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Jean-Thomas Tremblay, "Breathing Aesthetics" (Duke UP, 2022)
01:03:40
An interview with Jean-Thomas Tremblay
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- [00:00]
Jean Thomas Tremblay
Hello, everybody.
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Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to this podcast on the New Books Network, I bet you like to read. I know that I do. That's why I founded the New Books Network. So as readers, we need to know what to read. And I have a podcast to recommend for you. That being the Proofread podcast. Do you have a goal to read more this year? How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread podcast is here to help you. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They have 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. They offer a brief synopsis, there's fun and witty commentary, and there are no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. Life's too short to read a bad book, so subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming soon. Toast the holidays in a new way and raise a glass of Rumchata, a delicious creamy blend of horchata with rum. Enjoy it over ice or in your coffee. Rumchata. Your holiday cocktails just got sweeter. Tap or click the banner for more. Drink responsibly. Caribbean rum with real dairy cream. Natural and artificial flavors. Alcohol 13.75% by volume 27.5 proof. Copyright 2025 Agave Loco Brands, Pojoquee, Wisconsin. All rights reserved.
- [01:28]
Jean Thomas Tremblay
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Marshall Po
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Stentor Danielson
You're listening to New Books in Geography, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm your host for today, Stentor Danielson from the Department of Geography, Geology and the Environment at Slippery Rock University. Today, I'll be talking to Jean Thomas Trembly, author of Breathing Aesthetics, published this year by duke University Press. Dr. Tremblis, welcome to the show.
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Jean Thomas Tremblay
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
- [02:22]
Stentor Danielson
To start off, why don't you Tell our listeners a bit about your background and how you came to write this book, of course.
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Jean Thomas Tremblay
Well, I have a very promiscuous educational background, partly motivated by the fact that I wasn't sure in what direction I was going for a very long time. When the time came to choose a major in my undergraduate degree, I decided to go toward political science because I wanted to work in politics and I wanted to work in journalism. And I found myself gravitating toward theory courses and especially theory courses, where there was a very capacious understanding of what a case or an example could be and where aesthetic thinking and aesthetic discussion were welcome. And so when I moved toward graduate school for my MA and my PhD, I decided to go into the more aesthetic disciplines of literary studies, film studies, and cultural studies. So I did my PhD at the University of Chicago in English and in gender studies. I worked four years as an assistant professor at New Mexico State University. And as of recently, I'm an assistant professor of environmental humanities at York University in Toronto in Canada. The book Breathing Aesthetics was born out of a desire to make this background cohere, although I don't think I was immediately present to that. But I think I turned to breathing initially because it seemed like the right place to ask questions that were both aesthetic and political aesthetic questions. Because breathing is a question of rhythm. It's a question of duration, is a question of texture and density. When we think about breath in relation to poetry, for example, we're talking about the meter. In fiction, we might be talking about the breathless, free indirect discourse or the stream of consciousness. When we talk about breath and cinema, we might be thinking about questions of spectatorship and then politics. Because when we think about breathing, we're thinking about the uneven distribution of the conditions for living. We're thinking about the fact that breathable air is not evenly or equally spread across all atmospheres and capacities. Breathing was also a place where I could indulge my interest in contradiction. When we think about breathing, we don't have to think of vitality and morbidity as being antithetical to one another. Also, the self and the not self are strangely entangled. Insofar as breathing is about processing alturity, taking it in, processing it, and putting it out. And when I started working on the breathing project first as a dissertation, it was around 2014, so against the backdrop of the murder of Eric Garner and the non indictment of Daniel Pantaleo, his assailant, by a New York grand jury. And it was a moment when I Can't Breathe was emerging as A protest chant that was in many cases an explicit reference to France Fanon and a genealogy of black thought that took respiration very seriously for thinking about the restrictions on life, but also deliberation of life. And so, yes, so that's the context in which I started working on this project, when breathing was starting to become an object of interest in its own right, as opposed to something that just fades into the background. And so it was very uncanny to finish the book during the COVID 19 pandemic, because suddenly there were op eds about breathing and everybody seemed to have an opinion about it, which would have been an absurd thing to say when I started working on the project. But I think that the whey's breath physicalizes this uneven distribution of vitality has been made especially spectacular over the past few years.
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Stentor Danielson
Yeah, it's definitely a very timely subject to be taking on. So in your introduction, you say that, quote, breathing traffics between the structural and the experiential. And I was wondering if you could elaborate on that statement that I think captures kind of where you're coming from in the book.
