Midnight Meanderings: A Conversation about Ritual and Revolutionary Politics from the Pacific Northwest to Korea to Japan

KANZAN: …By hitchhiking you can sense the space of this monstrous empire.

JB: Very much.

BRENNA: You also get such generous people, and then they’ll take you to their special places. “You’ve never been here? I’ll go way out of my way to show you this thing that’s special to me.”

JB: Yes. And maybe a segue to our larger topic could be that, our hitchhiking story speaks of opening to the movement of the much-more-than-human flow of life. Hitchhiking does that. But also, listening does that. I want to echo a quote from your text in the second Liaisons, that maybe what we’re called to do here, is to listen.^[1] So, with that, I want to express my gratitude, and my listening.

KANZAN: I have known only urban America, like New York, San Francisco or Chicago. But not so much this vast America and what is going on there, especially the depth of the ecological approaches among radicals and anarchists. I’m beginning to understand the depth of these practices, the way of thinking, and how the body and spirit approach the Earth. So the concept of Earth is becoming very important to me.

But the Earth thinking became a necessity to me also from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. Before that, I had been involved mostly in anti-globalization, anti-capitalist, anti-statist, these politics. Then the Fukushima experience intervened, which forced me to confront the Earth. But it was not a positive way of relating to it. In contrast, your projects here are dealing with a singular place, this singular tree, the spirit of a place — you’re dealing with the place in a positive and affirmative way. But in my experience with Fukushima, we confronted the Earth unfortunately in a negative way. Negative because of the existence of radionuclides, which is invisible but everywhere, affecting our body slowly, gradually, over thousands of years. It’s monstrous.

And this is something the politics of the world, the politics of the nation-state, cannot deal with. The way radionuclides travel, merge with the water, everything on a micro level, is beyond the territoriality of the nation-state. So the legal process cannot listen to it. That’s why so many victims of nuclear accidents and nuclear warfare are not compensated. It’s been this way since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and now Fukushima is the same story. Because the people are developing illnesses coming from the small doses of radionuclides. The legal judgment tends to say that this has nothing to do with it. The movement of radionuclides is something that state politics cannot grasp. Also, it spreads beyond the Japanese border and accumulates in the planetary environment. Most of all, radio-contaminated water from the reactors: now the Japanese government and the electric company are releasing it into the Pacific Ocean. Can you believe it? The ocean is the planetary commons! And why can one nation-state claim the right to contaminate it? So, the geopolitics of the nation-state — or the politics of the World, which I consider the assembly of nation-states — is contradictory to the wellbeing of the Earth. This politics is conflictual with earthly thinking and living. But the division of nation-states dominates what we think of as political.

To me, beginning to think of the Earth would change the concept of revolution in a deep way. It’s a shift from the perspective of revolution in ’68. The new idea of revolution would have to deal with something we don’t even know. It would have to include the sense that we are part of something beyond the political ontology we have known. To think about this is my current project. I finished a book about the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and one of its main themes is what the politics of the Earth would look like.

But your practice here is more concrete, from your own experience, talking about what the planetary ontology, what the revolution, or changing reality, is like. Your body and mind are thronging to this bigger life, something like that. I’m very inspired. And then seeing this place. To me it’s a very important day. I’d like to communicate with you more. I’d like to get to know the work in progress here. So that’s the beginning of my exchange with you. But now I’ll ask the others to talk, and Eri especially. We collaborated on the Liaisons piece, but she really worked on it in a contemplative way.

ERI: Yeah, I got obsessed with how to articulate some of these questions. Also for me it’s been really compelling to think through these problems together, coming from different contexts between Japan and the US. So I was trying to express that. Like we talk about the nation-state, and the problems of nation-state societies, in the context of Japan. I really resonated on an emotional level with what I heard from friends’ experiences after Fukushima, and how they dealt with it in relation to the state and Japanese society. Their critique of insularity and homogeneity as mechanisms of social control struck me as an almost opposite version of the problem of the expanse and alienation that I experience in the American context, growing up in the suburban wastelands of the American empire. But there’s some kind of parallel, there’s a mirrored kind of desperation.

KANZAN: You know, we can imagine hitchhiking through America, this vast land. But Japan is insular, tiny and introverted, almost like Japan could be one of the states in the US. Actually, Japan is an independent nation-state, but still it’s a client state of the US. And the relationship with the land is very different. As we always talk about it in Japan, if you walk a little bit and there’s a commercial facility, there’s nowhere without an advertisement, or a ramen restaurant, or some kind of inn. It’s impossible to have such a big land project, you know, it’s just impossible to have something like this in Japan. The relationship with the land, the Earth, is very different.

If there’s a possibility to sense the Earth, that’s a place like Minamata in northern Kyushu, where the sea and the land interact almost like a fractal space. And they are badly polluted. That’s the kind of place we might have the possibility of feeling the Earth positively, and yet with negativity. But mainland Japan, it’s like one big city connected by the Shinkansen train, where we would need an earthquake, and then maybe we can experience a direct relationship with the planetary body. It’s a really interesting contrast between the ways we sense the Earth.

