Episode 2: What the seagrass said

The world comes up as you move forward. But it’s like co-arising as we make it, right, like so we are making the world as we move. But you can’t see it before your foot touches down on whatever that ground is.

We’re talking about relationality, a vision of life’s radical interdependence, and we’re trying to define it. I’m with Kriti Sharma and Michal Osterweil, whose new book, Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human, which they coauthored with Arturo Escobar, came out on May 16th. Reading the book, trying to take in their argument that to survive the world’s crises, we need to cultivate new ways of knowing, I am struck by how their mode of exposition takes up and cares for their argument’s reach for being otherwise. Since Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse partially inspired this podcast, it makes sense that I became animated by the book’s method. How do we get ideas across when they might not fit within given frameworks of legibility? What is this moving forward in the faith that a future will rise up to meet us?

I am Lette Bragg, and this is Many Academies, and this episode focuses on what it means to write in the middle of things. Talking to Kriti and Michal about their new book, I wonder what it takes to enact in our writing a theory of living at odds with what we know. First, though, we need to figure out why relationality is so hard to define. Why is it so hard to accept a relationality or to fully understand what it means?

It’s hard for anybody, but it’s also like specifically difficult for those of us enculturated into sort of the modern episteme, because it really feels like there’s no way of acting in the world without it being prior and external and for the world to exist intrinsically. That’s kind of how we know causation works, or how we know that reality is. And it feels like if we take that away, that there’s no means of understanding the world, of acting well within it, of even prediction. You know, any of these things that we’ve come to rely on quite a lot, not only to kind of exploit or manipulate the world in capitalist terms, but also to have sort of an existential place in it. And so, yeah, I think it’s particularly difficult for the subjects that we have been made as, in the last, I guess we could say, hundreds of years, you know, over the course of hundreds of years of colonization and sort of enlightenment thinking.

But I do want to say that the striving for legibility is so much of why we wrote this book. Right? Like, I mean, even I, I think we would both agree that that’s a political project because, especially in part of what we’re trying to do with the book is to say, like, look, we all are actually having these glimpses of relationality, if not like living on that plane. And the fact that we can’t put it into something, whether it’s words or, you know, and I think we say this a few times, like poetry might be more apt than prose, right? especially academic prose as a way of trying to get at this, but like, it’s like we need that because we are homo narrans, right? Like we need the capacity to narrate this into our existence because it’s politically vital that we can, like, not allow these moments to die or these movements to die or whatever we want to call those crystallization of political force. Right? And so while the legibility is really hard, it is definitely something we are wanting to continue to strive for and grapple with. And I mean, another way that I, I like there’s a quote in the book that I have used like or thought about for many years is like, it’s like a trip, you know, like Guattari is basically saying like it’s like a collective trip, like on an acid trip is what I’m trying to say, not like a tripping over, although that could be interesting too, right? But like some of us, at least in the modern West, have started to think that is a portal into understanding what we mean by like something becoming legible, or visible. And then the question becomes, how do you hold onto it when you’re not tripping? You know?

I love that, and I think it comes through in the book, too. To me, like, the book believes in writing’s capacity to enact relationality. Right? So you’re not just trying to get something across to me, as the reader, there’s also this relation that you’re trying to bring about through the writing.

And so there’s this moment in the introduction where I found myself addressed. So there in the introduction are these words, Can we be for you, dear reader, what the experiences that moved us to create the book were and are for us, and then in case I was like trying to avoid the tenderness, as we do, you insist, You are dear, someone who really matters, a being connected to others by love, a designer making life every day. We invite you to remember that you are dear and to remember those you hold dear as you read these pages. And it’s a risk, I think, because readers, we try to avoid tenderness, sometimes, like out of necessity. So I wonder, like, what for you does this kind of risky move, which is also about vulnerability, what does it help disrupt? What does it help achieve?

