Speaker 1 0:00
I come to a conception of nature as art, and instead of saying that art imitates nature, to say that nature is deeply, fundamentally esthetic, and it's something that Darwin understood when he spoke at the end of Origin, the web of life. He spoke of endless forms, most beautiful.
PJ Wehry 0:23
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host PJ Wery, and I'm here today with Dr. Robert Harriman, the Owen L. Kuhn Professor of Argumentation and Debate at Northwestern University, and we're going to talk about his book Formal Objects on Beauty and Sustainability. Dr. Harriman, wonderful to have you on today. Thank you. Happy beer.
PJ Wehry 0:44
So, just off the bat, it's coming out. Oh, I just looked at it and I and I blanked. It's coming out soon, and so everyone should pre-order December. That's right. And by the time this episode comes out, it'll be it'll be nearing. Get those pre-orders in. But as we're looking at this book, formal objects. Why? Why this book?
Robert Hariman 1:07
The
PJ Wehry 1:08
short answer is because the time has come, and I don't mean that's the messiah of a book. I do mean
Speaker 1 1:16
you know the day of the rhetoric, But it's time for this book and others like it, and the time is that modernity is in a crisis, and particularly in respect to global warming. But that itself is a symptom of a larger set of problems where we're seeing just terrible amounts of dysfunction in every sphere-political, economic, social, cultural, and of course, environmental. It's becoming harder to distinguish between normal system operation and system breakdown, and so you know we're in a mess. And one of the basic assumptions of the book is that the mentality that got us into the mess is not sufficient to get us out of it, and so we need something else. We need a more ecological sensibility. We need, I think, a more formal sensibility. And so the idea was to reimagine formalism in order to address the existential crisis of the Anthropocene, and I'm hoping that this is part of the solution we need, and that people are finally ready to listen to it, because formalism has been, you know, either ignored or denigrated for the last 50 years, and that was part of a remarkable intellectual revolution within the humanities and the human sciences generally, but it's been 50 years, and it's not going to be sufficient to do the heavy lifting that we now have to do. So it's time for this book, for other books. All of them are at this point very partial attempts to try come up with a new language for dealing with the problems of the 21st century.
PJ Wehry 3:09
Let me ask real quick. I wasn't sure when you said what it's. You mentioned that something is not sufficient to solve the problems that we're facing. Is that the intellectual revolution that happened in the humanities, or is that the or is that formalism? It's no, no. Formalism is you know what's being brought back into play. I would hope. Yes.
Speaker 1 3:30
Okay. So in other words, we need to recover lots of resources, indigenous wisdom, but also resources within the intellectual history of the West, and formalism is one such option. So, and I want to be clear: we need everything. We need technological innovation. We need market solutions. We need governmental policies. We need lifestyle changes. We need all of that, and that involves a lot of experimentation and also some careful planning, but that alone won't be enough. And so some of us have come to think that we need a fundamental reorientation, a kind of mindfulness that will help us recover what needs to be recovered, innovate in ways that aren't just bound by current assumptions, particularly Design assumptions that will give us a basis for you know getting through the crisis,
I come to a conception of nature as art, and instead of saying that art imitates nature, to say that nature is deeply, fundamentally esthetic, and it's something that Darwin understood when he spoke at the end of Origin, the web of life. He spoke of endless forms, most beautiful.
PJ Wehry 0:23
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host PJ Wery, and I'm here today with Dr. Robert Harriman, the Owen L. Kuhn Professor of Argumentation and Debate at Northwestern University, and we're going to talk about his book Formal Objects on Beauty and Sustainability. Dr. Harriman, wonderful to have you on today. Thank you. Happy beer.
PJ Wehry 0:44
So, just off the bat, it's coming out. Oh, I just looked at it and I and I blanked. It's coming out soon, and so everyone should pre-order December. That's right. And by the time this episode comes out, it'll be it'll be nearing. Get those pre-orders in. But as we're looking at this book, formal objects. Why? Why this book?
