John Protevi: Towards rhizomatic acts of mutual empowerment (Ep461)
“[The politics of the act of joy is about] your capacity to turn other people on. And that is, aimed at awakening their potentials rather than kind of dampening them down. ”
What are the psychological aspects of how military combat personnel are often socialized in training to feel more comfortable with carrying out acts of violence? Why is it important to note that many people, not just those in positions of power, actually desire fascism and power imbalance, and aren't simply operating from states of being deceived?
In this episode, we speak with John Protevi of Regimes of Violence: Toward a political anthropology.
Join us as we explore the nuances of violence in regimes and their roots, while landing on what it means to partake in joyful, rhizomatic acts of mutual empowerment.
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About our guest:
John Protevi is a professor of French studies and philosophy at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Regimes of Violence, Political Affect; Life, War, Earth, and Edges of the State, all published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Artistic credits:
Episode artwork: Lucy Haslam
Song features:
“The Valley Below” by Zoë & Nessi Gomes (Check out Nessi’s voice work here)
“Sisters of Winter” by MILCK
Dive deeper:
Check out thiese books by John Protevi: Regimes of Violence; Political Affect; Edges of the State
Listen to this interview with John Protevi on the Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour
Learn more about philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari
Learn more about the history of marronage and maroon resistance, and survival
This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, a book by Martin Hägglund
Expand your lenses:
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interview transcript
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John Protevi: I was born in 1955, and so I was 13 years old in 1968, which was a kind of coming-of-age, politically, for me. And there was a lot of violence in the United States and the world that year.
So we had the two famous assassinations in the United States of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, Jr. Of course, we had the American War in Vietnam going on. There were student protests around the world, met with more or less police repression. Not that bad in Paris, but very violent and bloody in Mexico City, for instance, where the Olympics were going to be starting.
And so, that was certainly a coming-of-age year for me. So that kind of caught my attention, the opportunities for the state to wield violence for its purposes. Then, just general left-wing suspicion and pacifism.
What else… I can't really watch gory movies. I can watch a cartoon Marvel Universe thing if it's obviously CGI (computer-generated imagery), that doesn't bother me. But that's something else that caught my attention. And so I'm not a really violent person at all. I'm not really sure how I got into it.
Another one that caught my eye was the Columbine High School massacre of 1998. That was probably the first spirally intervention that I did. So I wanted to investigate military training, 'cause now people can kill other people. And so I was reading a bunch of stuff around it. What we see is a spectrum where the closer you are and the fewer mechanical interventions you have, the harder it is for ordinary people to be violent
Except if they're in some sort of extreme rage state triggered by an attack on them or one of their loved ones. So, in other words, it's easier to pull a trigger than it is to actually choke somebody, for most people, most of the time.
And so I got into that and looked at ways in which militaries have to understand that many of their inductees are reluctant, or unable to kill at close range with bare hands in a calm mood. So I wanted to see the way in which the militaries train people, using distance and techniques, and also bonding among the troops.
A lot of motivation for many people is to fight not necessarily for their own survival, but for the survival of their loved ones in the troop. So a lot of military training is about bonding a troop together so that people will fight for the sake of their brothers and sisters.
Kaméa Chayne: Yeah. It's really interesting already in terms of how militaries have to kind of condition the people joining in a particular way to make it more comfortable for people to carry out the deeds. And also how warfare in general has changed so much from centuries ago, where people were forced to be a lot more direct and face-to-face with people in combat. Now it's like a push of a button from so far away, where it might feel like a video game.
John Protevi: There's actually a lot of stuff that's been done on drone pilots who aren't even on the same continent. And so, for many people, there's a lot of guilt involved with killing another person, even in combat. But that can be attenuated in a number of ways. The obvious one is dehumanizing the enemy or saying that they deserved it somewhat, or they were gonna kill me, so it was a kill or be killed situation. But drone pilots aren't in a kill-or-be-killed situation. So they have special psychological issues that they have to go along with.
So, the way to look at it, I think, is that, on a population basis, military organizations have to take the psychological makeup of their combatants into account as they prepare them and unleash them on their enemies. And so obviously, there are horrible examples throughout all of history of atrocities and massacres and all sorts of things. An issue that militaries face is this reluctance for face-to-face, fairly equal combatants to kill each other. So they make it easier through group bonding, command, mechanical intervention, distance and by dehumanization of the enemy.
