Logging Off, Opting Out, and Not Texting Back: The Ethics of Non-Response with Jana Bacevic

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What if you don't owe anyone anything? Not your attention, not your care, not even a reply to their message? That might sound like the philosophy of a sociopath, but sociologist and philosopher Jana Bacevic argues it's actually the foundation of a more honest and more just ethics. In this episode of LEPHT HAND, Emma sits down with Jana to discuss non-reciprocity, a concept that challenges the Kantian backbone of liberal morality and asks what it would mean to stop paying back a system that was never fair to begin with.

Related writing by Jana: https://janabacevic.net/research/understanding-nonreciprocity/

Jana's essay on the Free Nose Guy Problem: "Epistemic Autonomy and the Free Nose Guy Problem"

Jana's scholarly residency: Forest University

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello all and welcome back to Left Hand. Today Emma welcomes Jana Bachevich to the podcast to discuss a unique approach to 21st century ethics, the concept of non-reciprocity. While Emma held down the fort this past week, I was overseeing the kickoff of the AHRC Summer School, and it's not too late to enroll in one of our courses. Timothy Jackson's course on ontological anarchists' views of science, life, and art is a special five-week course currently underway. We've added an extra week to this special engagement, which means enrollment is still open just a little bit longer in case you'd like to slide in. There is already one fantastic recording in the course shell, but don't miss our upcoming classes on Fanon and Dialectical Philosophy, and Baudrillard, Anders, and the philosophy of science fiction. We have put together an exciting curriculum to feed your hunger for philosophy in an engaged setting. So, whether you're a longtime listener or just discovering us, there's never been a better time to dive deeper. And on that note, let's listen.

SPEAKER_03 1:12

Hello and welcome to Left Hand. This is Emma Stamm. Today I'm joined by Dr. Jana Bachevich. Jana is associate professor at the Department of Sociology, Durham University. She's also an editor at The Philosopher, the UK's longest-running public philosophy journal, and she's a member of the Cambridge Social Ontology Group. She's currently at the Forest University on Mount Frushkagora in Serbia, where she has a scholarly residency. And Jana describes herself as fundamentally interested in what we as humans can know, how the fact that we're human influences what we know, and how what we know influences what we do. This all relates to her current research on the concept of non-reciprocity, where she takes up the question of what we do not owe to others. This work challenges the dualism that frames morality as either self-interested and self-centered or altruistic and communitarian. She looks at non-reciprocity through lenses from political theory and social epistemology, often focusing on everyday acts of non-reciprocity, like not responding to a message or not showing somebody else equal regard as both ordinary things and not necessarily destructive to the social. Jana, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me, Emma. I look forward to our discussion. So, by way of introduction, perhaps you could give us an overview of your scholarly background and how it led to your interest in non-reciprocity.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

I'll just jump straight ahead and I'll say my background is in sociology and in anthropology, but I mostly work across these disciplines and philosophy and a number of other related disciplines that all engage with the question of exactly, as you've said, what it means to be human and how do we know what we know, and given what we know, what we can do about different kinds of things. And the interest in this particular project actually started from or evolved from a part of my work on social epistemology, so ways of knowing. And it was inspired, I would say, by a, or it happened in a political epistemology conference where I was one of the keynote speakers and I was presenting my work on epistemic positioning. So the way that people tend to evaluate knowledge claims coming from specific kinds of people in specific ways. And someone who was a fellow scholar responded to that by saying, well, aren't all questions of epistemic justice? So questions about what is the just and kind of proper and correct way to recognize and refer to to knowledge claims, aren't they all fundamentally about reciprocity? And I remember having this really strong reaction, which doesn't often happen around academic debates, I have to say, at least not to me, that went, no, this is absolutely not about reciprocity. And in the aftermath of that, I was really, really inspired to start thinking about why did I have such a strong gut reaction to that remark, which after all made a lot of sense because what the person was trying to say was that in effect, epistemic justice means we give credence or credit to knowledge claims, so to other knowers of the sort that we would like to see extended to ourselves, right? So basically a version of the Kantian categorical imperative. And the fact that I had such a strong reaction of, or a negative reaction, or a disagreement with that, despite the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, at that point, I didn't have a particular reason for that reaction, was to me an indicator that there had to be something about the absence of reciprocity that I thought would actually be justified in the context of epistemic justice or in the context of resolving epistemic injustice. So it basically got me thinking about well, are there situations where not non-reciprocity, which I still at that point did not really think about distinctly as or is distinct from absence of reciprocity or failure of reciprocity, which I will get to doing eventually in this project. But are there contexts where absence of reciprocity is justified, just, and desirable? And this is in effect how how this project came about. Because to me, it was again obvious that the answer was yes. But I was also aware of the fact that most people, certainly people interested in social justice, certainly people interested in social justice on the left, would probably not agree with this perspective. So I started thinking, well, why is it that I actually think this? And what do we think about reciprocity? And as the project went on, and I mean I'll just stop here, but we can we can talk about this more. As the project went on, I came to realize that this fundamentally linked to both my prior sort of education in anthropology because it engages with some of the classics of anthropological as well as sort of social theoretical thought, but also in a lot of ways links back to almost every single question I've I've considered in the entirety of my academic and I would say also kind of political life. So, in a lot of ways, it's it's almost like a a crown project to everything I've done and have been considering so far.

SPEAKER_03 7:25

So that makes sense what you say about people interested in social justice on the left, at least if you were to catch them off guard and ask them if in general non-reciprocity is okay, is something that we should not stigmatize, not not frame as ingest. But it it seems to me, reading through a number of your publications on this topic, that it really doesn't hold up under scrutiny. And I I actually see that now that I'm thinking about this, that it's not so much that that default position is based on an existing discourse, so much as a lack of discourse and thought around the topic of non-reciprocity, which is what makes this very interesting and hopefully it can push our thinking forward, because we're in this moment right now where there's so much informational exchange, exchange of knowledge, exchange of ideas, semantic DNA, if you will, is at such a high volume that if we simply stick to this idea that the Kantian imperative and this idea that we have to treat others with the same degree of regard as we ourselves feel we have been given, that it's going to lead to situations of deep exhaustion, resentment, and injustice. And that this is all the starting point for this project. Before we get into the more theoretical material, I wanted to ask if you could simply give us a few salient everyday examples of non-reciprocity.

