Jonathan Eburne, "Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

Summary

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Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry—A Conversation with Jonathan P. Eburne

Podcast: New Books Network: New Books in Film
Host: Alex Beeston
Guest: Jonathan P. Eburne
Episode Date: December 9, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, host Alex Beeston interviews Jonathan P. Eburne about his latest book, "Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry" (University of Minnesota Press, 2025). The conversation orbits around the nature of unfinished scholarly work, the complex and often opaque scholarly process, and the generative power of incompletion. Eburne discusses the book as an experiment in revisiting, renovating, and reimagining incomplete projects, and reflects on the labor, affect, and community that underpin scholarly inquiry—especially during the pandemic.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The ‘Exploded View’ Concept (03:24–08:48)

• Origin of the Title and Its Metaphor:

  • Eburne explains the visual metaphor behind "exploded view diagrams"—the schematic illustrations found in instruction manuals (like IKEA furniture guides), which show all parts of an object separately while revealing their relationships.
    • “By having it be blown apart, you actually gain purchase conceptually on how it all fits together.” (05:13, Eburne)
  • This diagram becomes a model both for the book's form—returning to unfinished scholarly projects—and for thinking about the unseen, partial, or discarded elements in scholarly labor.

• Why It Suits His Method:

  • The book originated during COVID, a period of enforced pausing and incompletion.
  • Revisiting half-finished work compelled Eburne to narrate his thought process, intentions, and the challenges encountered—laying bare the “labor functions” of academic work that are often invisible.
    • References to Sara Ahmed’s work on “orientations” and how the actual environments and conditions (care responsibilities, health, privilege) shape what gets completed and who gets to “breezily” work. (08:06)

2. The Richness of Unfinished Projects (09:51–14:03)

• The ‘Weird and Wonderful’ Content:
  • The host summarizes the book’s varied unfinished projects: from insect galls, to the speculative science of orgone energy, Leonora Carrington’s surrealism, and methamphetamine addiction in late capitalism.
  • Eburne identifies the ongoing pull of the process and community involved, more than any single topic: “The thing that's still like, nagging at me… is what you just described and summed up as the instruction manual part…” (11:18)
  • He emphasizes the communal ethos: “You can’t go it alone. And so thinking about that, thinking about how to fight alienation, how to work with others, to stave off isolation...” (13:04)

3. The Unfinished as Relational Matrix (14:17–17:26)

• Personal and Collective Markings:

  • Both Beeston and Eburne discuss how unfinished work contains traces of relationships, collective settings, and temporality.
    • “Unfinished is this sort of relational matrix… moments where we return to past iterations of ourselves and the communities that made the work possible…” (15:47, Beeston)
  • They note the heightened sense of these dynamics during COVID and the importance of collaborative work as a lifeline during isolation: “Zoom conversations… became such important tethers for us.” (16:55, Beeston)

• Power Dynamics of Incompletion:

  • Eburne reflects on how unfinished work results from multiple factors—some repressive (market forces, censorship) and some generative (open-ended process).
    • “The nature of process is just to create stuff. And not everything has a telos… There’s a really interesting spectrum...” (17:26)

4. Registering and Exposing Scholarly Process (19:26–26:33)

• Temporal Playfulness and Process:
  • Eburne describes how his book dramatizes the process of revision, temporal lags, and ongoingness—notably in the chapter about founding a nonprofit bookstore.
    • Real temporal uncertainty in writing about a bookstore mid-formation—“a little bit of a hedge because it's like, I really hope it does [exist]. It's still ongoing. And now it's like, yeah, actually it does exist and you can go look at it.” (25:12)
  • The “stomach tension” and “sunken labor” behind real-world projects become part of the book’s drama.

5. Vulnerability, Privilege, and Affective Labor (28:15–37:46)

• On Vulnerability Versus Safety:

  • Eburne, citing Tamantha Sylvester, distinguishes vulnerability from a mere absence of safety—it's easier to be vulnerable from a position of security, but we should also reflect on who can afford that risk in academia.
    • “It’s more easy to be vulnerable when it is not a transactional operation like a grant.” (32:16)
  • He acknowledges his own privileges, but sees value in foregrounding the structures (privilege, institutional support, rejection) that shape all scholarly work.

• Habit and the Myths of Mastery:

  • Beeston discusses the performative tension between celebrating completed projects (as required by grant applications) and valorizing the reality of incompletion in scholarship—“highly ironic…to be like, guys, I’m so good and I’m going to finish so many things. But also the project I’m going to do is saying we’re not…” (29:14)
  • Both agree that new models (like Eburne’s book) “explode the view” of what scholarly labor entails and can serve as a new pathway for changing scholarly habits.

6. Affect, Loss, and Social Tethers in Scholarship (37:39–41:32)

• Personal Stakes of Returning to Unfinished Work:

  • The act of returning is likened to opening time capsules or looking through old photographs—intensely affective, sometimes melancholic (especially given COVID losses).
    • “This was a COVID book…It also sort of bears some of the sadness and… powerlessness of those moments.” (38:20)
  • Yet, online writing groups and collaborations provided essential connection.

• Foregrounding Intellectual and Social Communities:

  • The book’s ambition: to blur the line between acknowledgment and main text, embedding the collective labor (editorial teams, colleagues, friends) at the heart of scholarship.

7. Intellectual Labor: Gift Economy, Friendship, and Collectivity (42:59–54:43)

• The Dismantling of Academia’s Gift Economy:

  • Eburne reflects on the unpaid, unacknowledged labor (peer review, editorial work) that upholds academic communities—labor increasingly difficult as more scholars lack job security.
  • Editorial startup work at the journal ASAP was “community building as well…” but also “like pulling teeth” as labor conditions erode. (45:07)
  • The friendship between Eburne and collaborators (e.g., Amy Elias, Dara Walker) animated these projects: “We became, you know, like it was almost like a kind of spiritual marriage, we would joke.” (46:22)

• Friendship as Scholarly Ethos:

  • Host and guest reflect on friendship as the alternative to transactionalism in academic work: “Friendship is reciprocal. Not transactional…The trickiest part is working out the spaces and possibilities of reciprocity on the order of friendship rather than a transactional relationship.” (51:25)
  • Volunteer work instills a sense of responsibility and “connectedness” that forges community (53:06).