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Jean Thomas Tremblay
Yeah, certainly. Well, one of the projects of the environmental humanities where I live and spend a lot of my time is to think across scales and try to produce methods and insights that can travel across scales. So what that means is that in order to understand something like ecological deterioration, we need to be able to think at the subatomic level, but also at the planetary or even universal level, the level of the universe. And breathing, I think, is very useful as an object to help us think across scales, because in breathing, we can see how bio and necropolitical processes get to be embodied and get to be experienced. When we talk about biopolitics of necropolitics, we're talking about the management of life and the management of death at the population level. One example of the biopolitics of respiration might be environmental inequalities or environmental racism. So the fact that asthma patterns and epidemiologies of asthma tend to abide by segregational divides. There's a biopolitics of respiration here, insofar as there's a management of which members of populations have access to to care, which members of the population don't have access to care, which members of a population get to live close to or far from a toxic hazard, for example. So these processes are processes that demand large scale understanding or large scale thinking. And so thinking about the phenomenology of respiration. So the experience of respiration might be a way of getting to have a clearer sense of how these large scale processes get to be registered at the individual level, and how they get to impact psychic life and everyday interactions. Breathing was a way of trying to move across scales in relation to the project of the environmental humanities, more specifically.
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Stentor Danielson
Yeah. And so since this is a work of environmental humanities, you're doing analysis of a whole bunch of different examples of art and film and music and poetry that address this issue of breathing. So how did you go about choosing all of those works that you put together into this book?
- [09:46]
Jean Thomas Tremblay
That's a great question. I mean, I think I could answer it in reverse by talking about a problem I'm currently having and how this new problem is an indication of how I went too far about trying to solve the problem of breathing aesthetics, which is I'm working on this new book called the Art of Environmental Inaction. And it's impossible to have an art of inaction, because to have an art of something, we need mediation. And to have mediation there needs to have been a gesture. None of the cases that make it into the archive can be actual examples of inaction. They have to be doing something else. For example, they're activating a process of unlearning. They're helping us unlearn our certainty about what an action is, or our certainty that politics exist within the realm of action. I'd be happy to say more about this project later, but the problem of the archive in this new project is that it has an n of 0, a population of 0 for its possible archive of examples. And the problem of breathing aesthetics is that it has an archive that is potentially infinite. Right. Any piece of art could be said to be related in some way or another to respiration, insofar as it demands some kind of human intervention, and also insofar as our models for the artistic act and what motivates the artistic act are primarily respiratory. The idea of inspiration has to do with breathing in the world, in order to breathe out form or breathe out an artwork or work, work of art. And so I had to establish very strict criteria for what could be included within the archive of respiration, or as exemplary of what I call the breathing aesthetics. And some of the criteria have to do with formal and content components, which is to say there needs to be an explicit discussion of respiration, but also an attempt to attune formally to the rhythms and texture of respiration. But there also needs to be a clear engagement on the artist part with the sociopolitical processes that are mediated by respiration and the framework in which I'm looking at this is called the crisis in Breathing, which is as close as I get to making periodizing claims. What I call the crisis in breathing begins roughly around the 1970s. And it's marked by the intensified pollution, weaponization and monetization of air and breath, which, of course, these processes have unevenly distributed repercussions. And so in order to make it into the archive of breathing, which, you know, I don't know if it's an honor or. A sign of misfortune on the artist part, there needs to be this clear response to the conditions of the present as being marked by a certain crisis in respiration. So this is why a great deal of the archive is interested in environmental collapse. Because in works, for example, like C. A. Conrad's ecopoetics, the destruction or deflagration of the world, of the planet is producing certain conditions for breathing that, according to them, according to Conrad, a poet has to respond to when they are cultivating certain conditions for writing.
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Stentor Danielson
Yeah, and you're so right about how easily your archive of examples could just explode out of control here. Because even just as I was reading it, I started thinking about wanting to pay attention to the breathing in any film I watched or anything, and think about it in these terms, because everybody's always breathing. We don't pay attention to it most of the time. I can see how that was a bit of a tough problem to get it down to a manageable scope for a single book. So my next question. I wanted to follow up on your mention of this idea of the crisis of breathing and ask you to say a little bit more about these processes of pollution, weaponization and monetization of our air.