SPEAKER_01 9:11

Of course. One, I think one example that's pretty, pretty present or very much present in everyday, sort of everyday discourse now is how a lot of people feel about migrants, including refugees and asylum seekers. So obviously, with the rise of the far right, but also before that, a lot of people would take the position that states do not necessarily owe to migrants or refugees or even asylum seekers. The kind of rights and protections that those same people would almost certainly want to see extended to themselves, would in principle extend to their fellow citizens, and almost certainly would expect and want to be extended to themselves if they were to find themselves in the same or similar situation as those migrants, especially refugees and asylum seekers, right? So that is one, as they say, I would like to think that it's not an everyday example, but in effect it is becoming an everyday example of non-reciprocity because this is something that we encounter on a daily basis and increasingly sort of in all spheres of politics, from public health to sort of questions of general social protections, borders, border policing, etc., etc., humanitarian law, et cetera. Another example is, for instance, not wanting to extend or give right to a platform, so right to public speech to people whose opinions or views or positions or just politics, generally speaking, we deem different or hostile to our own. Again, despite the fact that the freedom of speech and the right to free speech are considered some of the basic foundations of democracies. And again, this is often the argument, even of people who do in principle support the freedom of speech and freedom of expression, right? So not people who would just ban it outright, or who would have an outright unequal or differentiated approach to it. Another example is, for instance, and this is something that very much inspired my work on the or during the COVID-19 pandemic, uh, as well as the kind of work on epistemic differences and inequalities related to that, which is not wanting to wear a mask or not wanting to get vaccinated, despite the fact that we very much benefit and value people who do both things. Right. So that's that's another sort of self-exemption from the Kantian categorical imperative. And then a really sort of, I would say, again, perhaps not an obvious, but certainly was something that was an everyday one and one whose consequences were very much felt or dealt with by everyone, or as long as there is any kind of pluralism or allowed or sort of tolerated pluralism around these two questions. So whether people would wear masks or whether people would get vaccinated, then by definition, most of us are in positions where we'll be likely to encounter people who have made either of these typically polarized or either of the choices in terms of these things, right? Wearing a mask or not wearing one, or being vaccinated and not being vaccinated. And then the kind of the final one, which is often deemed trivial, but to me was also an entry point into the ethics of interpersonal relationships and how reciprocity figures in those, is for instance, the sort of act of not responding to a message, or the act of ghosting someone, as it is is colloquially known or often referred to, which we certainly understand as kind of not ideal or perhaps not really truly sort of morally glorious. But on the other hand, we don't really tend to think of it as a major moral failure. And the reason why I'm bringing these four, in a manner of speaking, very different examples is because I think what's really curious about them is that politically some people would almost certainly think that some of these cases or some of these examples, and but not reciprocity is vindicated in some of these cases, but not in others. And other people would think that it's vindicated in others, but not in the ones that people who choose certain amongst these would. So to me, that's a really interesting question, or that was one of the kind of the initial entry, I would say, entry points into the whole problematique of non-reciprocity, because it does in a lot of ways puncture the Kantian categorical imperative, the idea that our that we are moral beings, or that at least we're contemporary, modern, whatever that means, liberal moral beings, by in principle wishing that or being able to take the position that the principles we wish to see applied are those that should apply to everyone equally. That includes ourselves, obviously. So the question of why is it that we think some things are okay for other people, but not for us? And why is it that we think that in some cases we should be entitled to things that other people should not have, despite the fact that there is no tangible, at least not justifiable or defensible difference in terms of dessert, in terms of whether they are entitled to those? We are often talking about things that should be rights just or that should be part of human rights, so that people should be entitled to just purely, solely by way of being human, for instance, entitlement to protection as a refugee.

unknown 15:09

Right.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

So why is it that we've punctured the categorical imperative and what does that mean, precisely, as you said, in the context of everything that's going on?

SPEAKER_03 15:18

This shows the breadth of this project. You've laid a few things out that are rarely treated together under the same set of theoretical problematics. So the matter of the rights that we extend to immigrants and refugees, the platforming of certain forms of speech, or the denial to give a platform, attitudes toward COVID protections, and the very well-known phenomenon of not responding to a text message or deciding to ghost somebody or being on the receiving end of that form of treatment. It strikes me that in the case of ghosting and not responding to messages, this would seem to a lot of people to be a psychological matter. And when it comes to understanding what's going on when people are benefiting from others wearing masks and getting vaccinated, but deciding not to do so themselves, that we can understand this through psychological or cognitive science frameworks. And what I find compelling about your approach, and this relates to a lot of other projects that you've taken on, is not that you are denying the remit of the psychological, but you are drawing what is often, in particular, I think, in the context of research in the United States, perhaps more so than research from other parts of the world, what's often reduced to the level of the individual, the workings of the brain, biographic history, and really looking for continuities between that or or mutual constitutions between self and the political and the social. And I wonder if if this is part of perhaps what makes this project seem particularly complex to people. And that it's I'm not putting that out there as a question that's as an observation because the approach might seem even counterintuitive to certain types of people who might interact with it. And perhaps from there I can get into another sort of framing question here, which is about the stakes, really, because what this seeks is to prevent harm ultimately, to attain a deeper understanding of non-reciprocity in such a way that we're not collapsing morality into these dualistic categories, but arriving at some higher synthesis or nuance that for all of its complexities has the practical effect of preventing people from uh absorbing harm or preventing groups from absorbing harm. With that, how do you conceptualize harm basically? What what does it actually look like? What are you trying to prevent with this?