8. Community Work and Nonprofit Bookstore (54:43–59:41)

• Collectivity and Embodied Intellectualism:
  • Eburne discusses the wrenching loss he felt after moving jobs and leaving daily involvement with the bookstore — highlighting, again, the centrality of collaborative environments to intellectual work.
    • “A single person cannot create an environment… it requires a multiplicity of people.” (57:14)
  • The core learning is about how intellectual work is embedded in networks, environments, and ongoing negotiation of difference and shared responsibility.

9. Future Directions and Writing as Ongoing Process (59:41–68:06)

• Ongoing Projects and Scholarly Practice:
  • Eburne hints at a forthcoming surrealist project (“The Great Surrealist Bargain Basement”), focused on ideas of reuse, value, and the “inventive” nature of criticism.
  • He argues for matching scholarly form to content and being reflexive about motivation: “Every project has a new creative imperative behind it. Finding one’s voice is great, but the voice is not monotone.” (67:04)
  • The ongoingness of scholarly process is not just inevitable, but valuable and generative in itself.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “By having [the project] be blown apart, you actually gain purchase conceptually on how it all fits together.”
  — Jonathan Eburne (05:13)

• “You can’t go it alone… How to fight alienation, how to work with others, to stave off isolation—not just physically being alone, but the sense of hollowness that often people carry with us…”
  — Jonathan Eburne (13:04)

• “Unfinished is this sort of relational matrix. Moments where we can return to past iterations of ourselves and the communities that made the work possible, even if it didn’t eventuate as you imagined.”
  — Alex Beeston (15:47)

• “The nature of process is just to create stuff. And not everything has a telos.”
  — Eburne (17:26)

• “There’s something honest… about writing in a non-celebratory way about a project that was very different than what I was trained to do or habituated to doing as a scholar.”
  — Eburne (27:15)

• “It’s more easy to be vulnerable when it is not a transactional operation like a grant… Writing a book or producing a work of art or engaging in a relationship of any kind, one hopes they’re not transactional.”
  — Eburne (32:16)

• “The book’s greatest ambition may be to blur altogether the distinction between acknowledgment and text.”
  — Beeston referencing Eburne (41:32)

• “We became, you know, like it was almost like a kind of spiritual marriage, we would joke. And yet the work, it didn’t stop.”
  — Eburne on his editorial partnership with Amy Elias at ASAP (46:22)

• “Friendships can emerge from work… From the environment and from the proximity and habituation of collaborating… There’s a kind of intimacy and understanding… It’s trickier to do that the other way around, but it’s not impossible, it just requires much more negotiation.”
  — Eburne (53:52)

• “A single person cannot create an environment… it requires a multiplicity of people. Even in a classroom, when there’s one instructor, it’s the class that makes the environment, not just the professor.”
  — Eburne (57:14)

• “Every project has a new creative imperative behind it. Finding one’s voice is great, but also the voice is not monotone. And finding new vocalizations… is the beauty of writing more than one thing.”
  — Eburne (67:04)

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Key Timestamps

• 03:24 — Meaning and metaphor of the “exploded view” in scholarship
• 08:00 — Discussing the conditions of scholarly labor and privilege
• 09:51 — Examples of unfinished projects in the book
• 13:04 — The role of community and fighting isolation in scholarship
• 17:26 — The spectrum and causes of “the unfinished”
• 25:12 — Real-time drama and “sunken labor” of founding a nonprofit bookstore
• 27:15 — The honesty and uncertainty of speculative projects
• 32:16 — Vulnerability, safety, and transactional vs. relational work
• 38:20 — The affective stakes of writing during COVID
• 41:32 — The ambition to integrate acknowledgment and text
• 45:07 — The strain on academia’s “gift economy”
• 51:25 — Friendship, reciprocity, and the challenge of non-transactional relationships
• 57:14 — Collectivity and the impossibility of solitary intellectual environments
• 67:04 — Reinventing scholarly voice and creative imperative

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Closing Remarks

This wide-ranging episode is as much a meditation on the form and labor of scholarship as it is about Eburne’s individual book. Through candid personal reflection, theoretical insight, and practical examples, Eburne and Beeston illuminate the unfinished, communal, and processual character of intellectual work. The episode itself—marked by warmth, humor, and openness—models the ethos of friendship and collectivity that “Exploded Views” advocates.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in the nature of creative labor, the realities (and possibilities) of scholarly community, and the generative potential of incompletion.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the New Books Network.

[A]

Welcome to New Books and Film, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Alex Beeston, and today I'm speaking with Professor Jonathan P. Eburn. Jonathan is the J.H. hexter professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. We're sitting down to discuss his latest book, Exploded Speculative form and the labor of Inquiry, which was published earlier this year by the University of Minnesota Press. When I first heard about this book, it felt as though Jonathan had, incidentally, accidentally written it for me, so I basically had no choice but to ask him to come and chat with me about it. One of my research obsessions is the unfinished so all the creative works that are abandoned, interrupted, lost, destroyed, and the questions of creative process and creative conditions that are opened up by these kinds of works. And Jonathan's book, Exploded Views is a really fascinating and witty experiment in returning to incomplete scholarly projects in order to renovate and reimagine them. Five topics of enduring fascination for Jonathan. Five essays suspended in process. In his terms, this is the gambit of Exploded Views. The book is a challenge for scholars to grapple with the many kinds of labor that make and unmake scholarship. Just as importantly, though, it's an unabashed and extended act of nerding out, which is, I think, the humanist scholars prerogative if ever there was one. So I'm so looking forward to nerding out with you today about all things unfinished. Jonathan, thank you so much for being here.

[B]

Thank you, Alex. That's a lovely introduction. And the idea that we have been in a kind of concert or conversation all along is a wonderful idea to.

[A]

Absolutely, yeah. So let's just make that formal now, today. So to get started, I thought I'd ask you to explain for our listeners the title of your book, Exploded Views. So this title introduces the form of the exploded view diagram as a kind of model for the work that you're doing in the book. So for those who don't know what is an exploded View diagram and what is its significance for you in this project.

[B]

Well, thanks. I'll start by saying that the title came late and that concept of an exploded view diagram came late, which is really different than most of the way I work. I actually talk elsewhere about how perversely often the title comes first and then I figure out what that will include. But in this case, the book started as a writing process, but then as we went along, and I think especially in conversation with.