There's a lot. And other armies in the past also used all sorts of drugs. Soldiers got drunk the night before the battle or during the battle. And there were a lot of ways to handle the psychological trauma of having to go in. You certainly also could, by having severe military discipline or punishment of reluctant soldiers, force them forward because they know that their own people would punish them if they didn't. So all in all, what was a clue for me was to see that the psychological aspect was a part of the military operation. And that some part of technological advance is tied to making it easier to kill people.
My next question was, how did humans evolve such that many people feel this reluctance to engage in more than just kind of like pushing, and shoving, and slapping, or hitting? That's not that hard to do, but to go that next step takes a strongly altered psychological state of rage, or fear, or panic, or something like that.
I asked myself, what are the accounts for how human beings evolved such that those psychological states are common? Whenever you talk about human beings, there are exceptions. There are cold-blooded people for whom killing another person at close range, if they have some sort of advantage to be gained by it, is not a difficult thing for them to do. That's a pretty small percentage of the larger population. So there are no absolutes ever, but there are cold-blooded people.
So, just putting that aside, militaries have to deal with this psychological and emotional state. So that's what got me into the last two books, really, was an investigation of the anthropological literature on human evolution, and how violence ties into most accounts for human evolution.
Kaméa Chayne: Hmm… There's already a lot of layers in what you just shared that I'd be curious to dive deeper into throughout our conversation. What jumps out at me is how much more malicious it is to know that there are these higher-ups who are essentially trying to shape. Because they're the military personnel who join due to all different incentives.
A lot of military personnel are like low-income, middle-class people who are drawn into these programs for economic reasons. But once they're in there, they're also being shaped by their social conditioning, so that they can be more comfortable with carrying out certain acts. And so to think about the higher-ups who are strategizing, like, how do we make people more comfortable to kill other people?
How do we dehumanize the other even more so that people really believe this to their core? So, I mean, just thinking about these different layers of violence is already nuanced.
John Protevi: One big turning point in American military training was to move to what's called “live fire training,” which really makes the return fire close to a reflex. It's a little more nuanced than that.
Usually, you're trained not to fire unless you get to go ahead to fire. So there's like a disinhibition, 'cause the military doesn't want people just firing and then you tell 'em to stop. There was a shift from accuracy training, and this is where automatic weapons come in. Once you get the signal, you can just spray weapons.
Now it's a lot more sophisticated. There's field fighting versus urban fighting. When you're at a checkpoint, you can't just spray bullets around. There are a lot of different nuances involved in everything that I'm saying. But, moving down the scale from a conscious decision to closer to a reflex does increase the firing rates of ordinary soldiers.
But yeah, like I said, one of the biggest things that at least some people report — I haven't done an extensive reading of it — but I've read enough soldiers memoirs to say that, whatever their reasons for joining that once they're in, combat or in a dangerous situation, a lot of their emotional energy goes to protecting their brothers and sisters.
So it's kind of horizontal. They might join for patriotic or economic reasons, or a combination of those things. But fighting for your comrades is a big thing that does enable. But anyway, so that's the thing about the evolutionary story, if you'd like me to tell that.
Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, I was gonna ask, 'cause I think what undergirds a lot of this is our need to unpack human nature. 'Cause it feels very foundational to, like, our worldviews about people, and how we should best organize communities and society.
So, I'd love to welcome you to elaborate on how the idea of "the human" in Western modernity was created in a specific colonial context that was both anti-Indigenous and anti-Black.
What does it mean to understand this idea that's often portrayed as objective truth, that was actually born out of a particular historical power dynamic and subjective narrative?
John Protevi: Well, I haven't investigated that particular angle as much as some of the other ones, but I think it's implicit in the research that I have done. One of the things about most human beings, as opposed to other animals, is that we’re willing to run risks for people who are not blood-related to us.
So it's very common in biology to find that parents will fight for their offspring in every animal species you can find, right? The mother cat will fight for the kittens. But human beings also invest in and run risks for people and for ideas and for social patterns. So that's an odd thing that sets us apart. So we wanted to try to figure that out.
So Darwin, in one of his books, said that if you have war as your selection pressure, meaning that which favors some organisms over others — and he thought the social worked at the level of groups — so if war is the environment, then a group that included people who would sacrifice for other members of the group would actually be a better fighting force. And so they would tend to win their battles, and they would have the environment in which they could spread out, and their descendants would multiply. There were a lot of nuances about whether that worked at the level of groups or just individuals. But that was Darwin's story.
But that relies on the idea that war is an essential part of intergroup relations all the way back to human history and prehistory. Before the state, and the history that would've to be reconstructed, not from written records, but from artefacts and archaeological evidence.