SPEAKER_01 18:35

I think that's a very it's a very good question. I think it's it's possibly the key framing question, as you've said. I think in some ways it does go back to to my concept or approach to the relationship between the individual and the collective, the sort of micro and meso and macro levels of ethics, because it has always been my strong belief that there is neither a justification for nor a good reason to, or a sort of a consequential motivator to exempt individual action from moral evaluation if we focus on the level of the collective or on the macro level. Which is something that social theorists and especially social theorists on the left sometimes tend to do. Which is, and I mean it takes it takes different different forms, but I think most importantly, whilst it takes those different forms, we also tend to exempt ourselves from sort of ethical conduct or scrutiny of our own conduct that would kind of seem seek to align it with ethical sort of orientations, values, or categories that we at the same time think we actually subscribe to. And this fundamental ambiguity or inconsistency is something that I think is really important, if not core, to the project itself. I think the question of harm is directly related to this, because the way that I conceptualize harm, I mean, obviously, in kind of the broadest sense of harm and especially the broadest sense of harm when it comes to the question of reciprocity or non-reciprocity, we often think about violence, right? Because non-reciprocity of violence is the only form of non-reciprocity that standard sort of Kantian liberal theory actually endorses, right? And it's not only Kantian, right? It's it's also Christian in a lot of ways, which is kind of turning the other cheek, right? But the kind of the foundational, and this is how I'm narrating it as well in the book, the foundational sort of act of what we tend to think of as so really under a lot of quotation marks, civilization is non-reciprocating violence. So non-reciprocating killing, not perpetuating an eye-for-an eye logic, right? So that basic form of harm in that sense would obviously mean sort of harm to life or bodily harm or basically murder. But what I'm doing is, and this is I'm very far from being unique in that, is to say that there are other forms of harm that can be almost as bad, if not worse, than death. And obviously, this is kind of this connects back to a lot of both sort of Agamben and then Lauren Berlant and other theorists who actually talk about slow death, environmental toxicity, and stuff like that. So, from my perspective, harm would be not only creating conditions that are harmful to certain forms of life, but also creating or supporting forms of life that seek to actively. Limit or harm other forms of life, right? So, in a lot of ways, and harming other forms of life or limiting the conditions for the flourishing of other forms of life can mean a lot of things. But I think one of the things that we in in a lot of ways have a pretty clear understanding about is what conditions are conducive to flourishing not only of humans but also of other forms of life. So, and it's usually quite basic, right? It's kind of sunlight, space, freedom of movement, within limits, sufficient food, shelter, and hum, and sort of for humans, connection with humans and not only humans, for other organisms, other kinds of connections, and so on and so forth. So, in that sense, it's not as they conventionally tend to say, it's not rocket science, right? We know, in effect, what the absence of harmful conditions for existence looks like because we know what sort of minimally conducive conditions for flourishing are. Creating, conversely, or acting in ways that limit or directly endanger some of these conditions, to me, is basically acting in ways that are harmful, and we can do this individually. We almost by definition do this in some ways individually. For instance, when, say, for people who, I don't know, eat animals when we imprison them in factory farms or in cages, or for people who just like to see animals in a zoo, for people who who support their being imprisoned in cages for human entertainment. But we also do that often with supporting, say, border regimes that limit the movement of migrants again, et cetera, et cetera. So, in a lot of ways, we do engage in different forms of or creating environments of harm or environments that are toxic. And I think the question is whether we can in fact establish some kind of hierarchy of harm and what the scale of sort of ethical agency would be if we would accept this relatively high threshold of what harm actually means, without at the same time assuming that it's possible to exist in ways that entirely eliminate the possibility of doing harm, but at the same time accepting that we do have something that I describe as a strong obligation to limit the harms that we do, to minimize it, and to also actively interfere with and block those who seek to multiply forms of harm or who are in positions where they can in fact inflict harm relatively easily on multiple forms of life usually at the same time.

SPEAKER_03 24:55

This brings up a question I've had as I've been reading through your work and perhaps against my against the angels of my better intellectual nature, maybe trying to situate your political position in frameworks that are already available to me, thinking in terms of socialism, communism, left anarchism, the mainstream liberal configurations, especially that I'm mostly familiar with as a citizen of the United States who's spent most of my life here. And this response really drives this question to the front of my mind that I'm trying to tease out, which is whether this project and perhaps other projects that you've worked on throughout your career is more applicable in your mind to particular institutions, whether it's the institutionalization of capitalism or the institutionalization of higher education, et cetera, or to the nature, or perhaps not nature, but institutions as such, what it means to live in a civilization that is constituted by institutions. What is the target? And I'm sorry if this is a simplistic question, but I think it would be an interesting thing to draw out.

SPEAKER_01 26:28

No, not very far from that. I think it's it's it's a very interesting, it is a very deep question in the sense in which, I mean, to to give a relatively blunt answer politically, my background is anarchist and definitely left anarchist, but also as someone who has been both trained and in some ways raised both in liberal theory or liberal democracies and in socialism or communism, I'm also aware of the fact that most forms of coexistence for most people or existing with other people, for most people historically have involved institutions, right? We very few humans alive today have existed outside of institutions. We, you know, especially if we see institutions in this kind of very formal sense, and certainly not if we see institutions in the broadest possible sense in which say monogamy is an institution, right? So I don't think anyone alive today has actually existed outside of monogamy or outside of patriarchy, right? Regardless of whether they have been sort of endorsing, practicing, or supporting, supporting either or both of these themselves. But um yeah, private property, right? None of us have de facto existed in a regime that does not recognize private property again, even if we don't particularly like it and would like to see it abolished or whatever else. So, in that sense, I have done a lot of or a lot of my work has been sort of aimed at, or in some ways has found a salient example or target of both analysis and critique in institutions that includes institutions such as the university or the nation state or migration regimes or for that matter, monogamy. But I do believe that the question of ethics, morality, and justice is broader than that. So it does fundamentally pertain to the question of human and non-human relationships, as well, meaning human relationships to non-humans, interpersonal, as well as kind of broader, whatever that we mean that, or whatever we think that entails, whatever we mean by that. So, in that sense, it's really the question of how do we live with one another, even regardless of whether that that means living in institutions in liberal capitalism or ideally outside of it or in something that would seek to succeed or overthrow it. So, in that sense, the political background, I guess the overall political background of the project is a transformational one, but also I'm someone who very, and this is very much in line with my political sort of pedigree, I guess. I fundamentally believe that political change has to happen through and be mediated by the way that we relate to one another. So basically, we can change institutions all we want, we can abolish institutions all we want, as long as the kind of, I would say, in so in some ways, intentional moral inconsistency or ambivalence remains something that we refuse to engage with, including when it comes to our own actions. We are just going to end up reproducing exactly the same kinds of things that we have seen reproduce themselves over the years or decades or centuries in some cases.

SPEAKER_03 30:11

Thank you. That clarifies a lot for me, actually. I often find myself caught between the false binary of looking at the structural and institutional as a target and thinking about the everyday, the ethics of the interpersonal, the ethics that bear on to the way we not only treat one another, but non-human forms of life and I see debates that presuppose this false binary, where on the one hand, somebody might say vegetarianism or a refusal to purchase items from a particular store that's seen as unethical falls back on the individualistic, the reductive, and it takes energy away from the more transformational work, shall we say, of resisting or or directly affirmatively doing something to dismantle the structural or institutional. And the conversation can't end with recognizing that as a false binary. I think it has to begin there, and we have to really, I'll use this very academic word, unpack the particulars and the nuances that come out once we start really thinking about our actions and our commitments and coming up with a theory that works in everyday life and that people can also understand and act in all sorts of practical ways. With that, I want to turn our focus to something quite a bit more specific and related to just one project within within the broader umbrella of your work on non-reciprocity, which has to do with what you have called the free nose guy problem. And I found this a very useful example of something that so many of us were vexed by, especially at the height of the pandemic. I wonder if you could explain the free nose guy problem and then discuss the tension between epistemic self-reliance and trust in experts, and how this problem perhaps is a crystallization of other issues, and really perhaps what what your takeaways from that article were, because I think that that's really going to drive things home for some of our listeners. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 32:56