The editor, my editor, Doug Armato at Minnesota Press, who is just a wonderful editor, he's retiring this year, the idea of an exploded view diagram came into play as something that more or less described all of the things I was trying to do in the book. So an exploded View diagram is.

A kind of diagram that you might receive in IKEA furniture boxes or other kinds of instructional illustrations. And the reason why you see them in those contexts is that they represent three dimensional forms in two dimensional space, so you can get to see how something is built. So you might say it's a clock. An exponent diagram of a clock would show you the clock face, it would show you the inner workings of the clock all splayed out on the page. And then they show you the back, the back part too. So it's a representation of something you really can't do otherwise in that medium, which is to show how something fits together. And by having it be blown apart, you actually gain purchase conceptually on how it all fits together. And so I liked that idea of having something be blown apart and.

To give, let's say, readers and myself as the first reader of this material, a way of thinking about all of the parts that are on the inside that might otherwise be unseen or unnoticeable, but yet are still doing this work.

[A]

And so could you tell us a little bit about why that Fits with the kind of approach that you're taking to your own unfinished work.

[B]

Very much so.

It started off as unfinished work. And as I started to write my way back into these projects, and I'll mention more about that in a second, but as I started to work on these projects, to rework them.

I found myself narrating.

What I was trying to think about. What were the intentions, what were the challenges.

What it felt like even to read the work that I was going back to, and that interaction with the scholarship that was sitting around. And I should mention that this was during COVID So again, I'll say more about that, but just the idea of things were sitting around. There's a bit of static activity.

Our kid was late enough in the high school process that we didn't have huge childcare demands.

We were healthy, more or less, for the whole time. The losses that Covid brought were outside of our house, not so much in it. So that there was. I could still do work, but just not with research. So I started to really think about what that would have been as well. So there's a kind of speculative, like, what research would have mattered here, but also, what am I reading? What does it feel like? And all of those elements, to me, began to take shape as, let's say, these labor functions.

Of scholarly work, including, what is it like in the house.

Sara Ahmed's work on orientations, where she's talking about tables.

What are we actually working on? Not just the topic, but the surfaces, the actual environments. What are the labor conditions, spoken or unspoken, that allow certain people to breezily, you know, go about their. Their business. And some people, you know, have to. Have to deal with childcare, healthcare, emotional management, and all sorts of other things. So really taking that into account became what that writing process brought into. Into relief. And then what that. What the exploited views kind of names as those inner. The inner workings.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, I love that. I like the idea both of you providing us or yourself a kind of instruction manual for navigating your work and also the different kinds of explosions that are at play here. So there's the kind of. The actual work itself, which is giving us an exploded view of this unfinished project and kind of showing us its parts, but also the way that the scene of scholarship gets exploded, too. And you show us the different parts of the kind of scholarship. Scholarly moment, the scholarly moments that kind of build on each other. And as we sit at our desks or wherever they are, each of the chapters in the book stages an encounter as you're suggesting with a particular essay that you started at one point worked on, but then didn't materialize in the form that you'd imagined. At least it existed, but it didn't exist in a kind of final or complete published form. It's really striking the sort of richness and the idiosyncrasy of your scholarly interests as they get revealed through these unfinished projects. We move from the parasitical deformations of insect galls. Is that how you say it? Galls.

[B]

Galls, yeah.

[A]

To the speculative science of orgone energy, one of my faves. We move from Leonora Carrington's surrealist art and literature to methamphetamine addiction in the time of late capitalism. I don't want to spoil the book's many weird and wonderful kind of forms of content and interest for the listeners. And I think actually the list I've just given of the topics is a self enough to entice people to pick up a copy of. Of this book. But I did, you know, we are here to talk about the book. So I did want to ask you if, you know, you had to pick one of those unfinished projects that's really stayed with you, that you felt like you couldn't let it, wouldn't let you go, and you couldn't let it go in the kind of wake of its unfinishing. Which one would it be? And maybe you could tell us briefly the story of it sort of making an unmaking and then remaking in exploded views.

[B]

Oh, I have so many possible answers to that question. And I think that already testifies to the multifariousness or at least distractedness of the book. But.

It'S not a topic ultimately that stays with me.

We'll have a chance, I hope, to talk about different elements of the topics that you just listed and named because they are and remain important to me. But the thing that's kind of still in my craw, the thing that's still like, nagging at me or.

In the. In the best of ways, the sense of like, discovering a problem that. That you kind of can't purge. The part of that that really sticks is what you just described and summed up as the instruction manual part by which for me, this has to do with.

The other people that kind of haunt the project. And I mean this in the sense that some people that I've written, that I wrote about, died.

During the course of the book's making. There is a kind of elegiac tone. There are people I was going to write about, but I felt it was a bit too dreary to do so. But also the people that sort of allow so much of this scholarship, and especially as it starts to enter into the world as, like, a project that you do in real life, like a bookstore. We'll get more to that. But all of it requires communities. All of this requires interactions with other people. And that is the, let's say, if not the topic, then at least the ethos of the project. And the part that I find by far the most pressing and by far the most exciting to me, which is.

About community.

And that's a term that can mean everything and nothing, depending on the context in which you hear it. But when it comes to not having one and feeling isolated, alienated, that's a very pressing condition for many people. And I think at many times, even in a standard scholarly narrative, there are plenty of ways in which alienation and isolation are not only elements of global capitalism in general, but really part of the job of reading and writing and thinking. And so the moments where there really are these interactions, and they're formative, but they're also instrumental. I mean, like, to get something done in the world, you can't go it alone. And so thinking about that, thinking about how to fight alienation, how to work with others, to stave off isolation. And I don't just mean physically being alone, but I mean the sense of hollowness that often people carry around with us. Right. We, especially in the scholarly community, often tend to bear a lot of hollowness in us as we go through our daily work. And so finding ways to.

Create environments and situations or to join environments and situations and to participate in environments and situations where something else is happening. That's, for me, the crux of the project that sticks with me.