I feel like this actually goes back to the last question about legibility, which is, I think what Michal said about, you know, that we work hard in our on our side as writers to make ourselves legible and we use kind of whatever means necessary. Right? And sometimes that means reaching for the poem when the prose won’t do, you know? But there’s this other piece, which is the reader or the, you know, the receiver, that part of …like it’s not just that relationality is difficult to explain; it’s difficult to take in and I think that this taking in is because of just there’s a lot of resistances and some of those resistances, I think you know, to me, you know, somewhat obviously come from masculinist rationality or something like that, there’s like a lot of, one might say, like, the opposite of tenderness, [laughs] you know, like a kind of toughness or a kind of sense that, the real world is to be realistic and that the real world really is, you know, to access it means to, to have a particular kind of affect that is sort of unmoved, that is removed, that relates with the world that’s very much like on the outside. So there’s a tremendous amount of defendedness. It’s not just that we’re trying to say something that’s hard to hear, it’s that there’s so much defendedness in terms of listening. And so in order to open up listening, it’s like we’re trying to speak to the part of what we believe is in every reader, that, like, the tenderness is in every reader, in fact. And it’s just that it gets, covered over and it gets, it basically becomes neglected. You know, if that part isn’t addressed, that’s neglected, the other part gets really, really built up because it’s the one that, everyone is talking to. It’s the one that seems like it’s necessary for survival in this world. Yeah, it’s a matter of it’s, you know, the whole idea of kind of watering the plants you want to grow, essentially. I think.

Yeah. And I just, I think both Kriti and I, but I also think Arturo, like we have experienced the sort of academic attempt to annihilate our position when like the relational position, the world making position as naive, as romantic, but even worse, like there’s like this, like intensity that arises. It’s almost like this version of reality is threatening. Right? And so we were like thinking, okay, but how do we, like, it’s almost like you can see someone defending because there is like a nervous system reaction. Right? And so we can almost like be like, okay, sweetheart, like, you know, thinking of what is causing that person to lash out at us, right? It’s fear. It’s like what you were saying about this, like attachment to, to really make it you got to be real, girl. Like, you can’t be this soft, tender person, right? Like this very masculinist way of thinking and writing that has shattered me at times, honestly. Like I have lost my faith or my like confidence in my ability to say. And I think it really helps to be a trio of authors like, I don’t know that I would have had the confidence to write something like that, without it. And, you know, let’s be also really honest, like the two of us had the privilege of working with someone who is pretty secure in their position, right? So it was there was it was risky. And we took that risk very knowingly. And I can’t remember if we added that in after one of the really scathing reviews we reviewed for an original lens, I can’t remember if we’d already written that part of the preface, but I definitely remember having the conversation. We were like, oh, relationality has to be like how the tone is from the very beginning of this book.

Yeah, and I do, just quickly, I agree completely. And I do want to say that like, we’re not the first ones. And so this comes after as, as you know, Michal, you know, and we’ve said this many, many times, but yeah, it is risky. But it’s also after decades and centuries really, you know, of but let’s say in the modern academy, decades of feminist writing, of, you know, queer writing of women of color and Black feminism in particular was really, important to me in this process of writing the book. And so there’s a whole tradition of people like, you know, bell hooks is talking about love all the time. I mean, I could go on and on. Right now, I’m just rereading M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of the Crossing, where she talks about how to write like just a very, you know, beautiful sort of, you know, she’s talking about how the sacred in the secular actually can’t be so separate, and what happens when we, when we do that to our academic understanding and so or to our understanding of the world rather so anyways, these are a couple examples. But it’s because other people have been brave before us that we were trying to be brave here. [laughs]

Kriti, you said you reach for poetry, right, to bring things into legibility. But in the book that’s not… you do reach for poetry, but you reach elsewhere too. So, I’m speaking, of course, of the seagrass, to whom you reach to help you tell the story of transition, and so I wanted to quote the seagrass, and the seagrass says, Life is not like that, not a linear bursting forth from the Big Bang. Life is on and off memory and forgetting, a place where things don’t get better or worse, but different. And so, reading this, I thought, how much we need the seagrass. Like the seagrass, is somehow able to bring forward what the academic text cannot say with ease, which is this book is about life. This is a book about reality. So why do you think this works so well, bringing into the book what might not otherwise have found a way to be said? And how did this reach take place?