So it turns out that there's a strong debate in the anthropological literature between people who think that war was an ever-present relationship between any kind of group. And another camp that thinks that war really begins with states with a particular type of social organization.
Now there are intermediates, social forms between, like, a band of people who are hunters and gatherers and states that have temples and agriculture. And so there are tribes and there are chiefdoms, and a lot is going on there. But large-scale anonymous group violence such as war, there's a plausible and well-represented school of thought that says that really is contingent on certain forms of social organization, so it's not part of human nature. And that's a big debate.
I want to reconstruct a mainstream view, which is taken up by a lot of fascists today, that war is an essential part of human nature, and so “we must have a big military because everybody else is gonna do this and that…” Also, that kind of idea about war as the essential human relationship fates into some of the views of what we call the manosphere. 'Cause it's like a war between you and the date that you want to, I dunno how vulgar I'm supposed to be here.
Kaméa Chayne: However much you need to be.
John Protevi: But whatever the incel manosphere thinks is the conquest of their sexual object. That's a war environment. You know, you have to prepare yourself, and you have negotiating strategies.
You can even see this when some physical fitness people are at war with themselves, right? They wanna punish themselves. And so they're in the gym and they're working really hard. So I think it is true that there's no gain without pain; you have to work hard in the gym. But on the other hand, I do think there's a kind of self-hatred that you see with people who are excessively punitive in their workouts. It's kinda a weird thing.
There's a U.S. Army or Marine Corps slogan that says pain is weakness leaving the body. And that's a very nasty attitude to take towards your own body. So for me, human nature is a very delicate thing, 'cause human nature has been used as a way of distinguishing the Europeans from the rest.
And we are the full instantiation of human nature, and other people are only approximating that full thing. So it's a very difficult, um, discourse to enter. You have to be extremely careful. On the other hand, I don't think we should ignore that discourse. So there's one way you can say there is no human nature, it's all socially constructed, and I think that that's a step too far.
I do think that most human beings, most of the time, do commit to the social patterns. They have an emotional reaction to, and an intellectual and emotional investment in, the social patterns that they grew up with. That can be a hatred, you can hate the social patterns that you are, were raised in and wanna devote your life to changing them. But I think most people are rarely neutral towards the social patterns. So when they see a violation of social norms, it has an emotional reaction to them. They have an emotional reaction to that.
So I wanna try to figure that out. Why do we take risks for other people? Why are we emotionally invested in society’s social patterns?
Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, and it can be a both/and, right? So people can both hate their social conditioning, but also, we've already been shaped by our social conditioning in some way. So we can't extricate ourselves from the context to which we've already been enmeshed.
John Protevi: That’s a really good point. You can only really hate your social patterns if you know that it's a particular social pattern and that there are other possibilities out there. So it's really only that which enables you to do that.
But I don't think there's ever been a completely closed-off society that had only one set of ways of doing things. As far back as you can go, people gathered together and somebody would say, “I think we should do this because this is what the gods and the ancestors would want us to do”, and somebody else is gonna say, “No way, man, that's not what the gods want us to do”. Right. Human beings are talking political animals. We disagree about everything.
So I don't think there was ever any one society that was so monolithic that no one ever wanted to change anything about it.
//musical intermission//
Kaméa Chayne: The title of your book is Regimes of Violence, and to of weave in what we talked about in regards to our human nature. You write, “The notion of regimes of violence means that violence is not a natural impulse, but is always enacted in socially normative ways, indicative of the history of a community.”
So, can you take us back to the basics a bit here and share what a regime even refers to? And what do you mean when you say that “There are many different forms of violence in human ways of life that are regulated, in regimes, where some forms are normalized or legitimized, and other forms might be deemed illegitimate, or even criminal?”
So, how do we start to peel back the veils of this kind of imposed objectivity of just how things work?
John Protevi: Excellent. That's a great question, thank you. I think regime is just an enforcement-backed pattern. There has to be some sort of consequence for violating what you're supposed to be doing.
The reason I want to say that there's always a regime of violence is that I wanna fight against the idea that humans are essentially pacific, as well as essentially bellicose. I think that our potential for violence is a mammalian inheritance.
Like I said, if you threaten the kittens, the mama cat will fight. But it doesn't mean that mama cats are always going around fighting all the time. What I wanna fight against is this idea.
I don't think that we're essentially aggressive and violent, and only the fear of social punishment keeps us from expressing what we really wanna do, which is our inner urge to fight and dominate.
I don't think that's correct.