[A]

Yeah, that makes sense to me. I was especially thinking about the way that you're framing these. What endures about these unfinished projects for you is the way that they are these kind of. I don't know, they are these repositories, I suppose, of, like, relationships. And they're a way that they mark where you are at a certain place and time among whom you're working, what kind of environments you're in. That fits really nicely, as, you know, with the research that I've been doing on the Unfinished, and particularly on Women's Unfinished Film. A couple of years ago, I co edited a book called the Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film. And one of the really major things that my collaborators and I found in that project was exactly what you've described in relation to your own work with your unfinished projects, which is the way that Unfinished is this sort of relational matrix like it opens onto, I mean, even for an individual, right? Like when we each think of our own unfinished projects, whether they're scholarly or just things in our lives that have not kind of panned out the way that we thought they were, these are kind of moments where we can return to these past kind of iterations of ourselves and the kind of communities that made the work possible, even if it didn't kind of eventuate, as you kind of imagined. And it occurred to me that for my work on this topic, which I think kind of temporally lines up with the work you were doing on this book over the COVID years.

I had a particularly acute sense of my isolation because I was actually just much more isolated. I was in a very similar situation to you where I didn't have enormous caring responsibilities. So I was mostly just quite alone, actually, throughout Covid, and was lucky enough to work in a job that meant I didn't have to go out and do that job during COVID So I was at home like you, and trying to make sense of what was happening around us and outside of the home as this kind of privileged space, I suppose. Anyway, I was just thinking about your comments made me reflect on that project and how much of a lifeline it was for me to have a collaborative project, even at a distance, during that time. And I think that the conditions that we did that project in, whereby even the zoom conversations we'd have where we were talking through drafts or whatever became such important tethers for us. And I imagine that that also shaped the way. It's part of the reason why we were able to see how the incomplete sort of generates this new understanding of art and of scholarship as something that happens in community, irrespective of how isolated some of its functions may seem.

[B]

No, that's so fascinating. And I really think.

Your point about what the Unfinished discloses. And it's neither automatically bad or good, right? I mean, things. Things are kept unfinished by forces. I mean, there's often a kind of suppressive or repressive quality of so called market forces or censorship, whether, you know, inner or outer.

And I mean, that is always gendered and sexed and embodied as well as. And marked, you know, racially as well as, you know, purely economic, as that's always the case. And yet unfinished stuff is just part of process, right? The nature of process is just to create stuff. And not everything has a telos. And so there's a really Interesting spectrum that becomes available in looking at the unfinished. And again, there's a false singularization to say the unfinished. And I'm sure you've, I'm sure you know of this book, but if you don't, it's wonderful. Rowena Kennedy Epstein's book on Mueller Rukeyser, Unfinished Spirit. Unfinished Spirit, I thought was, was another sort of book in kind of conversation with, with us here that also talks about, I think that spectrum in many ways.

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[B]

Sure.

There's one point I make a little game of it in that kind of like Nabokov, I'm thinking of Pale Fire, where in the margins of these different accounts is where the story exists and not in the accounts themselves. So in the Insect Gauls chapter, I mentioned at one point that I make an allusion to a book on spheres, I believe, by Peter Slutterdike, which, when I started doing that, I hadn't read. And I mentioned that at some point. And then by the end of the chapter.

I quote the book, which I had, of course, read during the point, during the process of writing. And then I thought, oh, God, that's just too. That's not the point. That's cute. But it's really playing on.

Those temporalities that the time of reading and the time of writing are very different durations, usually anyway. So I'll say instead that there's One particular sense of temporal suspension that was very real to me and kept changing as the book was in production, which is the chapter about the print factory, which is a nonprofit, anti racist, feminist and queer inclusive bookstore that I was involved in. And that bookstore sort of started as a writing about project. And I had done that in several iterations with already the book in mind. So I was thinking, wouldn't it be interesting if I tried to use this method of making all the bones and inner workings of the process, part of the writing process, to create something that is not just, you know, a book codex in codex form, but rather a bookstore. Places where books circulate and people come in and read them. And it's like a dimensional step up somehow for me. Well, turns out that real life nonprofits take a certain kind of time to evolve and to come into existence. So too, however, do published books, right? So I mean, I think like I sent the manuscript into the publisher at the end of 2023 or something like that, so I could write about this thing that I, you know, this idea of this nonprofit that was coming into existence and yet it didn't exist. So it could all be very speculative. Well, a few months later there was a different step and there were people involved and I could name them and that, that had to be had to become part of the story. And then, you know, as like whatever final phase of the publishing process becomes the final text that you have to put out there, that kind of freezes the, the ongoing documentary tracking of, of the real nonprofit. And.

By the time, I mean the, the nonprofit opened, I mean, it exists as of this, it just celebrated its first year anniversary and it's remarkable. So there's all kinds of temporal lags in the prose that talk about this not yet thing. I don't know if it'll exist, maybe it won't happen, but there's a little bit of a hedge because it's like, I really hope it does. It's still ongoing. And now it's like, yeah, actually it does exist and you can go look at it. So that creates all kinds of temporal pressures that are not just tricks of writing, but actually are really, for me, the drama of.

The drama of like sunken labor, the amount of labor it takes to go into something that again, nobody really sees until the thing is done, but which you and you know, the collaborators know how long you've been fricking working on this thing. And it's a, it's a beautiful celebration. So I think that the drama of that time, if it's available to readers as drama is at least, you know, an index of.

You know, the, the amount of stomach tension that goes into a real life project where, you know, economics are. Are very real. So, you know, so that's it really.

[A]

Yeah. And so it's like kind of. It's not a trick because it's unavoidable. Right. You have, if you're going to engage with this not yet project, this sort of speculative or notional project, whether it's a real life bookstore, bricks and mortar kind of project that you're actually working in the community with others to, you know, to bring to life or whether it's something on the page that hasn't kind of, you know, found its like frozen form as you described it just then. Regardless, like, you sort of have to navigate those. That kind of ongoingness, I guess.

[B]

Yes and absolutely. And I just say that it's, it's. For me there was something honest and important in that honesty about writing in a non celebratory way about a project that was very different than what I was trained to do or what I was habituated to doing as a scholar. Okay. At a certain point, making books is a really exciting thing. Not knocking it. It's great to make books. I love books. I have books behind me. I live on books. But this was really a new kind of venture. And to write about it like, yeah, I did this thing that everybody should be, you too could really pull it off if you just had the guts, you know, or whatever or, you know, could spare 40 extra hours a week or, you know, oops, just happened to have this thing that keeps on bleeding money, you know, little bits here like, oh, I guess I'll pay for that.

