Tropical Utopia, Tropical Dystopia—Aesthetic Openings to Other Spaces: Interview with Michael J. ShapiroAbstract
Michael J. Shapiro is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and one of the most regarded critical voices in Political Theory, International Relations (IR), and many other fields. Indeed, Mike Shapiro’s transdisciplinary work has been for decades challenging (disciplinary) boundaries and broadening our understanding of a variety of topics, from methodology to culture and war. A world-renowned, and indisciplinary critical thinker, Mike has profoundly marked Critical Thought, including critical IR theory, with his Language and Political Understanding (1981), International/Intertextual Relations ((co-edited with James Der Derian) 1989), Challenging Boundaries ((co-edited with Hayward R. Alker) 1996), Violent Cartographies (1997), Moral Spaces ((co-edited with David Campbell) 1999), Methods and Nations (2004), just to mention (only) a few of his groundbreaking books and edited volumes. Mike has collaborated with and taught at the Institute of International Relations (IRI), PUC-Rio, Rio de Janeiro, numerous times in the last two decades, offering courses at IRI’s Postgraduate Program and teaching (almost) annually at the International Political Sociology (IPS) Winter School since 2015. Considered one of the leading figures of the ‘aesthetic turn’ in Critical Thinking, including critical IR theory, he has published Cinematic Political Thought (1999), Cinematic Geopolitics (2009), Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method: After the aesthetic turn (2013), and The Political Sublime (2018), among other publications on ‘the politics of aesthetics’ and ‘philopoesis’. Shapiro’s work highlights how engaging with art (both as objects of analysis and as instructive forms of thinking) can encourage creative and disruptive thinking in politics. He argues that Science-fiction, in particular, with its estrangement and ‘discognition’, not only opens up worlds of thinking, but allows us to ‘think with worlds’ – we could not imagine a more fitting and eventful (re)opening to this special issue and the contributions within. In this interview, conducted by e-mail in June/July of 2024, Prof. Shapiro shared some of his thoughts on aesthetics, politics, and science fiction.
Aesthetics and science fiction
Fernanda, Thiago and Thiago: Prof Shapiro, your work is usually considered to be part of what some call the ‘aesthetic turn’ in International Relations. Ronald Bleiker (2017: 260) wrote that ‘the aesthetic turn was and should continue to be about opening up thinking space.’ How do you perceive Bleiker’s assessment?
Mike: Roland Bleiker’s reference to a ‘thinking space’ is at the conceptual center of his mentor, Jim George’s IR text, Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re)Introduction (1994). It’s an excellent text that has not gotten the attention it deserves (which is why, among other reasons, I am mentioning it). That said, I do not consider my ‘turn’ to a focus on the politics of aesthetics as mainly a contribution to the field of IR. As I suggest in one of my methods-oriented books, my work is transdisciplinary (Shapiro 2012). Although it crosses many fields, rather than being meant to contribute to ‘fields’ its aim is to encourage thinking about political issues by filtering ideas through engagements with a variety of artistic media genres. Instead of a ‘turn’ (among IR scholars and social scientists in general), a contemporary embrace of aesthetic perspectives is a long-delayed epiphany; it’s an awakening from what I have termed the social science’s ‘pre-Kantian epistemological slumber’ (Shapiro 2006). Once social scientists got around to paying attention to Kant’s three critiques (long an influence among comparative literature scholars), especially his treatments of the beautiful and the sublime in the Third Critique, an aesthetic perspective recommended itself.
In my case, heeding Kantian and importantly post-Kantian thinking, I have engaged texts in literature, film, architecture, poetry, music, and photography – both as objects of analysis and as instructive forms of thinking that influence the way I compose inquiries. Crucially, to make sense of aesthetic methods requires attention to two senses of aesthetics. On the one hand, aesthetics refers to artistic texts; on the other, it refers to the embodied experience of life worlds. Both senses are represented in Cesare Casarino’s methodological concept, ‘philopoesis,’ which I have referenced as the approach in some of my recent investigations1. Casarino points out that while literary texts consist mainly of affects and percepts, philosophy consists mainly of concepts. Accordingly, philopoesis as method involves conceptual interferences as philosophy is deployed on literary, texts, resulting, as Casarino suggests, in a mode of critical thinking that becomes available because the interference between genres opens up ‘emergent potentialities that disrupt the status quo of the history of forms’ (Casarino 2002: 86). I hasten to add that an inquiry’s process is as important as its outcome. When I read a novel, watch a film, tour a building, or look at photographs, I am initially affected before proceeding to (re)formulate conceptually a problem or issue the encounter calls to my attention. As Gilles Deleuze (a main influence on Casarino’s method) famously puts it, affects are the ‘dark precursors’ of concepts. Thus, to contribute to political thinking after I am affected by an experience, – by a text, an event, or an interpersonal encounter – I proceed to the creation of a conceptual framing to what I have experienced and do so by looking for both textual and theoretical resources to structure and illustrate the thinking process.