I also don't think that it's correct to say that we're essentially peaceful and you have to be pushed into violence. Within a well-functioning society, most of the time, most daily encounters are peaceful. I ask my students, when you walk around campus, how many fist fights do you see every day on a campus of 30,000 people? You don't see any fist fights. Saturday night at the bar, two o'clock in the morning, maybe there'll be some, but most of the time, people don't really face that kind of thing.
But I do wanna fight this idea, and this kind of comes back to your point about European contact with non-Europeans. I really love Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and I think he's really badly read as proposing the idea of the noble savage or the peaceful human nature. I don't think that's what he says at all, but it's often projected onto him. So that Western culture becomes a kind of decline from when it had been good, and then we've declined instead. That's just the mirror image of a sense of what progressive is, a sense where European culture is on top and we've gotten out away from, or progressed away from, this baseline.
So there's a lot to be talked about in terms of that first encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans. And I do try to talk a little bit about that in my courses, but I'm not a specialist there. While I don't think it's an inner urge that has to be stopped, I do think that all societies will regulate violence. Some of it is praised even. Right?
It depends on how you think about hunting as well, right? Because if you wanna see hunting as violence, then there are certainly all sorts of ways in which societies will regulate the violence that humans can exert on our non-human brothers and sisters.
Kaméa Chayne: There are also different forms of violence, right? So there's the more brute type of violence like fist fights on campus, but then there are also the more, like less visceral forms of violence that might be occurring between people on campus too, but it's not as direct, like a punch in the face. Not necessarily campus, just like day-to-day life and systemic violence, and maybe like a slower burn type of violence than like an acute, in-the-moment type of violence.
John Protevi: I mean, the term violence is used in all sorts of contexts. In this book, I mostly limited it to physical violence. But it's certainly the case that I don't think it's a metaphor or an extension to say that people can exert psychological violence on each other by insulting them by demeaning them, or constantly berating them.
We have a whole vocabulary about how people can try to hurt each other.
There is a form of what I call social violence that consists in a hierarchical society, moving someone from a privileged to a less privileged position, which I think opens them up to more forms of physical violence. So, dehumanizing is one form, but even less than insulting, I think, is a good term, right? So you move someone away from the social position that should shield them from, or that should accord them respect, to a position that is expected to have less respect paid to them.
That is a form, I think, of social violence. Because it's often tied in with less punishment for physical violence against people in certain social positions. But by and large, in my book, this particular one, I wanted to just stick with physical violence.
Kaméa Chayne: And how about like, physical violence that is more drawn out, as in, for example, starvation or malnutrition or economic insecurity, which is very material and physical. But not in a second, like maybe over years.
John Protevi: Fantastic question. I mean, it's clearly the case that our international system has recognized starvation as a war crime at least. I think there's a distinction between a crime against humanity and a war crime, crime against humanity being worse. But deliberate starvation in genocidal practices, as we see in Gaza. Might as well just come out and say it is definitely a form of violence for sure.
Kaméa Chayne: I also wanna bring in this word “biocultural”, which comes up frequently in your work. And it's also a word that I have been using a lot in my personal vocabulary and curiosities, specifically when centering, for example, Indigenous and Traditional Ecological Knowledge that doesn't see biology and culture as separate.
And for you, you explained that culture and biology always coexist in living politically. “In a slogan, you can study digestion all you want, but no one has ever eaten food as opposed to this or that meat, grain, seed, or insect produced by certain practices and consumed in a particularly meaningful way.” You can clarify and expand on this.
What I’m thinking of is this fact that a lot of the ways that we interact with the world around us have kind of become depoliticized, like conversations around health might just talk about food or sleep quality, or mental health, in these kinds of pixelated ways, without confronting the fact that all of these things are deeply political and entangled with larger biocultural contexts.
So I'd like to welcome you to also speak to this more and about how biology and culture are abstractions that might be helpful in certain ways, but also dangerous when they're reified as separate and these distinct levels. So, how would you like to elaborate on these ideas?
John Protevi: Well, that's great. You've done a great job already. I think that one of the ways I got into it was thinking about rage. Some of the people I read have convinced me that rage is really a prey reaction, right? So, the predator is not really angry or enraged at its prey. In fact, the predator wants to stay cool, calm, and collected.
So the cat playing with the mouse is not enraged at the mouse. The mouse backed into the corner has to bear its teeth and fight for its life. They're enraged, right? So I think as a prey reaction. So I think that's inherited, evolutionarily. But what triggers that right rage is, I think, culturally implanted, maybe that’s the right word. There's a wide range of things that get people from mildly irritated all the way to blindly rageful. So that was the way I thought about biocultural.