Hmm. I’m very touched by what you’re saying, and I’m so glad that, you can hear the seagrass for me [laughs]. This is, yeah. I mean, I, my background is in biology and and spending a lot of time with microorganisms. I had the pleasure, the honor of, you know, working in a seagrass laboratory, basically, like there’s a marine laboratory off the coast of Corona del Mar in southeast California, southern California, that for my postdoctoral work, I was doing a lot of basically taking a lot of trips there and being with the seagrass and, you know, speaking of things that can’t. Right, so the the way in which those encounters will be narrated, you know, is in the scientific literature, as in like the experiments I’ve done and this is, you know, countless hours of being with seagrass doing, you know, there’s like multiple transformations to get to, you know, the scientific paper with graphs and particular kinds of paragraphs and, yeah. So it’s going to be a very non- poetic in that, [laughs] I wouldn’t say it’s not poetic, but it’s a very, very different genre.

And so, I was sort of coming up against the limits. And I do this often as someone working in the natural sciences, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs sort of talks about this also in, in, in Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals that when we look to the scientific literature or, you know, scientific textbooks is what she’s talking about, she’s reaching for like A Guide to Whales that’s written by a natural historian. And I’m reaching for, you know, The History of Angiosperms or, you know, The Genome of Zostera marina or whatever. And so that these, that this genre of writing both is, is supposed to like, reveal, it’s supposed to create knowledge and to tell us more about this organism. But there’s a lot of ignorance that’s also created in that, that there’s like, all these choices that are made. So there’s a way in which scientific knowledge, scientific literature as a genre, both like advances a certain kind of knowledge, but also advances a certain kind of ignorance. And so it’s I really have come to know that through my experiences with these organisms and with just doing science and, and what I want to do is to like, say, what can’t be said in the literature, in the scientific literature, and also to really say what, what actually heard, you know, in a way of like, [laughs] you know?

And it’s a risk, again, because it’s like we risk anthropomorphism, we risk projecting upon an organism what we think they are and not they’re like, you know, who they may be. And so I never presume to know seagrass in a way, [laughs] you know, in the sense of, I don’t know what’s going on for seagrass. And like, I don’t know if seagrass as an object or as a subject, actually. And I have related with seagrass sort of in both ways. But I think, in this in a way, it’s like the risk of any relation and the way in which, like, I actually don’t know any other person either, you know, and that we are constantly, you know, making guesses as to what the other is experiencing and that sort of what we call empathy. And we, you know, we, we try to be with each other in difference as well as in our similarity. And so, yeah, there’s this whole process kind of through science, but sort of beyond what the ordinary scientific practice can do and what it can say in order to come to this kind of poetics and or this kind of listening. >And then in some ways, you know, speaking about what it was that I learned from the seagrass.

And I love that you say when you say, “why does it work so well?” I’m like, well, that’s good of you say that it works well [laughs]. And I think in part it’s because maybe we’re just hungry to, like, actually hear stories like, really hear stories from beings who are not more than human. You know, that we actually need vaster senses, life. You know who is alive, about how long beings have alive, have been alive, how how much life has gone through to get to this place. And if we keep really just reaching to… even though, like we as a species, like have so much to say and say to each other, if we keep reaching sort of within our space species, we sort of like really, especially not just our species, but like the particular way in which the human has been defined in enlightenment thinking, you know, if we keep reaching for that, we really miss, like so many other ways of being, so many other lessons, and our lives become really small and constrained and isolated and separate, because that’s what we’ve been taught that we are and but when we look to, you know, seagrass, polyps, I was thinking of coral and, you know, coral microbes, you know, all kinds of beings and how vast their lives are and how long, how different, and, the, you know, the range of their senses, all the rest, I think it really opens us up to, beyond the limitations of who we think we are as living beings and specifically as human beings.

