Action Without Hope
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In this podcast, we get high on the substance of theory. I'm Kim Adams. And I'm Sharanik Bhashu. We are two tired academics trying to save critique from itself. Welcome to High Theory. Today we are talking with Nathan Hensley about action without hope. Nathan, would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners?

Yeah, sure. First of all, it's an immense honor to be here, and I really appreciate getting a chance to chat with you. Thank you so much. Yeah, my name is Nathan Hensley. I teach at Georgetown, which is in DC, and I was born in Fresno, California and live in Maryland now. And I wrote a book called Forms of Empire, and this book that we're talking about now is my second book. People, it's intense to have someone smart reading it, so I'm really grateful for the chance, sir, to talk to you about it. Okay, so let me ask you my first question, which is,

Nathan, what the heck is action without hope? Maybe it's a mood or a vibe or it comes out of that, which is a kind of intuition that many of us have.

That in the contemporary moment, we sort of feel powerless as systemic factors that are beyond any individual capacity to change seem like they're falling apart around us. And so the question is, I guess I say it's a requirement because it sort of arises in this project in a lot of ways arises from an effort to kind of be adequate.

to the intuitions of our students and young people and pretty much anybody who's paying attention, who's quite, I think people are sort of tired of being bullshitted about the kind of entrenched nature of the present crises. And yet we're sort of like constantly marketed

these ideas of hope and compulsory positivity that the culture industry stretches out in front of us as the only way that we can think about the contemporary world. So I think that instead of that kind of naive idea that things can be fixed or that solutions are possible, I got interested in sort of rethinking what it might mean to sort of work within systems from which no true escape is possible. So for me, that

developed or sort of led into a project that was really about a kind of like recovery of some of the methods of imminent critique that we know from like dialectical thinking and lots of other work, which is about how you sort of develop projects, positive projects from within kind of corrupted situations, or even like I call them mental grammars or this sort of cognitive apparatus of a world that is sort of

really wired for suicide that's kind of built on a kind of principle of omnivorous capture that shows no signs of slowing. So that's the project. Dealing with that or kind of reckoning with that question has required me to sort of think about

what we mean by hope and what we mean by action. And so those are sort of two terms that I kind of try in dialogue with many, many other people to sort of rethink and reconsider. And I could say more about that, but that's the sort of gist of it, I guess. Yeah. I want to ask you about your, basically your primary sources. And to a certain extent, you're looking at a history of public emotion. And we are looking back at a time when

people felt probably the way that we are feeling right now and so who are these people and what are they feeling and

What are they writing about it? Yeah, no, I really appreciate that. Yeah, the things we just discussed a second ago were very like hyper contemporary, like affective and material crises. But the book is really about the 19th century. And part of what's the gamble at the center of it is just that some of these incredibly perceptive like witnesses to a gathering fossil capitalist system, you know, when the bourgeois world was sort of becoming starting to feel natural to people, you

across the 19th century, that people who are paying attention to that in very perceptive ways diagnosed exactly the kind of public mood you're feeling and thought through in different vocabularies than we have now, but related ones, what it would mean to like inhabit this kind of gathering.

like omnivorous world of capture. And so, yeah, I start the book with Turner, you know, the famous painter of, of quote unquote modernity, who I think of as this kind of like ambiguous documentarian of this process work is charged with a lot of emotion, but you can not really tell what it is. So I look at some of his sketches and, um,

really beautiful kind of gestural preliminary sketches and unfinished works that I sort of argue are evocative of this unfinished mood of this ambiguous documentary process. The other sort of stars of the show are people like Emily Bronte, who has a starring role in the book because I have a chapter on Wuthering Heights and also about her really amazing work.

uh kind of fragmentary poetry objects that get transformed like dickinson's work um

into something we see as poetry, but only after processes of translation. And I describe it as a kind of commodification and capture. And really they're like as big as like a post-it note or like a fortune cookie tread. And these kind of like ambiguous documents about this gathering system by Bronte are very important to me. I look at George Eliot, whose middle march is a kind of like obviously an amazing monument to all kinds of

aesthetic achievements. But really, I look at this sort of theory of minor activity and gradualist social change that in her moment was counter-revolutionary. But I sort of try to recover and flip the valences on it to see how this

sort of theory of somatic or embodied activity could be recuperated for a period of political defeat like ours. And then Christina Rossetti, who's just an incredible poet and who's really thinking very hard about what it means to kind of live inside of suffocating verbal and intellectual and also social systems and still work within those. So I'm really into those people. And I also look at some other paintings at the end of the book

by this pretty obscure guy who was painting in Jamaica at the early moment of the 19th century. So there's visual art and there's a lot of poetry and then there's a couple novels. One of the things that I have always been sort of

impatient with, I guess, in our sort of orthodox critical vocabularies is something, you know, Eve Sedgwick talks about, but this sort of like good object, bad object, she calls it the sort of good dog, bad dog rhetoric of puppy obedience school. You pick good objects and you pet them and anoint them. And then you pick bad objects and you criticize them for being bad. And that's sort of insufficient for any kind of dialectical method. And so part of what I'm

interested in in these works that I'm captured by in the book is really like what forms of thought they enable us to have and what they what sort of their complexities and their contours of thinking like enable and make possible for us and so that's like a real like it's always the kind of encounter that

And it really escapes the sort of thesis-based programs that I associate with more moralistic discourses of criticism. And so I'm really not interested in that kind of stuff. And I want to see all cultural objects as outside of that plus and minus coding of that evaluative apparatus, if that makes any sense. Yeah. So it probably goes without saying that you're jotting out a path

I mean, there's an obvious way to use the idea, which is a kind of contemporary one. But I guess it's important to use it in a way that's not so much a contemporary one.

To step back from the question briefly and say that this question of use is really important to the book itself. What I'm trying to argue is this whole cognitive apparatus that you've described and that we basically breathe and speak as our common sense is really conditioned by a utilitarian calculus of means and ends and usefulness. And so the idea of the kind of instrumentalist logic of how do we use something is in a way the kind of like logic that is victorious around us.

And I'm kind of trying to take a sort of slant angle on. So nevertheless, with that asterisk, I will say that one of the obvious instrumentalizing ways of the way that one might use action without hope is this sort of on the political or social scale. And that's just to kind of think of action in a different way. So we're conditioned by these

increasingly absurd messages about recycling and carbon footprints and things like that to think of what you can do, quote unquote, and what action is as a kind of on the individualist, voluntarist basis of what I myself, Nathan Hensley, should or shouldn't do with my plastics or whatever. And that is a self-evidently inadequate approach.

rationale, like definition of action. And I think most people basically know that that's inadequate. And that's what part of what makes this affective complex so blue in the contemporary moment. So I'm saying to think about action in a different way and at a different register through the logics of solidarity and sort of mutual enactment of shared projects

and essentially on scales much, much smaller than the visible flow charts of inputs and outputs that our sort of fully managed world uses to measure things like action. So I think that's a sort of holdover from the utilitarian perspective

apparatuses of Bentham in the early 19th century that is essentially like the logic of all the COP conferences and it's the logic of carbon offsets and it's all of the other things that are offered to us as action. So part of it is to think about action in a different way

There's maybe a less obvious sort of how do we use it question. And it's possible that this one's sort of slightly more important to me, like just affectively. The other one is more important, like politically, but this is a theoretical level. And the book is really a defense of theory as a consequential mode of activity in the world. And so it's a kind of

defense of the conceptual as a kind of mode of intervention in the material world. That's why the book is really a study of mediation and a study of ideology. And it goes back to some of those core questions that animated people like Raymond Williams, which is about how sort of like seemingly idealist categories like thought and art and culture turn out to have concrete effects in the world. And so I'm very interested in the

that as a kind of justification for an intense form of close reading and like even sort of hyper specialist attention, like the book is not like for quote unquote, general audiences, but that's, that's kind of on purpose. So this less obvious, how do we use it question is the kind of call for people to, you know, do theory and make art because those things matter.

in real ways. Yeah. Going back to what you said, that we are conditioned to thinking of personal, individual action, what I as a person can do for the planet, and the logic there is that it will have a cumulative result. So, you know, my action can be scaled up to the scale of the planet. Then, in this scenario, you know, when you talk about

Ground level solidarity, theoretical interventions at person level or book level or, you know, level of a gathering of like-minded people. Is it deliberately resisting that kind of additive logic and the property of being scaled up?

Yeah, I mean, I think that sort of smooth scalar leveling up is something that is proper to the kind of calculative utilitarianism that I'm less interested in, you know, because one of the things that has occurred to me, you know, even climate change, or I call it in the title climate collapse, you know, that's a trope.

Because the people that talk about sort of the techno solutionists that talk about fixing climate change or beating climate change, they're usually talking about stuff like carbon emissions and particulate carbon atmospheric carbon levels. Even if we could magically capture all the carbon in the atmosphere, we would still have a rapacious deforestation project and the transformation of all lived beings into value. And so, yeah.

those processes of capture and this omnivorous transformation of unenclosed nature into value, that's kind of part of the polemic at the heart of the book is that the thing that we call climate change is really an after effect or sub subspecies of a much larger, uh,

problem that's really about orientation to the object world. And so the question is, by scaling up recycling or whatever the things you're describing, we leave those

base-level conceptual orientations completely untouched. And that's why this transformation in... Gramsci called it the organic basis of society, the sort of substructural foundations on top of which all other things stand as like events or questions, or he says conjunctures. But what is it, what are the thought processes and habits of mind that make...

that organic basis of society hold together and how truly can that organic basis of society be changed. And that really is not about any scalable

externalizable action so much as it's about transforming what things we value, whose lives matter, and all sorts of other projects that need to be altered and rewired from within in ways that are not touchable on those sort of like action templates that we like

get an email by our employers about what we should do to make things greener. So I'm interested in that sort of sub, that base level, the organic level of society. And that to me is what someone like George Eliot, for instance, is deeply interested in, in a project like Middlemarch and her essays and stuff. And that's always been very unfashionable from the

left revolutionary theory because it's so slow and it's so gradualist and it uses modes that are typically feminized. What Eliot calls it the incalculably diffusive effects of someone like Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, which looks from the outside world like tragedy, but Eliot really wants to think about how those tiny activities

can sort of scale up and matter. And I'm interested in that too. Right. On that note, and with the expectation that you will take my question completely apart, let me ask you. No. No, no. Let me ask you my final question, which is how will action without hope save the world?

Yeah, that's the question. But as you predicted, I kind of reframe it a little bit in the book because the sort of saving the world template is a lot of what we tend to get in like official climate discourse from geoengineers and techno capitalists and stuff like that. I think Anthropocene is a kind of sub discourse. The Anthropocene concept is a subspecies of that discourse.

discourse, which is a kind of masculine heroic register of salvation. And I'm really interested in the smaller and more durable adjustments and re-articulations that happen at the kind of like, like, sub heroic level, I call it in the book, and sometimes are barely even visible, they often like fall below the threshold of visibility. And so in the book, I kind of talk about

how Elliot is very interested in optical metaphors, microscopes and peer glasses and things like that. And she's very interested in what this anthropological theorist, James Scott calls ultra ultraviolet levels of activity, things that are like below the threshold of normal visibility, but also like

Emily Bronte's weird little poetic fragments that literally none of the editors throughout history have been able to actually read. And if you did OCR character recognition on it, it would just be glitched out and would never work. And this idea of the sort of not really visible or sub apprehensible processes

that nevertheless like gather and transform. And that's the organic basis of society stuff that is sort of slow work, and it's work that can only happen in dialogue with others. So that's where I think that world saving happens at a much smaller register. Is there a kind of tension there? Is there a kind of contradiction there? You know, if this is sub apprehensible, how do we

even talk about it, let alone convince someone or I don't want to use the word proselytize, but. Yeah. I mean, you have to, you in under conditions of total commodification, you have to sort of steal those opportunities really to come together. And, and I take that very literally. And I think it's, you're right that there, it's not a surprise that the same people that are foisting AI onto universities are the ones offering, um,

the same green solutionism, often in the same sort of provostial initiatives and things like that. So I think these are forces that are at war on these eddies in the current of commodification where real connection can transpire. And I think our work as people who care about these things is to preserve those spaces and seek to expand them and to learn from other people in history who in conditions of historical defeat

have found those spaces and labored to make them real and keep them real. And so that for me is why this sort of draw, it's a 19th century project about mostly Victorian British texts, but it's really takes its sort of theoretical approach

coordinates from the tradition of radical and revolutionary activity of thinkers whose work is conditioned from postures of defeat and retrenchment. And we can learn from that. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a beautiful note to end on. Nathan, thank you so much for coming to High Theory and talking to us about action without hope. We really, really appreciate it. It's such an honor. I really, really enjoyed talking with you, Sernick. And thank you for listening to High Theory.

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