But there are all sorts of ways that we think about it. So you are more excited when you have drunk a cup of coffee and your synapses are firing a little bit quicker, and you're a little bit faster in the way in which you're thinking and talking.
There's a whole history of caffeine in particular, as people have studied the way in which it's traveled around the world, its involvement in enslaved labor, and all sorts of ways. You can kind of see the new world. A lot of early trade of the Americas back to Europe involved drugs… Caffeine, sugar, alcohol, rum from sugar, tobacco, and nicotine. There’s all sorts of ways in which early trade was involved in changing the physiology and, hence, the moods of Europeans.
You cannot explain all of the history of the world, but there's an angle of the history of the Atlantic Triangle that you can trace via psychoactive substances like caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine, and possibly sugar. I think you could probably. If you wanna call sugar a drug, but it certainly has profound psychophysical, biocultural effects.
But even milder than that, I think, spices like peppers and things like that, that they really drove a lot of early trade from what I can understand. And that’s certainly tied up with the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world.
Yeah. So, biocultural, I think, to go back to the war thing, there are cultures. I often read a lot of stuff about the Greeks. I'll tell this story. So Odysseus goes in disguise back to his island. He goes to Troy with the others. He’s a fighter, and the Odyssey is his way back. So he comes back after the war in Troy, and he sacks a bunch of cities. He is a pirate and a gangster. And then he ends up kidnapped by, I forget how it gets there, but he ends up on the island of Calypso for seven years, and he kind of deprograms himself from his rageful, honor-based fighting body.
He’s then able to go undercover in disguise on his home island. So there's a way in which that long trajectory had raised his rage thresholds such that he could withstand the insults that the suitors were giving to the commoners in his thing. So by contrast, Achilles, the other great hero, would never have been able to go in disguise to his home, and he would've come in with swords and started fighting right away.
So there's something biocultural about that ability to hold your patience and restrain your rage. Because you do need rage in those close-range, hand-to-hand combat things. So Odysseus can hold that down. So, on the island, in disguise as a beggar, his wife Penelope says to the maid, Eurycleia, “Why don't we bathe this commoner? Because I want to interview him.”
So the maid is bathing him, and she sees a scar on his side, and she realizes it was Odysseus. Because one of the ways that you trained young boys was that you had a fight to train, right? But their graduation, as it were, was to take a spear and go hunt and kill a wild boar. A wild boar weighs five or 600 pounds and has these tusks. It's armed. It's kind of a fair fight, like a human being with a spear versus a wild boar. I'm not sure who's got the upper hand.
So, Odysseus, being a hero, kills the wild boar, but he receives a scar, and that's his identifying mark. So that made me say that there had to be ways that you have to train the boy up to be a fighter man, for him later as an adult to de-train himself or to undergo a different sort of training to go back in disguise. So it's ways in which your training literally leaves scars on you, depending on how you do it, but also in the sense of changing, in this particular case, your rage thresholds. What triggers your anger is amenable to a lot of social input.
// musical intermission //
Kaméa Chayne: The word fascism is thrown around a lot more these days, given the current regime of the United States. But for many communities, the sense that fascism has been on the rise goes even deeper into our political history, not just limited to the current administration.
You name fascism as “The desire to live in a world of asymmetrical power relations, a vertical world of command and obedience, hence a world in which self-originating mutual power is stamped out.” This is a bit of a tangent, but on a personal level, I have recognized that from my upbringing and conditioning, I have daddy issues.
So even if I know by logic what healthier interpersonal relationships can look like, sometimes the ways that I've been wired mean that in practice I enable and allow toxic relationships, and not emotionally safe and fulfilling for me to drag on, even when I know they're not good for me.
So on a bigger scale level, I'm curious if a lot of us might have like collective daddy issues at a systemic level, in that, the ways we've been conditioned and shaped by our sociopolitical upbringing by the daddy that is these regimes, means that a lot of people might gravitate towards believing or feeling like asymmetrical power relations are more comforting or more logical.
'Cause I think my idealistic self has trouble seeing why everyday people might willingly support or back fascism. So I wonder if this is more of a delusion in that people are being lied to when their basic needs are being weaponized against them. Or because of many people's conditioning to believe that this is actually what can bring us greater security, abundance, and safety.