Have you ever have heard of Barbara McClintock, biologist? There’s this beautiful article called “The Grace of Great Things” by Parker Palmer. And he just basically talks about Keller, who writes the intellectual biography of Barbara McClintock, and she goes the Keller asks, “well, how do you do great science?” And she’s like, “well, about the only thing I can tell you about the doing of science is that you somehow have to have a feeling for the organism.” And then she keeps pushing and she she’s really “all I can tell you about doing great science is that you somehow have to learn to lean into the kernel.” And then what Keller ends up writing is that Barbara McClintock, in her relation with ears of corn, practiced the highest form of love, which is the intimacy that does not annihilate difference, and the intimacy that does not annihilate difference, I think in some ways is relationality. Right? Like and that’s sort of when we describe, like we couldn’t pin down a definition, but we kept finding these like things of it. And the way that Kriti hears the seagrass. Right? I, I think you do hear that, right. Like I don’t think you said you qualified it a little bit. And I think that’s our like conditioning. Right. That we’re like used to talking to rational scientists. Right. And we’re used to like having to be like “oh you know, but like I’ll put that disclaimer whenever I like, say something funny about like, astrology in my classes,” right. Like just, you know, and of course, I’m holding both, right. Like, I can see the person who was like, “yeah, astrology.” And I’m like, “yeah, why not astrology?” Right? Like, so I guess that is what opening up to the relational world like, it was just as much a part of being true to what we were arguing for as any other part of the writing.

I’ve been struck by how much the idea of listening has run through our conversation. Right? Like I picked it up, in the book, of course. But speaking to you both today, there is again and again this idea of listening. Right? And it also came into when you were doing the kind of literature review move, in your book, and this was, again, something that I really appreciated because I think the literature review is this genre of academic writing, and it presumes that the scholarship is static and it’s ground and it’s still and we have to find our way through it and search yourselves in relation to it. And we have to we have to kind of deaden it very often in some way, but when you give like the description of the, of the book and where your argument about relationality falls within the scholarship, you say that, and here I am quoting the book, This book is a basket of noticings we have gathered at this particular juncture. We offer patterns we have observed the way someone listening to the ocean can offer a song based on the rhythms she hears in the waves. So, so again, like for me, you dislodge this image I have of the intellectual solitary in the office and but also of scholarship—still ground, built. And so I think it’s beautifully done. And I love that it gives us this example of things that we can do, and also just of the way things are—you know, sometimes this is what we’re doing. We’re just kind of listening and hearing things—and so my question is, although it’s it’s put so beautifully in the book, was it easy to move from one mode of listening to another? And how was it to find this mode of expression?

I mean, all I will say was that I, I wouldn’t say any of the writing of this book was easy personally, but on the other hand, it also was emergent and therefore, like, I felt a lot of trust for just how things came out. You know what I mean? Like, some of the things we had to actually have a conversation and say like, okay, let’s make sure to start the preface with this much more tender voice because of some of the ways that we were responding. And I do remember having that conversation, but a lot of the other ones is just like because we’ve been enmeshed in a really like the study of relationality for so many years, like, I think, you know, in one of our seminars when we did do seminars, I was like, what does it mean to be writing relationally? Right. Like, we we’ve thought about some of these things and some of the things just like, I like that it’s something I’ve been learning more and more about as like, you know, the the ways these knowledges live in us is like when you, and they truly live in us is that that they emerge when they’re needed.

Right? Like the capacity to write and to listen is because, and this is one thing that I think unifies Kriti, myself and Arturo, like we’re very much committed to being in integrity. Like we don’t want to just talk about this thing and then not live our lives a certain way, like we’re trying to write and be and think in coherence. And that doesn’t mean we don’t fuck up, sorry to say that, [laughter in the background] it just means that the aspiration is there. So I guess all I want to say is that like it was an emergent thing, right? And so I think that and, and I think we did it. And then when that sentence came in the introduction and the introduction, I think I don’t remember, but it’s like it was like a description of what had been happening. Right. And so I think a lot of that was like the way it worked.