I want to offer an example from a draft of a new book project on “Negotiating Civic Life.” In a chapter that attempts to make sense of the problem I call ‘civic cleansing’ (the way nation states bury inconvenient aspects of their histories, a form of willed amnesia), I do an analysis of Atom Egoyan’s film Ararat (2002) whose focus is mainly on the experiential aftermath of ‘The Armenian Genocide.’ The film has two disjunctive narrative threads, one that contains a contemporary series of dramas in the lives of Canadian Armenians and another that follows a film within the film which reproduces historical moments during the Genocide. This passage, which enlists my response to watching the film, provides a concrete way to convey the way my so-called ‘aesthetic turn’ works:
Embodied memory, [the painter Arshile] Gorky’s and others, is at the center of the film’s haptic events, those moments in which hands are the tactile media through which painful historical memories are recovered and intimacies are restored... An instructive way to frame that strategy is to turn to the jazz musician Thelonious Monk’s keyboard style, which enacts a creative tension between melody and form. As one critic puts it, ‘Where other musicians played light chords with their left hand and quicker notes with the right, Monk played equally complicated notes with both hands’. His musical compositions, arranged as he played, simultaneously deliver melodies and dissonant chords that interrupt them with both sound and spacing strategies. For that Monk’s keyboard method frequently allocates one hand to playing an intelligible melody (the right) and the other to playing dissonate chords that generate tension (the left). Rather than offering a melody for the listener’s enjoyment of something familiar, Monk introduces critical musical thinking, a demonstration that melodies are subject to a plurality of musical perspectives. Translating Monk’s musical composition for Egoyan cinematic composition, I suggest that while composing with one hand – the film-within-the-film directed by his character Edward Saroyan (Charles Aznavour) which offers an intelligible albeit fictionalized history – Egoyan’s other hand is summoning the viewer’s attention to details within a dissonant film grammar that thinks about history’s alternative presences located in contemporary lived experience. (Shapiro 2025a)
As I’ve noted in a recent investigation, to assess the way a text thinks one is advised to turn to a grammatical asset, the preposition “with”, and focus on that-with-which the text thinks. Thus, for example, to think about the plight of refugees who are subjected to border controls and exploitive traffickers, the Cuban artist Reynier Leyva Novo has created an installation that thinks with an insect, the Monarch Butterfly. As I put it in an epilogue to a forthcoming political theory book, he ‘challenges geopolitical security practices with a digital artwork, “Methuselah” (so named because the Monarch has a longer life span than any other butterfly species). Reproducing a 5000-kilometer transnational migratory journey of a single Monarch butterfly by tracking its travel from southern Canada across the United States to Mexico, Novo maps an unimpeded journey that contrasts with the hardships of people involved in immigration flows. His installation is intended as a critical commentary on the precariousness of those who must migrate at ground level and are subjected to predatory interlopers and border controls’ (Shapiro forthcoming 2025b). My emphasis on grammar here sets up the way I want to initiate my response to the second question.
Fernanda, Thiago and Thiago: Throughout your academic career, you’ve written about a wide variety of subjects: blues, Lars Von Trier films, cartographies, architectures, among many others. You told us (before the interview) that more recently you had been working on a paper about the sci-fi show Better Than Us. Could you tell us a little about what attracted you to sci-fi and this show in particular?