Robert Hariman 1:07
The
PJ Wehry 1:08
short answer is because the time has come, and I don't mean that's the messiah of a book. I do mean
Speaker 1 1:16
you know the day of the rhetoric, But it's time for this book and others like it, and the time is that modernity is in a crisis, and particularly in respect to global warming. But that itself is a symptom of a larger set of problems where we're seeing just terrible amounts of dysfunction in every sphere-political, economic, social, cultural, and of course, environmental. It's becoming harder to distinguish between normal system operation and system breakdown, and so you know we're in a mess. And one of the basic assumptions of the book is that the mentality that got us into the mess is not sufficient to get us out of it, and so we need something else. We need a more ecological sensibility. We need, I think, a more formal sensibility. And so the idea was to reimagine formalism in order to address the existential crisis of the Anthropocene, and I'm hoping that this is part of the solution we need, and that people are finally ready to listen to it, because formalism has been, you know, either ignored or denigrated for the last 50 years, and that was part of a remarkable intellectual revolution within the humanities and the human sciences generally, but it's been 50 years, and it's not going to be sufficient to do the heavy lifting that we now have to do. So it's time for this book, for other books. All of them are at this point very partial attempts to try come up with a new language for dealing with the problems of the 21st century.
PJ Wehry 3:09
Let me ask real quick. I wasn't sure when you said what it's. You mentioned that something is not sufficient to solve the problems that we're facing. Is that the intellectual revolution that happened in the humanities, or is that the or is that formalism? It's no, no. Formalism is you know what's being brought back into play. I would hope. Yes.
Speaker 1 3:30
Okay. So in other words, we need to recover lots of resources, indigenous wisdom, but also resources within the intellectual history of the West, and formalism is one such option. So, and I want to be clear: we need everything. We need technological innovation. We need market solutions. We need governmental policies. We need lifestyle changes. We need all of that, and that involves a lot of experimentation and also some careful planning, but that alone won't be enough. And so some of us have come to think that we need a fundamental reorientation, a kind of mindfulness that will help us recover what needs to be recovered, innovate in ways that aren't just bound by current assumptions, particularly Design assumptions that will give us a basis for you know getting through the crisis,
PJ Wehry 4:32
and so and I'm curious. You talk about rebooting formalism. What is formalism? Why did it get denigrated and kind of cast aside? And how does where do you think the reboot would take us?
Speaker 1 4:47
Okay, and and reboot though is my term isn't quite right because that would mean just bringing back what was there before. No, but
PJ Wehry 4:54
that's I
Speaker 1 4:55
opened that door, but
PJ Wehry 4:56
reinvigorate maybe I don't reinvigorate
Speaker 1 4:59
reimagine. Reimagine, yes. You know, formal. Very simply, formalism is the study of form. It's the attention to ways in which any artifact or organism or organization or anything is created and sustained through internal relationships, and then determining the relation between those relations and contextual factors, environmental factors, so forth. So, what is it that distinctively forms the object or art or organism? And then, how does that organization function? What does it do for it? How does it supply fitness, for example, and one of the arguments of the book is that beauty and fitness, beauty and utility, in fact, converge. That they're typically seen as opposites, and that gets us into the history of formalism because formalists themselves were very quick to say that this is about art that is not useful. This is about beauty, not utility. This is about the ascetic experience uncontaminated by politics, and they didn't all say that, but enough of them did. Such, yeah. Okay, and so formalism had a reputation for being apolitical, or worse, an ideological tool for elite domination, and it certainly was that some of the time. But that's not the formalism I want to deal with anyway. That's not my formalism. So instead, we said, "Well, how can we learn from our critics, and how can we revisit the history of formalism, which is a very strange history. It's just not canonical, and it's a motley of of you know absolutely world class philosophers, and you know rank amateurs, and everything in between.
Speaker 1 6:55
And and some are apolitical, and some are highly progressive, and some you might say have issues. So,
PJ Wehry 7:06
do you mind throwing out some names and some like who would be some examples that are illustrative of kind of the apolitical that you still find useful? The ones who have issues, whether you find maybe you find them useful or not, and then maybe people are more in your direction.