I think it was literally at the ocean. That was a composite sentence, the one you read. I think all of us like added to it. And the, the part that I added or something, it came when I was literally at the ocean [laughs] about listening to the waves. And so, yeah, because I was like, oh, it is like this, isn’t it? So there was something very embodied, very grounded about just like, oh, actually, I know what this is. It’s just like picking out a pattern. And I think all we were trying to do there, in a way, was to say something about the genre, the literature review. There’s like what’s at its best, it’s this kind of, at its best, it’s this like honoring of the work that comes before. And it’s a also a way of saying, this is what I notice. these are the coherence that I make. But the way it’s presented again is like very dualist in that it was already out there. And obviously these things fit together, you know, and this is what happens like on committee meetings or something where it’s like, well, if you want to know this field, obviously you need to have these people. If you haven’t read these people, then you don’t actually know the field, right? Because it’s as if it was already constituted as if, you know, it was out there. And the student just has to discover this canon that naturally exists. And instead of the fact, like, there’s no we tried to sort of like show the humility that we hope anyone would have in a kind of when referencing their sources, which is we were participants in that it wasn’t just out there to be discovered.

It was like the limit of like, you’re totally right. And so our collaborators, who we brought into the book, you know, and invited in who we’ve been listening to, you know, seagrass, Black feminists, abolitionists, you know, like there’s this whole community of people who clearly, like, we’re bringing with us multiple communities. but even there, it’s like someone could say, yeah, but you didn’t reach to here, here and here. And they would be right, actually, like that. There are vast communities outside of that. And that’s why we have to take some responsibility in some way of saying, you know, this is what we notice. These are the patterns we notice. This is who we reach to. And that’s not the limit of reaching, basically. And that’s not you know, there’s always more. And so, instead of making the move of like, I’m doing the literature review to show how much I know, in a way, it’s like doing a move, a review to show kind of how much we don’t know in that this is how we reached this is, you know, who we’re calling in and there’s so much more. And so I would say, so what I that kind of goes back to your this question, which is like, what is your archive, your sources, you know, and I think, that, you know, like the, the people I already named are our archive center sources. And that does not, actually the people and the not people, the more than, more than human people [laughs] , and so, I think but again, it doesn’t exhaust in a way. And nothing we have said has exhausted sort of the reach of relationality itself.

So I, I want to kind of, begin to think of a way of closing this off, right, of ending the conversation. And so I’m stuck at the moment of the transition or of the end. Very often, you know, in, in theoretical thought, there’s this idea that when we break through to another world where there’s this form of rupture or, or there’s this event, it can be triumphant, right? It can be uplifting. It can, it can give us energy, but what I loved about seeing in your book was this also this recognition, that it can bring a great deal of distress, too. Right? So you say it feels like stepping off the edge of what, when absolutely knows is real. How do you make space for this? And then because I also I want this to to recognize that writing is also a hospitality, right? When we when we take a risk and writes in a certain way, things come, right? We don’t know what they are, but things come. So how do you make space for this, this difficulty around transitioning to different stories? And then also what has come, after working in relationality and working to make it legible and to enact it?

Yeah, I think there’s a lot to be said about the triumphant and the sort of commitment to thinking that I think we do this a lot, and this is one of the ways that I would describe this slippage concept that we’ve talked about is like, we’re describing this other worlds, but then ultimately it still fits into the affect, the sort of structure of a story that we’re used to, that, you know, the hero always gets, you know, even if there’s a really like difficult part, they get there and they go through it. And if you’re willing to let go of like the futurity, sort of the notion of futurity that is sort of inherent to the modern episteme, right—that I love too—it really like humbles you, right? And allows you like to just to be with in a much more profound way, the falling apartedness of things, right? And that it is through the falling apart, and like the falling apart can even be our conceptual attachment to this being coherent up at the end. Right. So what came is… like something definitely comes. And I think that’s the other thing is like life and death is one of our dualisms in Western modern episteme, right, but every death brings forth life, right?

And every birth is death. Like, there’s there has to be a shift in our modern attitude to loss, to death, to pain. These are like affective dimensions. But I think as scholars and academics and theorists on let’s just like on the left, broadly speaking, the the belief that we have to have something that we’re reaching for at the end, right, is something we’re really, really, really still attached to. And I think the letting go of that… So one of the authors that we cite a lot in the book is Bayo Akomolafe, who is a Nigerian born public intellectual. He’s not an academic, but he, you know, he really challenges a lot of the taken for granted tropes, especially leftist thought, including justice, including climate change, including hope. Right. And I think thinking beyond those categories and realizing that when you’re attached to them, you’re still trapped in something. We’re also all three of us are very inspired by Buddhism as a practice, as a philosophy to some of us or like a spiritual perspective on the world, and Buddhism also has this like non-dualist understanding of hope, right, and that’s, like, that’s a hard concept, right? People get really frustrated. I sometimes get really frustrated, but it’s also such a relief to know that we’re not striving for something beyond us, right? We’re just allowing.

This beautiful, Michal. Exactly [laughs] what Michal said. I’ll just say quickly that the piece about, yeah, the stepping off the edge of what one knows is real… So I was inspired a lot by Sylvia Wynter around those around this notion of heresy, around like, the idea that there are other times when, you know, she’s talking about these various scientific revolutions that were existential revolutions, like the Copernican revolution, the Darwinian revolution, and these moments where it’s like, you think the world is flat or like it really is, you know, stepping off the world. The heresy is so intense and it will actually feel like death, beyond, you know, even physical death. And I think that and so she’s pointing to this as like she’s giving us clues as to if we’re approaching something that feels like death, it might not be bad. There are these moments that we really need someone to say, even though this feels like this may actually be the dissolution of everything that you know and or you know, and even in that, like, it’s actually okay that there is and so I think Buddhism does give that kind of guidance. There’s like multiple traditions that will give some guidance when we’re at the edge, you know, when we’re at these really, really horrifying, terrifying moments because they represent like the dissolution of everything that we are attached to and end. Right. So what came is… like something definitely that’s the other thing is like life and death is one Western modern episteme, right, but every death brings death. Like, there’s there has to be a shift in our loss, to death, to pain. These are like affective know. And so in the same way that we sort of do need guides, around death and letting go like that’s part of, I think, what Michal is saying about, like changing our relationship to death and change in transition is like that.

We kind of, many of us, even the younger generation, like I have a nephew who is, you know, eight and watching TV shows about how like uncertain the future is, you know, these are like cartoons and they’re like, oh my gosh, he’s eight. You know, like there’s…and so these future generations are coming into a world that already feels this kind of uncertain and this kind of unstable, which is like super sad to me. You know? But it is the reality. And that’s like the crisis that actually, like centuries of exploitation have sort of given us now. And so in the midst of that, I think like it really is like, how are we going to make these transitions with as much love and as much grace and courage as we can, and we have to, like, really give each other courage and to to sort of assume, like, actually, it’s not going to be easy, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. And so yeah, kind of be there almost as like the sort of transition workers for each other. Yeah.

And I think the post-apocalyptic like the, I mean, you know, we talk about indigenous cosmic visions and I don’t want to overgeneralize, but like many of our sources, some of the key sources—Black feminists are huge, like the fountain of our knowledge and our interlocutors, the people that we brought with us, as are indigenous writers, North American and Latin American particularly, were the ones we were reaching for, but the articulation of them in the poem that we start the book with also there is this idea that like, it is very much an arrogant Western modern idea that when there is death or when the civilization ends, it will be like the end of it all, right. And so the perspective of relationality is partly coauthored by people that have lived through many deaths of their worlds, right? And and it is a death. And there is still more and the there’s like, again, it’s not to romanticize that and to say, “oh, that it’s good that that happened,” [laughs] right, like that’s not what we’re trying to say, but that part of the the vision that we need to like, learn again or in a new way has to do with recognizing, yeah, that the this the apocalypse, you know, the ending of the world as we know it is maybe here. Right. And and so it’s so like, what do we do with that? Right. Like with love without like, being gripped by a kind of fear that doesn’t allow you to sort of like, listen, you know, and for me that I’ve been doing a lot of work with my students actually about like we just had a shooting on our campus and we, and I do this like, in all my classes anyways, but it was apropos, especially this particular week, because of that. And it’s like people are so afraid of letting fear in, of letting their acknowledgment of their fear of the uncertain of pain, of what’s going on in the world. But like, what happens if we just, like, breathe it in, like what just happens if we allow ourselves to make a compost out of it? is one of the meditations that I do, and like the idea that the heart that breaks open can hold the whole universe, right? This is something that Joanna Macy says, who was also an interlocutor, especially in the early days of this project, so I just yeah, like figuring what it means as what Kriti said.