JB: Can I speak to that just a little bit? It’s also a question for me. I mention it very briefly, but I talked a bit about this walk I make through the land here, the Circle Way. It’s something that in part is rooted in the land and the practices here for generations, but is also just discovering by doing — that is, just to walk through wildish places here in Portland.

It actually originally started for me on the coast. I discovered that there are places there that are honored as sacred. Special trees, or a rock formation, or a pool, where there’s not a shrine, there’s no flags, but places where implicitly there’s a feeling that people come here in different ways and honor it. And so the practice is walking through the land noticing such places, and praying with them, honoring them. And then meditating or listening or just being-in-the-world while walking onward, in a way that increasingly opens myself to experiencing more of a give and take with where I go, how I move, what I see. It started on the coast. But I don’t live there! So I began doing it in the city.

I walk out the door, walk through the forest here, up the creek, then over to the hilltops, then on and on. I take six days to walk all the way around the city in a big circle, as much of it as I can through those wild places. Wild-ish. In most of it there’s roads nearby, the cars, you can hear them. Or there’s joggers, if you’re in a nature park. Or in many of the places you’re crossing fences, or sneaking around barriers, following the lead of others that live with the land. There’s a lot of houseless people making encampments in the woods. But still wildish!

And for me, this helps. Over five or six days of walking through the city I start to see not so much the roads or the power lines, I start to see the shape of the land, and the water, and the deer trails. I see the land like a deer, the wildish places first, the city grid overlaid. And it changes how I relate to the land, even though it’s the city. And that feels important to me in exactly this way that you are saying, moving beyond us and them, beyond nature vs. culture, the human and the more-than-human. We’re all in this together.

And it’s been important to me not only because I love the wild — and I do, I really love the big wild, when I walk out on the mountain and I can’t see anything human for miles — but it’s been important to me because once, when I was on the mountain, I remember looking down on the valley, on the roads crisscrossing and the fields and the power lines, and thinking, I have to learn to live this way, the way I do up here, but down there. That’s the heart of a lot of this for me. Learning to see and experience aspects of existing life — like the city, like hiking, like breathing or listening — in a way that profoundly transforms them to being part of the Earthbound world our descendants need of us. Bringing the spiritual clarity and wisdom of the high mountain down to the valley, to everyday life.

So here’s another example. I’ve never been to Japan, but I read a story from someone in Seattle who did a pilgrimage around Shikoku…

HIROSHI: That’s where I’m from, Shikoku!

JB: OK, wow, yeah. So there’s a pilgrimage walk around the island, right? And people do it lots of different ways, some people do it in buses, and some people walk the whole thing. And for me that’s really inspiring — doing a pilgrimage for hundreds of miles that so many others have done for hundreds of years. What if we were able to add just a little detournement so that the pilgrimage becomes a revolutionary Earthbound practice for more and more who do it? Now, I know it’s easy to glorify what’s distant. I’m sure the Shikoku pilgrimage has many other meanings in a Japanese context. Perhaps reinforcing patriarchal tradition, or as a sort of escapism. But when I think about what are other ways we can take this existing life we have, as corrupt as it is, and look for ways that what’s already here can be not only part of the Empire but also part of something else — and we can breathe more and more life into the other that’s something else — I wonder if something like such a pilgrimage walk is in that direction?

KANZAN: That’s a very inspiring idea. I mean, what’s important is not less cultivated. Of course, a less cultivated place is important to build something. But on the other hand, even in the city, you can sense, or perceive, or be together with the Earth. That’s the next level. That’s very inspiring and encouraging.

HIROSHI: I think that your writing resonates with that feeling, jb, and I felt that. Actually some of the analysis, some of the ways that you see life as unbounded relations — not as divided, individualistic, human, one person, that kind of boundedness — but relations. It really resonates with a thinker that I’m friends with in Korea, where I was in kind of a commune with this group, in Seoul. So that was striking. At the same time, the passion, the feeling that’s right there has a different quality to it, which is really impressive. And I feel that again, coming here. I read your text when we were camping, before we arrived, but I felt it stronger coming here, and going through the city coming here. And hearing what you said, the problem is that we cannot see this closeness with Earth, because there are so many things that block that perception. So how do we deal with that?

And another thing that I’ve been feeling while interacting, not just here, but while we’ve been in the Northwest, is the kind of — I don’t know what you describe it — ritual, or spirit, this practice of relating with things that you don’t see, that you can’t observe or quantify. That’s something we don’t really have in Korea or Japan, activists or people in this milieu do not have a chance to get closer to. Maybe a little bit in Korea. There are rituals they do in demonstrations, or in these communes, a little bit. It’s kind of following in this more or less established way that people do things with these otherworldly forces. But it’s something that we don’t actively engage with. So that’s something I thought was very interesting to experience during this trip. And especially for Japanese people, it’s kind of hard to navigate through these terrains, like how do we do that, with the cultural baggage that these practices have in Japan.

KANZAN: Japan’s problem is politics, the concept of politics is very limited. The problem is a stereotypical idea of politics as just changing institutions, you know. But then, due to the neoliberal reforms, there’s the economic problem in the cities, precarious youth cannot live there anymore. On top of that, the radiation contamination from Fukushima has affected city life, including the movement. There was a big split in the movement between those who would go to Fukushima to do support and anti-nuclear organizing, and those prioritizing safety from radioactivity above all. But then, there appeared a new movement of young people migrating to deserted, secluded farmland, because the price of land is much cheaper in the country than the city. Among us, Sota is the one who started this, and he’s experiencing something very different now, trying to build the foundation for communal life in relation to the land. This kind of practice used to be considered not so much as political before, like it’s just a lifestyle thing. But now it is very political in a critical sense. So this is something for us to think about.

JAY: I feel like the focus on some kind of ritualistic aspect doesn’t exist in much of the Left, in the activist Left in the Northwest. I think maybe what you’ve seen during your trip is a little bit different in a way, a little bit special. And I think that in the Northwest, a lot of the forest defense stuff, like the song that jb sang earlier, has roots in that.

KANZAN: Forest defense means the tree sitting tradition?

JAY: The people who keep it alive, yeah. And of course we’ve talked about the repression from the Green Scare and how it pushed a lot of that stuff into more closed circles. And it hadn’t been a part of things recently, until Standing Rock. And then ritual became much more of a thing for people to think about again as part of struggle. And I don’t think it’s necessarily popularized, but people think about it now, much more than before.

TATSUHIRO: I have experienced a ritual as part of struggle, just once. It was at an anti-G8 summit camp in Hokkaido in 2008. At the beginning, a group of Ainu people did their ritual to pray for the spirit-guardians, kamuy. I’ve also read about one instance during the Minamata struggle in 1970, when victims and their supporters went to a stockholders meeting…

KANZAN: Just to give a little background, Minamata is the town mostly known for mercury poisoning. The locals live in this beautiful oceanic town that was polluted with mercury for decades, until finally the company called Chisso Corporation and the government acknowledged it. So the struggle lasted a very long time. The poisoning causes horrendous deformities of the body and mind. And people eating food from the ocean are directly affected. So this struggle embodies one of the most dreadful acts of victimization by the state and capital in Japan’s modern history. The people’s rage is so intense.

TATSUHIRO: One time they went to a stockholders meeting of the company, to meet the executives. A group of women, victims and their families occupied the stage. They sang a Buddhist pilgrim chant, wearing white clothes, ringing a small bell. It’s a kind of Buddhist ritual. They tried to be with spirits of the dead who were unable to die.

KANZAN: And they wore headbands with the symbol for curse on their foreheads, which is a dreadful character [呪]. When you look at the shape, it’s really scary.

JAY: I’m curious if you would say more about the cultural baggage of ritual that you mentioned. I’m curious what that is.

HIROSHI: I think it’s mostly because religion has been appropriated by the state, or powerful people. They were given certain places in society by the state if they were able to remain such, during the modernization period, the formative period of the Japanese state. So you know, it’s complicit with power, all these practices. Unless it’s really at the periphery, like Minamata, or Ainu people. Ainu people are not really part of Japanese society at all, you know, I mean, completely not in that world. No future for them, no place for them. Just like American society did to Indigenous peoples in the 19th century. They brought over an American politician and agriculturalist to Hokkaido as a foreign advisor for the Hokkaido Development Agency, who brought his own experience with the American government’s treatment of Indigenous Americans. That’s why in the movie about the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front^[2], they started with bombing the statue of the Ainu and the Japanese looking over the land as a frontier, with the Ainu as a guide.

KANZAN: They also targeted those corporations taking part in Japanese colonialism and economic expansionism. The choice of their bombing targets was evidently based upon thorough research into the economic and political powers that drove Japanese colonialism in the past, as well as expansionism at present. Their actions were a critical reminder of what makes the capitalist nation-state called Japan. But, by their bombings of corporate buildings, some people were killed. So the group became a problematic subject, almost like a taboo. So most people on the Left say that their intention was good, but the tactic was bad. This makes sense on a certain level. But then again, if it was just peaceful protest, would the impact be this deep? I’m sure bombing itself is bad both morally and strategically, but there is more to think about and discuss. And you know, they attempted to assassinate the emperor!

HIROSHI: We are in agreement about that, basically.

KANZAN: If they had succeeded, it could have been a very, very big change in the country. This ultra-militant group could have changed the political and social conditions completely. And even the failed attempt makes us imagine the possible world in a radical manner. They called it a beautiful codename: Operation Rainbow.

HIROSHI: There is kind of a strange aspect of their humor, or poetry, of their actions.

KANZAN: I love their namings.

JEAN: Their naming resonates in this strange way with the insurrectionary current that came out of Greece and Chile in the 2010s, Conspiracy of Cells of Fire and so on. I think that overall that current was a dead end, and many of those people, the CCF in particular, just ended up attacking other anarchists in prison. It became another form of sectarian violence instead of something contagious. But a lot of the rhetoric, and the names, feel reminiscent. The bombastic naming of things, like the Fangs of the Earth cell in the EAAJAF. The first time I watched the documentary I was thinking about CCF and Greece and Chile and the militant underground of the 2010s.

KANZAN: To clarify the importance of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, I would like to say a few things. They were the farthest from the sectarian violence, which was intense in the radical left milieu in post-’68 Japan. And as I just said, the choice of their bombing targets was an important revelation. And finally, they continuously question what they had committed, as a serious self-criticism concerning revolutionary violence. You know one of the members of Wolf cell, Masashi Daidoji, wrote a series of haiku in prison before his death. It expresses both his deep remorse and consistent faith in revolution. I believe he is one of the best poets in contemporary Japan.

JEAN: This is backtracking a little bit. I was thinking about ritual, about to what extent it does or doesn’t exist currently in radical milieus in the US. It’s something of an undercurrent that hides and then reemerges. And I was thinking about my experience at Standing Rock, where the ritual elements were very clear. The position there was that this isn’t a protest, it’s a prayer, it’s a ceremony, and so everything needs to be done prayerfully. And I witnessed a deeply jaded reaction to that, in some people I’ve known for a very long time, of people who have seen so many eco-defense movements co-opted for the sake of respectability or nonviolence. People assumed that this was exactly the same thing. But while there were certainly elements there attempting to control or defang the movement, I don’t think that’s what was going on. I think we can actually separate out two different antinomies, and it’s dangerous when we obfuscate them: one between respectability and militancy, the other between ritual, or prayer, or ceremony, and the legacy of the European Enlightenment.

So I’m trying to take some of your theses seriously, jb, in your text, which is to think more deeply about this critique of symbolic protest, which is very centered in the anarchist and left communist milieu. There’s an idea that we need to move away from symbolic protest and towards concrete goals and real material interruptions in infrastructure. And it strikes me that symbolic protest is a ritual, in which the gods are the media and the state. They are a ritual. And the backlash to that is that all ritual and all symbolism is bad, or is a distraction. The vulgar Marxist framing would be to critique symbolic protest as acting on the level of the superstructure, not the base. But what if actually we just need to start engaging with different gods, and doing ritual and doing symbolism differently? Because if we just revert to this crass materialism, of thinking that we’re living in a world of human subjects acting on inanimate objects, we’re actually just buying into and reproducing the logic of Empire and capitalism. So it’s interesting to me to think about how we can reorient differently towards ritual or symbolism, to fight over that terrain as well.

KANZAN: I don’t know if it’s related to the idea of symbolic protest, but I researched a little about the Olympics, because I wrote about anti-Olympic struggles in reference to Nietszche’s obsession with ancient Greece. There was a contemporary of Nietszche, Pierre de Coubertin, who reintroduced ancient Greek agonistic rituals, to make them into the contemporary sports event. He is known as the father of modern Olympic games. But I realized there was one big difference between the agonistic rituals in ancient Greece and the modern idea of sports. Of course, you could talk about many differences, but one essential difference is that the ancient agonistic ritual was not just staged for the audience, it’s staged for the cosmos. It’s not the audience in the sense of contemporary spectacle that’s supposed to be seeing it, it’s the whole universe that’s supposed to be seeing. To be part of the universe, it’s very different. And then I was stunned how different it is. Nietzsche at least understood this. But then, Coubertin made it into the contemporary sports spectacle.

JAY: There was a really interesting moment when we were all walking around earlier, and then we were at the place where the elk statue was, in downtown Portland, during 2020, you know. And that guy came and asked if he could pray with us. And I’ve been wanting to talk about this because I don’t know if y’all are familiar with this very particular thing that happens in America, where I’ll be walking down the street, and these people will come up to you and they’ll be really friendly and inviting, but really they’re trying to ensnare you in a prayer circle. It’s a very particular Christian thing, and I wanted to point that out. But I think it’s really interesting what you did with it, jb. Often the reaction from me and my friends to those street preacher types is like, no, get the fuck away from me. But it’s interesting when you have other tools that you can create a different possibility, saying, no, you can’t lead it but you can participate. Ritual does this thing that pure politics can’t, it creates this other pole or this way of thinking. You’ve gotta have the political pole and it’s necessary, but not sufficient.

HIROSHI: Oh, he was trying to do that?

JAY: Yeah, he was trying to pray to Jesus with us. He wanted to lead the prayer. They will just be walking around and gather people and be like, “Let’s pray.”

JB: And then I said, “No, but I’ll pray and you can join us.”

BRENNA: But that’s political ritual, in some ways. I mean that’s almost a really good organizing tactic.

JAY: It is, I mean they’re really good organizers.

JB: Yes, and also this is not solely a question of who has the better organizing technique. Sure, the traditionalist right wing mobilizes the language of ritual and prayer, and the Left has a kind of knee-jerk reaction against it. Said that way, it might seem easy to overcome. But I think it’s a deeper challenge, not just a game of using risqué words like ritual in a way that’s ultimately just metaphor. Instead I am commiserating with the way that so many of us experiencing ourselves as political, remain trapped in Empire’s horizons and in its logic — even if we’re in an antagonist position.

In other words, there’s a common sense that the Enlightenment disenchanted the world. From a different perspective, what happened is that the people of the Enlightenment lost our ability to see and hear, we lost our ability to perceive enchantment. And the core of what I’m trying to do in this text, is to create a path for “disenchanted” moderns — and for me, this is my path too – a path for us to recognize that it’s all there anyway, always already enchanted. It’s all ritual, it’s all spirit. It’s among us, life is moving all the time. It’s just that some of us can’t hear it, we’re out of tune. And so it’s not about, should we have ritual or should we not. We’re always already doing ritual, even people who don’t believe at all. It’s happening anyway. It’s just the less you’re attuned to it, the less agency you have. It’s like when you’re watching media, you’re being ideologically conditioned whether you know it or not. In fact, the less you know it, the more it’s happening. So the less we’re attuned to the way that imperial ritual is organizing us, is animating us, the less we’re able to choose. So it’s not about ritual or not ritual, it’s about being more concerned about ritual, so we’re not blind.

OK, so that’s step one: recognizing spirit, noticing ritual. But as folks have been saying, the Empire is ensorcelling us, the Empire’s gods! So how do we mobilize an antagonistic, transformative, revolutionary spirit? On the one hand, there’s a way in which we have to do something completely different — we have to reject all of Christendom, of Empire, and do something different. This is what witchcraft is in some ways, and I think that’s powerful and important. But analogously with a more familiar tension: you can’t just do lifestylism alone. I think there’s something valuable about lifestylism and creating little bubbles of a world that is as completely different as possible. But as movement ecology you also have to come back, to interact with and engage the world as it is.

And so I look for the ways in which it’s already true that in the life of the Empire there are little pieces, that currently are owned by capital and organized by capital, but they exceed that, or they could exceed it, or they already do in some way, and so we ask — is there a way that we can see in vague shape and outline where our descendants could take that, and then give that energy, give that more strength, help that to be born? These are the sorts of rituals, the spirits I mean for us to attune with.

For me, my family’s really Christian, so I think a lot about syncretism. Ways that revolutionary Indigenous spirits have tucked themselves into nooks and crannies of “Christian” practices. For example, in Cancún in 2003 during the resistance to the WTO biopiracy round, the beginning of that incredible coming together we talked about, there was a powerful ritual. A whole bunch of curanderas from Chiapas, Mayan indígenas, came and did a huge ofrenda in the big traffic circle in the front of the fence the state had built. It was this beautiful ceremony. And the Pagan Cluster, who were doing semi-Euro-descended neopagan rituals, came together with them in the way that this was a mutual encounter with respect, in a sense of giving and receiving. And curanderas are not only Christian, they may identify as Christian, but they’ve made a peace with it so that the Indigenous practice of ritual can be carried forward. Vodoun, and Santeria, and Brazilian syncretistic religions, Irish Catholics, Native American Church: there’s all kinds of ways that people are living with the Earth in a way that has made some sort of hidden, secret but nonetheless present vessel to go under the radar. And I think that the time of destitution and breaking apart is the moment where those seeds can flourish.

KANZAN: I see, I sense that too. The world is collapsing. That is where we’re living.

JEAN: And the more that political milieus refuse to engage with it, or lump all of religion, all of spirituality, all of Christianity in with the enemy, the more that it cedes that entire terrain to reactionary elements.

BRENNA: You also lose an important tool, of magic and prayer and miracles. And this is the one still definitely enchanted person — I really believe in magic. And I know that Empire people are doing it too. And so if we cede all of that terrain to them, that’s giving up a set of tools.

JB: And this is not some woo-woo abstraction. This is the heart of materiality. The organization, the subtle organization of humans and the rest of life, is the very stuff of this monstrous big life of the Empire — and also of whatever other assemblage of humans and more-than-humans we can become. From the perspective of that hyper-objective life, its tissue, its gristle, its bones and blood, are our rituals, and our spirits, are what relates us.

HIROSHI: Yeah it’s real. And you remember these things are real, there are instances that they become, they are real, we get shocked. Like activists think, in Korea, they are doing these practices because they’re just rituals, and using a kind of popular practice to commemorate deaths and things like that. And then, you know, they have Shamans. And they tell things that shock activists. Because those words come from somewhere else, things they are not supposed to know about people who are dead.

JB: The invitation here is to be empirical, as opposed to being so sure that such things are impossible.

BRENNA: It’s a little arrogant to believe that things are impossible.

ERI: Would you say more about the last thing you said, about how Empire people are also using magic?

BRENNA: I think insofar as jb is right that we are engaged in these rituals that we don’t recognize as such, basically if you think of prayer and ritual as the thing that creates the body of the spirit, right, we’re doing that all the time in the empire that we’re part of. And I think that there’s people who are intentionally using that energy and manipulating it. This might be, the tech people in Silicon Valley with their spiritual AIs that they’re creating, they are creating gods, and I imagine that there are other bodies being created in the stock market and things. People are giving their life blood and their energy and their intention and their prayer and it creates these egregores, these other spirits, and they are feeding them. And I think that some people call that spirit or magic, and I think we also have to feed those different bodies, and bring life into them. And when we just dismiss all of that as woo-woo shit or something, we’re ceding territory that I think other people are, intentionally or unintentionally, really using and manipulating. And, I just live in a world of miracle. jb has been utterly confused that I just can’t imagine that everybody doesn’t believe in magic.

JB: Like, “Why are you writing all this stuff to help people see that there could be spirits — doesn’t everyone just see this?”

BRENNA: How could you live in this world and not be in utter amazement of it, or think that there’s not miracles? And I guess people don’t, and, it’s almost simplistic, but I think that if we can help direct what we believe, leaning into mystery and magic, instead of away from it — it’s exciting, it’s a more engaging world than this disenchanted world that we’ve inherited.

KANZAN: Yeah. It’s not exactly the way you put it, but in your text you’re talking about revolution. If we can change the reality at all, then more we are part of something bigger than us. This is something very important. Even revolution or political turmoil or change is already happening, but it’s not just in politics. In the history of Japan, the moment of radical change occurs very simply. It’s the earthquake. And the earthquake repeats in that country, because it’s on the volcanic Ring of Fire. It’s connected from here, this beautiful place.

JB: We’re gonna have that earthquake here, any moment.

KANZAN: Yeah that’s what I hear. And this area has huge mountains. Incredible, beautiful volcanoes.

BRENNA: Mount St. Helens^[3] erupted in 1980, very recent.

KANZAN: I love volcanoes. I don’t mind dying in a volcanic eruption. But I do mind dying by a fucking nuclear reactor. I’m happy to live and die with a volcano. And, as a practice of actively relating to the planetary body, I want to learn more about the tradition of tree-sitting people and Earthbound projects. That’s something I don’t know so much about.

BRENNA: Tree sitting I think straddles that line, like Jean you were talking about symbolic actions, and the difference between actually changing things at the point of production. And tree sitting is right in between. Because you’re just in one tree, so in some ways it’s hugely symbolic, because you’re not going to save all the trees. You might save that one tree. But it’s also a focus point, so it can bring a whole community of people together, a whole community has to support that one person. And so it’s a movement builder, it’s built around that. And often I’ve been part of campaigns that have had tree sits, and also so many other things like road blockades and action camps, but the tree sits are such a heart. So even if people are just in one or two trees, it just keeps things going. And those trees have been saved.

JB: And what happens to those people who live in the trees?

BRENNA: Lots of things, I think they go a little bit mad.

JB: It’s true, but people become a part of the tree.

BRENNA: They also become part of the trees, which can be palliative, to come back in this culture. But they really acclimate to being a forest creature.

JB: And so I think what is so missed by a traditional understanding of politics is that it’s always focused on, what is the impact on the Empire?

BRENNA: And not, what is the impact on us?

JB: Because the truth is that all that matters is — and I mean this not in any woo-woo sense, just historically — if our descendants are gonna carry something forward and navigate the tumult, it’s gonna be because we gave them seeds, gave them something. So what transforms us, and what emerges out of us, and how much we can align with these patterns that are in the world in a good way, is the matter of a revolution that isn’t trapped within rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic — which is unfortunately, what actually existing revolutions always were.

For example, let’s think of Hegelian History, this idea of world history in which everything that has happened is an outworking of what he calls Absolute Spirit, but in practice is just the spirit of the Empire. So there’s this illusion that the rituals of the Empire are actually cosmological; this fiction that the Empire is the whole world, is the cosmos. And it’s not! But still it’s not just a laughable idea, because the Empire has created a sphere of power where it’s virtually true, or you can pretend it is, because when you do, everything “just works.” And so many of us live inside this pretend truth, this superstitious disenchantment, in which all that’s real is money and mechanics. So we have a hard time believing, in spirit, in ritual, in ceremony — we have a hard time believing in the Earth. Because with our phones and our food systems and our cars and our roads and our apartments, we inhabit the power of that machinic world. And so we need to believe in it, because it’s how we live and work and feed ourselves. But it is very much not the cosmos, it is very much not the Earth, it is very much not everything.

And so if we’re to find a way beyond Empire’s History, maybe it can be through sitting in a tree for months on end, or even days — three days is enough.

BRENNA: It’s transformative. You’re just in a scale that’s different. Because when you live in a city everything is built to human scale, everything is built for humans to use, for humans to inhabit. When you’re out of the city, especially in a forest of really big trees, you’re in a totally different scale, and you cease to matter in the same way, you matter in a different way. And that can be really freeing. And it helps you come back to the city and see the scale, instead of just living in it like it’s normal.

JAY: I have a couple of thoughts, some of them may be dissident. One thing that is true for me, in my experience of the spiritual world, is that the way that communities are built in the US today, around spiritual things, are actually the things that made me leave spirituality. So that’s maybe a piece that we haven’t talked about, it’s not just the ways that things are put together, and the Left that has abandoned that, but it’s also because partially the ’60s hippie movement reached where that could get us, and that’s also limited. So I wanted to bring that up too, that it’s necessary but not sufficient.

And for me, I don’t necessarily know if I believe in miracles, I don’t think I do, but I do believe that what ritual does for me is change subjectivity, in the way that connecting with ourselves and with the space around us in a different way creates different possibilities. For me I don’t use the word magic or miracle, because of wanting to leave that spiritual, hippie world, feeling like that world was limiting me. And I also do feel like it’s important to connect to Earth, and unfortunately those things aren’t always accessible in the places where we’re struggling. You know, I cut my teeth doing eco stuff, but I was also doing a lot of work like bringing inner city kids out to camping trips and stuff, and they started understanding that this dirt is ok, it’s not like city dirt, like they were worried about getting their pants dirty because city dirt is fucking gross and actually has fucked up shit in it, but forest dirt is different. So maybe I just wanted to toss that out there, that it’s important to think about these things as well, connecting to the natural world. How does this work in places that are more urban?

BRENNA: Think about New York City. There’s a reason that tree sitters like New York City, because it’s like an old growth forest equivalent of a human environment. It goes deep down into the ground, it goes way up into the sky, there’s all these niches of life going on in there, like, you can just connect to that vibrancy there, you know. But the miraculous can be everywhere, it’s just easier to find in some places. Like, maybe suburbia is not where you’re going to find the miraculous, or like a tree plantation as well. But it’s probably still there.

JAY: Yeah I think I agree with that. And maybe it’s just an easy example, to talk about the spiritual experiences people can have in the forest.

JEAN: I’m thinking about New York, and these urban spaces, these giant cities actually have so much, so many different spiritual practices going on all the time, and so many different overlapping communities, all of these different peoples that have not been fully subsumed into Empire. Some really weird spaces. And I think that whatever words you want to use — becoming Earthbound, terrestrial relations, being situated — it doesn’t mean only becoming Earthbound and connected to a beautiful pristine place, it’s being in Japan and knowing that it’s irradiated, and knowing that it’s always going to be irradiated, for longer than we can conceive, for hundreds of thousands of years, and that people are still living in it and dealing with it. It’s knowing those specificities of where you are, and all the impacts that are around you, rather than living in this illusion that we are in this flat capitalist world of commodities, where everything is perfectly explainable and purely exists on the level of market exchange.

JB: Which is a reified illusion, but it’s breakable.

BRENNA: I have to go to bed, it’s way past my bedtime. But I’ll leave this: you made me think of my favorite Pokemon. I don’t know if you all have to be around Pokemon, but I’ve got kids, and they’re really into Pokemon. And my favorite Pokemon by far is named Burmy, and the reason I love Burmy is that it makes little cocoons for itself out of whatever is around it, and so there’s a leaf Burmy, and a dirt Burmy, but my favorite is the trash Burmy, who has a cocoon made out of trash, and there’s something about it that I just love, and that reminded me of it. Whatever’s around you, create with it, even if it’s just a trash cocoon.

Thank you all. And thank you to whoever is going to help jb rescue our car. Goodnight!

JB: So much of our politics is not even of the 20th century, it’s the 19th century, so much political imagination is trapped in the idea of the mechanism.

ERI: Something that I want to highlight is this unique way that I hear jb and Brenna talking about animism, that you’re really speaking from an animistic worldview, that grounds your understanding and analysis of Empire as well. It’s refreshing in contrast to the materialist analysis that circumscribes a lot of political thinking, or like structuralist analysis of social dynamics or something. Hearing you all express that of course there are spirits, energies, more-than-human bodies or whatever words we use, that’s also animating Empire — that feels new to me, and helpful. It’s not only about having certain practices that are ritualistic or spiritual — although of course that is important — but that you have this holistic understanding of the world and how life is animating it. There’s no either/or between materialism and animism.

But then, to go back to something Jay said, because I think it’s an interesting problem: what I heard was that you find expressions like subjectivation or changing subjectivity useful, versus words like magic or miracle. To me it seems like this is also a problem of language and wordviews. Maybe magic and miracle are expressions attempting to point to these animating forces. But for you those expressions are lacking, they’re not getting to the heart of your lived experience. Which, I agree as well.

JAY: I’m open to the real difference being aesthetic. It’s maybe too early to understand an aesthetic difference versus a real analytical or philosophical difference…

HIROSHI: Aesthetic difference between what?

JB: Punk and hippie!

JAY: It’s funny because I find myself here because my roots are so much more in the hippie world, and so I feel those limits a lot more. But I also feel the anti-ritual elements of punk in the other world.

JB: Sublation, baby!

JEAN: I have a different word, if we need to bypass the baggage around ritual, which is habit. There are some interesting linguistics with the word habit that I want to draw out for the non-native English speakers: habits are what we do, a habit is what defines our daily existence — brushing teeth, making coffee, whatever else — but the habit is also the garment that monks put on in the monastery. And this is where this word comes from, the words are linked. Because when you put the habit on, and you adopt the habits of being in the monastery, you’re becoming a different sort of person. And not to get too deep in the etymological weeds, but ultimately it’s from the verb haber, to have or hold, to be situated, etc. So a habit is something you have, that you hold, but also that holds you.

JB: You’re inhabiting a different habitat.

JEAN: Yes, exactly. Because this is not just me, it’s also Agamben’s work on monastery and law, in The Highest Poverty. I was reminded of this again when Brenna was talking about the spellwork or the magic that the forces of Empire are doing. You can think about the habits that we are all imbued with constantly: they create addictions to things that force us into a certain way of being. So if we have a problem with the word ritual, or there’s a cultural block to using it, habit is another way of thinking about becoming a different subjectivity that’s not defined by Empire channeling through us. And it’s also interesting because it sounds so nondescript, so nonreligious, but it’s actually deeply religious, because it was in these monastic orders where these conflicts were playing out between immanence and transcendence. Ontological and religious and philosophical and scientific combat  between conceptions of God as a law-giver and administrator of things, through the developing notion of economy, versus god or cosmos as reality, the law that we follow because it’s what we do, and it’s how we are and who we are, it’s the form of life. And all of these arguments were real fights with real stakes at around the same time as European colonialism, really driven by the Church, was spreading across the planet, and as the earliest stumblings of capitalism began to take form. There was an open question about whether we could live a particular form of life, immanent to itself in its habits and context, versus a transcendent rule that we have to follow, live up to, or be punished for failing to live up to.

JB: Eri and I were talking last night, and I feel like it’s important to touch on an even more controversial and difficult subject than ritual, I think, and that is nation. I was thinking, when you were describing the monastic orders, about Empire and Christianity. There’s this duality in all these spiritual traditions — I mean, Jesus was absolutely revolutionary in a way, but then 400 years later the tradition married the Empire that he was killed by, and then became the spiritual heir of Rome, that we’re still living in, via the Church. This feels clear to me. But throughout this process there’s these various conflicting attempts to become a Body of Christ, so for me there’s this recognition that this is a part of the whole weave of human history — becoming collective beings, as a spiritual process.

I think this is quintuply emphasized by The Dawn of Everything, which we haven’t mentioned tonight, but there’s so much to say about David Graeber’s work in this. And that book, and a lot of anthropology understood wisely, can help here: recognizing that the human weave of life has been largely about becoming peoples, becoming a form of life, a type of life entity.

This is nuanced. Like everything else, “peoples” aren’t separate “things.” There’s so much life around us, it’s all a weave, it’s all woven — and yet there’s also particularities, and you look at it and you see layers and layers of complexity that is organized in overlapping and interpenetrating ways. You can see those particularities as individual “things,” but only ever in a partial way. So humans — and not only humans, other life forms — are social, but beyond that humans are also becoming singular collective beings, not separate, interwoven but distinctive, in these many ways over and over. And that process is at the core of what the Davids are encouraging us to see as freedom. So human revolutionary practice — if it’s about freedom, about liberatory practice — is about the potential to leave the form of life that you’re in, and become a different one.

And on the one hand, monastic orders were a way to do that, to adopt a new habit and become different. It was explicit and it was conscious, but also receptive and dynamic, and failed and succeeded and failed again at becoming other, more godly forms of human life. And there was great diversity, both relatively radical monastics and deeply imperial monastics. But the whole reason the “Catholic” all-encompassing Church allowed the formation of these sometimes heterodox orders was to maintain overall control over the complexity. Sometimes it worked, sometimes didn’t, maybe at the same time.

And similarly Empire, all of this around us — this is also what you’re talking about in terms of seeing the continuities — Empires are an attempt to eat up other forms of life. This is colonialism, it’s a particular lifeform that has grown by accreting and combining and sticking conquests together under a form of order and a sovereignty, a transcendence. But that transcendence is still also a remnant part of a lifeform, so there’s transcendence-immanence-transcendence-immanence. And David also talks about this. Empires eat nations.

So in this sense nations are real. I don’t like the word nation, I’m being provocative, but nonetheless — peoples, ethnos, you know, this describes something important that many leftists pretend away at their peril. I’m not trying to overstate this, there’s many caveats, and of course they’re not real in some pure sense. But also, they are the only way that humans can actually be anything, and if we ignore the deep plurality of peoples we run the risk of tacitly implying that the Empire is all that is possible, like Hegel did. This would be the most pernicious form of white supremacy.

So then a liberatory practice is about being choiceful and having agency in the crafting of the peoples that we are, the collective spirits of our being. But not from nowhere! And this is the Marxist idea that we make the new world, but out of what’s there already, in the framework. So in this sense ritual is one of the lineaments, the integuments, the gristle of these modes of life, of Big Life. And if we cede that bursting human capacity, if we imagine that only conservatives, only the state, only Empire can mobilize that national feeling, we trap ourselves. In the same way that we’ve been talking about media or ritual or spirit (where if we don’t pay attention to them we actually are ceding the ground) this is a core way in which leftists are actually participating in the reproduction of the Empire. Because the implicit mode of the Empire’s psychosocial ritual of citizenship, and individuality, and of humanity, is through not noticing, is through being or becoming “white,” therefore default, therefore not a person, not ethnic. So we cede the nation, and national feeling, at the utmost peril of being reactionary…

The fire flickers, and the conversation journeys on.