Speaker 1 7:23
Yeah, the I mean Clive Bale, you know, formalism as it was established in art history early in the century, as it was established in literary studies mid-century, so forth. So as when we were reading about well rod urns and things like that, so they're very clear movements, you know, within various disciplines where you could say, okay, now I think you can go back and revisit those and see it wasn't quite as pure as as claimed or hoped for those who like to use it as a foil, but nonetheless, you know that was there, and and it too was a response to you know the political circumstances of the time. Not necessarily the best response, but but when the academy took a hard turn into critique, as it did in the '70s and beyond, that was a very important term, and it said that we are interested in politics, we are interested in practice, we are interested in not just understanding how art works, but understanding how society works, and so that was important, important development, and it gave us, you know, every movement we have since then, from feminism, queer theory, so forth and so on. But curiously, now you've got queer theorists who are, you know, have are taking a ecological turn, and you have feminists who are taking ecological turn, and and all and so forth, and Marxists, but often they're sort of handicapped by their own intellectual history, and that they don't have formal. I mean, my favorite example of all this is an index entry I saw in a book, which will go unnamed, which said formalism, error of the error of formalism. That's all it was-a mistake. So you can and you can see how that came about. But the way I'd rather think about it is: it may be the case that the right political problem for formalism has finally arrived; that it wasn't geared to deal with questions of justice straight up. It is geared to deal with questions of. Sustainability, and in particular of developing a just and sustainable society, it is geared for thinking about systems and system failure, and across any kind of system. Well, when we're seeing comprehensive systemic problems, systemic collapse. Maybe we need a new vocabulary, and so and that's typical of any paradigm shift going back to Thomas Kuhn and structural scientific revolutions. It's not that what people are doing is wrong; it's just that anomalies start to develop. There are questions they can't answer that effectively. They can't even pose the questions that effectively. New questions are introduced, and eventually you get a shift in the attention space. And it's not that the old problems disappear; that they're realigned with new problems subsumed under them. You develop a new conceptual vocabulary, and some of the old questions are answered, some are not. Some new questions are answered, some are not. But there is a clear shift in the attention space, or the problem space, and a clear shift in what the grounding assumptions of inquiry are, what the proper object and method should be, and so forth. So we had it. We had a scientific revolution in the humanities 50 years ago, and maybe time for another one. And formalism might be part of that. I'm not saying it need be the whole of
PJ Wehry 11:41
it. That's why you said this book and others like it, which I appreciate. That
Speaker 1 11:45
yeah, no, it's so. But I don't know about others, but by the time I finish a book, I know everything that's wrong with it. But but you have to stop.
PJ Wehry 12:00
Yeah, yeah. At some point, yeah,
Speaker 1 12:02
yeah, and they're all partial attempts. I mean, particularly, you can only do so much in in any way. Yes, I wanted to
PJ Wehry 12:14
ask you when you talk about, and I think this is something we've talked about in this channel before with different guests, but I'd love to hear you articulate it. When you talk about scientific revolutions in the humanities, we have this weird inheritance of science and humanities fighting each other, right? So, when you say a scientific revolution in the humanities, what do you mean?
Speaker 1 12:38
I mean a ground level change in the production of knowledge. I use science in that sense more in the European sense, where it just means discipline, formal inquiry, so forth. One of the key promises of formalism is that it is oriented towards working in both the arts and the sciences, it's something that can be a shared vocabulary. It's also geared for working across nature and culture, and so you know I have this term formal objects, but they're both natural and artifactual. So so formalism says this is a theory that doesn't have to honor these distinctions between art and science, nature and culture, and human and non-human.
PJ Wehry 13:33
Which, as as you talk about the ecological turn, was what you're saying when like it's the moment for formalism to arrive, right? Yeah, that's right. What? So, what? What are your the specific resources that you the the methods that you see coming out of formalism that help you answer specific questions?
Speaker 1 13:53
Well, part of that is what the book is about. I came. I'm using the term formal objects, which is a term of art, and it's used in a number of disciplines, from scholastic philosophy to the philosophy of the emotions today, and so forth. All of them are relatively anesthetic in their use, whereas I'm using it with a decidedly esthetic inflection. So, a formal object is a very familiar thing, natural or cultural, both right. A formal object is a very familiar artifact. Let's say that's widely recognized and valued for its esthetic, in particular, formal properties. And so I have several examples: shells, yeah, silhouettes, ruins, ornaments, and then I also have some shadow objects because these are provisional. In fact, you could flip them. So a shell. I also talk about the spiral, spirals, and with the silhouette, I also. Talk about rituals. They're both relatively empty social artistic forms. And with ruins, I talk about fossils. And and with ornament ornamentation generally, I talk about plants and the way plants figure. And there, I ultimately, you know, I come to a conception of nature as art, and instead of saying that art imitates nature, to say that nature is deeply, fundamentally esthetic, and it's something that Darwin understood when he spoke at the end of Origin, the web of life. He spoke of endless forms, most beautiful, and I love that phrase. And so, this endless generativity that is observed formally through the continual generation, replication of forms, and that beauty has something important to do with it. That if we don't recognize how it's beautiful, even though that is of course anthropocentric, don't lean into that beauty. We're not going to fully or adequately understand it. In fact, we're pitched very quickly towards very instrumental conceptions of knowledge, and with that of nature, and then nature becomes alienated, objectified, mute, and of course, tailor made for exploitation.