I have just one quick thing to say, which is— it just came to me as a Michal was talking—that there was a sentence I was just reading in Pedagogies of the Crossing by M. Jacqui Alexander where she said Crossings are never made all at once and never once and for all. And this goes back to what you were saying about that, you know, yeah, it goes back to the idea that “we’ll finally get there,” right? It’s like, “yes, we’ll make it!” And she’s like “Crossings are not made all at once or once and for all [laughs] and there is, like— if there’s a transition from here to there, it’s not a final one it’s like a back and forth and a going back to what the seagrass said. And it’s particularly poignant becuase M. Jacqui Alexander is referencing the transatlantic crossing of the enslaved people and so it’s like it’s happening over and over, it’s never— and then she’s also talking about the many crossings: the crossings of the spiritual beings that came with the people and the crossings that we make sort of all the time, as Alexis Pauline says in her beautiful commentary, or like her poetic work in conversation with M. Jacqui Alexander which is called M Archive. And so, I just wanted to leave that quote with us as we think about pedagogies of the crossing, you know, how do we cross [laughs] and not once and for all.

That’s how we’ll end… [laughter]

Could I say, could I just say one thing and you cannot include it or include it because it’s not as profound as that, but it’s more to like the audience because something that you said just now just made me really want to, just to think of the graduate student or the young, not like tenured or whatever person that, like, has this calling in them to write in a certain way. I just want to implore folks to to believe in that because I, while Kriti has, and Arturo has written many, I haven’t written the book yet. And I think, honestly, I don’t want to ever write alone because it’s what I like. This is hard. I told them several times, “It’s like, even if they never published it, this was so amazing. I loved it.” And and I will say that one of the reasons I never wrote a book before was because of the violence of the Academy and the way in which I felt like, and I mean, I’ve had this response to my articles like, it’s not real. And I was rereading bell hooks’ piece about theory as a liberatory practice, and her naming how often that happens to people. Like, you self-censor yourself because of that. And so I guess just like in that letting go in that allowing for like I had almost let go of the idea that I would ever write a full book, right? Like I still write essays, and I’ve actually transitioned myself to thinking of myself much more as a teacher. And then I write little blog posts and I write shorter things, you know, but, just that the opportunity came. So, I mean, yes, we had wanted to write a book actually for many years. And then when it finally was able to come and then and then Covid happened. Like that was all sort of serendipitous in this very interesting way.

And I could imagine a world where you’ve already, like, kind of closed yourself off and, and like, I can’t write the way academics want me to write and or I will. What I have done is like, tried really hard to write that way. And it kills me because it hurts to write that way. And also, I got to be a much worse writer than I used to be as a result.

And so I guess I just want to plug, right, the idea that, like, have faith in the fact that you can write differently and it might not you might not be the book that gets you tenure or it might not happen in a linear way where that writing, you know, like, works out. But I just really want to like, honor and encourage folks to not lose faith and not lose like their courage to be brave like that.

And I will say that we have moments in the writing where we were not clear that because I think the original vision was a much more scholarly book. Right. Like a much more traditional scholarly book about the sources of relationality. Right. Like that’s where we originally started. But like, that’s just not how we could written that way from our perspective.

Yes. Yeah, [laughs] I agree.

Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human is in the world. Congratulations, Michal and Kriti. Thank you Sebastian Bauer for composing the music for this podcast. Thank you Jodie Riddex for the arts. And thank you, Aydelotte Foundation for your support. Thank you for listening.