So I was going to say, I mean, the Freenos guy as a concept was a very fortuitous framing, which was not mine. It was Rebecca Solmit who who first described it as such. And this was in 2020, 2021, sort of at the at the I would say the height of debates around the pandemic, right? And then I took this Freenos guy, and Freenosed Guy is the paradigmatic figure of a person, and it is usually a guy, meaning it is usually a man, who kind of wears a mask under pandemic conditions, but wears it under his nose. So in a way that doesn't really that that signals somehow some vague acceptance or recognition of what protections for not only himself but other people mean, but also not the willingness to actually fully endorse it. And I became interested in the free nose guy figure, not necessarily as a representation of a certain kind of careless or care-absent masculinity or lack of consideration for others, as much as a figure that basically drew out a lot of our meaning, those of us who were aware of the fact that who knew how masks should be worn, our own ambiguities towards how we judge other people and how we evaluate other people's behavior, especially morally, and what that means for us politically. Because, I mean, curiously enough, the pandemic was one of these occasions that really I think brought to the surface our tendency to evaluate moral conduct of others, right? Or evaluate others' conduct in moral moral senses. And because I've always been interested in this intersection between epistemology or meeting point between epistemology and morality, right? So whether we tend to think that people who form a certain kind of opinion or who process knowledge in certain ways are also morally superior or not. I think a lot, almost everyone does that. And that's something that the left is by no means exempt from, I would say, perhaps even on the contrary, right? And this has somewhat to do with kind of, I don't want to say purely, but has something to do with demographic and historical factors in the sense of a lot of us are highly educated and we do come from backgrounds and contexts that value knowledge, that value reflection, and so on and so forth. But I think it also has to do with an implicit acceptance of things that we would not always want to admit we're accepting, including some kind of almost near evolutionary fitness test to see as kind of a test of, or among other things, we tend to see people's intelligence or cognitive processing as qualifying them for. And this is something that obviously I was very concerned about. Because if nothing else, and especially going back to what you said, Emma, at the beginning, given the informational landscape or ecosystem in which we find ourselves, not to mention the sort of more basic inequalities in terms of access to knowledge and access to different forms of processing or cognitive processing that people have by the virtue of their position in the social system, so in the in the social structures. We are bound to see people who process information differently and arrive to different conclusions. In that context, the free nose guy is someone who very clearly embodies that ambivalence, right? In the sense of someone who recognizes the existence of a virus, they need to have social protections in or sort of forms of protection in place, et cetera, et cetera. But still in the manner of speaking, behaves as if that were not the case, or as if it doesn't really matter whether those protections are applied diligently, at least not to himself. And thus embodies that question of okay, well, how do we actually treat people who tend to at least temporarily or on occasions or inconsistently exempt themselves from what we tend to think should be general requirements of behavior? So, what should be the categorical imperative, right? And in that sense, to me, reactions to the free nose guy or the to the free nose guys of this world were much more telling than our reactions to, for instance, people who were ideologically opposed to any kind of pandemic controls or protections, right? So, because in some ways, like true, proper, as they say, card-carrying anti-vaxxers or anti-maskers are in some ways much easier to deal with because we kind of know what they're about. Much like true card-carrying fascists and racists are much more much easier to deal with because it's very easy for us to understand why we disagree with them, right? It's easy for us to understand why racism is not a desirable and sort of a valuable moral orientation. It's much more difficult for us to come to terms with racism amongst our own ranks. It's much more difficult for us to account for our own forms of extant racism, xenophobia, sexism, et cetera, et cetera, right? Ableism in particular. So I became really curious about what this what this figure actually, the way that we react to it, what it provokes in us and what it tells about more or moral reasoning. And I was kind of stuck by this classification offered by another, or struck by this classification offered by another another philosopher called Linda Zagzebski, who said that basically the problem with that is that it challenges the two values that we have in liberal democracies, broadly speaking. One is epistemic self-reliance. So the idea that, or our belief that people should come to conclusions themselves, right? That we value epistemic autonomy, basically, rather than people who say follow someone else's lead or just believe what they're told or just believe what they read on the internet. And epistemic egalitarianism, on the other, which tells us or which kind of makes us believe that people in principle have equal capacities to attain and process knowledge, right? That it's not given some mild variance in supposedly inherited or sort of inborn aptitude, given the right kind of conditions, people will kind of perform relatively similarly in terms of being able to reach with if we explain to people that this is how germs are spread, they're going to understand why wearing a mask, including wearing a mask by covering your nose, is something that they should do. And because denying either, so denying either epistemic self-reliance or epistemic egalitarianism really puts us in, it puts us on difficult political ground. What happens when we explain away between those guys either by saying, oh, they're not for self-reliant, which means that they're just being misled, or worse, when we say they're just stupid, right? So denying epistemic eitherism, saying they're not, they're just not capable of they're not as smart as we are. So that was that was kind of the the background of of that figure of ambiguity, if you wish.

SPEAKER_03 41:26

What vexes us about free nose guy is the inconsistency and ambiguity. And just to be as clear as possible, the free nose guy is the guy who is wearing the mask, but in such a way that it makes the mask useless because it maybe covers the mouth and not the nose. I link up free nose guy with a guy that I've called the too-late indicator guy. So some people might relate to this, some people might not, but too late indicator guy is making a turn in his car where you need to put the indicator on, but only puts the indicator on after the turn has already begun, thus rendering the indicator useless. It's purely performative. I have thought a lot about too late indicator guy and was excited by the free nose guy framing because it was an interesting way of theorizing that frustration that I've had. Of course, the the epistemic side of things isn't the same with too late indicator guy, but just to drive the point home about what this actually is. Somebody who's engaging in an act that seems to suggest that they they understand their moral responsibility and yet at the same time don't care enough to act consistently with it to the full degree. Free nose guys don't have to be framed as dumb or as jerks. When I've thought about free nose guy and too late indicator guy and any other day-to-day example of this inconsistency that we can come up with, it takes me to the use of the tie in your work, actually. And I think we can take it there on this topic. Maybe I'm making a spurious connection here, but when people act inconsistently with their understanding that in a way that makes the moral and the epistemic registers very blurry, I've sort of gotten them off. In my mind, or maybe solved this problem provisionally through a lens that I used to think of as purely psychological, but through Bataille, maybe it becomes not merely psychological. Where my justification for them has been that they're reaching out and making contact with some plane where consistency and economy don't really govern our thinking and our actions the way that they're supposed to in the current society that we've set up on all of its premises. So I see you you nodding, and hopefully this is making sense in a way that I can tee you up to talk about how Bataille and his thinking about expenditure and waste might actually modulate our thinking about these topics.

