I talked in “Creating Through the Crisis #25” about a number of the things that I’m working on, these days. Or, at least, I alluded to them. Among other things, there’s a major strand of work that I hope will become a book project, and there are several smaller strands, some of which intertwine with each other and the maybe-proto-book and some of which don’t. One of those smaller strands involves trying to figure out how I want to write about the world, and specifically about the state of the world in the current moment.
On a certain level, this is just a modest extension of something I think all of us have an obligation to do: We live in the world, so we need to have some way to talk about it. And we don’t all need to become experts about everything — we can’t, obviously — but I think there is some level of ethical and political imperative for all of us to develop practices for thinking and talking about the world that go at least a little bit beyond the fragmented, me-focused ways that neoliberal culture inculcates in us. And these days, it’s perfectly ordinary for a lot of that communicating about the world to happen in mediated ways, even for people who don’t think of themselves as writers or content creators or journalists or media-makers. That means that talking about the world in informal but public ways that go beyond interpersonal conversation is pretty ordinary too. And I am a writer, so it makes sense that, for me at least, figuring out how to communicate in relatively informal ways about the state of the world, including in writing, is just part of figuring out how to live.
On another level, this is a weird thing for me to feel I have to do. After all, I’ve been writing about the world in one form or another since I started publishing book reviews and op/ed pieces in a university student newspaper in the mid 1990s. Since then, I’ve done it in a lot of different forms and modes, in a lot of different media, on a lot of different platforms. Writing about the world is a big part of what I do, so why on earth, thirty years in, do I feel like I need to figure out how to do it?
That’s a reasonable question. But, even so, ever since the end of Talking Radical Radio, I’ve felt a sort of existential restlessness as I’ve reached for and failed to grasp a way to talk about the heart wrenching state of things and our efforts to make change — a way that I want to feel satisfying personally, politically, and in terms of craft.
That points to another aspect of where this impulse comes from. Part of why it’s hard to know how to talk and write about the world, these days, is not just that it has always been difficult (although that’s probably true) but because the state of the world today makes it all so much more difficult. The world is, as the title of this series of blog posts suggests, in crisis. And it isn’t just a single crisis. I don’t like the neologism “polycrsis,” but I think it’s true that the world is in the midst of a cluster of multiple, interlocking, and escalating crises. And, sure, there’s lots to be said about how this is far from historically unique. As some radical commentators — particularly some who are Black and Indigenous — have reminded us, many worlds have ended in the past, and many of those ended as a result of the violence that created the world we’re in now. And you can make a pretty decent case that precisely because of the foundational violence and injustice upon which our current world is premised, this world needs to end in order to make a more liveable, just, and liberatory future for all. The problem, of course, is that the worlds that look likely to replace what we have now seem to be pretty uniformly worse. Our task, or at least one of them, is to change that.
Anyway. All of that is fodder for future posts in this series, I think.
The point is that we are immersed in terrible crises, and that makes it harder to know what to say and how to say it. How do you capture the enormity of it all? How do you express the simultaneity of the terrible violences that surround us and that produce the world we live in, with the ordinary, everyday moments of living? How do you talk about the current re-shaping of the world being led by the authoritarians in power in the US…and the ways in which the preceding liberal version of the capitalist order was both itself horrifically violent and also created the conditions that ushered this new reality in? How do you talk about the climate crisis and the larger threat of ecological collapse that looms beyond it? How do you talk about the complete disconnect between what the vast majority of humanity needs and wants and what actually happens in the world, as demonstrated by (among so many other things) the Israeli state’s genocidal violence in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine over the last few years and by the ways in which capital and Western states are relating to the plagiarism machines misidentified as “artificial intelligence”? Even something as simple as the escalating violent disregard that so many in our communities are showing for homeless people or for drug users — how do you capture, in words, the tragedy of that, the injustice of that, the way that it points towards a narrowing of our worlds and a much broader turn to cruelty? How do you express the magnitude of what we face while also identifying the cracks, the contradictions, the possibilities through which struggles for collective liberation might make things better?
I don’t expect to come up with anything particularly profound in thinking about all of that — I know much smarter people than me are wrestling with their own versions of this problem, and I’m certainly not going to solve it. But I’m a person who’s living now, so I need to figure out, as best I can, how to talk about now. And I’m a person who writes about the world, so thinking about how I want to do that is, of necessity, an ongoing commitment.