John Protevi: Well, there's a lot there, and this is truly excellent. This is a great interview. I've done a number of podcasts and not to cast dispersions on my others who have had their own virtues, but I really appreciate that question. So, there are a number of things to say. So Deleuze and Guattari, who are my favorite philosophers, have a critique of a certain type of Marx and Freud combination.
So what they say is that to understand fascism, you have to understand that in certain conditions, people want it. It's a matter of desire. It's not a matter of being fooled. So it's not like false consciousness or ideology is a matter of implanting bad ideas that hide the reality of it.
So, it is true that MAGA people have wrong ideas about immigration, whether they get paid and the taxes and the contributions, they have a lot of wrong ideas about that. Crime rates, everything like that. It's sufficient to account for MAGA, I don't think, it's not that people are being fooled. Deleuze and Guattari don’t think they're being fooled. So that's an important thing.
So what are the social conditions that do it? To the largest extent, people often say that they go back to what Marx and Engels said in the Communist Manifesto, which is that capitalism destroys the ancient codes.
I often tell my students that. We're all existentialists. We have to worry about how to construct meaning for ourselves, right? There are no real anchor points. We have to build a life for ourselves. To a greater or lesser extent, back in the day, you had more than enough meaning. The priest was gonna give you all the meaning you could ever handle. It would explain exactly your role in society and even your role in the cosmos, right? They had a whole plan for you, and you didn't have to worry about meaning at all, right? It was given to you.
So the line that they say is “all that is solid melts into air with capitalism.” Everything is up for grabs. The only stable thing is that there will be another crisis. The final crisis of capitalism never comes. It's always another crisis. There's never any stability. They might be kind of slow things, but even then. So that is, often seen as the largest framework for the desire for command, it is the fact that we have to build meaning for ourselves, 'cause the large meaning structures have been dissolved. And that can be seen as a desire for security or predictability.
Now, to come back to the daddy issue. The leader is the daddy for the society, right? You often hear things like that. But it could be, in fact, that our daddies, our fathers, were little leaders in our family. So it's not like you go from the small one up to the large one. It's that there's just a leader inside the family already. And I think that kind of creates this way in which we wanna be our own commander.
That's why I go back to the people who work out and will like whip their body into shape, and they're going to command themselves. It's not necessarily that much better if you're gonna be your own capitalist, either. There's a way in which a lot of people do self-help, but they create this kind of economic regime for themselves. And “If I go to the gym three days a week, I can have an extra cookie.” So they have a kind of reward and punishment thing, which is more economic than military and commanding. But, I'm not necessarily sure that that's much better.
I think the real problem is that we don't have horizontal friends, right? It's everything about us, right? Am I gonna be the military commander of my life? Am I gonna be an economic self-capitalist, a self-entrepreneur, and invest with an eye to returns? And I'm gonna manage my portfolio of emotional investments and activities so that I end up with a profit at the end?
There are all sorts of ways in which people offer you ways to run your life. The problem is the idea that we have to run our lives, right? We have to form communities and networks and horizontal, self-reinforcing ways.
What I try to tell my students as much as possible, and what I try to do in my courses is, develop their skill at turning other people on. And what you turn other people onto is their ability to turn other people on, right? So, in other words, you have to try to teach them how to think and operate in a way that connects with other people. That enables those other people to connect with other people. So rather than us being individually in charge of our lives, militarily, or economically, or any other way, it's how do we form networks of self-support?
Kaméa Chayne: Yeah. Thank you. It helps to understand, I guess, these daddy issues at all sorts of levels, from like the individual, our relationships with ourselves and how we relate to ourselves, to the familial level, to the community level, to the systemic and regime level.
John Protevi: Well, that’s what Guattari says, in so many words. They say, “Look, Hitler was not the father of the German people. The problem was that the German families all had a little Hitler as their father.”
So it's just spread all over. That might be a precondition for everybody idolizing and glomming onto a great leader. Thinking that the father has to be the leader, the commander, of the family lets us think, then, well, our society needs a commander.
Kaméa Chayne: Yeah. We do have to start winding down our conversation, and as we look to our current reality and our steps forward, I'd like to invite you to talk more about, you started mentioning — our politics of joy and cooperation. And distinguishing what you name as “joyous acts” as more horizontal, mutual empowerment. And I love this framing you share of “rhizomatic acts of mutual empowerment”. So I'd love to invite you to share a bit more about that.
And also something that I was very inspired by reading about was the maroons, which refers to enslaved people in the Americas running away from plantations and establishing independent communities as a sort of resistance. So yeah.