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Jean Thomas Tremblay
Yeah, absolutely. So it's a very imperfect periodization, as all periodizations are. But I do think it's useful one, a useful one to think about processes of intensification. So when we think about the weaponization of the air, I mean, Peter Sotterdijk would tell us that this goes back to the. This goes back to the First World War and the use of mustard gas, for instance. And there are, of course, antecedents of biological or chemical weapons that far precede the First World War. So even that, as a starting point is not ironclad or not immune to criticism. But what happens in the 1970s is that chemical weapons migrate. They are outlawed for the purpose of war, which is to say for uses across state lines, for international uses, but then they become legalized for use by police forces in, quote, types and quantities proportional to the demands. And so it's really unclear what counts as a proportional type or quantity when it comes to disperse a crowd or attack a crowd. And, and the ambiguity around. Around this kind of legal language has made it possible for. For police forces to. To abuse the substance and in very spectacular ways, in ways that have been highly mediatized. And so what happens is this. You know, there's this moment when we think that chemical weapons are being outlawed, but actually what they're doing is they're pervading the fabric of everyday life in North America. And also I should say, as a little asterisk, that we would be wrong to think that users across state lines have not continued. When I was based in New Mexico, in southern New Mexico, I was very interested in news reports on the use of chemical weapons, tear gas, specifically across state lines by border patrol agents in order to prevent immigration or the passage of migrants. This is a violation of international protocols, international protocols that are very unevenly enforceable, but it really shows how the rubric of the domestic can just grow and grow and grow in places like the borderland. So that's for the weaponization of the air. When we talk about the monetization of the air. Well, one way of thinking about this is that having access to breathable air is now a marker of privilege. So there were all these new trends that I was really interested in when I started working on this project. For example, bottled air and oxygen bars, which seem to be all the rage in the 90s and early 2000s. And now it seems to be even more spectacular insofar as breeding has been sort of incorporated into the industry of wellness as this kind of byproduct of the growth and capitalization of New Age. So now there is something like what Kelly Conoboy reporter calls the breathfulness industry, such that we can take breathing classes that have a therapeutic purpose. And so who has access to breathing classes is, of course, a very basic political economic question, which nevertheless reveals a great deal of information about who gets to afford a free breath or an unencumbered breath. Then when we think about pollution, I mean, processes of pollution can be dated back to, I mean, at the very least, the 13th century with early industrial expansion. But then what happens in the 1970s is that suddenly there are state protocols for, well, with the purpose of containing or reducing emissions of pollutants, even though they have not always functioned in this way. And so the crisis in breeding also coincides with the current shape or the emergence of the current shape of the environmentalist movement in the Western world. And so I'm not saying that any of these processes of pollution, weaponization, and monetization begin in the 1970s, but that it's useful to think of these processes as intensifying in what is often called the long 1970s, which is to say the inauguration of this world where neoliberal policies are naturalized and implemented more than any other kind of economic or political policy. And the long 1970s is one way of rethinking about the fact that we're still caught in the financial decisions and the intensification of the financial decisions that started to be made with particular fervor and vigor in that pivotal decade, as Judith Stein calls it.
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Stentor Danielson
And in your answer there, you actually kind of anticipated a little bit my next question, because you mentioned the idea of breathing as something therapeutic, and you bring that up several times in the book, taking kind of a critical perspective on seeing breathing as a therapeutic or a therapeutic perspective on breathing. So could you talk a little bit about that and how some of the works that you analyze in the book give us a different perspective on breathing than a therapeutic one?
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Jean Thomas Tremblay
Absolutely. So There was a bookshop.org selection around the holidays, I think, in 2020, of trade books that were all about respiration. And when you're working on a project like this one, you tend to have tunnel vision. You tend to look, you tend to think that the information you'll be able to collect and the information that will be useful will be located in certain corners of the universe and not others. And so it really struck me when I saw this spread of books that were being publicized for the holidays in the first year of COVID that is, in order to write, to monetize breathing in a different way. And I like to joke that my book is one of the few books published in 2022 that do not instruct their readers to take a breath or to take a deep breath. It's a book that does not engage in this kind of therapeutic trade off with the reader. But I am interested in ways that therapeutic approaches to breathing have been critically engaged, especially by minoritarian traditions, which is to say, traditions tied to artistic genealogies dominated by people of color or people who are differently disenfranchised, for example, individuals with disabilities, queer trans individuals, and so on. So there are two chapters in the book that focus on therapeutic approaches to respiration. One of them is on what I call aesthetic self medication, so the notation of breathing for therapeutic purposes. And the other one is on what I call feminist breathing. So the ritualization of respiration, mostly in black feminist healings and indigenous ceremonies. So I can say a few words, maybe, about each. So in terms of aesthetic self medication here. I'm interested in artists, writers and artists who are working within the very broad category. Of queer life writing and performance. I'm thinking of C.A. conrad, whom I mentioned before. Dodie Bellamy, as well as Bob Flanagan and