PJ Wehry 16:36
What something you said at the very start of our conversation that I think is a great thread to draw on here is the idea of sensibility, and so how does the role? What is the role of sensibility in your project?
Speaker 1 16:53
Great question. The one way to answer is to say that for all all that we get from scientific knowledge, and we're living through a second scientific revolution. It's just unbelievable what has been going on even before onboarding AI. So, if you want to marvel at something, marvel at modern science. But for all of that, we need another kind of knowledge called esthetic knowledge, and esthetic knowledge is fundamentally relational. You, as a subject, are always in some relationship with what is being known. So you attend your standpoint. You extend to that relation. You recognize how it is socially constructed, so forth. It's fundamental, but also how it is ethically significant. So you're always in a relation with something. It's embodied cognition, which is so the emotions are always involved, and it's engaged. It it really is realized only through communication, and so there can be a rhetorical dimension to it. Where, and I see art somewhat rhetorically, obviously, but I see nature somewhat rhetorically. That it is always competing for attention, whether it's the attention of the bee or Whatever, and so, so there is a sense that we need esthetic knowledge as part of the overall, you know, repertoire of the ways of knowing. We also need spiritual knowledge and other things. I mean, people can speak to that, but and you know that. Oh, you're a professor of
PJ Wehry 18:43
rhetoric. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1 18:44
and spiritual knowledge and the wisdom tradition is closely adjacent to formalism in some very significant ways, but there's also a misunderstanding that can come there, which is that people think quite rightly, because it started with Plato, that if you're talking about a world of forms, you're talking about another transcendent realm, places Plato said beyond heaven, and the forms themselves are fundamentally self-sufficient, pure, unmixed, untouchable, known only through the mind and only by very few minds, and so forth. So you're getting this transcendental, or if you come from some of the Asian traditions, it's a world of appearances where they align with Plato, but also where you're continually trapped on the wheel of desire, and that too we find in Plato. So, but basically, you need to get out of this world. You need to get into this transcendental realm. You have to see how reality is an illusion. You have to become free of your desires, and I reject all of that. So,
PJ Wehry 19:51
you're happy to be here.
Speaker 1 19:52
Well, grateful, and that's what Aristotle provided. Said no forms are actually part of part of and a very important part of this world, and they're here not as copies of another world, but as actual material, organizing energetic processes, and so. But I'm not grounded just in Aristotle. So it's I'm taking much more you know, modern, much more eclectic group because I think that's necessary. I mean, if you want a risk-healing theory of form, it's out there. You can go grab it. It's a history of commentary and so forth. But we need more than that. So, anyway, to get back to all this. Yeah, the sensibility involves leaning into. It's not so much freedom from a world of appearances that we all desire. It's leaning into beauty. It's leaning into ecology, into sustainability, into ecological solidarity, trying to be to unlearn some things to become more open, such that you then can participate in the world, not as one who names and dominates it, but as in relationships of resonance and reciprocity, what Robin Kimmer others call kinship, so forth. And beauty provides the resources for doing that, and so I think sensibility is very much an issue. But you have to think it through a bit, and it can't just be merely intuitive or emotional. You do have to have a language. You have to have a vocabulary. You should be able to talk about it with other people. You should be able to argue about it with other people, so forth. So, by sensibility, I don't just mean a way of sensing the world. I mean a way of being centered in the world and in a world of forms, and how that might invite us into a different, better understanding of nature, which is already there. I'm not having to invent it. Lots of people are articulating it, and a lot of beautiful writers articulating it. But the question is how to really operationalize it, make it part of your life and part of your collective life, and I think we need a language for that. And so this was one attempt to start saying, "Well, these are some terms. And so if I talk about shells and trying to understand shells, I come up with some a few concepts. The same thing with silhouettes. Same thing with runes, so forth, and certain distinctions. So ruins and fossils give us a way of thinking about the relationship between historical time and deep time. The
PJ Wehry 22:52
yeah. I so as I'm listening to you, and I just want to make sure that I'm tracking with you here. I would love to hear who are some of the authors that you think write beautifully. But what I'm hearing from you is that there's a common kind of esthetic proverb in, I would say, Western culture, maybe American culture. There's no accounting for taste, and what you're trying to provide is not necessarily the beautiful writing about nature. You're trying to provide the language that allows us to give an accounting of taste or of sensibility, so that we can properly focus our attention on the right sorts of problems and the right sorts of solutions.