John Protevi: We can start by talking about marronage. Certainly, anywhere that there's enslavement, people will try to run away. Particularly studied here in the Americas because it's a recent, slave history. So there are lots of places here in Louisiana where I live, where enslaved people ran into the swamps, or sometimes they would run to the capital city, to New Orleans, where they would get fake papers and blend in with the thing.
So any time that you can escape from the visibility of being an enslaved person. A lot of enslavement requires that you always be under the sight of literally the overseer, right? So, there's a lot to be talked about there. So there are ways in which escaping from that is a thing. And now marronage and maroons are often seen as a symbol or a metaphor for attempts to escape from visibility. So hackers, squatters, and people in favelas, underground people, can often be seen as maroons in that sense. Yeah.
The politics of joy. You have to remember that, and this is how I end the book, that it's not simply joy, but it has to be active joy, I think, in the following sense. The fascists are really joyful people. I mean, they're out there, out of their minds, happy. They're marching around, they got flags and music and all sorts of things, right? They’re carrying torches, and they're having a great time. So it can't just be joy. I think that joy is something that’s like being under the spell of a leader figure, such that outside of that gathering, they're not necessarily able to turn other people on.
I do think that there is a kind of viral aspect to fascist radicalization that happens through the internet, and so on and so forth. But, I do think there's a distinction to be made between that virality, which is aimed at creating a world of command versus the, what I was asking for, is the kind of act of joy, in which it's in your capacity to turn other people on. And that is, aimed at awakening their potentials rather than kind of dampening them down.
It can be quite complicated because while I say that, I'm also really a New Deal social democrat, where the social safety net enables people to live and have command over their time so that they can develop their talents, without being forced to work for mere biological or social survival.
So while I'm really into rhizomatic networks and stuff like that, I do think that we should have Medicare for all. I have a whole list of very standard, kind of, social Democrat things. A few of them are represented. Many of them are represented by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. The vast bulk of Democrats are, I think, neoliberals who got us partially into that mess. So I'm a kind of New Deal Democrat.
So in that context, then, people can form those networks of supporting each other in developing our talents and taking command of our time, so we can mutually enable each other to develop talents. I often say that one of the ethical principles for Deleuze and Guattari is that people need a workshop, and they need friends. So, if you are forced into competitive work with other people, it's really hard to have friends, and you don't have a workshop to develop your talents, 'cause you're running around in a gig economy.
After all, you're behind the wheel of an Uber, and then on the weekend, you're doing TaskRabbit and you're putting things together. I'm learning all these new apps. I have to ask my students, what are the new gig economy apps? So that's a new one. I heard of TaskRabbit, where I guess if you're a carpenter, you can go in and build an IKEA bed for somebody. But those kinds of things don't enable you. What you need is a workshop where you can make your own stuff, not putting together prefab, IKEA beds. So anyway, I'm both the politics of joy guy and just a social Democrat.
Kaméa Chayne: Politics of the acts of joy, rhizomatic relations, the maroons taking inspiration from that. Also, ways to become ungovernable. Maybe in little ways, in plain sight of mass surveillance.
And then, as we start to wind down our main conversation, I'd like to invite us to take a step back to look at the bigger picture. So you talk about how, “States are not the telos or the ultimate aim of social formations, as many of them entrench domination and exploitation, even if we seem to be stuck with them, and might as well try to use them as we can.”
Here, I think about how states and nation-states as ways to organize human societies are relatively really young in the grand scheme of human history. But it is all that a lot of us have lived and know. So a lot of people feel like this is how things work.
But to me, I find that a lot of the systemic issues that we face today are kind of wired into the logic and worldviews of these kinds of modern states. Like, even nation-state governments of so-called developing countries or Global South countries are tethered in certain ways to broader global economic interests and global capitalism, and often are prioritizing those at the expense of their own most marginalized communities, their Indigenous peoples, and their more-than-human communities as well.
And so when I kind of tried explaining a lot of these to one of my friends, she was like, “Well, you can't just say that countries are bad... You can't say, like, nation-states are bad”. But I feel like I've learned enough about different countries all over the world to kind of see similar patterns in terms of how the most marginalized communities, even in developing countries, are struggling at the hands of their own governments.
So I wanna ask you, what limitations do the social configurations of our political selves in states impose? And now that we've already arrived here and been entrenched in these states and regimes, what is your theory of change for how maybe moving beyond these modern political forms might take place?
John Protevi: The biggest thing is what we started with. Nation-states are an assemblage or a composite. They are a recent development, and they were put together. So if they were put together, they can be taken apart.