Mike:I am returning to Atom Egoyan at the outset because his remark about the film grammar of Ararat helps me organize my response. In an interview about the composition of his film, he says, ‘[t]he grammar of the film uses every possible tense and mood available to tell its story, from the basic pillars of the past, present and future to the subjective, the past-perfect, and past-not-so-perfect, and the past-would-be-perfect-if-it-weren’t-so-conditional’ (Egoyan 2004: 886). To pick up on his word ‘conditional,’ I turn to the Kantian perspective on knowledge which in the case of the film features the question, what are conditions of possibility for the Armenian experience of the event. Simply put, Egoyan is pointing out that to address the consequences of the Armenian genocide with a film, he had to be attentive to the grammar of the cinematic historiography he was composing.
With that as preface, how can we situate sci-fi? In an analysis of how a sci-fi text works (in a chapter entitled ‘The Grammar of Science Fiction’) Farah Mendelsohn (2009: 10) begins with the sentence, ‘[s]cience fiction is less a genre than a way of writing about things, events and people.’ In order to provoke critical thinking, the texts create what Mendelsohn calls ‘cognitive estrangement’ or what Steven Shaviro (2015) similarly calls ‘discognition.’ The purpose of sci-fi’s way of composing aligns with what Maurice Blanchot attributes to the purpose of literature in general, to ‘interrupt the purposeful steps we are always taking toward a deeper understanding and a surer grasp of things.’2 What especially attracts me to the genre is the disruptive way sci-fi texts speak from multiple subject positions while locating those subjects within a war between or among different worlds. To evoke again the role of the preposition ‘with,’ Philip K. Dick, whose writing has found its way into much of my work (most extensively in my book on the phenomenology of religious belief(Shapiro 2021)), ‘thinks with worlds’ while (as David Lapoujade puts) ‘staging a war of worlds conceived as a war between psyches’(Lapoujade 2024: 1).
Although in his early philosophical reflections, Dick explicitly acknowledged and endorsed Kantian subjectivity, he eventually departed from the Kantian perspective in which a productive form of subjectivity moves toward a universalizing consensus. Rejecting Kantian universalism, Dick posited multiple conflicting worlds. Moreover, the mind for Dick is located not in individual persons as it is for Kant but in worlds from which various media broadcast to shape public life. Grammatically, therefore, subjectivity in Dick’s texts has no stable second person plural; as such, it’s a compositional realization of what I regard as critical for political analysis, destabilizing subjectivity.
Cutting finally to the Better Than Us essay that Sam Opondo and I wrote, we find a protagonist, the Chronos Corporation-designed robot Arisa, who like Dick’s Androids (also manufactured by a corporation), manages a self-fashioning that exceeds the codes with which she has been programmed (Opondo and Shapiro forthcoming). Our suggestion is that like much of the sci-fi genre, Better Than Us uses its protagonist to evince an allegorical meditation on human freedom. The series is among other things a speculative story about the conditions of possibility for developing a conviviality that could alter a dystopic life world in which all the families in its milieu are internally estranged. As Arisa becomes an increasingly empathic subject, far exceeding the codes with which she has been constructed, she intervenes in domestic spaces to assist those she serves by providing an escape (like hers) from institutionalized codes that control social conditioning.
Characters, spaces, encounters
Fernanda, Thiago and Thiago:In Architecture as Event Space: Violence, securitisation, and resistance (2019), you wrote that architecture is not inert, but can ‘create conditions of possibility’ or even ‘shape events,’ with micro and macro political implications. Architecture has always been a central feature of sci-fi: dystopian cities, spaceships, alien planets, even sentient architecture. How can thinking about these settings as ‘event spaces’ teach us about politics?
Mike: There is more I’d like to say in response than space permits, so I will stick with two moments that schooled me about what architecture can teach us about politics – specifically about the ideational consequences of the way a building’s organization of space (re)invents the viewing/thinking subject to provide insight into the politics of subjectivity. Moment 1: Decades ago, during a work visit to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I found myself with enough spare time to visit the Elvehjem Art Library on campus. Quite arbitrarily, I selected Erwin Panofsky’s study of the Gothic Cathedral to read and was immediately enthralled. Paraphrasing from something I eventually wrote about the book: Treating a radical shift in Christian thought associated with the emergence of Scholasticism, Panofsky shows how that system of thought was embodied in the way the Gothic Cathedral departed from an earlier Romanesque design.