Speaker 1 23:35
Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm poor on names on short notice. Oh, no worries. Yeah, but from Wendell, Wendell Berry, Robin Kimmer. Oh, okay. So many. Oh, you said Kimmer. Okay,
PJ Wehry 23:46
okay, yeah.
Speaker 1 23:47
I mean, there are so many. And
PJ Wehry 23:51
and Dillard, Annie Dillard. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 23:54
No, but I don't. I don't want to say that's great, but it's not good enough. so
PJ Wehry 24:04
you're you're in an ecosystem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're filling the needed gap. Yeah, it
Speaker 1 24:09
applies, but yeah, there are two basic misconceptions about beauty. One is that's universal, and something that exists independently of cultural inflection, for example, or that if there's cultural inflection, that's just you know icing on top, froth, or something. And the other is that it's entirely subjective. And we, you know, each of them has a certain intuitive sense to it. We recognize that there's no accounting for tastes. So, I might like garden gnomes, and you might look at my library and say, "How could a guy read that like garden gnomes? The. And I do like garden gnomes more than brutalist architecture, for example. But I can argue about that. I can talk about why the one alienates and why the other reenchants, and so forth. But the esthetic is, in fact, a much, much bigger, richer intermediate realm. You know, as John Dewey said, it's it's a public realm, and these are things we we share in common, and we share them with other species, even though we, you know, we have to be very careful about that. But you know, even some of the science now and so forth is saying, well, actually, it's not entirely mistaken to be, you know, even as we learn how different species communicate, even though we recognize we can't think like a bat. But nonetheless, as we think about beauty and economies of attention and things like that, Darwin was onto something.
PJ Wehry 26:16
I will say, I I've been looking at architecture recently, and I was really attracted at first to biophilic architecture. But the the brutalist influence for a lot of biophilic architecture was very confusing to me. It felt very like I love the idea of biophilic, and I've seen some that I really like, but the the the sudden huge walls of concrete cutting through. Anyways,
Speaker 1 26:44
I think, I mean, if we're just going to shoot from the hip, not talking about any specific works or architects, but it could be what you're seeing is based on an insufficient understanding of ornament. So if you're just putting a lot of ivy on a brick wall and calling it biophilic, or putting a few trees in an otherwise a no-make atrium and calling it biophilic-that's really not it. It's not what it should be. So there were several architects I leaned on. One was Christopher Alexander, another was Lars Brady, another was Lance Hosey, who unfortunately has passed. But and many many others. But I so at some point we really do need to pay attention to architectural theory here, and these are three people, and you know there are issues with each of them. Alexander had a skyscraper size ego, so forth. Sverbeck may be working on Ruskin, maybe too esoteric for some readers, and things like that. But Posey may be a little too programmatic. But they each had powerful understanding of the of what is needed, and as you know, as Hosey said, you know, alternative energy is important. Alternative design is essential.
PJ Wehry 28:14
Yeah, yeah, it really is. I mean, we anyways. That's I don't I don't know if you want to veer off into that direction, but that that is maybe as an example of what we're talking about. I think it's it could be really useful because I I've been studying a little bit of this kind of stuff. Not it's adjacent to what what your book is about, and for instance, we have a three-mile walk around wetlands that are buried in the the midst of our suburban neighborhood, and my poor wife. Every time we walk, there's always there's strips of grass alongside, and one of the sprinklers is always broken, and it's just gushing water, and every time I'm like, "Why? There's so many better options than a lawn, and I just got the book that that traces it from to English aristocracy, right? Like the the the meeting of lawns, and we're having a water table crisis in Central Florida, and I'm like, I'm like, why am I like? And our HOA is like, hey, your lawn looks bad. Also, you can't water it. And so I can see that the HOA is struggling, and it's just, it's very like. And I think this goes back to working or broken systems. It's like we're just in an impossible situation where we have people who are relying on cutting grass for jobs, we have people at the same time who are like it's written into the league the the rules that you get fined if your lawn looks bad, but then there's like there's no water, you know. It's and because Florida isn't. Made for lawns, anyways. I don't know if that.