SPEAKER_01 44:56

The question I was also really, really glad you brought up Bataille, because I am I am right now sort of working working on the part of my project, which is also a book which engages very directly and especially with with La Part Modipe, so the accursed chair and this question of access and the question of destruction. And obviously where they link up is really the question of what is irrational, right? Because to us, the I like the two too late indicator guy as well. The too late indicator guy and the free nose guy are people who act irrationally because if we again, if we assume that they just didn't know, so that the Freenos guy did not know how masks worked, and the too late indicator guy did not know what the traffic, the rules of behavior in car traffic were, or conversely, so the epistemic bit, or conversely, the moral bit, which is that they just didn't care, right? The too-late indicator guy just didn't want the signal at all because he doesn't give a toss, and the Freenos guy just doesn't want to wear a mask because he doesn't give, he doesn't care. Neither seemed to be the case, right? So if either of these were the case, we could just say, well, they are in fact behaving rationally, right? They're behaving consistently in line with their beliefs and their values and their orientations, despite the fact that we may disagree with those or not share those. The problem with them is that they are acting in ways that to us seem irrational, which is to say, well, if you want to abide by traffic rules, then why not signal or indicate before you actually make a turn? If you want to abide by public health regulations, why not wear a mask in a way that makes it efficient and thus achieves what public health regulations set out to do, which is protect other people from infection, including yourself, right? So why, if you want to abide by traffic rules, why not behave in a way that achieves what traffic rules are there to do, which is minimize harm to others and thus also consequently to yourself? So why, if you are nominally subscribing to the categorical imperative, are you acting uncategorically? And this is, I think, where the where the link to Bataille's work comes in, because Bataille says economy is not economic behavior in the broadest sense is not rational in that way, right? And he's not the first one to say that. So the interest in irrationality or apparently irrational economic behavior, apparently irrational behavior, is well, clearly it's a very present moment in the entirety of 20th century thought. Some tend to kind of establish it first, or kind of more most notably in Freud and his concern around what happens when people engage in large-scale killing, i.e. World War I. But two other people whose work I'm very much engaging with in this project and in this book, both of whom, and especially one, but Tide draws extensively on, were also concerned with this problem. And one of them was Braunislav Malinowski, one of the sort of founders of anthropology, who engaged in kind of extensive ethnographic research of the economic institution of Kula in the Tropient Islands. The other was Marcel Moss, or Mause, depending on how you how you prefer to pronounce it, one of the founders of French anthropology, who famously wrote the gift, which is this treatise on what he refers to as primitive economics, which deals, among other things, with the concepts of gift giving and what reciprocity and non-reciprocity mean in terms of the gift, and quite explicitly engages with the institution of the potlatch, which involves in some cases the exchange not of goods, but the exchange of the ability to destroy usually a significant amount of goods and what that means. Now, I'll I'll just kind of make a little genealogical note because both so Malinowski was ended up doing fieldwork in the Tropian Islands because, as a Polish citizen, once World War I broke out, he was frightened for a good reason that he'll be because he was at that point in Australia, that he would be put in in a prisoner of war camp by the and so decided to kind of take a, as they would say, an extended field break in the region, thus doing research de facto on this, or this sort of delving deeply into this institution. As Elmos was was very along and sort of following his uncle Emil Dukheim was himself very much impacted by World War I and very confused with like everything that was going on. So all of these thinkers, in a manner of speaking, addressed the question of what is the rational element of human behavior and especially how irrationality and the supposedly supremely rational mode of or domain of action of human action, which is economics, how do they actually relate to one another? And both Malinowski and Maus came to a similar response, which is that what seems to us to be irrational behavior, in the case of Malinowski or in the case of Kula trading bracelets and necklaces clockwise and anti-clockwise in a way that does not in and of itself carry any economic value or significance. In the case of Mauser, most famously in the case of Potlatch, destroying large amounts of goods, that this actually is rational in the context of the those cultures, those societies where it occurs, and that something that it does is, or that the way that that connects to our own our own meaning, obviously the kind of Western capitalist economic behavior is, or broader social institutions than just the economy, is in basically this constituting a form of competition around social position, status, and hierarchy, right? So that in effect material possessions are not the first, they're only a proxy for something else, and that they're a proxy for basically social positioning, right? They're a proxy for status, power, and rank. And Bataille takes this question even further and basically tries saying, at least this is in my reading, try saying, well, this isn't in and of itself a consequence of an organization of economy or economic life or provision of goods. This is a consequence of the organization of life itself. So life itself will produce a surplus unless we find a way to deal with that surplus in a way that's not harmful, it's going to turn harmful. So he basically says there is only one way to kind of to deal with this excess, which is either to lose it or to squander it, or to have it turn into something that's explicitly violent, including war. And he he kind of frames violence and war as the ultimate expression of that of large-scale destruction that needs to happen if this excess, if the surplus is not lost or squandered. By which he de facto says something very different from what Malinovsky and Maus had said, which is technically, as long as we have capitalism, we're gonna have this. Because capitalism requires the accumulation of surplus. Not only does it require the accumulation of surplus, it basically rests on the idea that the accumulation of surplus is desirable, is the primary goal of economic action. So where I depart from, or sort of where I move away from Bataille, and very much, I would say, kind of disagree with his framing, is or I think his framing kind of follows the thread of Malinovsky and Maus and a lot of other other thinkers at the time, is really in thinking about reciprocity as coterminous with exchange, and thinking about reciprocity as and exchange as indexical to human relations or relations as a whole. And I think that this is something, this is a limitation in all of their work. I think it's one that they were not, for better or worse, able to see. I don't think it would have been possible to see the possible that it would have been possible to see limitations of that in that particular historical context, certainly not from within capitalism, and none of them lived outside of it. So, but I think that this is this is where we need to go further if we want to think about what can potentially succeed capitalism. So, what what can we have instead of that? So we need to kind of I would say not necessarily for once and for all, but at least to begin with, we need to break the association between exchange, reciprocity, and relationality, and just think about what would these terms mean if we did not treat them as coterminists.

SPEAKER_03 55:14

In other words. Sorry, that's a lot. No, um, this is uh a way for me to make sure I'm following you and to take it into a different direction. The idea is that reciprocity and exchange are in the current construction that is very, very difficult but not impossible to think beyond constitutive of what it means to be in relation to others. In other words, there's no way that we can without a great deal of deliberation and intention, which is what your project is engaging in, this very deliberate attempt to think beyond us. But without that, that we're always going to come back to this idea of relationality as gift-giving, as gift-giving, and as I suppose fundamentally unethical, untenable without this logic of reciprocity and exchange. So is it possible then to come up with a general heuristic that applies across various sites, whether it's the mundane everyday not replying to a text message, up to the level of institutions, let's say denying platforms to certain types of speakers, which is something that you've written about. Is there a general general heuristic by which we can affirm non-reciprocity without enacting harm? Or does it break down into a matter of so many variables that come to bear on different contexts that it's not so much a search for a general heuristic, but some sort of extremely flexible, not fully theorizable, perhaps new value that you're seeking?