Attending to the homologies between two different thought-worlds and their material realizations in cathedral architecture, Panofsky suggests that the thinking materialized in Gothic architecture provided what is central to the Kantian revolution, a shift in the conditions of possibility for intelligible experience from the thing in itself to the subject’s structure of apprehension. Scholasticism’s philosophical position he notes transfers the aesthetic sensibility from the object to human reason and experience. As it materializes the way scholastic thought privileges subjectivity, the Gothic Cathedral makes a space for a thinking/viewing subject by virtue of its interior layout. In contrast with the prior Romanesque design, in which space is determinate and impenetrable, the Gothic design, having removed barriers between sections, lends a perspective to a seeing reasoning subject who in an earlier thought-world – materialized in the Romanesque design – was locked into a version of faith that was insulated from reason by impenetrable physical and ideational barriers.
Moment 2: Many years later while at an academic conference in Berlin, I visited Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum. To summarize the effect of the Museum’s architecture: The building itself is a curator whose built-in mission is to ambiguate the history of the Holocaust by creating ontological vertigo for the visitor. Faced with a series of oblique axes with no prescribed routes, the visiting subject is on her own. How to experience the historical moment to which the museum is dedicated requires productive reception because there is no guided version. Reverting to my later focus, influenced by Bernard Tschumi’s treatment of buildings as event spaces, I saw Libeskind’s museum as an interpretation event space that demands the subject’s participation. Writing about the experience subsequently, I noted that instead of housing a history of the Holocaust the museum’s dysnarrative design transfers responsibility for interpretation to the museum visitor who is enjoined to think inconclusively about a historical episode that more inflexible texts have treated as conclusively fixed. The museum creates unease, disrupting any attempt to consummate a narrative of one of history’s most violent episodes. Like Panofsky’s treatment of the Gothic Cathedral, Libeskind’s design is a lesson in the politics of subjectivity. They both alter the grammar of the subject-architecture relationship. Rather than treating the way subjects construct buildings, they show the way buildings make subjects.
Fernanda, Thiago and Thiago: In a previous interview, you posited that we can consider the character of ‘the detective’ in mystery novels and television series as ‘an epistemological character’ (Khreiche, Shapiro, and Ward 2019: 7). What do you understand by epistemological character? Would you say there is an epistemological character in science fiction?
Mike: Yes, science fiction characters are often epistemological subjects. That they are such (in a phenomenological sense) is shown for example in the case of Philip Dick’s Rick Deckard in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep as well as in Ridley Scott’s film version Blade Runner. In addition to doing the detective work of disclosing the structure of hegemony in a futuristic dystopia (aided by one of the androids/replicants), Deckard is also involved in self-discovery. Rather than going over old ground (e.g., other texts in which I have treated detectives as knowledge agents), I want to draw on recent illustrations from analyses of novels, a lexical genre to which I often turn in my inquiries because it emphasizes not only the forces that contribute to events but also the umwelts within which events transpire as they are experienced by the people involved. Importantly, in addition to epistemological subjects, which I treat as what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘conceptual personae’ – those who provide concepts in essayistic moments of disclosure through subject-oriented narration (through either a specific narrator or through free indirect discourse which ambiguates the subjectivity in the text) – are aesthetic subjects, those who have experiential rather than explanatory roles. Their experiences disclose aspects of the historically sedimented world, the life world within which experiences are shaped. I offer two examples
First, in his commentary on William Faulkner’s novel Light in August James Snead provides an apt illustration of what I have meant by epistemological subjects which are thought vehicles conveying what a text wants to think as well as how it thinks. Referring to the novel’s main protagonist, Joe Christmas he writes, ‘Joe Christmas is an idea rather than a person, a character who remains almost completely opaque...[he] avidly resists the properties and effects of written imprintation’ (Shapiro 2025a) The other characters in the novel are aesthetic subjects in that their reactions to Joe Christmas, whose racial ambiguity is disconcerting, disclose the way the racialized world within which they dwell is experienced. Second, I have referred to the roles of the eponymous protagonists in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon, a text that transforms historical characters hired to draw a boundary to settle a legal dispute into subjects whose commentaries and activities disclose a history of violence and exclusion on the American continent. Pynchon’s Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, are the characters who serve as the primary vehicles for the plot (while much of the conceptual commentary belongs to ‘The Reverend Cherrycoke’). Their roles are represented not only as character types with distinctive personalities but also as guides and shapers of the eighteenth-century American life world. As such they are exemplars of what I have called aesthetic subjects because as I have defined the type, their ‘movements and actions (both purposive and non-purposive) map and often alter experiential, politically relevant terrains.’ As aesthetic subjects, their actions are more significant for what they reveal about the world within which they move than about their personalities. On the other hand, Mason and Dixon (along with some other characters, e.g., The Reverend Cherrycoke) are also ‘conceptual personae.’ In that role, they serve as vehicles for the author’s concepts, articulated through the novel’s essayistic interventions which accompany its plot – for example, a moment when they state their realization that they are ‘trespassing’ in the space of another civic entity. In their conceptual role, rather than mapping the novel’s geopolitical terrain, they are showing what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘thought’s territories.’
Finally, I want to offer another example, a sci-fi protagonist Memo involved in both aesthetic and epistemological roles. He’s the main character in Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer (2008), a science fiction film that invents a future of cross border relationships in which Mexican working bodies stay in Mexico and work virtually in the US. They are jacked into their roles biologically as well as virtually (hooked up with cords running from vision machines to nodes implanted on their bodies). Early in the film Memo is mainly an aesthetic subject whose movement from his village to Tijuana, the border area in which he finds work, articulates the experience of those who are vulnerable to exploitation by the US corporations that hire them. Once on the job, however, he becomes an epistemological subject who provides a futuristic Malthusian commentary on the way his working is resulting in biological debilitation. Noticing that his body is facing ultimate exhaustion, he informs the viewer (while explaining his situation to his family through a face-time app) that, like the others in the virtual Fordist-structured factory that hired him, his vitality is dissipating as it flows outward from the factory through virtual space to the work site (a building he is helping to construct). The film is among other things a Malthus-inspired political economy lesson situated in an imagined future which, as the director Alex Rivera suggests is one ‘that really could be five minutes from now.’3
Fernanda, Thiago and Thiago: In this same interview, you said that you sometimes draw inspiration from ‘strange encounters,’ which immediately caught our attention. You’ve also written about encounters, particularly in Methods and Nations, and about the negotiating of identities and relations that takes place in frontier spaces and moments. How do you think this history of encounters, and the stories that have been told about them, have influenced and been reflected in our imaginations of otherworldly encounters?
Mike: I have used a lot of examples in my work to show how encounters at diverse historical moments provoke reflection because they unsettle assumptions about how one dwells in space and time. Here I will repeat one to which I have turned often because it implicates the issue of genre which I want to elaborate. It’s the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes’ report about a conversation with a local peasant when while lost in the Morellos section of Mexico he has asked about the name of the village to which he and friends have wandered on a driving trip. Getting the answer that it depends – in times of peace the village is named Santa Maria while in time of war it’s named Zapata – he first has an epiphany; there is more than one time in the world. Then he has a genre reflection, wondering what artistic practice can best capture that temporal multiplicity. Not surprisingly, he nominates his own vocation, suggesting that it’s the novel.
However, when critically attuned, a wide variety of artistic genres capture temporal multiplicity. As I’ve noted in work underway, ‘[e]very critically-attuned artistic genre encodes complex temporalities. [while] Carlos Fuentes nominates the novel as the one best suited to capture the world’s multiplicity of times, Gilles Deleuze ascribes that capacity to cinema, Art Spiegelman, whose graphic documentaries, Maus I and II, respond to his father’s post-Holocaust grief, nominates the commixture of image and narrative in comic strips as the genre that best brings the past into the present, David Shneer credits a photograph’s ability to tell a vast and complex history, and reflecting on ‘the political force’ of [Ariel] Dorfman’s theater works, Mieke Bal refers to theater as a ‘time-based art form’ that is ‘eminently suitable’ for ‘staging, and consequently exposing’ subjects’ affective experiences. Such art forms, she adds ‘make History enter art and accordingly, suspend the unfortunate and damaging...opposition between fiction and reality’ (Shapiro 2025a).