Sherry Rose. These are all people who've published works. Where respiration is producing conditions of writing and through an experience of crisis. For example, Bob Flanagan lived with cystic fibrosis. And he was known for his extreme body art, extreme performance in a. In a masochistic, cytomasochistic register. That he performed with his partner in life and in art, Sherry Rose. So he was able, in those performances, to regularize his breathing. In order to experience a kind of suffering that he found to be exhilarating, as opposed to debilitating, or strictly debilitating, at least. And then at some point in his life, it became impossible for him to participate in this kind of performance. So he started to devote more attention to what I call these journals of bad breathing. Which are essentially everyday notations of the symptomatology of cystic fibrosis. And they're extremely repetitive. And it turns out that the repetition, the iterative nature of it has some kind of purpose. Which is to say that the symptomatology turns into structures. Like a melody or a joke with a very predictable punchline. And all of these structures afford him some kind of psychic coherence. And through an experience of loss. And it's a loss of health, right? A kind of deterioration of his condition. But it's also a loss of bearings and a loss of personality. Because he really identified as a performance artist and as a masochist. So the question there is, what kind of relation is he able to develop to his suffering. When it can no longer be aestheticized. In the specific ways that he used to think of as spectacular and cool and shocking. So that's it for aesthetic self medication. And in terms of the feminist breathing chapter on the ritualization of respiration. Well, I was really interested in works by Toni Kidd Mambra and Linda Hogan. Which were trying to think about how the ritualization of breathing would be helpful. In terms of creating the conditions for convergence and for congregation. In the event of political losses and political setbacks. So there is this narrative in feminist history. That there's this moment of exhilaration in the 60s and the 70s. What is colloquially called the second wave. And then there are too many losses that take place. For example, the era is not ratified There is a great deal of external opposition. There is infighting in terms of racism, homophobia within the women's movement. And so the kind of vitality or fervor that feminist activists brought to the movement becomes unsustainable. And so this is a kind of tale of deflation, or what Jane Elliott calls declension. And I think that we can tell a different story about what happened to feminism in the 1970s and beyond if we look at these minoritarian traditions where the ritualization of respiration is not meant necessarily to recover vitality, but it's meant to organize the experience of political lows or structure the experience of political lows. And it's a double edged sword, ultimately, because what happens through healing is not that people suddenly feel well and they're invincible. What happens through a healing of the kind destroyed, excuse me, described in Toni Cade Mambura's novel the Salt Eaters, is that individuals can return to the work of political activism, which is to say they can withstand being hurt. Again, there's something completely heartbreaking about that. But I think that it's not a coincidence that breathing is the means of producing those conditions or generating those conditions, because breathing is a way of making life out of vulnerability and out of exposure and in many cases, injury and suffering.
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Stentor Danielson
Okay, and so next I'm going to kind of take advantage of getting to be the interviewer here to hone in on a bit of your book that's of special interest to me, which is Wildfire, because wildfire smoke is one of the big threats to breathing in lots of parts of the world today. And it makes a few appearances in some of the art that you analyze. So what can your work tell us about wildfire and its relationship to breathing?
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Jean Thomas Tremblay
Okay, yes, this is a great. This is a great question. Wildfires have been happening with increased frequency and in ways that have been indeed spectacular and mediatized. I had been writing for a few years about Rennie Gladman's Ravica novels. Those are experimental novels that take place in this fictional city state called Ravica. And the air in Ravica is clouded by this thick yellow smoke. And the poet and writer David Buick has this reading of Glanman's novels as being partly New York novels and partly San Francisco novels. And it was scary, sublime and horrifying, right, to notice that the air had become yellowish orange in San Francisco a few years ago in relation to wildfires that had been taking place in the area. So there are weird moments when I realized that reality was catching up to fiction. And in Ravika we have characters who gather information about each other by way of their difficult breathing. Right. So the idea that breathing would be a primary way for thinking about sociality in a moment of ecological crisis that is being speculated by Ravika is also taking place in urban spaces and rural spaces where the air is clouded by smoke. There's another place in the book where the question of the wildfire comes up. It's in relation to specific works by Ana Mandietta and Amy Greenfield. And there I'm especially interested in complicating a set of works in queer theory that think of the destructive and productive aspects of fire as inherently queer and therefore available for a kind of pleasurable and promiscuous recuperation. The depiction of a wildfire in a dense piece like Amy Greenfield's Wildfire, where the women are producing the very flames that they're also being engulfed by, is pointing to a kind of structure of suffocation, or an experience of suffocation that is not so easily redeemable as. As potentially pleasurable and therefore queer. And so, yeah, so these are some of the places in the book where the respiratory repercussions of wildfires are being explored with particular attention. At New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner, However you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what running is all about. Run your way@newbalance.com Running.
- [31:35]
Marshall Po
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- [31:36]
Jean Thomas Tremblay
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- [31:40]
Marshall Po
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- [31:50]
Jean Thomas Tremblay
For introverts and extroverts, the thinkers and.