Speaker 1 30:02
And one question: Why is it always broken? Why isn't it being fixed? You know, John Dewey said the opposite of the esthetic is, you know, slackness, laziness, the humdrum, just you know, indifference, which is what's killing us nowadays in in so many domains, but particularly environmentally. So you know, why is it allowed to be to be broken? Why isn't it fixed so far? Well, and you. far, it's always a
PJ Wehry 30:43
different
Speaker 1 30:44
one. There's what?
PJ Wehry 30:47
It's always a different one because the way it's this is actually yeah, it's actually so they're always fixing them and they're always getting broken, which is almost worse because it's not an easy like hey you're slacking on your job. It's like the way was designed is slack. Bad
Speaker 1 31:02
design. So you know. So I mean, one way or the other, it's either bad design or bad maintenance, and we have too much of both. All over. Yeah. So, and that's what happens when you're this ridiculously affluent society living on scarcity models, you know. So saying that we can't raise taxes, we can't, you know, we can't mobilize the vast amounts of wealth that are now circulating. So I mean, there are deeper problems there too. But part of what the book is about is again getting away from the alignment of ecology and scarcity, saying that in order to have a just and sustainable society, we have to have fewer people, we have to have fewer resources, we have to live without this, this, this, and this. And you know, in the short term, you can always say, yeah, we. Why do we all have? Why did I don't? Why as many people have storage lockers? I mean, it's just nuts. Oh
PJ Wehry 32:08
yeah,
Speaker 1 32:08
yeah, and so forth. But in the long run, no. Is that nature, which of course involves scarcity processes, survival of this is real. Just constant impersonal competition is real. You know, fear and death is nature's way of doing business, but nature is also incredibly abundant, unbelievably abundant, generative, and you know, when I talk about ornament, what ornament demonstrates about form is its its incredible generativity, its space-filling function. It just replicates constantly, as do what we call weeds, but all kinds of what we
PJ Wehry 33:03
call weeds, yeah.
Speaker 1 33:05
But the point is, yes, we may need simplicity. Yes, we need we need different economies. Absolutely, but we don't have to give up on abundance. Life should still be a life where you're not gritting your teeth, where it can be full of joy, where everyone can have what they need to live, and so forth. So I think that's a really important element of this formalism. That the point is not to get back to some sort of classical repose where everything is in supposedly white marble, you know, overlooking the Aegean, but a world that's full of plants and full of life.
PJ Wehry 33:55
So it looks very different. Yeah, there may be some of the similar methods, but it looks very different from the. the your intellectual ancestors of your argue of your argument,
Speaker 1 34:06
yeah, and you know, and that's why other books certainly means people writing from other parts of the globe. I mean, one argument is that this whole project should be done by people from the global south and indigenous societies. They are the people who have contributed the least to global warming, and they suffer the worst effects. So, but on the other hand, as Amitav Ghosh and others have argued, the West is a central player here, like it or not. The fact we lead the world in climate science, climate advocacy, and climate denial. So it's our trifecta, and so I can't be those other writers, but we can say, well, what is it within the Western tradition that nonetheless could be rediscovered? Reimagined, put to work, maybe because its time has come.