Picking up on the reference to ‘our imagination,’ I want to treat acts of imagination with which sci-fi, as a temporally-attuned genre (whether lexical or cinematically realized) can illuminate imagined worlds. Let’s imagine a world that is growing within our world, displacing the way we are used to negotiating our collective tasks. A ready-to-hand example that might help asserted itself in an email exchange I had recently. A co-editor of a forthcoming collection in which I have a chapter passed on a query from the ‘copy-editor,’ who has asked me she said to provide a reference for my mention of Tennyson’s Ulysses (in his poem, ‘Idles of the King,’ he invents a lamenting Ulysses, unhappy with his stagnant life). I responded with the remark that it is so well known it needs no reference and added: ‘Would the schmuck [my angry characterization of the copy editor] ask for a reference if I had mentioned Hamlet?’ The response I got from the co-editor was, ‘[w]e suspect that the schmuck is an algorithm.’ To put the matter simply, the growing sophistication and pervasiveness of algorithms – a virtual world metastasizing within and adjacent to our world – makes us wonder whether a given text we encounter has been fabricated in that world. Among what we have to rethink as we face that virtual text-fabricating world is the extent to which its mediations of individual, interpersonal, and collective projects alter the locus and thus politics of agency of acts and accordingly the resulting distribution of value/credit attached to them.
However, we can look more positively at that world and imagine the extent to which a willed encounter with algorithms – e.g., purposely comparing one’s own versus an algorithmic textual response to an issue – can guide one toward originality. The protagonist in Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Texaco, Marie Sophie, who is advocating on behalf of an oppressed creole population seeking urban enfranchisement in Martinique, states the issue this way: how can one write words that break with the stasis of ‘the things written before.’ If I were to recommend instruction from sci-fi literature to sort through the political issues algorithms implicate, I would nominate Neal Stephenson whose ‘metaverse’ (e.g., in Snow Crash) is rife with what a critic points to as ‘algorithms underlying this secondary fictional universe.
Fernanda, Thiago and Thiago:Similarly, and considering the perspectives that have been historically dominant in science/literature/cinema, how do you think different conceptions of modernity have been reflected in our imaginations of other and future worlds?
Mike: Beginning with the question’s initial provocation, ‘considering the perspectives that have been historically dominant,’ I want to share part of a current writing project in which I juxtapose the Caribbean thought world’s version of modernity as it has developed in the seascape-inspired fluvial imaginaries of the Antilles with the perspectives of Western nation states whose dominant thought world arises from a static material geography consisting in boundaries, borders and frontiers. Reading Caribbean texts, I learn for example from Edouard Glissant (who views modernity as a chaos monde) that the lexicon characteristic of Caribbean writing evinces counter historical imaginaries, conveying another rhythm or dynamism shaped by the archipelago’s fluvial, imaginary; from Derek Walcott I learn about the implications of writing within a seascape aesthetic. I also learn from Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s concept of the Antilles as a meta-archipelago, and from Michel Cliff’s analysis of the way the European thought world had coercively shaped the Caribbean’s linguistic resources. So schooled, I have had to rethink the political theory canon that comprised my early education. In addition, as I have pursued a wide variety of other Caribbean writing (the texts of Wilson Harris, George Lamming, and Patrick Chamoiseau stand out as especially compelling), I learned that Caribbean literatures – very much like what one learns from Deleuze’s writings – teach us about the futility of attempting to stabilize and authenticate singular and collective identities.4 To respond to the final part of the question, I think that the conceptual frontier that separates Euro-American from the Caribbean texts provides a paradigm for anticipating future exotic encounters as much as it does for rethinking historiographic journeys into the colonial past.
Sci-fi and pedagog
Fernanda, Thiago and Thiago: With your extensive classroom experience, how do you assess the effectiveness of using sci-fi (or pop culture in general) for teaching?
Mike: What I want to reflect on first is what constitutes ‘effectiveness.’ It’s hard to assess the extent to which the materials and conceptual orientations in one’s courses have the effect on students toward which one should strive: unsettling their deeply held assumptions, encouraging them to want to continue learning when a course is over, being motivated and guided to recognize their responsibilities to others, past present and future. The world outside the classroom is an inhibiting force on the effectiveness of pedagogy. As a teacher one is always competing for attention with things that many enrolled in your courses find more demanding. It’s easier to think about the effect of the materials on yourself. Teaching a course is the kind of ‘aesthetic work’ which [to borrow a phrase from Alva Noë) ‘does not leave us as it finds us’ (Noe 2023). Teaching, if approached productively, should be like writing; what you write (and similarly how you design a course) should be what Michel Foucault refers to as a ‘learning text’ which once consummated should leave you changed. What that implies (and it’s something I suggest to everyone who is beginning a teaching career) is that the main target of the materials you select is yourself.
That said, I refer briefly to how I have been affected by the sci-fi texts I’ve used most often in courses, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep along with the Ridley Scott film version. The first time I worked on those texts – both in a writing project and as course material – my focus was on identity boundaries: human/Android (or replicant as the film calls them) and human/animal, recognizing that in the novel version a complex identity triangle is involved. To the extent that one is sympathetic to animals, one is not suspected to be an android, i.e., a positive valence between human and animal reflects a negative valence between human and android. The animal drops out in the film version, leaving the ambiguous human – ‘replicant’ boundary as the issue. That identity problem was something I wanted to share with students while at the same time challenging long-held presumptions attached to my own self-fashioning. Whatever may have transpired for the students, I no longer recognized myself the same way once the course was over. I did, however, learn that in the course as in many others I have taught, what inspired those students who felt they got something from it resulted from identifying with my struggle. They were able to see that I was passionately committed to learning and to sharing not only what I have learned already but also the sense that there is much more for me (and us) to learn. I have thus tried to live in my courses the way I try to live my scholarly life, committed to the proposition that everything I think I know might have to be revised. I like the way Nietzsche’s Zarathustra puts it (in a new translation of the book): ‘My today revokes my yesterday.’
To stick with the Philp K Dick texts, the last time I used them in a course, I was committing myself to reading them differently, that time – to reflect on the way they encourage thinking about life. For that reason, I paired them with other texts that inspire that ontological issue, among which was Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, a novel with which I had struggled the first time through. I wanted to give Rushdie another chance to affect my thinking and to ask myself (and have the students ask themselves) what learning can take place when the texts are now located within the problematic of ontologies of life.5 The Do Androids... and Blade Runner texts are classics in the sense that what makes a text classic is that no matter how many times you read or watch it you cannot exhaust what it can say. Nevertheless, there are ways in which one can approach less complicated popular culture texts (from which I also continually learn, e.g., Tarzan comics) in productive ways, where ‘productive interpretation’ is a self-changing practice as Roland Barthes famously points out.
Fernanda, Thiago and Thiago: Any recommendations for our readers? Any books, series, or movies (in addition to Better Than Us) you would recommend?
Mike: There are many things from my recent reading and watching I would like to recommend, but rather than listing them, I want to begin by selecting one that I regard as a superb example of what the comparative literature scholar Linda Hutcheon calls ‘historiographic metafiction,’ Judith McCormack’s The Singing Forrest (2021), which stages an encounter between a young Jewish/Canadian female prosecutor and an elderly male fugitive from justice who participated in the war crimes in Belarus during his youth (assisting in the murder most of the Jewish population, among others). Here’s the beginning of my analysis of the novel (from a chapter in a project in production):
Jill Jarvis provides an instructive prelude to Judith McCormack’s The Singing Forest, a novel that uses the occasion of a legal case to resurrect a repressed historical event. Referring to literature’s ‘unexpected, disruptive, and surreptitious power to make ghosts perceptible, and to make possible what state violence has rendered nearly unimageable,’ Jarvis suggests that in contrast with ‘activist effort to instrumentalize the language of the law to compel the state to listen,’ literature does its work by ‘flagrantly disregarding and defying the language of the law.’ McCormack’s novel reflects on and complicates the law-literature binary that Jarvis proposes. A literary recreation of what had been for decades a hidden atrocity – thousands of people in Belarus murdered by Stalin’s NKVD – the novel makes ‘ghosts perceptible’ by staging the historical event as a crime story in which the main drama is the trial of a collaborator in the Stalin-ordered mass killing of (officially) thirty thousand, (‘unofficially two hundred thousand’) residents. Before it concludes a novel that begins as a crime story thinks well outside of the issues of justice, crime, and punishment, as it constructs a series of dialectic inter-articulations between national histories and individual biographies. (Shapiro 2025a)
Without going into an exhaustive explication of the plot, I want to share my take on the juxtaposition the novel composes. The defendant, Stefan Drozd (elderly by the time of his apprehension) embodies a self that had been hardened by a childhood in which he has been continually disparaged and beaten by a brutal alcoholic father. Because he has been driven by fear and anger from early childhood on, cruelty combined with a survival instinct become his unchanging way of meeting the world. In contrast, the prosecutor, Leah Jarvis is gradually changed by her role. At one point she realizes that being quarantined within legal procedure has impoverished her perspective on the defendant and on the issue of war crimes in general. As McCormack puts it metaphorically, ‘She felt as if she has been exiled from a world of hues and pigments, and sent to a place of flat words, a place from which all the color had been leached. Banished to some arid country she had no idea existed.’ In short, rather than simply playing out a courtroom drama, the novel stages an encounter that both illuminates a historical episode and ponders the experiential consequences of roles related to its afterlife. In my reading of the novel, I note – in a sentence that provides me with a transition to another text I want to recommend – ‘In comparison with the self-assurance that permeates the lives of her male colleagues [in her law form], Leah’s way of being resembles ‘an infinite rehearsal.’
The quoted expression is the title of the Guyana writer Wilson Harris’s fictional autobiography, The Infinite Rehearsal. What I think is distinctive about Harris’ s fiction and non-faction is the extent to which he engages in ‘serious noticing’ (an expression that the literary critic James Wood applies to good writing). His exemplary world-attunement is evident in what I will call his mantra: ‘How tragically impoverished we would be if we lost an ear for other voices, other rhythms, in the fabric of reality.’ Having worked as a surveyor, Harris came to appreciate the world as an active ever-changing force. In his essay, The Music of Living Landscapes, he writes, ‘I sensed over the years...that the landscape possessed a life because the landscape, for me, is like an open book, and the alphabet with which one worked was all around me.’ Harris hears ‘preternatural voices in rivers, rapids, giant waterfalls, rock, tree,’ while also finding the industrial environment no less loquacious. While working in a factory he ‘took away the hoarse call of the wheels of industry and the clamor and the grind of slice metal’ encouraging him ‘to visualize links between technology and living landscapes in continually new ways’ (Bundy 1999).
I want to recommend one more text that reflects that same degree of attention to the music of the world, the jazz musician, Henry Threadgill’s autobiography. This passage in which he relates what he learned while a soldier during the Vietnam War is exemplary.
One of the main ways that war transforms you has to do with your sense of hearing. It’s partly an expansion of your aural palette, all the new stuff you become attuned to in the new environment: the sounds of helicopters and distant howitzer fire, sure, but also the ribald banter among the guys you serve with, or the voices of the Montagnards, or the unfamiliar patter of rain on a triple-canopy jungle, or the melodious cries of street-food vendors in Saigon hawking their goods. But it’s not simply a matter of hearing more—it makes you hear differently, too. You acquire a heightened sensitivity to sound. Your body learns quickly that listening can be a matter of life or death. Your ears start to pick up things you wouldn’t even have noticed back at home, because in the war missing the slightest signal. (Threadgill 2023: 152)
Finally, having invoked sound, I recommend two 2023 films in which the soundscapes are arguably the most important contributions to the way the films think: Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, focused on the life of the Auschwitz Commandant, Rudolph Höss and family whose house and garden are within hearing distance of the noise from the atrocities occurring in the camp, and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a noisy film in which an increasingly intense musical score often obscures much of the dialog among interacting characters. The score prepares the viewer – mood and apprehension wise – for the awful consequences of the radically contingent circumstances – whose force exceeds what can be captured in the conversations of the characters – that led to the atom bomb-creating collaboration among scientists, military commanders, and government bureaucrats.
Notes
References
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- Blanchot, M. 1989. The Space of Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
- Bundy, A J M ed. 1999. Selected Essays of Wilson Harris. London: Routledge.
- Campbell, D and M J Shapiro (eds.). 1999. Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
- Casarino, C. 2002. ‘Philopoesis: A Theoretico-Methodological Manifesto.’ boundary 2: 86.
- Der Derian, J and M J Shapiro (eds.). 1989. International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics. New York: Lexington Books.
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- Lapoujade, D. 2024. Worlds Built to Fall Apart: Versions of Philip K. Dick. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- McCormack, J. 2021. The Singing Forest. Toronto: Biblioasis.
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- Shapiro, M J. Forthcoming 2025b. Thinking Outside the Canon: Political Theory as Textual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Shaviro, S. 2015. Discognition. London: Repeater.
- Threadgill, H. 2023. Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music. New York; Alfred Knopf.