How do you do that without even more massive harm? There was a lot of human cost imposed by nation-states on other forms of social organization tied in with colonialism, slavery, capitalism, all that stuff.
Again, I don't think you can just pull them apart. But yeah, you're certainly correct that what are called “developing nations”, even that term has a particular history of the post-colonial era, and that's how national debt was used in what's called “structural adjustment”, via the World Bank and the IMF. And a lot of these things result in the European powers having the ability to direct the social spending of developing countries for them to refinance their unpayable debt. They end up being able to command the dropping of social spending, which then produces a drop in wages for employed workers.
So there are a lot of ways in which what you say is exactly correct. “Developing countries” often end up being the exploited arms of the global capitalist system. So, I'm also a Marxist in the sense that the real relations are between owners and workers and not between citizens of one nation or another. Right? So in other words, I have a lot more in common with a professor in Mexico or in Chile than I have with the president of my university, like the owners of capital. Now, even the president it's just an employee, but like the company owners that form the board of supervisors of my university.
Just 'cause they're Americans, I don't have that much in common with them at all compared to my colleagues, professors in Mexico City. So in that sense, I think we have to analyze the way in which nation-states, at least from this economic aspect, enable capital to flow while they restrict the rights of workers.
So lots of workers cross national borders, but they don't bring a full set of rights with them. That's why undocumented people, in the United States, some percentage of the total workforce is made up of undocumented people because they're easier to exploit them and this and that.
So that's one way to look at it, right? The nation state allows for capital to pass back and forth, and it doesn't allow for fully rights-bearing labor to pass across the borders.
Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, and this could be a whole other conversation in and of itself. But yeah, thank you for offering a brief overview of what really deserves whole entire conversations on.
But maybe just to close off our main conversation, I wonder if you can share how you see these more like rhizomatic and horizontal acts. What might these look like in practice? So what are some things that people can do that help to create that ripple effect that you mentioned, where it's like enabling other people to then enable each other, and kind of having this webbing out effect rather than a narrowing?
John Protevi: I think that the thing that we want to do is we have to ensure people's biological survival. So we need food, shelter, and clothing. Once we have that, I think there are all sorts of ways in which people can teach each other the things that they've learned across their lives. So, I can teach people how to analyze basketball games as long as I don't need to charge them money, right? I could have a website in which I give away my basketball knowledge or something like that.
But people need time to invest in that, and you don't have time to invest in those activities, those cultural enrichment and mutually empowering activities if you gotta work, right? So it's tying biological survival to working for somebody else.
One way I put it is this: If working means having a job, then nobody should have to work. We have more than enough productive capacity. We have to pay people not to grow food. Lots of stuff produced sits in a warehouse.
Kaméa Chayne: There's so much overconsumption and so much like superfluous things that are, I feel like jobs for the sake of jobs and not really supporting people's quality of life.
John Protevi: I think part of it is, once you have your survival assured, then I think people will group into interest groups in which older people will share their knowledge with younger people, and younger people will energize older people by giving them new ideas.
And we can have a series of communal self-help, or not even have self-help, but communal interest associations. And you see a lot of that already, it's just that it's not as prevalent as it could be, 'cause people are either working or exhausted from work, just fried from work, and they don't have time to develop their talents. So I'm no different. I've watched many a basketball game at nine o'clock at night, and then I have to go to work all day.
// musical intermission //
Kaméa Chayne: What's been one of the most impactful books you've read lately or publications you follow?
John Protevi: Well, one of the ones that we talked a little bit about here is Martin Hägglund’s book, This Life, which talks about the time that we have to spend working versus the time that we have to develop our talents. And that was an important and influential one. I thought that was great.
Kaméa Chayne: What is a motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
John Protevi: So my grounding mantra, I think, is kind of preventative, or gets me out of things. So what I say is, don't live inside your own head. So get outside your own head. So, if I'm up at night and I can't sleep, I try to get up and actually write something down or read something.
But I do think it’s a bad way of living when you're just monologuing or dialoguing inside your head. So get outside your head.
Kaméa Chayne: Yeah. Thank you. I relate to that. And finally, what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
John Protevi: Well, my wife.
Kaméa Chayne: Beautiful. Well, we are coming to a close here, but it's been an honor to share this time and conversation with you. Thank you so much. As we wrap up, where can people go to check out your book?
And what closing words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
John Protevi: Well, my book is available at the University of Minnesota Press, and on Amazon and other booksellers. I have a website, which is www.protevi.com/john. I have a lot of materials there. And words of wisdom, “This too shall pass,” I think, is a good one.
