions about well, what does that mean for seller future? What does that mean for white future? What does that mean for Princeton's future or [inaudible 44:27] future? And I found that really challenging and exciting perspective to encounter, and something that I think that the university is making that possible was exciting. But, it's an interesting article to think about in this light as well because it is collectively written by one indigenous scholar and one settler scholar. And so it brings back this question about coalition building that you were raising earlier and the ways that difference can be weaponized. But, also the ways that difference can be weaponized against the status quo, I suppose, by traversing that difference and writing together and so they write with their/our set of pronouns as I'm going through the article, which is, I think, one day I want to write a paper about the revolution on pronouns and what's going on now. They were like, trying to find ways not just in gender, but in in our collective pronouns as well in our individual pronouns, how do we think about who we are, it's changing and, and part of that is because of what [inaudible 45:42] and Harney, you know, this piece, I think, is from the very late '90s, so it's fashionably called The Cyborg Reification of knowledge. But it does have to do, I think they're right to call attention to the social dimension of the social production of academic knowledge. And to, I think, what they're doing is inviting us to inhabit that. So, they lay out to like, their own kind of double consciousness. One is the craftsman consciousness, the academic labor as an artisan who's producing something from out of their soul and shaping it, and it's wonderful, and it's beautiful. And there's a long tradition of this for people to draw on. And then there's another tradition, which is, oh, I actually realized that what I'm writing and thinking about is over determined by where I can get hired, by what's fashionable, by the conversation that's going on, by the factoryness of the university and the--especially at a public university, the the fact that education--we educate our citizens towards what we value at time or what the status quo values. And so that second subjectivity of the academic knowledge worker is, they don't want to say alienated, but maybe they say abused, I think, so exploited, not free in some important ways. And they, they end by inviting to inhabit it and find potentials for liberation in that social collective aspect of knowledge making and obviously, now, very different time. Easier to see and feel that that possibility and as well as just the necessity that... I don't know, one thing I think about is that although when people used to critique great books, courses and say, "Well, it's all so Western." And then the counter critics would say, "Well, you can't expect people to be experts in the Greco-Roman tradition, and the Indian tradition and the Buddhist tradition and... but now you can because now we can work collectively, if we are able to do this work of changing our messing with our pronouns, articulating them, articulating our pronouns, articulating our subjectivities into some kind of cyborg collective knowledge making.

Dan-el: And that I feel will augur well for projects that in the spirit of Julieta Singh and others seek to Unthink Mastery, right.

Chiara: I love that book.

Dan-el: It's a great book, strongly recommend it, it's awesome. But, there will be and, you know, this is something I hope will take up in our seminar discussions, there will be the inevitable pushback from folks within and beyond the academy who remain invested in an ideal of mastery, one that rejects categorically the ideas of distributed expertise, you know, the conception of a universal that is enriched by all that is particular to invoke [inaudible 49:28] resignation letter from 1956.

Chiara: Say it again.

Dan-el: The universal enriched by all that is particular. The universe enriched by every particular, the deepening and coexistence of all particulars. And that's the mountain to climb is to make that vision one that not just takes off, but, you know, in time receives some institutional backing both within and beyond the university. But again, it may very well be that the university in its present configuration because of its factory aspects is arrayed against the epistemic formations that would most faithfully give life to a universal that's enriched by all that's particular. And so yeah, then we just got to... we got to reimagine this university from scratch, so.

Chiara: This talk of the universal is making me feel like we ought to turn to Lucretius. And I don't feel bad that we left him till last, and to maybe the end of our energies. And maybe the way to bring him in is by asking the... asking of him the original questions of this class, so the original hypotheses of this class, which were, that classics have something to offer activists and that activists have something to offer the classics. And I confess that I struggled to think through these propositions with respect to Lucretius. I found myself looking for... I'm reading [inaudible 51:39] also at the same time, and you know how [inaudible 51:44] Virgil takes this one little leftover bit of the Iliad, which is that Aeneas is saved from his duel with Achilles because he's supposed to found, you know, he's his ancestors, his descendants are going to be the one who carry on the race of the Trojans. And so Virgil takes us up and spins this incredible, epic settler epic, to kind of interject into the past the Roman present and future, the Roman present and future Empire. And so we have roughly contemporaneous Virgil's is a, I think, really important colonizers story, trying to erase that colonization and make it somehow indigenous spaded. But, what I thought was important was that he took this leftover bit of the Iliad, and he spun it out of that. And so I was looking for a leftover bit in the Lucretius. And I was like, is there something here and this narrative about the coming to be of government and language and townships and the heart and the home? Is there like a supplement that we could then spin the coming to be story of the activist? You know, because otherwise, what we are left with here is a story about it's better to stay quiet and obey than to yearn for regal power and to govern kingdoms. You know, when you kill kings, things return to the utmost dregs of chaos. And a story in which law and government arise when humans are exhausted from the violence that they impose on one another. Whereas I think contemporary analysis says that says that law and violence just encode, law encodes violence, law perpetuates and extends the violence at the state at which, you know, the last state of the war gets encoded in the law until an activist or another force comes along to do a different violence, different sort of violence and upend it. I don't know. So, the question how did you read the Lucretius together with the other texts and did you find value in it for you, the activist part of yourself?

Dan-el: I had a hard time returning to lucretius and avoiding my own sort of, the sort of propulsive habit I have whenever I pick up Lucretius of going to the section in book three, book five instead, which is on [inaudible 54:47] I mean, there are other sections of Lucretius that I go back to often, I mean, this is amazing denunciation of twerking at the end of the book, for those who are interested. But, book three has been meaningful for me in the era of COVID. And I keep going back to this extraordinary meditation on, you know, why you shouldn't be afraid of death. And I was thinking a lot about one of the lines from that meditation in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. This is the line that Lucretius adapts from [inaudible 55:50] in which he writes, "Even good anchors had to die. So, who are you?" But, with this section of book five, I found something provocative and also, I mean, something pretty demoralizing about the possibility that, in fact, governance, and its potentials arise from exhaustion from just the fatigue that settles in after a bout of violence. And there's certainly a fair amount here that I think rewards the sort of an activist informed reading, I mean, so for one, we can think about the tension between one vision of time in this text, and then this stretch of text that is linear, and another that is cyclical, right. So, the linear one would read this kind of claim, it's not radically dissimilar from the theoretical projects in Angel political philosophy, it attempts to locate an origin story for, in the distant past, for the emergence of political institutions. And they say well, you know, in the past, there were, you know, these convulsions of violence, or alternatively, there were these frictions of households and communities coming together that were then followed by the emergence of some sort of super familial structure, ie. the polis. And this sort of works sequentially, but it could also work from like first principles as we see sort of tested out in Aristotle's Politics. But then there's the cyclical side, and this is what I find at once invigorating and disheartening. So, the idea here is that communities will fragment and [inaudible 57:51] running at a time where it seemed quite likely that the republican state would fall completely to pieces as it did. But then people would get tired of this eventually. And they would, at least those who survived, would get together. And they would try to sort some governance out. This is encouraging if you think that there may be an end to the surge of violence and the contemporary moment, but it is kind of a bummer if you think about what it takes to arrive at governance that can aspire to some semblance of effectiveness. It also mirrors, in a curious way, a series of arguments that have been put forward with increasing insistence by people who sort of orbits the political theories of folks like Michael Waltzer, whose book of philosophy I don't much buy but who did in a series of publications on citizenship, starting in the '70s and '80s, make this case that you have movements that are radically disruptive of the civic order, especially in democratic states, but people get tired. Fatigue sets in, and when they get tired this is when the machinery of governance is restored. Because and this is what I found most depressing about one of his articles, if you time the periods in which revolutionary or activist fervor is at its maximum, these are relatively brief and very concentrated. Now, I'm only representing his argument, I actually think he's like somewhat wrong about this, but I mean, we could set that aside. They're brief and very concentrated, Waltzer proposes, because even in democratic political orders people don't have the kind of energy that would be required for this, especially in the modern 20th and early 21st century context, people have a space that they have demarcated as private and they like private life, they want to retreat into their private life. And they like what comes with being able to claim a private life that is outside of the public view. Without a commitment to being in public view all the time all most participants in these movements will, at some point, walk away. I don't think this makes me happy, because there's an element of it that's true. I mean, I think it's borne out also by the tendency in many activist circles now to have meaningful conversations about things like self care, I mean, this is because burnout is real. But, it also might mean that every, every single movement has to develop a pretty robust theory of exhaustion. And some of us have sort of like and in thinking about activist work, have reached for this insight in different ways, perhaps without the vocabulary of exhaustion necessarily. So back in 2015, I came down to Princeton to lead an American Studies class before I rejoined the faculty. And I had a series of conversations with a student who was fairly involved in PJL work at that point and my question to that student was, how do you ensure that your work isn't co opted, and that you aren't, as a community too tired from the struggle to avoid it's being co opted. And we went back and forth about this, I think productively, but the concern, the mutual concern was that it's when the exhaustion sets in the cooptation can happen that consumerization can happen, that the metamorphosis of the activist work into a site for nostalgia can happen and that this then is the major conceptual and praxeological dilemma to attend to, it's how to think about exhaustion. So, Lucretious is I think pretty relevant.

Chiara: Yeah. I think that's really helpful. One of Mike and I's first joint campaigns was to combat activists burnout in the community of activists in Palestine. We called it Long Term Vision. And so as you're talking, I'm thinking about the ways in which the classics inculcate a sense of long term vision. And, and that they might do so precisely because you learn to inhabit and understand multiple kinds of temporality. So, there's a linearity and the cyclicality, but there's also the way in which you can position your move through different layers of time in the poem, the events being narrated, the author's time of narration, the reception of that poem, which shouldn't really be ghettoized as a separate field of study, but is, and then your own temporality and how it's touching you at this particular moment of, you know, which fascism is going to be confirmed in the United States. So, I think that that's a nice connection, but it brings us back to this question of soulcraft. And it leads us into that dangerous proposition that the classics are there to cultivate a certain type of soul. But this time we're saying that the classics can cultivate a certain kind of soul which is activist, certain kind of soul which is resilient and can wait through... I mean, I hope that student is alive today to see that the protests in 2015 bore fruit in 2020, and that they did get Wilson's name scrubbed from the school. And that those, there's a... it's true that protest movements are often short lived, but they also have a periodicity to them, and a recurrence to them that and those moments resonate with one another. But, it can be... Because the status quo always has the greater resources, their strategy is always going to be to outwait and to outlast whatever attack is coming at the door. And so it behooves activists to have a long term vision and to have a sense of the Trojan horses that we can use to get through the gates.