PJ Wehry 35:07
Yeah, and I wanted to ask you. You've mentioned the Anthropocene. It's kind of written into the book. Some of what you're mentioning sounds like some other kind of hot terms, like not I won't even say hot terms. Some commonly used terms like late stage capitalism, and I think I know I'm starting to understand the shape of your argument enough, the form of your argument enough, but why Anthropocene over like late stage capitalism as kind of the target,
Speaker 1 35:43
right? That's a question you know I had to address right away. Why Anthropocene? Why sustainability? Why nature? Those all those terms have been subject to significant critique. My argument is fundamentally pragmatic: is that there are other terms: capitalocene, plantationocene. In fact, there's a nice article I can give you has identified 80 some terms, and and I mention, and yeah, that is the first reaction, and I I can't say I don't appreciate it, but but every one of those terms is useful in some contexts, and some of the time, plantational scene is exactly what we should be thinking about, particularly when you're putting the foundry on top of the plantation site and so forth, and when black folk are being moved from one system into another with not a whole lot of improvement. So those terms all have value. There's no doubt about that. But they're all more esoteric, or they all ask you to sign on to projects that you may not want to sign on to. And you know, Anthropocene has its problems. I mean, the idea is it distributes blame instead of having it focused on the few bad actors who are most responsible, and it clearly is used that way by some of those bad actors, maybe all of them. But this is a term that now has widespread currency across the sciences, across public culture, within the arts, there are critics everywhere, of course. But it's something that is recognized, and you know most of the people using it are using it critically. I mean, they're not fools; they recognize the problems, but they're saying Anthropocene, and then they're zeroing in on fossil fuel companies. They're using Anthropocene, and they're zeroing in on microplastics, and so they're very aware what the problems are. I think there's not a lack of critical consciousness among you know millions of people who use the term Professional and advocacy settings, and so forth. And you know, what does it ask of you? Is its fundamental assumption to recognize that you're human. It doesn't ask you to overthrow capitalism. You know, which is a pretty heavy lift. You know, Frederick James said, "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than imagine the end of capitalism. So, you know, it doesn't ask you to have a position on the role of the South in American history, so forth. So, it's a much more cost-efficient term to use a term some people will hate. But so I think that, and the same thing goes with nature. Nature's been term has been a bedrock for oppressive ideologies, as Stacy Almano says. But on the other hand, it's a really useful term, and people resonate to it, and that resonance is important. Same thing with sustainability. People say sustainability just means reproducing the status quo, and you know I know a lot of people use that term, and none of them want to reproduce the status quo, and for a very simple reason: the status quo is not sustainable,
PJ Wehry 39:22
right?
Speaker 1 39:24
That's the first basic assumption. The status quo is not the sustainable society. Is not this society? It's the one we need to create. So
PJ Wehry 39:36
do we answer? Oh, go ahead.
Speaker 1 39:37
I mean, these are I think are much much of the time, strawman arguments to say, "Well, you shouldn't be using this term or that term. And academics love to argue over terms like that and stake out positions accordingly. But I think if you're really focusing on a much more public approach to creating a better world. We need to use terms that we need both critical attentiveness and familiar terms.
PJ Wehry 40:11
Now, when you talked about the, we talked about sensibility and we talked about mindfulness. How does mindfulness towards sustainability? What does that look like? Kind of, I want to be respectful of your time here, but
Speaker 1 40:25
the short answer is there is
PJ Wehry 40:31
there a practical example you can give us, or like a concrete example?
Speaker 1 40:35
There, one is it just means being attentive to the way in which we already are surrounded by forms. Turn around and look at the way your books are organized, right? In those very nice bookies, so the way we put knives, forks, and spoons into a drawer, the way in which we admire a screen pass, you know, you know, a give and go, a line dance, a break dance. There are all sorts of ways in which we already live in a world of forms, and it was part of this just slowing down, taking a breath, and appreciating. If you look around you, everything is form, and some of it is what we call clutter, which itself is its own esthetic, and some of it is much more severe. One example I worked through a bit in the book is the movie *Perfect Days* directed by Bimber. Marvelous, marvelous movie about a middle-aged man who spends his workday cleaning toilets in Tokyo, and the rest of the day lives this very simple, highly ritualized life, getting up and washing, going to work and eating, doing his errands and so forth, and all the while when he's car listing this uncanny mixtape of '60s rock songs, so which throws you off a little, and rightly so, because I talk about the uncanny as being important part of formal appeal, being on the edge of the uncanny battle. But anyway, it's a marvelous movie, and as you and it's very slow, so the pacing is. But as you go through it, you start asking, "Who is this guy? And you first you think he's a low-skilled worker, and then a recluse, and then neurodivergent, and then a Zen monk, and and each of these sorts of falls away, and then you finally realize he's an ordinary person living a mindful life, and and it and then it you know you can identify all the other ways the director has worked in subtle forms, even a tic-tac-toe game, as part of it, and it's a beautiful movie. And it's it's not wholly idealized because as part of this, you realize he's traumatized. He, for all his mindfulness, he may be stuck, such that you can't just say, "Oh, we should all be like him. That, in fact, he may be needing to take a step that, for some reason, he can't take. That the resources provided by the mindful life he has are insufficient for what is actually needed, and so you get to the fundamental problem: Does you know does beauty give us happiness or just the promise of happiness? And maybe only the promise is enough for some, but maybe we might need to push further. So even the example I would give of someone living a very mindful life, and other critics have recognized there's a certain mindfulness to it, at least one. The we don't want to stop with any one example. Just as I've identified a lot of time on formal objects and their shadows, there are others, and and other ways we could be talking together about what it means to live in a just and sustainable society that is yet to be designed. But the one thing I'm sure of is, if we do have a sustainable society, we don't want
PJ Wehry 44:34
it to be ugly. Well, it won't sustain. People will see it zach body.