- [31:54]
Marshall Po
The doers for old friends and new.
- [31:58]
Jean Thomas Tremblay
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- [32:01]
Marshall Po
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- [32:06]
Stentor Danielson
Yeah, and so in the book, you draw on a really wide variety of scholars and theorists to help in analyzing your material. And I was particularly pleased to see you citing Sean Hsu, because I interviewed them back a year or two ago on this podcast. So it's kind of a fun surprise to see the new guest citing the book that the old guest had come on to talk about. So could you talk about some of the more important scholars that you cite and kind of how their work contributes to yours?
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Jean Thomas Tremblay
Absolutely. I mean, I think I can start with Sean, who's such an important figure for my thinking, but also who's been an incredible mentor figure. Toward the very end of my PhD and in my first years on the tenure track, Sean wrote a book called the Smell of Risk, which you interviewed him about. And what the Smell of Risk does is offer us an account of the generic life of the olfactory. So how our very understanding of aesthetic, genre, aesthetic form, ought to be informed by what Sean calls atmospheric differentiation. And so the concept of atmospheric differentiation as one way to give form to the uneven distribution of risk and also to understand its aesthetic life, its aesthetic repercussions, that was very central to the last few years of this project. And those are very critical years because they tend to be the moment when you write the introduction and you pull the threads together and you tie them neatly. And I should say also that we're actually collaborating on a piece that we wrote, a piece that will come out eventually, hopefully sooner than later. And we wrote that with Alyssa Corinne, who's an olfactory artist based in Los Angeles. And that piece is about skunk, which is related to the questions of chemical weapons that I mentioned earlier in our conversation. Skunk is this malodorant chemical weapon that's been developed by mostly the Israeli Defense Forces, and it's been used against Palestinians. It's also been stockpiled by US Police forces, although there are, I believe, no recorded uses of skunk against populations on US Soil as of yet. And we've been sort of fascinated by the fact that there's a whole industry around skunk and that its value has increased even in the absence of clear, specific, documented uses in the US and skunk is also useful to think through because it's a way of thinking about the role of chemical weapons and crowd dispersal beyond the event of the protest. So skunk instills in individuals this foul smell that will stick to the skin for multiple weeks. And so there's a kind of process of social ostracization or stigmatization that takes place through the duration of the smell being perceivable. So that's it for, you know, my. My little fan account of. Of Sean's work and having worked with Sean and, you know, hopefully it's received as a way to express my gratitude because it very much abounds. There are other works, other authors, excuse me, who've been really critical to. To the genesis of this project and continue to inspire me as I. As I think about. About new work. The environmental humanities, you know, tend to be very dutiful insofar as they expect their objects, works of literature, works of cinema, to impart in spectators or readers particular civic virtues. And that means that in order for an object to be interesting in the environmental humanities, it often needs to be good or be considered good. Right. It has to. To be reparative in and of itself, as opposed to inviting itself to a reparative reading, if we put it in those kind of Sedwickian terms. And scholars like Nicole seymour and Sarah McFarland Taylor have been very helpful in thinking about the wider range of reactions that an encounter with equal art might produce. And I find that especially helpful to keep in mind when we're talking about respiration. Because if we keep. If we take seriously the idea that the aesthetics of breathing can be both invigorating or debilitating, or is often at once invigorating and debilitating, then we cannot overstate. We shouldn't overstate the capacity of readers and spectators to go out into the world and then just change it through sheer force of will. Right. Like, we can't overestimate the pedagogical value of the aesthetics of breathing. And so part of what this project is interested in in relation to the environmental humanities, and part of what scholars like Seymour and Taylor make possible is a way of thinking about aesthetic responses to eco art that is open to reactions like exhaustion or even titillation or confusion. Right. And those are reactions that might not be so easily recuperable into a kind of pedagogical process.
- [38:25]
Stentor Danielson
Yeah. So then another. Another interesting thing that you talk about is this idea of a right to breathe that a lot of people were talking about in the context of things like Covid. But you're kind of a little critical of that idea, and you contrast it with your own call for, quote, benign respiratory variations. So can you talk a bit about the difference between those ideas and why you want to go past this right to breathe?