SPEAKER_01 57:19

I was gonna say, I wish I could give you a one-word answer. I maybe can, which is I think so, and I hope to find out. So by the time the book is out, I hope to have uh a stronger response to that. But I would say for a general heuristic, I think by about, and I think even if we did not think that, or if we do not think that this is possible or desirable, or something that's worth looking for because what's what's the value of a critique of a total or a theory of everything, if the only thing we're going to come up with again is another theory of everything or another total worldview, right? Is to recognize limits to reciprocity as a standard. And this to me is really, really important because I think this comes back to the question of what is the figuration and the relevance of reciprocity as a standard evaluative moral standard for progressive political orientations movements, basically for the left, right? So what justifies the absence of reciprocity? What would we call that absence of reciprocity? And I'm developing the theory I'm developing calls it irreciprocity, so not non-reciprocity, not anti-reciprocity, not failure of reciprocity, no absence of reciprocity, very intentionally calls it irreciprocity, because I argued that there are conditions which are pretty general conditions, though obviously not always applicable, they do not always apply, they do not always obtain, which then reduce or break down the requirement of reciprocity as a moral standard, and that these three conditions which can apply to specific cases but will often apply to categories of cases or categories of social situations, are irreducibility, irreconcilability, and irreparability. So in cases where conflicts or different positions cannot be reduced to a minimal common denominator, the requirement of reciprocity disappears. In cases where the values or concepts, although they may seem to pertain to the same issue or same question, cannot actually be reconciled. And in cases, which is probably the most difficult one and kind of difficult in the sense of painful to people, think about where relations cannot be repaired in the interpersonal or sort of general manner. For instance, I think our relationship with a lot of the world, non-human world, cannot be repaired. I think we have harmed it beyond repair. The requirement of reciprocity breaks down. And that has very serious moral consequences for what I think we can expect to be owed in the future. So that's that's another element where it then gets to, which is not a question of what we can or should do, because one of the things that I demonstrate is in effect that that does not have, that does not excuse us from from or exempt us from moral reasoning very far from that. But it does remove certain kinds of justification, including probably a lot of the consequentialist ones.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:02

This touches on what I think would make this agenda quite a difficult one in the sense that you use the word difficult emotionally, psychologically difficult for people to embrace, which is that it seems to belong to a world, I would say, and this is clearly what you're you're saying, the world that we already live in, and certainly the world of the future, a world where the breakdown of ecological diversity, a world changed by anthropogenic climate change and the acceleration of capitalism, have rendered a lot of our old frameworks completely untenable. And when I say old, I mean in particular those from the 20th century that are still with us today in the 2020s. I want to play devil's advocate of sorts for somebody who believes in these frameworks that I would agree are no longer serving us, perhaps even as we may still be attached to them. If you belong to a racialized category or a gendered category or any other sort of marginalized category, it could be very difficult to subscribe to your reciprocity when you have never truly benefited from reciprocity. And somebody might say that as long as we haven't transformed our economic conditions while we are still living under capitalism and its liberal premises, we can't move forward with the project of irreciprocity because, of course, those who have institutional power, those who are not sidelined, are going to use it. If we theorize it as such, and if the theory becomes available and thinkable to people, it could very well be misused, misinterpreted, and misapplied in ways that propagate harm, which is the exact opposite of what you're trying to do. But it seems so likely, frankly. This is this is what somebody might say. What would your response to that be?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:29

That's a, I mean, it's a it's a valid point. And I think in some ways, the kind of the emotional difficulty is precisely why I feel both in some ways lucky to be able to do this project or sit in this uncomfortable space. And thanks thanks to the Lieberhume Trust for basically giving me a fellowship or giving me the grant to do this. And from that position, and this is obviously kind of this is one of the first counters that come up, which is exactly like here, your reciprocity is great if you're kind of past history or past time. One of the questions are one of the issues I deal with quite extensively is, for instance, the question of reparations, including reparations, but most narrowly sort of climate reparations, but also reparations for slavery, which is one example of this, which is to say, well, it's great to say that there is no way to pay back the harm done by colonization or slavery or climate change or sort of environmental harm. But what about people who would want to take that? And obviously, from my perspective, it's not, first of all, it's not mine to say. And second of all, I think the framing of that basically reproduces this kind of false dichotomy, which is either you have to go along with the liberal framework and then accept whatever the liberal framework can give you, or basically you need to accept that the liberal framework can treat you in whatever way you it sees fit, which has mostly, for as you rightly identified, for a lot of groups, especially marginalized groups, has been a very harmful way of being treated, historically and at present, and it continues to be that. So, in that sense, for me, the kind of the true promise of e-reciprocity is to say this is actually a way to move beyond that, that says you don't need to profess loyalty to that framework. And that's not because that framework will never pay you back, but it's because as long as we believe that it can pay you back, you continue to abide by it. It remains a master framework, it remains a master narrative, it strengthens it. Which isn't to say you should not take any kind of reparations you can. Get, but it is a way to say accepting that logic tends to perpetuate the same cycle of basically violence and harm that it has created. So I would say obviously there are minimal conditions under which I think it applies, in the sense of if we really think that say reparations can repair something on the minimal level, if someone whatever sort of breaks down or uses a part of borrows something from you, kind of it breaks down and then they fix it so it works again and they return it to you, that's fine. But we know that these are not the like these are not the really interesting cases we're talking about, right? So in that sense, there are forms of repair that are much broader, much more politically interesting, and I think in some ways almost certainly impossible. So the question of reparations is not the question of whether something can truly be repaired, it's the question of whether there is a social justice purpose served by certain kinds of frameworks that are conceivable within the sort of liberal liberal justice system. And to me, it's a question of okay, sure, whatever those ends are, but we need to understand that those ends in and of themselves are not capable of surpassing the framework that created them.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:34

That makes a lot of sense. And for those who subscribe to the logic of reparations, apart from those who benefit from them or those who would be involved in bestowing reparations upon other people, I do sometimes wonder what the end game is. If they sort of see a zero sum, ultimately we're working towards this act of completion. All of a sudden, maybe at some point 200 years from now, with adequate reparations, then we will have erased slavery from the historical ledger, which when you put it that way, it seems absurd. It can simply never work that way. And this falls back onto the issue of inconsistency, I think. There's almost a sense in which so many people who I think would sign on to reparations would not agree that there's this clearing of the deck, as it were, and yet they still will perpetuate this idea that this is this is something that we should be doing. And this isn't to say that we shouldn't be doing it, but just to point again to this vexing issue of fundamental inconsistency. And on that note, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about examples of a slippage and a sort of blurry thinking in moral and epistemic rectitude that cashes out, for example, in questions related to expert authority or the way that we process and then act in accordance with what we consider scientific or accurate information. Because this is a case where I like to think that we can be a little bit more consistent, and that does seem to be something you're you're aiming at that I'm not so sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:47

Sure. Yeah, I mean it's it's one of the, I guess one of the early things that I I became interested in and the whole sort of problematique between of the relationship between the epistemic and the moral, right? Which is, I mean, it's one of these examples that people who work on these things often use, which is to say, well, if you do think that climate change is a problem, then why fly, right? Or if you agree that doing harm is wrong, how can you justify eating meat and stuff like that? And I think in some ways there is, I mean, there are obviously ways of explaining why people, some people tend to do either of those things or often both. But I think it is really the question of okay, what do we see as the proper framework of moral action? And that does come back to something you've mentioned before, which is the way that especially again, we on the left tend to um sort of dismiss individual action, especially if it's individual action taken within the framework of a capitalist global capitalist economy as somehow irrelevant. And to me, that is always the question of yes, and in the sense of I and a lot of people of my kind of general moral orientation would say it is truly impossible to act for, say, global justice if you knowingly engage in acts that are counter to those principles. Right. So it's it's one of these examples that kind of intersectional sort of feminist theorists often use, which is sure you find sort of a minority ethnic sort of person to take care of your children, and then you go off to a sort of protest against the working conditions of women in factories somewhere else, right? So, in that sense, it's the question of okay, what is truly the scope of moral action and whether that in and of its whether there is an implied trade-off and whether there isn't a trade-off that we can somehow, whether there is a way to put a to put a measure or to measure, to, to put, to quantify, to compare, to scale forms of moral action. And one of the things that I tend to be quite absolutist about is that there isn't. This isn't to say we can't talk about varieties or scales of harm, but there is no way for us, there shouldn't be no way for us to kind of say, well, do you know what? It's actually okay that I'm taking this flight because I'm taking it in order to go and say, participate at a COP conference fighting for further reductions or sort of further implementation of the Paris Agreement. Yes, it is almost certain you will, if you want to attend the COP conference, you're gonna have to fly. It is likely that for some people, not the majority of people who do attend them, but a lot attending that conference is meaningful within that scope of action. That still doesn't make flying okay. And I think this is which isn't the implication, is not you shouldn't fly, but it is it's not okay to fly. And I think this is what we really need to kind of own up to in the manner of speaking. And I think one of the things we will discover if we do this is, or if we take this approach, is that in effect, a lot of the choices that we make, which are truly choices, as in we really can make them as choices, especially the everyday choices, and including those that are within the remit of individuals, sort of including consumer choices, are choices that we really don't have to make. As in, it is not absolutely relevant to our well-being that we consume a certain kind of coffee or we take a certain flight or we post yet another meme, right? And then progressively divesting from and progressively learning to not do those things will not change the world in and of itself that it won't do, but it will train us to see the totality of moral choices we make as something that is conducive to the state of the world that we aim to contribute to, or the new world that we aim to create. And to me, that is an absolutely necessary step, right? That has to happen. There is no way to bring about transformation that doesn't entail this. That's not the only thing that's gonna do it. That's not the only thing we should be doing, but it is a thing we have to be doing as well.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:52

So, yes, and this makes me think of two things. The first is something I'd put out there simply as a clarifying question to make sure I'm following your thinking. And the second addresses the big stakes of this work. First matter if I decide to fly to another country, knowing full well the environmental ramifications and justify it through whatever reasoning, let's say it's to see a family member who's ill, or because I think I need to take this vacation for my well-being, or if I buy things from Amazon knowing full well that it's one of the most harmful corporations in the entire world, and justify it by saying I'm so so economically poorly off that I need the cheap goods and services that it provides. These are reasons. They exist, I think, and I'm not sure. This is the question that the logic of exchange here is it is sort of this eye for an eye. So I the the question is is this part of the reciprocity that you're theorizing here? Maybe I'll just leave it at that and then I'll get to the next matter.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:16

Yeah, I think it is. It is the question of because I mean the way that you know I frame the question of non-reciprocity is is often the starting question is what do we not owe others? But obviously, one of the many sort of mirror images of that question is what do we believe we are owed? And a statement such as, I deserve this because I've been underprivileged my whole life, or this is why working class people should get the sort of the best coffee, etc., is a question that in effect sort of brings up again this question of what is it that we think is valuable, and you know, why sort of fully automated luxury communism is not really the way to go or a solution to anything, pretty much. So if you ask me. But yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:10

Thank you. The fully automated luxury communism troupe, whether it's a joke or something that people took in any way, shape, or form seriously, I think belongs to the the old world. The whether it's the pre-Trumpism world or the pre-pandemic world, but that that's sort of a silly aside. The other matter that I wanted to bring up, and perhaps this is a good place to begin winding this conversation down, has to do with what you were saying a moment ago about recognizing the the totality of choices as part of this moral and epistemic totality that we can we can turn away from, essentially, that we don't need to be in relationship with. So, but I'm wondering about what that looks like in practice. As I'm preparing to teach a course on anti-civilization thought, and I recently revisited Franco Berardi's book, Quit Everything, which is a long defense of the objective in the title. It's uh it's really about um, you know, this this idea, yeah. Yeah, that all all of the ways that we can think about activism and changing the world are exhausted at this point, and simply bowing out is the only ethical way to go. But what does that really entail? And is this is this possible, I suppose? That that's the question.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:53

I think that's a that's probably a really a really brilliant sort of wrapping up question. Speaking of, I mean, the the course you're preparing sounds very exciting here at the Forest University. I was talking to to one of the sort of fellow residents who teaches the course on alternative economics, and we're discussing very much sort of similar questions, which is okay, so what does it mean to actually depart from or not participate in neoliberal capitalism for want of sort of a more nuanced, variegated way of framing it? And I mean, I have a lot of answers. One is we know of multiple ways of not participating in this that have been tried and tested and people engage with or in for sometimes for years. Say the zapatistas are one of the examples, but not everyone can, as they say, not everyone can afford to sort of go deep into the Mexican jungle and secede from the rest of the uh and and defend that position for decades, which is the most important thing. I would say for a lot of us, first of all, the world is much more varied and multilayered than we tend to see it as. And I would say most of us will probably not ever, sure to a really sort of major apocalypse. Not that I do not sometimes wish that would happen as well, but anyway, will not exist entirely outside of capitalism, not least because I mean, as the sort of carbon emissions tend to remind us we are in some ways stuck with the legacy of industrial and then neoliberal capitalism forever, for for more than anyone's lifetime. So that option does not really, in that sense, the original position of innocence is one that we will almost certainly never attain. However, again, recognizing this does not mean that we cannot exit a lot of the elements of what it entails. And sometimes I talk to people about different steps and different strategies and different techniques, and clearly these will vary depending on where we are in the social structure, where we are locationally, so geographically, where we are within our own bodies. What does that mean? Are we, say, reproductive parents? Are we elderly people whose mobility or health are very limited or dependent on certain kinds of aid, human, physical, chemical, and so on and so forth? Often so different variations of all of this, what kind of languages would be we speak, what kind of access to sort of food and other resources we have. One of the things that I always say to people first is literally, if you want a single, the one good place to start with is quit social media. Quit social media for a while. Don't quit it as an experiment, don't quit it counting how many days you can stay off whatever Facebook or X or Blue Sky. Just quit social media and see what that changes in terms of how do you feel about. And obviously, a lot of people will say, well, I can't quit social media because it is part of my job and don't. But there's also we have a degree of choice over how much we engage with, right? So it's not about, you know, having this supposedly perfect life in which you never fly. It's about thinking about, well, okay, what if I just didn't do some things, right? So what if I just didn't eat this thing, or if I didn't go to this place, or if I didn't take this particular flight, or et cetera, et cetera. And I think one of the things we will discover is that as we start to make these choices, or at least if as we start to engage in discussion or think with other people about how we could live differently, all of a sudden many of these other worlds become not only possible, but become more tangible, more visible to us, which I think is is a good way to go about approaching transformation, which isn't to say, oh, it needs to be like a gestalt switch, right? All of a sudden you have to, you know, only use solar panels and drink water from the well and stuff like that. It's more about start with one thing at a time, because what we tend to see of as a totality is composed of many more parts than we see or than we tend to acknowledge. And sometimes just removing one of them will not collapse the whole structure because that's not how it works, but it will make us more sensitive to how fragile or how human-made, as David Graber famously famously framed it, this whole system is.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:15

I think that this can rescue the conversation from going in a direction where some people might take it, which is to say that there's a nihilism perhaps to some of this. I think that's that's one way, but a very superficial way of reading this. Sometimes people ask me what it's like to live in New York City, which is where I live. And my default response is that it's a lot like living inside the internet with the overproduction of signs and culture and the density of the population. And as a matter of work, I have to spend a lot of time online on social media and as a matter of circumstance, or at least I tell myself I have to live here in New York City for so many different reasons. And yet, with certain leanings, I recognize both urbanization and the globalization of the internet as downstream of economic conditions that I would rather have never crystallized in the first place. And yet sometimes I tell myself when I feel particularly upset by living in a city, by having to be online all the time, that these structures make certain sorts of experience, make certain sorts of knowledge and relationality uniquely possible. There are things that you can experience and things that you can know that would not prevail if it weren't for the institution of the city or the internet. And yet, I mean, I I think that what I'm about to say doesn't completely negate that. But where I've landed at this point, realizing that that might be a little bit of cope, as they say, is that this rejection, this refusal to accept that we need cities or that we need the internet, that we need to participate in these things, that that rejection and turning away opens up things that we could not see beforehand. You know, it it sort of activates faculties of perception that all of a sudden make the new world seem possible. And I think that this is what Birardi was getting at, and that this is what certain thinkers of this anti-civilization, anarchist ilk are gesturing towards, even though it can seem frankly problematic from a more doctrinaire leftist perspective, is that it's not simply about turning away into a void or regressing into. And I'll use a term here that is incredibly loaded and at least from a conventional viewpoint, very problematic, regressing to a primitivist state, but instead turning towards something that from our vantage point would seem new or at least radically different. And there's a positivity there, not simply a void or absence. Which is why at the end of the day, this work to me seems remarkably constructive in a way that more sort of conventional leftist projects that are are working towards this building in addition to critiquing, but still nonetheless don't expand the imagination, frankly, or the sensitivity, the range of things that we can feel and the range of things that are are thinkable, which is a long way of saying that. I'm really compelled by this work. I find it really, really important, which might be a good. Place for me to ask you the final question, which is simply to talk about what you're working on in in more detail. You've said that this is a book, or if there's anything else that you would want to share with our listeners that you have coming up or that's on the agenda for you.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:17

Thank you. And I mean, thank you. That's a very that's a very generous, generous evaluation, I guess. It's a gift. It's been also a difficult project for me to engage with because I mean, as as you've said, and as I recognize as well, both before beginning and and in the process, it does kind of tend to attract all sorts of reactions, some of which are accusations of nihilism, some of which are kind of accusations of anarcho-primitivism, which is definitely not what I subscribe to, et cetera, et cetera. I think to me, I mean, it's called the the full name of the project is uncategorical imperatives, conceptualizing non-reciprocity or understanding non-reciprocity. It is in some ways a project of really coming to terms with fundamental human moral ambiguity, as in we act in ways that are inconsistent and we need to find a way to deal with this, a way that does not imply that that's not been tried and tested by some of the major religions, including Christianity, and a way that's not outsourced this moral ambiguity to some kind of semi-seudo-univeralizing apparatus, be that the market or sort of the Kantian, the Kantian approach to liberal or the Kantian liberalism, liberalism of the Kantian sort. Not least because both are demonstrably insufficient to deal with everything that we have created, sometimes as a consequence of exactly these apparate, and sometimes really as a collateral or as sort of perhaps unwanted consequence, an unintended consequence. And I would say the same thing applies to the kind of consequentiality that you're referring to in terms of living within cities and then turning away from them, right? I mean, it's one of the reasons why I love New York City is because living or spending any time there, I think from my perspective at least, reminds me at the same time about why it's that city and cities in general are the best place to live and the best place to not live in, right? So it's absolutely the same, it has to, it is both. It is both at the same time. Like it literally cannot be just one or just the other, or great for people who are able to feel only one of these things. But for me, it's a constant reminder of both. And this is really what I think our present human being, human condition, as Hannah Rendt would have put it, is about, right? This is what we are. We are inheritors of liberal modernity, we are inheritors of the world that we've made uninhabitable for a lot of beings, including increasingly ourselves. That means that within that world, we need to find ways to sort of reckon with that. And we need to find ways that we can, in ways in which we can live with one another that are hopefully less harmful. And that really requires a serious moral reconsideration. And this project is part of that. And asking what we do not owe one another or what we do not owe others is a way to move us beyond the idea that the only thing we need to do is to really kind of be a bit more caring because that is not going to fix it. And to me, the real departure begins not necessarily with moving away upstate or to the countryside. It begins with turning away from the idea that there is anything that we fundamentally owe that system, right? It's recognizing what it has given us, the good and the bad, and the sort of in between, most of which is in between, and then stopping with wondering whether we need to pay something back before we can exit that system. Because I think this is what keeps us in that endless cycle of the bad kind of reciprocity.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:37

This is a beginning. And I am really delighted to hear that you're working on a book. Well, Jana, thank you so much for joining us. If you have anything to share with our listeners that you can link to, I'll I'll be asking you to provide links for us for our show notes. And yeah, this has been really wonderful. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:58

No worries at all. Thank you, Emma. It was it was truly a delight to have this or share this conversation with you and hopefully with the listeners as well. The book is not out yet because I'm still completing it, but should be, I'm guessing, out probably sometimes mid next year. But in the meantime, I can share some resources. I'll obviously let you know when it's once it's it's in production or about to be printed. So yeah, thank you so much.