But instead to like, to actually to document like the unknown that is necessarily involved in something like that. And I think that there are, there are very good works about organizing and political work and community work that know this already. And I've really started to find that kind of writing and I find it really useful because yeah, it's not just the summation of one's career as a successful activist. Right. That one reads, but rather like, here's what you have to deal with when you start doing it.

[A]

Yeah. Like, it strikes me that that's a very like. It requires a certain type of vulnerability and a willingness to not play into that role. I guess what I'm thinking about, Julietta Singh's book Unthinking Mastery and the idea of being able to find a way of doing scholarship that does not have as a Background aim.

The presentation of oneself as the kind of expert or the exemplary individual or whatever who has undertaken this work. And I wonder if. I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit more, because sometimes when I've been ongoingly working on the Unfinished, which is a project for me that has a real aim to rethink these ideas of the kind of art history or of literary history, film history, as being these parades of successful, finished projects by a range of exemplary individuals. But then you have to write grant applications in which I have to be like, yes, but look at me. I am a successful individual with a parade of successful projects. And so I think there's a way that it really pushes up against a lot of the kind of norms, the capitalistic and neoliberal kind of norms, about the way we're meant to present ourselves within scholarship on the page, also in these ancillary genres like the grant application. It's highly ironic, right, for me to then be like, guys, I'm so good and I'm going to finish so many things. But also the project I'm going to do is going to be saying that we're not. That's not really what it's meant to be about, and trying to sort of disarticulate a lot of those myths of completion and of mastery. So, I mean, I was thinking this when I was reading your book, particularly because you wear so lightly, but also so overtly, some of the sort of emotional and personal labor, I suppose, that's involved in being able to return to these old projects. I'm thinking about things like, you call it an act of self interrogation, these kinds of acts of return to the scholarly essays. And there's that kind of vulnerability, I suppose, of sharing and even critiquing one's draft work. And I mean, all our students know this. We know this when we send our work out for peer review. How vulnerable it feels to send work out before you know it's ready, before it's passed through all those really important stages of getting feedback from other people and so on. But there's a real kind of wry, like, self depreciation, deprecation at certain points where you're sort of critiquing your earlier prose. I loved one bit as well and found it super relatable, where you kind of talk about writing in the margins of one of your drafts. Is this anything like that? Is. That's perfect. But I was thinking, I mean, that's quite a vulnerable place to be sitting in as you're working on this book. Can you talk to us a bit about the kind of affective and personal labor that went into it?

[B]

Well, I'll start by citing an artist I was talking to maybe last weekend or so the other week, Tamantha Sylvester, who's an artist who works with the Double Edged Theater, which I've had some experience collaborating with. And.

She said something amazing, distinguishing vulnerability from safety from a lack of safety. And I think that's so important.

It's more easy to be vulnerable when it is not a transactional operation like a grant. Grant proposals are transactional, and if you get one, you may apply to 100. If you get one, you've succeeded. You've also not succeeded 99 times. But anyway, those are transactional occasions. But writing a book or producing a work of art or engaging in a relationship of any kind, one hopes they're not transactional. They aspire not to be transactional. And.

Therefore the distinction between vulnerability and safety becomes so fundamental it's easy to be vulnerable if you are safe. And what is, you know, what is safety? And this is, I think, what distinguishes my work and my positionality from.

Let'S say, auto theory, is that my positionality is so bound up in.

You know, all of these privileges before my, you know, like, institutional situation. Like I'm a het. White cis.

You know, male identifying type of. Type of fellow. And, you know, I'm not sort of at risk as on the, on the wheel of human subjectivity that sort of gets being spun by day, every day. And with that in mind, I think that.

I think that it's however, important to recognize that the willingness to be vulnerable.

It'S not predicated only on safety. Right. I think there's a lot of advice out there like, you know, you can, you can take these chances once you are, you know, once it's your ex book or once you have tenure or once. And I get that as an economic and transactional logic. And yet there's something very sad.

About it too. Like you don't take risks and don't be vulnerable until, you know, until this time. And I, for me, it is my third book and I do have tenure, right. So who am I to say? But I wanted to at least introduce the possibility of.

Admitting to these structures not as something that is like a problem, right. Not as something that is like, oh dear, you know, you've done it wrong, but actually as part of the process. So the shadow CV being another version of this. And even just to. To acknowledge that if you've gotten a grant, you've probably written 900 others that you haven't gotten. You're about to say something and I'd love to hear.

[A]

Oh, I was just thinking. Yeah, it can also be quite sinister, that kind of advice as well. Even if it is well meaning, because of how it kind of produces. Well, it encourages people to conform to certain norms. And that becomes habitual, I think, too. And then the kinds of people who then get tenure are sometimes the types of people or who have job security in different contexts outside of North American contexts. They end up being the people who are most habituated to the norms of the environment. And if we're all habituated to all norms. I'm not trying to be idealistic about this, but it's interesting. I think a lot of what we do as scholars is habitual. There's certain habits of writing, habits of thinking, and in fact, things like peer review or things like the processes we have around publication. That's why I see one of the value of a book like yours, Jonathan, and especially being able to recognize the way that a book like this is formed through the kinds of environments and privileges that you are a recipient of. And that's just the reality of how you're working. I think that it gives a model for doing a different type of work for those who don't necessarily have those privileges. And since the norms of scholarship are these kind of accumulative things that we all actually do get to participate in and build on and change if we want to, it means then somebody else can kind of point to your book and to other books that are similar to it that are doing something different and say, actually we can let go of some of these associations that we have with forms of failure or loss or disappointment around things that don't pan out the way that we expect, or around the reality of the unfinished as something that just shapes scholarly labor. We can find new registers on the page to be able to actually explode the view that we have of what it takes to make scholarship as well. So I think there's a way that this book is a new pathway for new habits, I suppose, and I know it's not the only one doing that, but I think participating in a tradition that's offering a different model. Yeah. Jonathan, I was really struck in one of your chapters by a description that you have about what it feels like, I suppose, to return to these unfinished scholarly works and particularly describe revisiting unfinished essays as feeling a bit like opening a time capsule or like looking through old photographs. I found this really compelling and wanted to ask you to share a bit more about the personal and affective stakes or the work entailed in these acts of return. So how did it feel to do this kind of work? I mean, I guess in comparison perhaps to some of the more straightforward or conventional scholarly writing you've done in the past?

[B]

Well, first of all, I love the question, how did it feel? Because.

Increasingly that is not only an object like affect as an object of study, but really as also a self reflection on the work that we as scholars do.

So what I'll mention is that because this was a Covid book, I'll just say that again. I mean, it was a book that sort of originated in the COVID shutdown and in the, you know, semi trauma of online teaching.

It also sort of bears some of the sadness and, you know, powerlessness of that. Of the. Of those moments. And yet at the same time, it also procedurally resonates with some of the experiences that you also described in terms of online collaboration. So for.

The structure of this book, because it was tinkery, right? It was involving these sort of narrative insertions and rereadings, it lended itself very well to.

Online writing sessions that I set up with friends that are ongoing. I have, you know, with three or four regular writing buddies that I work with who are all brilliant. One of them is 92, and we speak every week. And she's just amazing. And we collaborated years and years ago, so it's just this wonderful return. So these were kind of situations in which there was a kind of socialization process through zoom or whatever it was at the time that became zoom that allowed me to write in this format, but which was also.

A social platform. So that really.

Gave life to that period. And again, I still.

Have that today. And so that sense of connectedness was part of the process of the book, both in the sense of not having it in one scheme. Right. Having connections. I had a dear friend who was a child psychiatrist who was so overwhelmed by Covid that it cost him his life.

And there's all these severed connections that people have experienced that have gone virtually unmourned publicly, right. So there's one. These. All these severances of connections, and yet these little filaments of connectedness arose too. That was really powerful for me. And it was a process that I started doing, much like you described through interviewing. I'd been doing a number of artist interviews for the ASAP Journal, which I write about in the book. And these were wonderful.

Experiences of learning about and then meeting and then talking to and now becoming friends with these wonderful artists doing incredible work. And so this was an extension of that medium into my own, let's say. Yeah.

[A]

Those moments in the book really struck me when we get these little glimpses of the. And not little, actually sometimes really foregrounded sort of views of the intellectual and social communities that exist around you and that capacitate the work that you do. And limited and all of those kinds of things. And particularly, I guess. Yeah. Speaking of interviewing, that's part of the reason why I wanted to start hosting on the New Books Network, Donovan, I think because of the way it allows us to open onto and think about exactly these forms of.

Kind of labor, the aspects of our work that are often underplayed or devalued or that sit in the background without coming to the foreground. But that's exactly what your book does, isn't it? You talk in the acknowledgments which come at the end of the book about the book's greatest ambition, which you suggest may be to blur altogether the distinction between acknowledgment and text. And that comes through a lot in the chapters when you talk to us about especially your connection to the association for the Study of the Arts of the Present asap. I love how hard you guys worked for that acronym. It's wonderful. It's great. But obviously. So it's a scholarly association that's devoted to the contemporary arts in all its different forms. And you've been quite involved in its formation as an association as well as the journal. And as you suggested, they're also doing artist interviews for the journal. So I wanted to ask you about this, actually, if you talk a little bit more about how your work is as part of ASAP or part of the community around that is asap, what role that played in the formation of your book. And maybe if there were one or two particular ways you could share about how that labor, which is again, not usually at the forefront of the scholarly writing that we do, but actually is a really significant aspect of what scholarly work looks like. Has it shifted the way you think about intellectual labor in certain ways, and particularly its kind of administrative or infrastructural or collective dimensions?

[B]

Absolutely. And you've already just said this. But so much of what, dare I say, traditional academia, or at least post what, World War II academia, especially Anglophone academia, but pretty much more or less global academia, is predicated on, is a kind of gift economy.

Read a peer review, for example. But reviewing books, reviewing articles, reviewing tenure cases.

That'S been dismantled. Right. I mean, I think that factor has been connected to the privilege of.

Tenured positions.

As gift economy labor that is not remunerated.

As part of the job, except it is. So I get paid to do more things other than teachers, and those things include peer review, tenure reviews, and so forth. I consider that to be part of my job. That's what I'm paid for.

Maybe not everybody knows that who pays me, but anyway. But the gift economy has come under huge amounts of duress. Getting people to review an article for a journal is increasingly like pulling teeth because people are so busy. And then there are. The majority of scholars working today are involved in a labor position where they're not being paid to do that kind of work. They're being paid, in many cases, course by course, not a living wage. And so that labor cannot fall on those people's lapses. And so that's a kind of, as I say, it's a shame. It's a really difficult set of conditions because so much of what that gift economy affords, beyond, let's say, the prestige and the cultural capital that it sort of gets connected to.

It actually is. It's community building as well, right? This idea that your work is being read, that you're reading other people's works, you're having these conversations that. That people are citing other scholarships. There's a kind of. There's a sense of a virtual community.

Of readers that has been systematically dismantled.

What working with ASAP really emphasized was first, that it's really fricking hard. Editorial work is amazing. It's difficult. It was a startup journal, so my dear friend Amy Elias.

Founded ASAP at the University of Tennessee with a number of colleagues elsewhere. We knew each other. I kind of helped out early on a little. And then when it came time to start a journal.

She invited me to do it with her. And it was really wonderful. We spoke on the phone, you know, at least once a week. Often much more than that. We became, you know, like it was almost like a kind of spiritual marriage, we would joke.

And yet the work, it didn't stop. And so much of that work is trying to be fair and to treat with respect and dignity all of this work that we're both, you know, needing to start a new journal. We need the work, we need submissions. We sort of demand it from people as it's only a gift when people give it, but when you're sort of asking for it, it's not really a gift. And then to what are we going to give back. If we're asking for work, are we going to publish every single thing we receive? And if we say no, are we just abandoning the work? So we're really trying to think about the responsibilities of kind of what comes before the gift economy.

And how to respect the labor of everybody that's sending us material and to make sure that we're actually offering some kind of cultural capital in return. Right. They're getting something back, maybe just in terms of the reading attention, some good notes, or.

Trying to make the Journal be read by people so that it has a sense of not just going into a waste bucket. So that particular aspect of ASAP is working with Amy on the Journal.

And working with the other editorial team.

Was so illuminating. And again, it was really wonderful, effectively. It was really hard. And again, people know this, but it did also.

Yeah, I'll stop there.

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Yeah, that's fascinating. I mean, it struck me as you were speaking, Jonathan, that in a way, this book is. You could read this book as a kind of testimony of like, the.

Importance of friendship, as the kind of ground grounding of your work in a very practical sense. I'm thinking about. The first chapter begins with your friendship with your neighbor and A kind of collaborative writing project that didn't eventuate that you undertook with your neighbor who's a scientist. And then also. And we kind of then also have these moments of you and your friend Amy kind of doing this work on the phone together or your writing buddies. Those kinds of things, I think. I mean, I'm quite personally obsessed with friendship. Like, I'm the kind of person who'll watch a movie and, like, I don't care about, like, you know, erotic romance, but give me some people being nice to each other and I'm.

[B]

Seriously, Seriously.

[A]

Yeah. I was thinking it's interesting then to think about scholarship, not just a gift economy, but kind of as a. There's a potential ethos of friendship that could kind of animate certain types of scholarly work and could be a really cool way to think about what it means to do, say, editing or peer review in a way that's good faith and critical. Because a good friend is not someone. Is someone who's going to tell you when something's bullshit, right? When you're, like. When you're not.

[B]

Is this anything? No, it's not.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. Is this anything? No, it's not. But let's figure out how to make it something together. You know, I think I hadn't thought of that until you were just speaking just now. But there's a way that friendship is really threaded through this book. And that's quite a cool category, a relational category. I think that. And not to sort of mystify or to sort of suggest that we're not doing professional work that should be remunerated properly by institution, you know, but I think that that would be an interesting way. I think I'm going to start thinking about my labor more. More like that in future.

[B]

It's. It's a. It's a. It's. It's a tricky proposition because.

It'S not necess. Friendship is reciprocal. Right. And again, not transactional. And I think the. The trickiest part, the hardest part, is working out the spaces and possibilities.

Of reciprocity on the order of friendship rather than a transactional relationship. The problem with so much of these gift economies, I keep using that term, is because they have to be transactional. You need two readers reports. Again, who says? But to establish the criteria of peer review, according to publishing standards, two peer reviews is necessary. Maybe three, if they don't agree. Well, you need to get those. It's an extractive proposition. It has to happen.

So how do you mediate it through friendship? How do you reconcile it through Friendship. Can you reconcile it through friendship? That, I think is for me the hugest question. And it makes, it makes things very interesting.

One of my dear friends and collaborators on the Print Factory, the Bookstore, Dara Walker, who's a brilliant social historian.

Has been especially good at articulating this when it comes to volunteer work. She recently said there's something that she wished people would understand more or come to learn more from volunteer work, which is that when you volunteer.

The thing that you're volunteering for becomes yours in some way. Like there's a kind of. Not ownership is the wrong word, but there's a way in which when you volunteer to do something, you actually gain responsibility. Right. Of and for the thing you're volunteering for. And that sounds like a doubling down, right? So when you volunteer, you give your labor, you become responsible as well, to bear the obligation. But in some ways that responsibility means a connectedness, right. That is not simply transactional. And she's so good at articulating that I think.

It'S always been easier for me to make friendships from work.

So friendships, whatever that work may be, it can be yard work, it can be, I think for a lot of people it's playing on a sports team or doing volunteer work. So from the environment and from the proximity and habituation, like you said before, of collaborating with somebody, of noodling on fiddling with details with somebody, the friendship can emerge from. From that proximity. There's a kind of intimacy and understanding of how to thread responsibility, reciprocity, love, right through the particularities and demands of a transactional experience. It's trickier to do that the other way around, but it's not impossible, it just requires much more negotiation.

[A]

Yeah, it seems like the last chapter of your book is about the bookstore, the not for profit bookstore that you've spoken about that at the time of going to press was still in prospect, although you've said that it now does exist, which is great. Although I understand that your relationship with it has changed as well as these things do. And so I just wanted to, as we come towards the end of this interview, invite you to reflect a little bit more. It sounds already, even from what you've just been saying in response to that question about friendship, that your way of doing your work, you've really come to new ways of understanding it through the labour that's involved in kind of putting together, imagining, trying to develop this bookstore. So would you like to reflect a bit more about what that's meant for you in the context of your scholarship? I Suppose.

[B]

Absolutely. Well, first, you alluded to this. There's a wrenching gap in my life right now, a hole in my life, because.

Six months or so after the bookstore opened, which was on November 15, 2024, we had our grand opening. After years of planning and renovation and all the things, six months after that opened, I changed jobs.

Which was a choice. It was a family decision. Lots of reasons.

So I'm still on the board of the print factory, but it's not part of my daily life in the way that it was for so many years, and then for these months where I was in the store so much. And I miss that community. I miss that feeling of talking to people who are familiar and unfamiliar coming into the store. I miss the event programming. I miss the sense of having something that I needed to do at that time and place, which feels very much like teaching, but in a different environment and without that sense of there being a contract, other than a kind of social sense of mission. So that's the part that's changed. What even that wrenching change illuminates, though, is how collective the. That space became necessarily was in order to exist.

A single person cannot create an environment.

I mean, a single person can become an environment like after death, when all these insects take over our bodies and eat us up and become a commune of insects. But let's say socially, in human terms, right? It requires a multiplicity of people. And even in a classroom, when there's one instructor, it's the class that makes the environment, not just the professor, right? So that's all the more true in the case of this bookstore, which anybody who's been involved in a nonprofit knows. But I hadn't been involved in nonprofits that much and saw their maybe public face, but not the inner workings of them. And so starting one up had everything to do with the ways in which my colleagues, my comrades, my friends and I learned to speak to one another, learn to trust one another, like what our limits were, what our capabilities were, learning to listen to one another, like really listening.

Making sure that somebody's idea is different, how do we accommodate that difference?

And yet also to recognize that there's also often a need for somebody to take an initiative and take charge and do something and get it done. And just all of that type of work that has to do with negotiating.

Communication, reciprocity, those kind of social aspects of the kind of community work, that's the stuff that's sticking with me. And it has so much to do with my ongoing work and my continuing work about what does it mean to be an intellectual? Being an intellectual is about being integrated in culture work, to be an embodied part of community networks, to be part of working environments where thinking happens, in which thinking traffics. It is not a singularity. It is precisely about these types of relationships. So I feel like, what is it? You know, my ongoing question is, like, how to be.

In intellectual space?

And what forms of being does that require?

[A]

So is that kind of where you're. Is that kind of the work that you're doing now? How is that shaping the research that's come in the wake of exploded views? Are you continuing your experiments with kind of reworking older materials, or are you exploring new? Is this going to be an endless, like, endless archive where we're not getting any new hits from Jonathan anymore?

[B]

Going back to my childhood writings now.

[A]

Like, is there a limit?

[B]

I mean, the fact is, most scholars I know tend to have projects that gestate for a long time. And something can be a little inkling back at a certain point 10, 15 years ago, and it can be there on the proverbial back burner. I've been working on a surrealist book. My dissertation was about surrealism, the Surrealist movement. And I've had the title of this surrealism book for a long time.

[A]

Can you pass the title, Donovan?

[B]

Oh, it's called the Great Surrealist Bargain Basement. And it's about reuse. It's about the kind of reception and reinvention and often rejection of surrealist techniques, concepts around the world.

The title comes from Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban author who was part of the Surrealist group in Paris for 10 years, but then wanted to push off against it when he was naming the marvelous real of the Americas. He wanted to make a distinction between what was he thought was happening in the kind of hybrid space scarred by colonialism and middle passage from what was happening in Europe. But it's also articulated through that negation.

But it's a very vexed project for me because it sounds ambivalent. It sounds like it's about devaluation, but I'm actually trying to suggest it's about revaluation. And.

The question and the way this relates and why I'm talking about it is because that idea of, like, what is valuable, what is meaningful, what matters to our lives is something that I consider to be the most interesting filament in Surrealism. Through all the kind of crazy rejections and excommunications and debates and. But even the question of who counts as a surrealist, who is or is not a surrealist at a certain point. All of those questions really hinge on ideas about value. And not just exchange value or commercial value, of course, but what matters in this sort of existential way. So for me, that's the part that's informed and I think animated by all that we've been talking about. I don't think I can go back. I mean, I'm still struggling with. Do I use the same conceit of rewriting things?

No, I can't. But I can still approach that work first thing through the question that what matters for me matters to the project. I'm not just reporting on a third, on a third person neutral fashion, but also to think about.

How do I approach this as a kind of always struggling writer and always struggling reader. I think that just being mindful and aware of the difficulties and investments on the kind of personal front is part of that. Very much part of it.

[A]

Yeah, that's so interesting. And the new book sounds fantastic. I look forward to hopefully chatting with you about it in who knows how many years. Well, I think one thing I really like about your book is that it felt like the form was motivated. You know, it's like. I think one of the things for myself, the creative challenge of scholarly work for me that I enjoy the most, maybe on the page at least, is trying to find the right form for an argument. And I don't just mean like the order in which you say the ideas, but I think increasingly trying to think about how do I adopt new registers of writing, of voice that are in line with the ideas. And in some cases when it comes to unfinished works, I think that there's a way that it's hard to get around a certain self reflexiveness. Recently I wrote an essay about the idea of rewriting. And it was looking at a couple of different authors who have returned very much like you have kind of returned to earlier works and then have had these kind of either vexatious or.

More expropriative kind of relationships with their earlier work or someone else's earlier work. And as I was writing it, I, without meaning to, ended up sort of reflecting on how my own writing processes of reworking and returning to their work and ended up embedding in some of those kind of details of the way their writing got under my skin and then the way that I was trying to re signify it in my own kind of process. Which isn't to say that you always need to have those gestures, but I think, think there's something really Cool about your book, Jonathan, in the way that it's so committed to the bit. But the bit is not just a bit. You know, the bit is like, material. Right. And there's a way that on the page, you're finding ways to sort of. And you've done this in this interview as well, Right. Like, I think it's very telling that we haven't talked too much about the details of what each of the chapters is about. Not because they're not endlessly interesting, and I'm sure that listeners will all go out and read it immediately and agree, but at the same time that it's as much about the kind of labor producing the book. And so it's absolutely appropriate that for this book, this is the form it takes. But it'll be interesting to see what the form that the surrealist book then needs to take. What does reuse or reevaluation in that context invite from you or demand of you as a scholar in kind of working with the material?

[B]

Well, first, please, if you have a PDF of the essay, I'd love to read it. I'm sure I can Google it, but I'd love to read that. It sounds brilliant.

You're absolutely right. And to rehearse the bit, to reuse the bit would be absurd. But. So I think the question, even to ask the question.

As I'm writing, or as you were writing, just like, what does it mean for me to be doing this? Can never in my mind not be an interesting question. It's always going to be valuable. Why am I doing this? I mean, that's a vexed question. I'm writing a dissertation to get a degree. Yes, but why this one and not another? So finding, mining that question for all that it can provide.

I just use the mining as a metaphor. But sure, I'll take it. Like sort of really plumbing, right? Sort of really exploring. It's more like a spelunking metaphor, really. Plumbing that question to see what is, what it shows, what it discloses about those investments. I think that's always interesting, how it'll show up in prose. That's an open question because as you said at the beginning of your question.

Every project has a new creative imperative behind it. I mean, finding one's voice is great, but also the voice is not monotone. And. And finding new vocalizations of that voice, new kind of resonances of that voice, I think is the beauty of writing more than one thing.

[A]

Well, and even also because we change as well. The work changes us, we change through time. So it kind of makes sense that it can't not kind of fall out in a certain way on the page, I think.

[B]

And also, criticism is inventive. I mean, this is no secret either, but. But the creative and the critical are not divorced from one another except artificially and by force. So thinking about every project not only as representing new figurations and configurations of oneself, but also making new stuff up is part of the beauty of being able to write.

[A]

That's, I think, a beautiful place for us to end, Jonathan, and really fitting given what an amazing achievement Exploded Views is. Thank you so much for chatting with me today. The book is out now with the University of Minnesota Press. I really recommend it. Thank you so much for your kind of wide ranging and very wise reflections on the process of writing this book. And thanks for speaking with me today, Jonathan.

[B]

Thank you so much, Alex. I really enjoyed speaking with you.

[A]

My pleasure. I'm Alex Beason. You're listening to New Books in Film. I hope you'll join me next time.

[B]

Sam.