- [38:57]
Jean Thomas Tremblay
Well, the right to breathe as a framework was popularized by Akilah MBE, who wrote this op ed around the first few months of the COVID 19 pandemic, and also in response to the calls for racial justice and the demonstrations and mobilizations against the institutions orchestrating anti black violence. And I mean, I agree with the sentiment and I share the sentiment, which is to say that I would like to reduce the strain on the breathing of differently marginalized individuals. And I do believe that the role of the policy or the role of the social should be to do that. But maybe because of my sort of dogmatic education in political science, I've been scarred for life by rights based politics. And I don't think that rights based politics are the most useful way of thinking about a process that is so relational and so social as Respiration as breathing. And so I tend to think a little bit more through networks of mutual care, networks of grassroots justice as well. And the idea of the benign respiratory variation was a way to try to move toward a more radical social theory of what it means to try to breathe better and breathe differently together. The concept of the benign respiratory variation is a reference to Gayle Rubin's idea of the benign sexual variation. And Gil Rubin was writing in the 80s and thinking about the unprecedented visibility and repression of political behavior such that there was this sort of anti sex moral panic which feels extremely immediate to us existing in the present. And what Rubin was saying is that a radical theory of sexuality needs a concept of benign sexual variation. So it needs to have an account of the, I would say, okay, ness, but also ultimately the social good of there being deviations from certain social norms. If these deviations do not have victims, right? If the crimes are indeed victimless. And I thought it was a useful way of thinking about respiration. Even though I don't endorse this kind of one to one analogy between respiration and sex. There is a concept of sex in the book. It's not something that's absorbed into respiration as this other more capacious or more porous kind of mode of relation. But I do think again, it's useful to think about benign variation with respiration. Because you know, what we want as individuals, I believe, and this is a proposition, not a claim. But what we want, I think, is not to never experience breathlessness, but it's to experience the breathlessness that we can bear or the breathlessness that we find vivifying. As opposed to life threatening, right? Or life extinguishing. So, you know, there are many situations that might involve breathlessness or that might involve interruptions in respiration that are. That are desirable. One of them might be the gasp that you make when you encounter a work of art that really overcomes you. In queer theory, sex is a place where one gets to think about non sovereignty, about the encounter with alturity, about being beside oneself or outside of oneself, right? Ecstasis and ecstasy. And these moments can also be breathless. So I do think it's helpful to think of a project of social betterment as having to do with a certain intervention in respiration. But I don't think it's necessarily useful to root that project in making breathing easy and flowy for everyone. Because it does not account for the fact that certain interruptions or variations in breathing can actually be something that should be valorized and that people should be Able to have access to one of the cases I think about in order to make sense of the idea of the benign respiratory variation is an excerpt from Tricia Lowe's excellent book of nonfiction, Socialist Realism, where she recounts going to a BDSM workshop where she is learning about waterboarding. And she, in this context, gets to be waterboarded by a peer. And this is done under extensive supervision. And Low recounts the experience of feeling the water droplets sort of fall into her nostrils. And she is describing the kind of experience of pleasurable sedation that comes with that for her. And then suddenly, the damp cloth that is placed over her face that's supposed to keep her from breathing is lifted in a way that she does not expect. And so she writes about being surprised, right? And so she asks, why was the. Why was the cloth lifted so early in the exercise? And then the person who's running the workshop says to her that the cloth had to be lifted because Trisha Lowe was really good at holding her breath. And she was good at holding her breath because she had been trained in synchronous swimming, synchronized swimming, excuse me, as a. As a child. So she was really good at breath holding. And so the person running the workshop said, we need to be able to see you combat the water drops in order to know that you're still responsive and that you might indeed be experiencing pleasure. Because if you're just calm, there's no way for us to know if you're okay or if you're on your way toward permanent brain damage or even death. And what I find interesting in this moment is that the person running the workshop is abiding by a concept of benign sexual variation by. Or I should say that the workshop itself is abiding by a concept of benign sexual variation. Because, you know, Trisha consented to being a subject in this kind of context. And consent is a really important criterion for the benign sexual variation. But there's this additional criterion here, which is benign respiratory variation, which is to say that the person writing the workshop notices that breathing is telling something that consent wasn't telling. Right. Which is that Trichelot has certain physical abilities that make it dangerous for her to participate in this kind of activity. And so this kind of attunement to the subject's respiration allowed for a relation of care and for a safer environment for all the individuals involved in this kind of ritual. And so this is the kind of analogy or allegory that I offer in order to think about the kinds of contexts where an attunement to respiration and an attunement to the ways people are or are not abiding by pleasurable scripts of breathlessness is inducing certain practices of care and attention.
- [47:06]
Stentor Danielson
Yeah. So, shifting gears a bit now, I want to ask about the visual design of the book itself, because you've got this cover that has this image of kind of yellow smoke on it, and then your name and the title are written in these. It's kind of like concentric circles or kind of pattern around it. And then the table of contents is circumstances of swirling or askew like that as well. So how did you make the decisions about the visual design of the book and how does it tie into the content of what you're writing?
- [47:42]
Jean Thomas Tremblay
Well, I have to give full credit to Courtney Lee Richardson, who is a designer at Duke University Press and did a fantastic job on the design of the book on the COVID but also the design of the interior of the book. And I'm immensely grateful to the work that she's done. So I try to shout her name whenever I can again to express my immense gratitude. And I mean, so I think she might be in a better position to answer some of these questions. But in my author questionnaire, I did give a kind of synopsis or a precis of what I had in mind for the COVID And I was hoping not to feature a work of installation art, because installation art had been featured in ways that were really beautiful and really striking in other works on air and atmosphere and smell. And I didn't want to sort of copy that approach. And I was hoping for something quite abstract and also non representational, because there are very few examples of breathing aesthetics in the book that are sort of straightforwardly about, like, watching people breathe. Right. Like, there often is a work of mediation here that is. That is a lot more complicated. So I wanted to honor that and not offer a kind of straightforward representation where, like, somebody takes a deep breath. Yeah. That did not seem to match the ethos of the book. And the synopsis that I offered was a kind of set of quotes from Renee Gladman's Ravika books that take place in this fictional city state where the air, as I mentioned earlier, is clouded by this. This thick yellow smog. And so I was hoping that the conditions of Ravika could be sort of replicated as the conditions of the book and the conditions through which viewers or readers, I should say, would encounter the content, the material. And one thing I really enjoy about the COVID design, and again, this is entirely Courtney's work, is that the way that the Title and my name are position is reminiscent of a radioactive symbol. And so already there's something quite alluring about this sort of fluorescent yellow smoke. But there is a signal of danger that you perceive. You perceive very, very quickly. I also really enjoy the fact that the text is printed in a way that is not. That does not. That. The contrast, I should say, between the background and the text is not so stark because you sort of have to look closely in order to read. And there is something about the aesthetics of breathing that demands this really sustained attention that is also being replicated here in how the book itself is presented.
- [51:15]
Stentor Danielson
Yeah. So we're moving toward the end of our time, so I wanted to give you an opportunity to give a shout out or a thank you to anyone whose help was important to you as you were writing the book.
- [51:26]
Jean Thomas Tremblay
Oh, yes. Well, the acknowledgments are pretty extensive in that regard, but there are a few people at Duke University Press I really want to thank. My editor, Joshua Guterman. Tranen was a chance champion of the book from. From the very beginning and. And gave me really, really, really sharp notes throughout the process. And. And Joshua expressed care in the way that I like care to be expressed, which is through very rigorous and sustained engagement. And Ken Whitsaker was also an early advocate of the book. He's observed the evolution of the project since June of 2018. So I'm really immensely grateful for his editorial work and his guidance throughout the process. And I mean, I was on this panel on this roundtable with other authors of recently published books last Friday at the association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. And Marquis Bay, who was one of the authors on the roundtable, asked us what it was like, what the experience was like physically for us to write these books. And I had not asked myself the question explicitly, but the only answer that came to mind in that moment is that one of the experiences of the. Of the writing process was one of grief. A few years ago, when I started working on this project, I was really adamant about countering this predominant vitalism and environmentalism and ecocriticism, like this idea that there's a kind of vibrancy to all matter, such that anything can be sort of recuperated into. Into. Into a good or. Or plus or a benefit. And I was really interested in. In confronting the kind of incommensurable morbidity that respiration confronts us with if. If we're willing to. To pay attention to that. And so it's a. It's a book of of, of death. And it's a book of that is morbid insofar as it's really relentlessly oriented toward death. Even the last chapter is on depictions of and discourses, mostly discourses of the last breath in end of life, documentary, feature films. And then I lost people who were very dear to me in the last few years of the writing process. I lost both my grandmothers and one of my grandmothers I can credit for my curiosity and for my desire to be in and learn from the world. And I also lost my advisor, Lauren Berlant, who was I think, the most important person in the genesis of this book. And it's strange because I received a copy of Lauren's new and probably last book yesterday in the mail. So I just started reading it. But it, to me it's impossible not to mention Lauren's important contributions to this project. And also it's impossible not to mention the very strange feelings that emerge as these two books are entering the world at the same time. And as I want to share my excitement, my reflex is always to text Lauren about, about developments in the publication of the book. And then I remember that Lauren is no longer with us. So I hope that the book does justice to our many conversations over the past decade.
- [55:37]
Stentor Danielson
Okay, and then finally you touched on this earlier, but now is your chance to give us a little more detail about what you're working on next.