Speaker 1 44:40
I mean, there's two sides to it. If it did sustain, that means we're stuck with
PJ Wehry 44:45
it,
Speaker 1 44:46
and it's ugly. So your life is already degraded, but it wouldn't be sustainable if it's ugly,
PJ Wehry 44:55
because it has to be something that people would want.
Speaker 1 44:58
Has to be something people would want. It's because there are certain efficiencies and certain affinities with natural processes that we find in beauty that would be trammeled otherwise.
PJ Wehry 45:16
And I think that it's interesting because it feels like we've kind of trailed off a little bit, but that feels like a great summary of kind of the the entire project. If I could ask you one more question,
Speaker 1 45:31
sure.
PJ Wehry 45:31
Besides buying and reading your excellent book, you know, and seeing the, but seeing kind of this rejuvenation, the not refreshing. I you have said that reorient no, you have said this word reimagining the reimagining of formalism. I could not. I wrote it down. I couldn't find it. Yeah. But besides buying and reading your book, for someone who has listened to this conversation, what would you recommend they do or think about for the next week in response?
Speaker 1 46:11
That's a good question. I think attentiveness is a key. So you'd say, what does this mindfulness involve? Well, it involves thinking in terms of both the individual and the collective, the local and the global, the human and the non-human, historical time, deep time. So, starting with what is right in front of you, see what's there, and then try move out from that. How does that articulate? At what point does friction start developing? It's a beautiful plant. You start moving out. It's a ugly building, and maybe the plant is there to compensate the pervasive ugliness. What if it were the other way around? It was a beautiful building, and you had a bit of a mess on your desk. That might be a better arrangement. So part of it is just starting with a certain attentiveness and working out from there. And you know, I should say, I'm a terrible example. I'm so I'm I'm the guy who said to my wife one day, "Has that plant always been in the stretching room at the gym? There seems to be a new plant in there in the corner. She says, "No, it's always been there. Well, I've been going there for 10 years, what? Oh man, I was focused on other things, you know, like my all-important hamstrings, whatever it might be. So, so just working on mindfulness in the sense of attentiveness to where you are, and and to what extent the environment is a source of assurance and education and hospitality, to what extent it is a a form of friction, imposition, something like that. The other thing I think is to get beyond some of the assumptions, get beyond the scarcity assumption, get beyond the idea that a formal esthetic life is a contemplative life and not a life of work and play. Get beyond the idea that that beauty exists ultimately in some other realm, not this one. That and particularly, it's in terms of the history of formalism. It's important to stress that people think of it as monocultural. If you're a formalist, you're imposing a single esthetic on people, and that typically is a classical esthetic. And one of the arguments of the book is that all the way through formalism, save for the blight of Plato, Plato is very important. He's a blight on inquiry today. That in fact diversity is central to formalism. Forms Replicate forms generate forms transform because of the continual diversity in formal processes. They're absolutely dependent upon, and you know, monocultural regimes kill. And life is fundamentally diverse. And so, getting away from these assumptions that better design is necessarily modernist asceticism, that a just and sustainable society necessarily means doing with less, with too much, doing without some. Things are really important for life, like other people, you know, so forth. I don't think we need to reduce our population, and I don't like because I know how that is typically done.
PJ Wehry 50:15
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 50:17
So I mean, there are numbers. So so being attentive first of all to the place they're in, and second of all to the assumptions that are informing the discourses we have now about global warming and our other crises, and the way in which we could approach them. A
PJ Wehry 50:35
beautiful answer, Dr. Herman. It's been an absolute joy having you on. Thank you.
Speaker 1 50:40
Well, thank you. I've enjoyed.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai