Feb 13 2024 76 mins 6
On this episode, my guests are ClementineMorrigan.com and Jay Lesoleil of the F*****g Cancelled Podcast.
Clementine Morrigan is a writer and public intellectual based in Montréal, Canada. She writes popular and controversial essays about culture, politics, ethics, relationships, sexuality, and trauma. A passionate believer in independent media, she’s been making zines since the year 2000 and is the author of several books. She’s known for her iconic white-text-on-a-black-background mini-essays on Instagram. One of the leading voices on the Canadian Left and one half of the F*****g Cancelled podcast, Clementine is an outspoken critic of cancel culture and a proponent of building solidarity across difference. She is a socialist, a feminist, and a vegan for the animals and the earth.
Jay is a writer, artist and designer from Montreal and is the author of the Substack jaylesoleil.com and the zine series What Else Is There to Live For. Jay is also the co-host of F*****g Cancelled.
Show Notes:
Clementine & Jay’s Travels
The Nexus
Identitarianism and Identity Politics
Gentrification & Solidarity
How Nationalism Leaks into the Left
The Contradictions of Identitarianism
Freedom, Limits and Guesthood
Borders and Biomes
The Quest for Offline Communities
Radical & Reciprocal Hospitality
Authenticity
Homework:
Jay’s Substack (including Dumplings & Domination)
Transcript
Chris: [00:00:00] Welcome to the pod, Clementine and Jay. It's an honor to have you both here today. Each of your work both individually and together has been a great influence on mine and definitely eye-opening and if I can say so much needed in our time. So thank you for joining me.
Jay: Thank you, man. Thanks for having us.
Clementine: Thanks for having us.
Chris: So, I'd like to start, if we can, by asking you both where you find yourselves today and what the world looks like for you through each of your eyes.
Jay: Well, we both find ourselves in Montreal which is where we live. I was working in homeless shelters for years and then I got let go cause I tried to unionize the one I was working at. Actually I succeeded in unionizing the one I was working at. And they mysteriously did not have any money to renew my contract after that.
And yeah, so I'm writing and I just launched a new solo podcast about like world history outside of the West. And so I've been working on that. It's called [00:01:00] dumplings and domination, which are two things that human beings love. And Yeah, so that's, that's what I'm up to.
Clementine: Yeah, so I'm also, yeah, I find myself in Montreal, in the snow, and I guess, relevant to the topics of this podcast one of the things I'm grappling with now is my perpetual existence as a unilingual anglophone in the city of Montreal, which is a bilingual city, but it's a French city, like.
Actually. And I'm planning on having a child and I'm planning to have this child here. And so I'm facing the dilemma of being like an English speaker whose child is not going to just be an English speaker. And so I really need to learn French, basically. So this is my struggle, because being 37 and only speaking one language my entire life, it's like super hard to learn another language.
And I've really, really struggled. A couple times I've made an attempt to learn French, and it's like really [00:02:00] frustrating, but that is one of the things I'm grappling with. I feel like it's relevant to the podcast, because in many ways, even though I've lived in Montreal for like almost seven years, there's a way in which I still am kind of like a tourist here, because I haven't learned the language.
So, will I complete my transition into becoming Quebecois?
Chris: Yeah, maybe so.
Jay: Only time will tell.
Chris: I was just reading this biography of Ivan Illich, who's like was an Austrian philosopher and he said that like trying to learn a new language, especially if you're immersed in the place is the greatest measure or degree of poverty that one can undertake because of the degree of dependence that they have on other people and not just dependence, but like dependence on their hospitality, assuming it exists in order to, you know, be able to understand what you're saying and communicate in that way.
Clementine: Like Montreal is interesting because at least in the neighborhood that I live and in many places in [00:03:00] Montreal, it's functionally bilingual. So it's not like learning in an immersive environment as if you went somewhere and everybody's speaking that language.
So you kind of just have to or you won't be able to communicate. Like you have to learn here. You know, when I'm fumbling around trying to speak French, people just start speaking English to me because even if they're a francophone, like, at least in the neighborhoods where I live, most people are bilingual, and they speak better English than I do French, so they will accommodate me, which is polite of them, and also, It does not help me learn, you know?
Jay: Whereas the government of Quebec will not accommodate you.
Clementine: No, the government will not accommodate you at all. And so, like, it's only in circumstances where, like, I desperately need to understand where, like, there's no, there's absolutely no accommodation. So.
Chris: And that kind of touches on my next question, which is, you know, in terms of the travels that you two have.
Has there been that degree of poverty elsewhere? I mean, I imagine you might have traveled to other places maybe in Canada, maybe elsewhere. [00:04:00] What have your travels taught you each, if anything, about the world, about your lives, about culture?
Jay: Yeah. I had kind of an unusual relationship with travel.
Because as a kid, I moved to a different country every like three or four years cause of my parents work. And so, yeah, I grew up like in Asia and not just like dipping into a place and then like leaving right away but spending years of my life in each country. Right. And like learning the languages and stuff.
And so, yeah, I think that was a quite an unusual way to kind of experience travel as a kid. And I think that it did definitely have a lot of impact on me. Because I think that travel in general, I think is a wonderful and amazing thing, you know, which is why people like to do it. And it can be really profound for your mind and your understanding of the world and of other people, you know but obviously there's travel and then there's [00:05:00] travel.
I feel really grateful that I was able to see so much of the world by living there, you know and I think that it was really important for me in my kind of embodied understanding that other people and other parts of the world are, you know, just as real and just as important and just as embedded in history as I am and as like the people are in my passport country, which happens to be Canada, you know?
Clementine: Yeah. I've traveled a little bit, but I think for me, like, When I was young, I was too crazy to travel, you know, and I truly mean that, like I have complex PTSD and like as much as my life was so chaotic and like really, like, you know, on F*****g Cancelled, Jay and I talk about how we're both alcoholics in recovery, like, When I was drinking, I always wanted to be someone who traveled, and my life was very, like, chaotic and full of violence and danger and all those types of things, but the PTSD made it really hard to do [00:06:00] anything because I was always scared, you know and being a woman traveling... like, in recovery, I've wanted to try to travel more, but the combination of one being a woman traveling alone, it does come with certain risks to it.
You're more vulnerable in certain ways and then add that to the PTSD. It's like... it's super anxiety producing, you know, so it's something that I've done a little bit but not as much as I would have liked to and I guess we'll see like what the future holds with that. One thing is is that like I learned to drive pretty late.
I learned to drive in my 30s and once I learned to drive going on road trips was actually a way that really opened up travel for me because having my car with me gave me this sense of like safety, basically, that I could leave a situation like I was there with my car. So I had like the independence to like not be dependent on like strangers because I was afraid of them basically.
But we went on a podcast tour last [00:07:00] year and drove like all across the United States in like a month and like drove down to like Arizona and like back up the West coast. And like, that was really, really cool.
Chris: Beautiful. Thank you both. And so, you know, it might seem a little strange for you two to be invited on a podcast about tourism, migration, hospitality given that, you know, perhaps on the surface of things, your work doesn't appear to center around such things, but I've asked you both to speak with me today, in part, because I see a lot of parallels between what you've both referred to as the nexus in your work and what I refer to as the, a touristic worldview. And so to start, I'm wondering if you two could explain for our listeners, what the nexus is and its three main pillars.
Clementine: So, in shorthand, or in, like, common language, you might call it social justice culture. There's a lot of different ways that this culture has been talked about but it's a particular [00:08:00] way of doing politics on the left, or left of center. And. Like, Jay and I come from inside this culture, so we are coming from inside social justice culture, being, like, leftists and being queer people and having existed in, like, progressive social justicey spaces for our entire adult lives, basically.
And basically, we're noticing that there wasn't really language to talk about some of the phenomenons that were happening inside social justice culture or even, you know, social justice culture itself doesn't really give itself a name. Like we can call it social justice culture or we could call it something else, but it doesn't really have a name that it like claims for itself.
It basically describes itself as like just doing politics or like being morally correct, you know, right? Yeah, being right. So we just started using the nexus as kind of like a placeholder for talking about a phenomenon that like doesn't really have a name. And we were trying to describe like this social phenomenon that we were totally [00:09:00] immersed in that there wasn't really language to describe.
And we pulled out like three components that we saw interacting with each other to produce this phenomenon that we were calling the Nexus. And those pillars or components would be cancel culture, social media, and identitarianism. So, you maybe want to say more.
Jay: Yeah, and we were just noticing how like when those three components were interacting on the left, you know they were producing a kind of like fourth thing that we were calling the Nexus and it's just like cancel culture was kind of this, you know, this culture of disposability and very sort of like intense acrimony functioned to sort of like boundary the whole thing and to keep, you know, certain views out and keep certain views in and sort of like establish the boundaries of what was thinkable or not.
And the identitarianism provided the sort of ideological underpinning of the whole thing, like a way of making sense of the world, a [00:10:00] way of thinking about any problem and any issue, you know? And then social media was kind of the medium in which it was all taking place. And that was providing a lot of the kind of like the scaffolding of what it ended up looking like.
Yeah. Does that make sense?
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you both. And so I like to start then if I can with with identitarianism and you know as it pertains to, I guess, the end of tourism podcast and the way I've come to understand it is that to be a tourist isn't just to be a foreigner, but a stranger to the place one inhabits.
And so in this sense, I feel that people can be tourists in their own homes and to a large degree the housing crisis, among many others seems to enable and ennoble this, you know, people know that they won't be able to afford a rent increase. And so they don't bother getting to know their neighbors or participating in the community.
And beyond that community is often described in demographic terms, you know, the black community, the queer community, et cetera. But rarely [00:11:00] anymore in terms of the diverse people that you actually live beside or near. And so, for me, this is where tourism not only hits home, but is kind of unveiled as maybe beginning at home.
You know, it's not just an industry, but something akin to a lifestyle or culture, as you said, Jay, of disposability. And so in this context, what I understand is identitarianism seems to enable this kind of touristic mentality of not needing to think of myself as a person of consequence in my building or in my neighborhood because I'll be out of here in another year or two anyway, right?
And so I'm curious what you think of this idea and whether you think that identitarianism is a consequence of these crises that exist today, like the housing crisis, like landlordism, for example.
Jay: Yeah, I definitely think it's all connected.
And I think that I think that a huge part of all of this, right, is accelerating alienation that people are experiencing under the [00:12:00] dominant form of neoliberal capitalism. And alienation just describes this deep embodied sense of disconnection from oneself, from one's work and from one's fellows.
And this is a concept that goes all the way back to Marx and before him even, you know, but Marx, I think correctly identified that capitalism had a mechanism within it that amplified this, this sense and created more of it. And I think that as we hurdle down the path of neoliberal apocalypse, we're sort of like more and more exposed to the sense of alienation.
And so what does that mean? It means that we end up feeling like we don't know who we are. We don't know where we are. We don't know who the people around us are. We're just sort of floating, we're atomized, you know. We don't have roots or the connections that we do have feel fleeting and shallow.
You know, and it produces obviously a deep sense of like misery in a lot of people, [00:13:00] whether they know it or not, I would say. But it also produces a longing for connections that feel real and that feel authentic. And I think that the turn towards identitarianism that has become more and more apparent over the last like decade or so both on the left and the right because I think that the rise of like the alt right, for example, was very much an identitarian movement as well. Yeah, it's that, that pivot towards identitarianism is a consequence of people feeling like they have no connections and they really want connections. They want to feel embedded in something, you know and so they're looking for other forms of community that they can belong to other than the communities that they actually live in, you know, because those communities that they actually live in have started to feel so disconnected and illusory, right?
I do have more to say about the concept of like authenticity and all of this, which I think is like really foundational to tourism. But I will pass the mic. Well, I feel like we're probably going to get [00:14:00] into it later.
Clementine: Okay. Well, yeah. So I mean, I think when talking about identitarianism, it's useful to make the distinction between identitarianism and identity politics.
And we make that distinction on the podcast, but in case listeners aren't really familiar with the term identitarianism, I think it's useful for us to be a little bit clear about what we mean. And basically, identitarianism is distinct from identity politics. So, identity politics is just basically saying that identity matters when we're thinking about what is affecting people's lives, right?
And when we're organizing politics, when we're trying to think of solutions where we can make the world better, identity is going to play a role. And that just means we're acknowledging that things like racism exists, homophobia exists, like, sexism exists, that the ways that our lives are shaped are impacted by identity.
And like, we agree with that, we're not against that, as a framework. But identitarianism takes identity politics to a new place, where it basically does two main things to it. One, it [00:15:00] acts as if identity groups are homogenous, or share, like, very intense essential qualities, you know? So, when you make a statement, like, the BIPOC community thinks this.
You're being identitarian and you're also being essentialist because you're actually making a statement in which you're saying that billions of people share a view, which is incorrect and also, like, very disrespectful to the vast diversity of thought that exists within any identity group, right? So it's actually like, it's an expression of essentialism and this belief that, like identity groups share essential qualities.
And it erases, like, the vast political differences and personal differences that don't exist always within any identity group. And then secondly, Identitarianism acts as if identity is the primary or only way that power functions. So when we're trying to understand, like, what is wrong with the world, and what is going on, and why are we all suffering?
Identitarianism [00:16:00] encourages us to look first, and maybe only, at identity as the way in which power is divided and organized. And so, in this way, you know, we have people, like basically collecting identity points. And what I mean by that is, like, adding up their various identities to try to understand their lives and their access to power.
So people will be like, okay, I have these identities that are considered marginalized identities, and then I have these identities that are considered privileged identities. And so if I do some math, I'll be able to figure out where I stand in terms of power, right? And this is a total oversimplification of the way that power works.
Identity is probably impacting your life in various ways. and may have a role in like your access to power, but it is not the only thing, and it's not as simple as just adding and subtracting to try to figure this out, and many, many things are lost when we are only using identity as the way to understand power, and so like when you're talking about, I just want to say that like that what you said [00:17:00] about people moving, I think is really fascinating because I moved like every year or two years.
My entire, like actually I kind of haven't stopped because I've only lived where I currently live for like just about two years. So, I've basically been doing that since I was 16. I'm 37. Wow.
Chris: Wow. Wow.
Clementine: You know, and like, I don't mean cities, but I mean neighborhoods and at least apartments, you know, and actually my current neighborhood I've lived in probably the longest that I've ever lived anywhere but I've still moved several times and I've managed to stay in the same neighborhood, but like over the course of my teenage years, all my entire twenties and into my thirties, like, I was just constantly moving.
And, you know, I, I had a sense of place in terms of the city I lived in. Like, I was living in Toronto for most of for my twenties. But I lived all over that f*****g city. Like, all over that city. You know, I didn't live in any particular neighborhood. And so because of that, like, I didn't really have that sense of like place and like there wasn't really a point in knowing my neighbors because it's true. I was going to [00:18:00] be moving and I knew that and so that is like a material reality that is being structured by capitalism and by landlords and rent and not having enough money and not having housing security.
And identitarianism isn't really helping me to understand that, right? Like I can't really make sense of that experience if my only lens that I'm looking at the situation with is identity. And that's just like one example, but there's many, many things that, identity as if it's our only frame is not going to help us to understand.
Jay: Or like it, it might help you feel like you understand it, but it's probably not going to give you a very good explanation, you know clear picture. Yeah, it's like there's this word that I stumbled across recently. I think it's like "monocausotaxophilia" I'm pretty sure is what it is and it's like the it's like the obsessive belief that like one there's like one answer for everything or like one thing can help you explain everything and it's it's like a common like logical fallacy that humans fall into, where like we just we discover something that really seems like it's right and then we're [00:19:00] like this can explain everything we can just apply this to everything, you know, and I think that identitarianism is like a an excellent example of this tendency that humans have
Chris: Yeah.
Wow. Kind of monotheism for politics, I guess. It's fascinating for me because I see a lot of these identitarianist dynamics play out in the context of tourist cities and the one that I lived in, still live around, just not in anymore.
And then of course the people that I interview who deal with over tourism and of course all the crises that come with it. And so You know, like in the early pandemic, for example, in places like Oaxaca or Medellin in Colombia, for example, they suddenly became hotspots for digital nomads and other tourist escapees.
And the consequences of over tourism in these places already existed, but once travel restrictions had [00:20:00] dropped and vaccines were doled out, places like this, and maybe the more obvious ones like Bali or Hawaii or Barcelona those consequences exploded and, you know, the number of visitors skyrocketed.
And so both local people and foreigners opened Airbnb after Airbnb, and this is kind of what ended up happening in a lot of places in the, in the course of, you know, a couple of years essentially deepening the economic and social divisions in those places. And so what we've seen is that people simply tend to point their finger at the tourists, at the foreigner, ignoring the economic and political issues that affect these things.
And so, what's arisen on the internet at least have been faceless social media accounts basically cancelling tourists or foreigners for you know anything you can think of for being cheap, people complaining about prices on their YouTube video or whatever, and others criticizing local cultures for X Y Z Zed pardon me and some Some who [00:21:00] refuse to, like, to speak the local language, for example, all of which, you know, constitutes bad behavior.
And even still, like, other people, foreigners who become landlords in their new homes, right, who move to another country and just, you know, rent a nice place and then put it on Airbnb or something. And so, I'm curious about the individual? And why do you think, in so many of these cases, especially in regards to people who claim to be leftists or anarchists or radicals, that the focus is squarely put on individuals or individual behavior as opposed to the conditions or systems that created that behavior?
Jay: Oh yeah, I mean, we've become like ludicrously unable to actually look at structural causes of anything in a way that allows us to formulate policy and work towards policy. Like, I think that like one of the major like failings of the left currently is that it is, especially in like the Anglo world, like completely f*****g unmoored from policy.
I think in the US there's like a really [00:22:00] obvious reason for that, which is that there is, you know, no political party that's even remotely. So the idea that you could, that you could have policy that you like is sort of like nonsense to people in the first place. Right.
So everything then becomes about either it would become either about individual behavior or about some sort of like more radical revolutionary option, you know but the radical revolutionary option doesn't exist. So it's all about the individual behavior. And a comparable situation is going on elsewhere in the Anglosphere as well where the sort of like political avenues for policymaking are severely lacking.
So I think that there's this like strong, strong emphasis on the individual, on individual behavior, on moralizing on sort of angrily saying what should be true rather than working with like, you know, like reality. Yeah.
Clementine: Yeah, I think that people, like, we haven't seen an effective left in our lifetime, like, you know, like we haven't seen the left making gains, like, for [00:23:00] millennials, like basically for our entire lives, you know?
We haven't seen movements be successful, and so we feel very powerless. Like, there's a deep, deep sense of powerlessness in the face of capitalism and in the face of climate change and in the face of so many of the horrible conditions that we're living under, and we don't have a lot of evidence of things working, but we know we have the power to take down some individual person and publicly humiliate them and destroy their life.
And so I think people get very addicted to that sense of power because it is like a balm to the abject helplessness that we feel under capitalism where we don't have a lot of power to really make the changes that we want to make, you know, but one of the things we're always talking about on the podcast is how cancel culture, while it provides this like temporary relief and this feeling like we're doing something like we have power.
In fact, it erodes the very conditions that would allow us to have real power and the conditions that would allow us to have real power are solidarity. Right. Like, the one thing that the working class of the world [00:24:00] has that the capitalists don't is our numbers, right?
Like, they have all the money and the use of force, you know? But we, there's just lots of us, and also we are the ones who make all their s**t. Like, or like, run their little online companies or whatever it is that they're doing now. Yeah, exactly. So, it's like literally the workers of the world are the ones who actually make capitalism run and there are no profits if the workers of the world organized and f*****g withdrew their labor, right?
But currently, we don't have any conditions of like an organized working class movement that could actually threaten to do something like that. And so, there's no real avenue. Like unions have been like totally f*****g eroded there's no solidarity.
There's no, like Workers movement that is being effective. I mean there are attempts at it like there was I don't know what happened with it because I'm off social media now, and I haven't been checking the news, but there was a gigantic like uprising of Bangladeshi textile workers who were like going on strike and like the police were trying to totally shut them down.
I don't know what ended up happening kind of disappeared off my radar, but I think any movement for solidarity, you [00:25:00] know, cancel culture b******t aside, because honestly, it is such a distraction. Like it's annoying and it's a distraction would have to move towards like international solidarity.
And I think that this is something that... we don't even have, like, solidarity, like, where we live, let alone solidarity, like, across the globe with workers in different places, you know? But under global capitalism, I think we're going to have to start looking with an internationalist lens and thinking about what would it look like to have the workers of the world actually uniting.
Jay: Yeah. It reminds me of gentrification, you know? It's like, individual gentrifiers are sure like annoying, right? You know, people who sort of like don't belong there and are bringing their like annoying habits into the neighborhood or whatever, you know, and driving up prices and all this.
But at the end of the day, this is like a structural issue that can only be solved by policy, right? You can't, you can't just sort of like be hostile towards gentrifiers and expect that to sort of like end up with anything other than you being angry and other people perhaps being frightened for like a couple of years until the [00:26:00] process of gentrification is complete.
And I think that you know, there's like a similar thing with tourism, you know, I mean, tourism is just kind of like gentrification on like a, an international scale in a certain sense. Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. I mean here in Oaxaca, tourism is like 85 90 percent of the economy in the center of the city. And so it's all changing really quickly, wherein, people are sometimes hearing more English than Spanish in the streets, right? Not just in Oaxaca, but in other places as well. So there's this relative and understandable kind of resentment against the foreigner, but then when we have these gatherings and, you know, people ask me, well, like, "what should we do?" And I say, "well, go talk to the tourist, like, you can build solidarity with that person, even if it's by them understanding what's going on here, and maybe not coming back. As an extreme example, right.
But what's also happened as a result, not just this waving or wagging the finger at the individual, but also in the context of identitarianism, reconvening the nation state.[00:27:00]
And so my next question.. It kind of feeds off of the first and has to do with the effects or consequences of this kind of pseudo cancel culture that arises from tourism crises in places like Oaxaca and others. And so what you tend to see are locals identifying tourists or foreigners based on skin color.
In Latin America, you know, the tourist is by and large the gringo, or the gringa, basically a white American. And what's happening as a result, especially among people who consider themselves, again, leftist or anarchist, is that they end up self identifying in opposition to the foreigner. And so what we see is an over identification, or what I will call anyways an over identification, with one's own skin color, class, and especially, especially now, nationality.
And so, understanding the other as American means I'm Mexican or Colombian, or whatever, right? And I'm curious whether or not either of you consider [00:28:00] identitarianism to be a child of nationalism or how nationalism fits into these contemporary understandings of identitarianism.
Jay: Right, right. Well, okay, I definitely have some thoughts about that for sure. I would say that like, nationalism is certainly one of the kind of original modern identities, right?
And it was very much like crafted on purpose to be that, which I think that a lot of people don't know, unless they've like, you know, done like a sociology degree or something, but nationalism and the nation itself was like a modern invention created a couple of hundred years ago for specific political purposes, namely to unite quite disparate populations within at that time, mainly like European countries and to try to get the children of those people to think of themselves as like French instead of Breton, you know and to get them to speak French instead of Breton, right? As an example.
And there is similar cases all over Europe. Anyways, that being aside, yes, like [00:29:00] nationalism certainly is like a form of identity and one of the most important forms of modern identity. I think that when we talk about identitarianism, often we end up not talking about nationalism very much because on the left, nationalism tends to be sort of like not the most important identity.
It's one that you kind of downplay, especially if your nationality is one of the privileged Western rich nationalities, right? However, obviously if your nationality might you know get you points in, in whatever sort of like game you're playing, then you might, you might play it up.
Clementine: Yeah, I have a couple things to say about this. I mean, one, the nexus or social justice culture, that we talk about on F*****g Cancelled, comes out of the United States of America. And the United States of America, they don't know that they're in the United States of America. So,
Jay: This might be surprising to people because of the number of flags that are everywhere in America, but they don't know that they're in america.
Clementine: They think they're just in the world. They think that that is the world, you know? And so, [00:30:00] there is this like, this lack of awareness or like basically they're not contextualizing what they're thinking and doing in an American context, even though it is, and then they're exporting that to the rest of the world, especially like English speaking places.
But then it like leaks out from there. But it is an American way of understanding things based in an American context and an American history, right? And so you see this a lot with identitarianism where the popular framings and understandings around race, for example, that are going around social justice culture right now are specifically coming out of an American context and American constructions around race, and they don't map on perfectly to other contexts, but because it's being exported, because Americans are exporting their culture all over the world, we, in other places, are expected to just take it on and to start using that framework. And people do, but it doesn't really work properly. It doesn't really make sense in a different context.
So that is a way in which like nation kind of disappears even though it is operating [00:31:00] in the way that identity is actually being shaped.
Another thing that happens, and Jay and I were just talking about this for an upcoming episode. Another thing that happens is that because in North America anyway, like we don't really use nation as a category in identitarian thought, what ends up happening is that people actually racialize their national identity in a weird way to make it make sense in identitarianism. And so one of the ways that this can happen is that people from South America who are white, in a Northern American context, are sometimes racialized and considered people of color because they are not speaking like English as a first language, for example, or because there's cultural markers that are showing them as not North American, and so therefore they are impacted by various types of discrimination and so on and so forth, but in their context, they are actually racialized as white, but then in North [00:32:00] America, they may be racialized as non-white. And so this actually comes through like a I mean, first of all, it shows that race is like a made up category that can shift and be expressed in different ways.
But also it is partially like the narcissism of North America that can't conceptualize difference, basically, and understand that, like, a person can actually be white and from South America and speak Spanish, for example.
Jay: Which, like, this can also sometimes, we were joking about this, too, because it's true, like, this can also sometimes extend to people not being sure about, for example, like Portuguese people, and sort of like racializing Portuguese people on the basis of their sort of supposed affinity with like Latin America.
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Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know, one thing that I want to mention too, you're just reminding me of this because of my research that you, that you mentioned is that like racialism, which is the idea that race is important and, and as a major identity category that people should care about a lot, let's put it that way, has often existed very [00:33:00] uneasily with nationalism.
And so for a lot of like neo Nazis, they're not necessarily like opposed to nationalism, but they would, they would treat racial affinity with much more importance than they would a national affinity, especially when the national affinity is seen to have been kind of polluted by like foreign elements, for example, you know, and a big part of the national project has been to say that, like, we are all members of this national identity, sort of like, no matter who we are, blah, blah, blah. Right. And obviously some of us are more than others, right, is usually is how it's gone, but it tries to integrate like many different groups of people, including, you know, in the United States, for example, including like black Americans.
Right. And, you know, the project of the integrated military, for example, has been a big part of the American national imaginary but if you're a white racist, you're not interested in a sort of national identity that, that includes black Americans as [00:34:00] well.
Right. And this is also somewhat true on the left in different ways. But yeah, I'll just put that out there.
Yeah. And then I guess the only other last thing I would like to say about this is that when we are anti essentialist and anti identitarian on the left, one of the things that, that like an anti racism that is rooted in an opposition to essentialism will argue and put forth is that race is a constructed and made up concept, right, which is something that I believe: race is not a real thing.
It is like racism is real, but racism is based on the invention of this way of dividing up people based on race. And so there's a lot of anti essentialist leftists who are arguing this, but one thing that is important is to not confuse race, which is a made up category, with culture and ethnicity, which are real things, right?
And one of the things, like, Jay and I have been talking about, and we're going to do an episode about this, or, like, related to these ideas, is, like, we actually care a lot about things, like, language protection, [00:35:00] culture protection, like the importance of people being able to keep and protect their cultural identities is like, it's a very important thing in respecting people's like human dignity.
And in Canada, where colonialism has so thoroughly attacked indigenous Canadian people's cultures. They don't have their languages anymore. And like, Protecting language is, like, hugely important for people's mental health and well being, right? So, dividing those two things, that being, like saying race isn't real doesn't mean that we're not in favor of protecting culture and language.
Yeah.
Chris: Right, right, right. Of course. What's interesting about the, I guess, the reactions to overtourism here, it's not just that, Oh, the gringo is an American, so I'm a Mexican, but it's also racialized. It's also, okay. So who I see on the street, white people, and because I'm dark skinned, it reinforces those dualities, binaries, et cetera but it re-racializes local people, and in the context of Mexico [00:36:00] anyways the roots of their understandings of their racializedness, if I can say that comes from the imposition of race, of races, by the Spaniards, onto them, and saying this is who you are now, 400 years ago.
Right? And so the new invasion, the tourism, right, is recapitulating that dynamic in ways in which people internalize the racial impositions that were put on them 400 years ago. Or their ancestors, right, I should say. So it's just mind boggling.
Clementine: Yeah, I think, I think it's interesting though, right? Because how do we hold, like, the importance of culture and language and ethnicity while also acknowledging that those things were always shifting, changing, like, were never a static, constant thing, you know?
That always included diversity, and within it, language is always changing and evolving. Culture is always changing and evolving, but also those things are real things that you can speak about and point to, and definitely notice when they'restolen from you or when you're no longer allowed to speak your language.
Right. So yeah, like, I think we tend to go [00:37:00] to extremes. It's either like it doesn't exist or it's not important, or it's like a very essential, like static thing that has always only been one thing.
Chris: Yeah, and also for a lack of history, right? I've been doing this investigation into Macedonian culture, ethnicity, history, etc, in part because my father is a first generation immigrant to Toronto, but from Agaean Macedonia and, you know, the Ottoman Empire was there controlling those lands for four or 500 years.
And so the Ottomans were Muslim and the Macedonians weren't Macedonians to them, they were Christians. They were a Christian race, Mm-Hmm regardless of their language. And then when the Ottoman Empire fell, the Greeks and the Bulgarians ended up fighting over that territory, that land, that a lot of people considered to be Macedonian.
And so the Greeks and the Bulgarians referred [00:38:00] to the Macedonians as the Macedonian race, no longer the Christian race, but the Macedonian race. So anyways, beyond that, once you get into the 20th century and start speaking in a global context, it's like, no, no, no, they're not the Macedonian race, they're a white race from Macedonia.
And so, just this idea that race is inherently tied to skin color is very contemporary and it depends, of course, where it's coming from and who it's coming from, right? This idea of what race is becomes very fluid.
I wanted to ask you two about escapism. I was just listening to your episode on freedom as a principle. Mm hmm. One of your most recent episodes and in it, you two speak of carceral institutions, jails, obviously, and I don't think it's very difficult to imagine how a touristic worldview, one built around escapism arises so fervently among people who feel powerless [00:39:00] to change the conditions in the culture that are oppressive and domineering.
At the same time the glorification and commodification of that escapism through tourism creates a kind of a culture of abandonment and disposability, in the sense that you're leaving behind all your people and then once you get to this place, well, you're actually not responsible for anything you do there because it's not my, it's not my people, not my home.
And so I'm curious, do you think that the freedom, that is usually couched in the freedom of movement has limits? And what do you make of the the inability to stay still in the context of all this?
Jay: Man. Yeah, I mean it just makes me think about my own sort of like internal struggles that I have where like, basically like whenever I'm not doing very well, I have this part of me that wants nothing more than to just f**k off and travel sort of like indefinitely. It's like one of my strongest like internal urges, you know.
I [00:40:00] don't know. I just keep thinking about that. But yeah, I mean, another thing that comes to mind for me, that is not, not a direct answer to your question, but it's just something that's coming up for me is that like, I think for like so many people in the wealthy West, you know they live in places that are comfortable because they're in the wealthy West, but they're like psychologically so destructive because it's just like these like vistas of like parking lots and like box stores and like depressing nothing places that no one could ever love and I think that like for a lot of people, and I hate to say this because it sounds like snobbish, you know, but it's like, whether or not they know it they are being psychologically attacked by the f*****g places that they live, you know, and there's a part of them that is like, I want nothing more than to get out of here, you know, and see something beautiful, and my question is sort of like, why can't we live in beautiful places? You know, and, and I actually like do live in a beautiful place and I love where I live, you know, [00:41:00] and the neighborhood in Montreal where I live is like gorgeous, you know it's a beautiful place to just walk around and look at stuff.
It's very f*****g pretty. And there's a reason why I live here, you know, and I lived in other parts of the city and, and I gave up. You know, bigger, cheaper apartments to live here because I like how it looks and I like how it makes me feel to sort of like leave my house and f*****g walk around. And other people like it too.
Millions of people come to Montreal as tourists. We actually have tourists in this neighborhood. And, and like when I leave my house and like walk around the corner, there's like lineups of tourists, you know that I have to sort of like navigate to like get to the gym.
Because they're flocking around because it's f*****g nice here. But like a lot of places in North America are really not nice. They're not nice places to look at. They're not nice places to live. You can't f*****g walk anywhere, even if you wanted to you know, everything basically looks the same as everything else, you know?
And yeah, it's not surprising to me that people would want to get out of there. Right. Also though, as I say this, it's not just North America that people [00:42:00] come from when they're tourists, right. Right. We're seeing like a gigantic increase in tourism from countries like China. Japan has always produced a lot of tourists, you know?
So I think like part of it is just that like, as people get wealthier the desire to just see different things and whatever is always present in people and if they can do it, like there's no particular reason why they wouldn't but I think that it's, it's definitely worth trying to imagine what travel could look like and what like guesthood could look like, you know outside of a context where it's all just like this very commodified process that is not necessarily very great for the people who are on the kind of like hosting end of it.
But yeah, again, like I live in a heavily touristed city, but apart from the tourists being quite annoying to have to walk around, like when there's like snow everywhere and they're taking up the whole sidewalk apart from that, and the fact that like Airbnb is a big problem in Montreal they don't bother me much here and I think that like a big part of that is just the, like, you know, Montreal is a very wealthy city, you know, so like an influx of like wealthy [00:43:00] foreigners doesn't like impact it that much other than to sort of like inject cash into the economy, which is not such a bad thing, right?
And I do think that like part of the answer to all this is that we need to be like taking seriously internationalist solidarity and like the development of places that are not as developed.
And it reminds me of like sort of debates about immigration to the West, you know, and it's like immigration, is a complicated topic and people have lots of different opinions about it, but like a lot of people on the liberal left will, will, will act like immigration is all by itself, like an amazing, awesome thing, always. And then people on the right will act like it's this terrible thing always. And I'm like, I don't know, it's kind of a neutral thing, you know, like there are good and bad things about it. Obviously people being able to travel is like a nice thing. I'll just say this, like, I think that like immigration is a good thing when the places that people are coming from are not so undeveloped or so poor that it's like forcing people out. Right. You know what I mean? And yeah, I dunno, , that was, that was like five [00:44:00] different tensions, so That's great.
Chris: Love it.
Clementine: So what, what is coming up for me is I saw this drawing that was like of whales swimming in the ocean.
And it was like, basically saying something like, borders aren't real, because like, there's no borders in the ocean for whales or whatever. And this is part of this, like, thing on the left, and it's kind of related to what Jay was just saying, that, like, on the left, we do have this, this big like, belief in things like open borders or just free movement, free travel as, like, this positive and, kind of obviously good thing that we should support and I understand it, but at the same time, the fantasy that there aren't different areas in the natural world is false.
There might not be borders, but there are biomes. And one of the things about travel that I don't think gets talked about a lot, and that is a big issue with, like, environmental destruction, is actually the reality of biomes and the fact that the movement of people across the world at the rapid way that we do it now [00:45:00] is moving plants, microbes, fungus from biome to biome and in different biomes the way that evolution works is that, like, those ecosystems were totally separate for all of this time, and then when some new, plant, animal, microbe, fungus gets into this new ecosystem, it may be that the other beings that live there have no defense against it, right? And then it causes massive problems, such as what goes on with invasive species.
But like, just as a random example, like one of the major things that's causing extinction of bats is the introduction of this fungus into North America that comes from Europe or something and it comes on like tourists. They come and they don't know that they have it on them because it's just like little fungus and then they go and they visit bat caves and then they accidentally infect the bats and the bats are all getting sick and dying, you know, and so I just bring up this random example because the question of like what does it mean to be responsible when we go somewhere [00:46:00] when Even us just going there can cause problems that we didn't intend, you know?
And it is a really complicated question. I'm not saying I necessarily have the answer. But especially from an environmental perspective, even if we get climate change under control, even if we deal with, you know fossil fuels, which we're not even close to dealing with, but even if we deal with that, we would still have this big question of, if we are going to continue to travel, say we get rid of planes, and then we have like airships and we're able to fly in a way that's not killing the climate, we still have this big question about what it means when we're bringing things on our clothes by accident.
And I'm kind of like, instead of like security at airports, like I wonder if there could be like these places where we go in and we basically have to like leave our things. And like, when we arrive, we get like a special clothes that we wear. I don't know what it would look like because we're carrying fungus on our clothes.
Jay: So. It would be really interesting to think about borders in a better world, you know and what that might look like, because I can imagine something like where it's like a supra national kind of like agreement between [00:47:00] different countries and stuff. And like the border is the border of the biome, not the border between the countries, you know?
Clementine: Yeah, and I was just talking about it on like an environmental level, which I do think is very important and doesn't really get talked about enough. But I also think we can look at this on a human level where, you know, if we're thinking about like invasive species and like a plant coming in and just growing and taking over, we can also think about how when we bring.
You know, for example, English, we can think about English as an invasive species, you know, like English is a species that's going to go there and because it's the language that if people speak more than one language, one of the languages that they speak might be English because it's kind of like taken over the world, then it means more and more people are going to be speaking English and then other languages are going to start dying out.
And so this is like literally what an invasive plant species does, you know? And so I think, We need to think about that when we're bringing English into a space. Like, what are we doing in that space? How are we changing that space by bringing English into it? And I say that very self consciously as a unilingual English speaker, but [00:48:00] it is, you know, like.
So, like, this idea of what it means to be a responsible guest, what it means to be somewhere, to visit somewhere, we need to think about, not even just the more obvious things, like throwing our garbage around, or being totally disrespectful, or using a place as a party spot, and then leaving, like, all of those things, I think, are very obviously disrespectful, and we need to be more considerate, but there's even more subtle ways, where just our very presence and the way that we bring ourselves can have an impact that we don't intend. That I think is part of the conversation about what it can mean to, to travel in a more ethical and responsible way.
Chris: Amen. Amen. Yeah, I'm reminded of, and I don't know how relevant it is for the conversation, but I'm reminded of Terrence McKenna, the great psychedelic bard. He had a hypothesis that the main vehicle of evolutionary change or growth wasn't human beings or mammals, for example, but language.
And we were just vehicles for language's evolution and spreading. And that languages are just fighting this secret battle, this secret [00:49:00] war. But, anyways.
To speak to what both of you are saying, I interviewed, a man named Daniel Pardo in the first season of the pod, this activist from Barcelona, and he said, you know, "in no way can tourism be sustainable because we can't extend it to everyone on the planet. Like, it's actually impossible to ensure that seven or eight billion people can go on vacation once a year or fly. Right? He said, "there's no right to fly." And, so it's important to ensure that people have these freedoms, but then to what extent can they actually be applied?
And I remember being back in Toronto last summer for a few months, and there were whole families and communities of migrants sleeping in front of churches on the street because from what I understand, the Canadian government the year previous had let in something like a million migrants and maybe half of them went to Toronto because it's the financial hub of the country. And there was [00:50:00] simply nothing for them there. There was no plan for them, by the government, there was no jobs, no social support, nothing, right?
And so they ended up on the street, sleeping on the street in front of churches, en masse. In terms of the people that I knew who grew up there, and myself, we had never seen that before. And so you can create the freedom to migrate and things like that but what is at the end of that movement, right? So there are definitely these dynamics and nuances that need to be spoken of in terms of travel and the way people travel and the borders and, and biomes that affect the way we move.
Yeah, and of course, I could go on and on.
I have two more questions for you two, if that's alright? Sure. Okay. So on some of the f*****g canceled podcast episodes you have subtitled the theme of the quest for the offline left. And, you know, I think [00:51:00] largely emphasizing the word offline. And so, you know, what do you think being together offline and organizing offline can do to people whose lives have been shaped around online and social media mentalities?
I mean, the three of us are more or less of the age that we still have a lived memory of life before the internet, but what about those who don't?
Clementine: Yeah, absolutely horrifying. I mean, I think we are social animals who evolved to be together, looking at each other's faces, like, talking and being in the same space together.
Like the alienation that Jay was talking about before, like both leads to our compulsive social media use and our desperate attempt to find community through that, and also completely contributes and worsens the problem, making it a million times worse where we are staring at our phones when we are literally, actually, physically together and could be having a conversation.
And that is really like sad and depressing. And I [00:52:00] think that in terms of organizing across difference building solidarity with people... like on the Internet, we can believe that a community is people who share either like an interest or an identity category with us. And that is a community online whereas in real life, community is going to be full of people who are not necessarily like ourselves, who we might not share interests in common with, and we might not share identities in common with, but they actually are the people who are in our spaces in real life, and we actually share many things in common with them that we might not realize because we share a place together, we share a world together and being able to build relationships with people who are different from ourselves is, first of all absolutely necessary as a political strategy if we want to get anything done on the left.
But also, it's deeply enriching for our human lives, you know, to be able to meet and talk to people who are not exactly the same, not the same age, not sharing the same politics, like, who are just different from ourselves. So I think it's very important. The other thing is like, the absolute erosion of our [00:53:00] attention span due to social media.
I have recently not been on Instagram for, like, a month, and I feel like my brain is, like, damaged, and I'm, like, recovering from a severe damage to my attention span, you know? Like, I wasn't able to read books for years, because I just didn't have an attention span to, like, really keep up with it.
It was, like, way harder for me than it used to be when I was younger, you know? Because I have been on the feed that is giving me just five second blips of information and then giving me something else and getting my brain hooked on this, like, dopamine response cycle, which is absolutely horrifying.
So, I think it's also really bad for us, like, mentally in terms of our ability to think critically and at length and to, like, pay attention to what we're thinking about. Yeah,
Jay: I think that the internet gives people the illusion that things are happening that are not actually happening You know like I don't know you make a a really good post and 2, 000 people like it Wow.
Okay. They're all scattered across the f*****g planet. [00:54:00] You know what I mean? It doesn't, you don't know them. It doesn't translate into anything, right? It feels good. And you feel like maybe you're influencing the discourse or something like that, you know but it doesn't translate into anything.
And it can give you It can give you the idea that like to be politically active and to be politically successful is to get more people liking your f*****g posts or whatever, you know, but it's not true, right? It also gives people the illusion and Clementine was gesturing at this that a group of people, it's not even really group, it's like a category of people that are like you, is a meaningful sort of group to be in. But let's say like, take like queer people, like LGBTQ community. Okay. And then you extrapolate that to like the whole world, or you can even just extrapolate it to like North America. You know, that's like a scattering of people that are spread out over this enormous geographic area.
You couldn't possibly meet them all. Not only because there's so many of them, but also because they're so scattered, right? And you couldn't possibly organize them all and like, and so [00:55:00] on. And, and it's not a community. It's not a community. It is. It's like there's a word I'm looking for and I was, I've been trying to think of it for the past, like five minutes, but I'm just going to say it's like an electorate or something rather than like rather than like a community, you know it's like this, it's this like demographic group that like marketers might market to you or that politicians might try to get to vote for them or something like that. But that's not, that's not what a community is. That's not what a real group is like a real group automatically encompasses difference.
Like a, a sort of like authentic human group, like always has differences of like age and occupation and often ethnicity and all these sorts of internal differences that, you know, human groups have always had. Right. And when we try to sort of like make these groups based on identity, which the internet makes very, very, very easy.
We like miss. The people that were actually around, like, yeah, but yeah, as for the offline left, I mean, we desperately need to be organizing and in the real world, and I think that[00:56:00] that's not to say that like you can't do anything on the internet.
Like the internet obviously has massive advantages for many, many reasons, you know. F**k, there's this like, there's this like image in my head. I'm a very like visual person. I get these like pictures in my head and then I'm like, I have to explain this picture. But it's like the, the thing about like the, the, the groups being this, these kind of like electorates, it's like, if you are this electorate, then you're only choice is to sort of petition your leaders to do something for you. You know what I mean?
But like if you are a real and authentic community, you can organize your community to enact something in the real world, you know? And I don't want us to always be in the position of petitioning our leaders, because it presupposes the leaders, it presupposes that we accept their authority, you know, it presupposes that we don't have another option other than to allow a tiny class of parasitical, like rich people to rule everything for us, you know but I would like us to move away from that.
Clementine: Yeah. Like just one other thing about that is you'll [00:57:00] see, you know, this gesturing towards actual organizing but through posting, but it's missing the actual organizing piece, which involves building relationships, right? And building trust. And so one of the things you'll, you'll see, like in the last couple of years, I've seen it a few times with different political things that are going on where people will just randomly call for like a mass strike and they'll make a post about it.
And they'll be like, on this day, we are calling for people to strike for like this political issue. I saw it for like abortion rights in the United States and I recently saw it for solidarity with Palestine. But it's like, people can't just walk out of their jobs randomly because they will be fired.
Like, the point of unions and the point of organized labor is that you have this guarantee where all of these people are taking this risk together in an organized and strategic way and they are trusting each other that they are doing it together and it is their numbers that makes it so that the boss can't just fire them all.
And they have strike fund. There's a lot of them and they're [00:58:00] supporting each other to do this and it's organized and they've actually built enough relationship to be like, okay, I trust that my fellow workers are going to do this with me. So, like when I take this risk, it's like the risk is mitigated by the numbers and I know I'm not alone in it.
Right. But a social media post cannot produce that. It is not relationship. And so random people reading that, like they're like, "should I just walk out of my job tomorrow?" Like, probably if they do that, they're going to be the only person at their job who's doing that, and they're just going to be fired or reprimanded, best case scenario. And that is not organized at all. And, and so then people are like, "Why aren't you guys walking out of your job? This is not solidarity." And it's like, "you're right. It's not solidarity. Because the solidarity hasn't been built." Like, you have to actually build trust with people to get them to take risks. And if you don't build that trust, and you don't have those actual real relationships, it's not a good idea for people to take those risks because they'll be by themselves taking those risks.
Chris: Yeah, begs the question if in order to have solidarity with people elsewhere, does it [00:59:00] have to exist at home first?
Clementine: I would say yeah. Absolutely.
Jay: And solidarity is kind of meaningless if it's just you. Like it kind of has to be organized, you know, like in some meaningful fashion and that can take place in a small scale or a large scale. But if it was just you feeling solidaristic, like it doesn't, yeah,
Clementine: like for example, with the Bangladeshi textile workers, you know. If there was organized labor in North America and say, for example, that like the H&M's were unionized, which I do not think that they are, but if the H& Ms were unionized because, like, the clothing at H&M all comes from Bangladesh, the workers could choose to do a solidarity strike, to strike alongside the Bangladeshi workers, so that the retailers were striking alongside the textile workers, right?
And that would be very effective and very cool if that was happening, but in order for that to happen, the retail workers first have to be organized, and they have to have unions, and they actually have to have like an organized labor force here in order to do any kind of meaningful action in [01:00:00] solidarity with the workers in Bangladesh.
Chris: Food for thought. Yeah. Thank you both. So my final question. Of the main themes of the pod, one is radical hospitality, which, to me at least, stands as a kind of antidote to industrial hospitality. You know, the systems, the hotels, the restaurants that produce, expectation and entitlement, especially when people go abroad, right?
I paid my money, so I deserve this, etc. The word radical in that term means rooted. And, so for me, what it means to be rooted in a place, rooted together, and maybe even reciprocally generous. So, I can only imagine the kind of volatility that might come your way as a result of naming the nexus, and broadcasting F*****g Cancelled.
And so, I'm curious, as socialists and people committed to organizing towards new and better worlds, what kind of radical hospitality do you think might be [01:01:00] required for those worlds to be born?
Jay: Very, very interesting question. For me, like, the first thing that comes up is that the, the idea of radical hospitality is almost like the inverse of alienation in a certain way. Mm-Hmm. and like our intense disconnect from one another. It's like the negation of hospitality, you know. It's like, I don't want to be hospitable because I don't know you and I don't owe you.
And I think that that's how like a lot of people feel and it's not even necessarily their fault for feeling that, you know. It's the world we live in, you know, but I think hospitality obviously is like a good quality and an important thing and it builds community and it builds connection and I think that community and connection are incredibly important for people.
For me, I really want social movements and a socialism, whatever it ends up looking like, a socialism for the 21st century that takes alienation seriously as like a major problem to be tackled, and that is like actively trying to build policy to like undermine alienation and bring people [01:02:00] together more, which is difficult. I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to do it.
You know I think that it's going to be like a complicated thing, but I think that alienation is as much of a problem at this point as like many of the other sort of like evils of capitalism. It's hurting people a lot. I think that it's producing this absolutely gnarly f*****g epidemic of mental illness and despair and addiction and I think that people are like utterly traumatized by it and we need to be working, we need to be working against it.
And I think this like a concept like radical hospitality is a really interesting and beautiful one that could be part of that.
Clementine: Yeah, I think the first thing that comes up for me is just the concept of like reciprocity and like how that is connected to trust. And it's very hard to give with an open heart when you don't believe that you are going to receive. And when you're very exhausted and very depleted it is very hard to be generous, you know, and I think a lot of people are in that state where like they're not feeling very generous because they don't feel like they have what they need [01:03:00] and they're worried that if they give they're not going to receive, you know.
And so it's kind of like somebody always has to go first. If you're caught in a cycle of everybody in a mentality of scarcity. That's just going to keep reproducing until somebody starts to shift towards generosity. But it is also true that you can get yourself in a situation where you are being consistently generous to people who are not being reciprocal, right? Which is also not good.
Generosity also needs to be boundaried and self respecting, in the sense that, you are not turning yourself into a resource that is just being exploited, you know and so that is like that trust building. It's like if I'm offering radical hospitality, am I also receiving it? Not necessarily as like a one to one, like this where we're keeping a book to make sure it's all exactly the same. But is there a general sense of reciprocity in the relationship? And that can be expressed in a lot of different ways. In terms of, you were just talking about our work and the work that we do and like the extreme hostility that we receive from certain people for talking about these things.
One of the things that has been [01:04:00] beautiful, for us is the hospitality that we have received from the listeners of the podcast who have received so much from our work, because I'm sure you can understand as a podcast or yourself is a labor of love, it's definitely a labor of love. It's a huge amount of work and you're not really getting paid for it or at least we're not getting paid for it to the degree that would actually be like sustaining, and it's a struggle and we're like always trying to make it work. But the listeners, you know, who have been very impacted by our work and who feel very grateful for it have definitely shown us that gratitude.
And when we were on tour, we toured independently, no funding, just, just a couple of punks, like in my little car. And it was our fans who put us up all across America. It was our fans who put us up, who helped us make that happen in one city. We had an event plan and then we got canceled, we got literally pushed out of the like conference that we were supposed to do, due to cancellation b******t, but we had already put that city on our tour and like a fan like hosted us in his living room so that we could still do, [01:05:00] you know, do our event in that city, which was really cool and he put us up and everything too.
So, you know, I think that, that there are people who see the risks that we take in doing this work and they want to, they want to do that reciprocity and they want to like give us something back and make us feel like welcomed and safe doing something that they know is very risky. So I appreciate that.
And that is like an example of just people doing that like mutuality and reciprocity and action.
Chris: Thank you both. Yeah, and I hope that you know, through some of our conversation today that this has given a bit of an opportunity for your words and your work to have a platform among, you know, people who are dealing with these, these questions of gentrification and migration and of course, tourism.
Before before we finish, Jay, I just remembered the authenticity.
Jay: Oh, yeah yeah, yeah, I wrote a paper once in like my undergrad about tourism and [01:06:00] authenticity and for some reason it's like the only paper from my undergrad that I like still remember, you know but I think that I was like onto something with that paper and it's just interesting how with tourism, like a huge focus is on selling an authentic experience to the tourist and yet everyone involved, including the tourists are aware that it's inauthentic as soon as you sell it. Basically that is like the sort of like definition of what makes something inauthentic to most people is that like when you sell it, it's not authentic anymore.
Especially when it's like an experience, you know and yeah, I just think that this like process of sort of like inventing authenticity and then selling it when everybody's aware that it's not authentic is like very very on brand for late capitalism and is like also something that's going on in like the rest of our, our lives and something.
I don't know. It's just something I think about a lot.
Chris: Well, it comes, comes home to roost, right? The whole tourism worldview or touristic worldview and like [01:07:00] the desire for the authentic. We have all the labels now, organic and fair trade and all that stuff. And it's like, there's still no chance that you buying that coffee is going to get you any closer to a relationship with the people who made it or the land that it was made on, you know, and all that stuff.
Jay: Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's interesting. I actually, I have like a question for you, you know, cause you were like a backpacker for a long time. And I think that like part of the whole thing about backpacking is that it's more authentic, you know, because you're not really being like a tourist exactly, you know, because you're not going on tours, right?
And you're not like staying at like hotels and, or like Airbnb is, you're sort of like making your own way and like staying with locals or like in hostels or like whatever. And do you think that what you were doing was substantially different from mainstream tourism or did you get kind of like jaded by that in the end?
Chris: Yeah, I guess like to some degree it's I could say that one could say that it's less choreographed. Right. There's [01:08:00] less expectation. I think there's still probably the same amount of entitlement that people could have or feel, but there's less expectation because it's not as not as choreographed. But I did an interview recently where my friend Patrick, he asked me like, so what's the difference between a tourist and a traveler, right?
And I said, well, you know, based on all the people that I've talked to and all the episodes that I've done the interviews and all that it seems that people want to make a distinction between these things because they want to justify their version of doing it or they don't want to look like the stereotype of the ugly tourist or whatever.
But at the end of the day, almost everything you do as a backpacker or a tourist is housed in the tourism infrastructure, right? You still have to get on a plane to go where you're going. You still have to take those buses, you know? Maybe just because you're not with 30 or 40 other tourists doesn't mean that the same dynamics aren't happening, [01:09:00] you know?
Surely there's a degree of difference in it, but, you can go to, like a lot of Canadians go to Cuba to sit on a beach for a week, eat and drink whatever they want, or all that they can. Or, you know, you could go in, like I did, and spend like two months, you know, in the middle of nowhere in Peru, right?
But, at the end of the day, everything that happens there is temporary and therefore disposable. Nobody has, or nobody questions, the degree of consequence that they have in that place once they're gone. Right? And even if you did question that, you could never know. So, I think that that kind of you know, brings it back around a little bit to that question of, like, you can, you can be a tourist in the place that you live, in the city that you were born in, right? I have these questions sometimes when I wonder about like, you know, my friends and family back home after being gone for eight years, you know, my sister has two kids and all that stuff.
So my parents are getting older, you know, all that stuff. So how do [01:10:00] we understand ourselves as people of consequence in the places we live. And, anyways, I think that that's to me where I can offer a deep bow of solidarity to you two for your work, because I think that's kind of where they find themselves woven together a little bit, is that place where we find the ability to either respond or we find out how we have been removed or obscured or, or just made handicapped from the ability to respond in a good way, so.
Hmm. So, yeah, so on behalf of our listeners thank you two so much for your time today. And I know you have a lot of podcast episodes online and also a lot of writing projects. And maybe you could tell our listeners a little bit about those before we depart.
Clementine: So you can find the podcast at FUCKINGCANCELLED.COM and you can also find it, like most places you listen to podcasts, so Spotify or Apple [01:11:00] or whatever if you just look up f*****g canceled, maybe f*****g canceled podcast.
Jay: It's got two L's cause we're Canadian.
Clementine: Oh yeah. We're Canadian. So it has two L's. And then my rating you can find at CLEMENTINEMORRIGAN.COM. I have a Substack there that you can subscribe to. And I also make zines and books, which you can check out in the shop at CLEMENTINEMORRIGAN.COM.
Jay: Yeah, my writing is JAYLESOLEIL.COM. It's all up there. So, yeah. Thanks so much for having us, man.
Clementine: Yeah, thanks for having us.
Chris: And Dumplings and Domination, is that right?
Clementine: Oh, yeah.
Jay: Dumplings and Domination, yeah. So far, there's only one episode out. And I've told myself that I'm going to be boundaried about it and try not to treat it too much like a job and just do it for fun. So who knows when the next one's going to come up, but that's also on JAYLESOLEIL.COM. Like for now, I'm just putting them up as posts on my Substack. So yeah.
Chris: Awesome. Cool. Well, I'll make sure that all those links are up there on the end of tourism website and Substack as well when it comes out and thank you guys so much for your time.
Jay: Right on man. Have a good one.
Clementine: Thanks for having us. [01:12:00]
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