- [55:46]
Jean Thomas Tremblay
Yes, of course. So I'm working on two books right now. One of them is further along than the other. It's a collaborative book with Steven Swarbrick, who himself is publishing a book this year called the Environmental Unconscious at Minnesota. And it is a spectacular book. I highly recommend that everyone pre order it. And the book that we're writing together is called Negative the Cinema of Extinction. And what it tries to do is it tries to make queer theories of negativity and non sovereignty responsive to the pressures of life under climate crisis. And specifically we're interested in this kind of contradiction in the present where there's a paradox between individual survival and species longevity. So if to live longer is to generate waste, it's also, at least theoretically speaking, to lay waste to the worlds that we might wish to protect. Right? So there's a kind of self contradiction in conceptions of life and conceptions of futurity and reproduction that ought to be taken seriously in the context of climate crisis and that we want to take seriously also as people who are very devoted to certain tradition, that is an antisocial tradition in queer theory. So our claim here is that while negative life, our central concept, is about the formalization and representation by film of life's heightened paradoxes under climate crisis. And the idea is that encounters with negative life are precipitated by this hyper contemporary corpus that we call the cinema of extinction. And it includes films Bhopal Express, Minari, the Wall Lamb, as well as Furscau. And what these films have in common is that they prevent spectators and characters alike from accessing the ethical realm of multi species entanglement or enmeshment that ecocriticism so often adopts and accepts as the horizon of politics and the horizon of ethics. So instead of doing that right, what it does is it confront characters and spectators with the kind of void or the irrecoverable loss that it identifies as symptomatic of the present. So part of what this book is trying to do is it's trying to make sense of a series of films for which equal criticism does not yet have a vocabulary, which is to say that the films do not, cannot match or be incorporated into the critical apparatus of ecocriticism, which is so devoted to positing a horizon where it is possible to exist in harmonious and ethical multispecies relationship. So that's the primary book on which I'm focused at the moment, but as we're finishing it, we're finishing our draft. I'm also starting to work on another project, which is a solo book called the Art of Environmental Inaction, which I mentioned I spoiled earlier. And this book has two objectives. The first one is to detach environmentalism from this dichotomy between harmful and beneficial actions that locks climate futures into a paradigm of human management. Probably the most obvious iteration of this paradigm would be the tech rhetoric of innovation, which tells us that the only possible response to a destructive gesture is a restorative gesture through innovation, as opposed to the eradication of the conditions that made destruction possible in the first place. So we're caught in this kind of cycle where we need to accrete actions in order to try to overcome destruction. And then the second aim is to loosen liberal individualism's hold on ecocriticism. As I briefly touched on earlier, equal criticism tends to assess the aesthetic and moral value of its objects based on their ability to rouse in spectators and readers particular emotions. And by conflating aesthetic experience, which is to say the experience of a work of literature or work of cinema with moral education, ecocriticism might both overstate and underestimate aesthetics. It overestimates aesthetics insofar as it offers this kind of leap of faith that allows us always to understand how encountering a work of art will have immediate repercussions on people's attitudes and people's behaviors. Right. It gives us faith in that idea and it underestimates what aesthetics can do because it narrows down aesthetic experience to very recognizable effects such as the acquisition or the transmission, I should say, of say, liberal or conservative attitudes. So the gambit of this book is that in order to develop a non managerial environmentalism and an illiberal equal criticism, we need to produce a political concept of inaction. And of course, I'm not endorsing climate nihilism or apathy. Actually, what I call inaction, or what I call this concept of inaction aligns itself with a variety of radical traditions that have predicated environmental futures or planetary futures on downsizing the infrastructures of life. For example, Sylvia Winters anti colonial and black feminist critique of destructive humanity, or man, as she calls that figure also decolonial movements like degrowth and a variety of anti capitalist traditions, from lewdism to ecocentrism to degrowth. I think I meant to say land back in relation to decolonial movements and now degrowth in relation to anti capitalist movements. So, for instance, right now I'm working on this piece on eco terrorism, which poses an interesting problem for action because ecoterrorism is a direct action, but it's an action that is posed in the name of preventing further actions. And here I'm especially looking at a pair of absurdist comedies, Nelzink's novel the Wall Creeper and the Icelandic film Woman at War. And I'm interested in how the absurdity of the film is mimicking or is reproducing the kind of semiotic crisis or crisis of meaning around action that is being activated or precipitated by, by eco terrorism itself. So those are the two main projects on which I'm going to be devoting most of my energies in the years ahead.
- [63:20]
Stentor Danielson
All right, well, we'll be looking forward to both of those projects. So thank you so much for coming on the show.
- [63:28]
Jean Thomas Tremblay
Thanks to you and thank you for your questions.
- [63:32]
Stentor Danielson
This has been a conversation with Jean Thomas Trembly, author of Breathing Aesthetics, published this year by Duke University Press.