Creating Through the Crisis #29
Generally speaking, I’m uncomfortable telling other people what to do. I know and respect people who make use of their platforms in that way — at their best, they offer guidance to movements, advice to individual organizers, suggestions about the positions that people should take with respect to the news of the moment or the actions that would be most politically useful. I definitely read and watch and learn from such content. But mostly, in my own work, I try to be quite cautious about taking that approach, at least beyond the way that publically saying “I think X for reasons Y and Z” can’t help but be read as arguing that other people should think that too.
This is not a hard and fast commitment on my part. You could probably look back over the three decades in which I have been saying things in print, audio, and video, and find lots of examples of me opining about what movements need to be doing or how people should be acting in a particular circumstance. And I’m not saying there’s anything inherently wrong with me, or anyone else, doing that. In fact, I think there are moments and contexts which call for exactly that kind of speech. But I think for me personally, it’s mostly not what I want to be doing and it’s mostly not the most useful thing I have to offer.
Take, for example, Listen! Knowing the World and Fighting to Change It, my book that came out late last year. It is, in part, a book about listening. There are lots of books about listening out there, and most that are written for a lay audience put a lot of effort into telling you when and how to listen, and how to do it better. I’m very clear in my book, though, that it is not a self-help book and it is not a how-to. I’m more interested in pushing readers to go beyond thinking about listening as an individual practice and into thinking about it socially.
Of course, I can’t help but say a little bit about listening as an individual practice, because that is an important element of listening. But I focus more on what happens as we listen, on how it works, and on why all of that matters, than on offering people instruction or advice. In Chapter 2, I do briefly talk about about the kinds of advice offered most often in other articles and books about listening, but I don’t add advice of my own and I think I make it clear that I’m sharing all of that not to get the reader to do those things but to illustrate some important ideas about how our culture relates to and talks about listening. Fundamentally, I realized as I was working on Listen! how easy it would be to write about listening and social movements in a way that reproduced the neoliberal cult of responding to the world by trying (and inevitably failing) to perfect the self, and I just didn’t want to contribute to that.
All of that said, though, the self still matters. It’s our starting point for navigating the world, after all. Neoliberal culture has taught many of us in North America to look only at the individual level as we think about how the world works, and to default to individual change — in ourselves or in other people — as the only imaginable way to make the world different. I think that deep training into erasure of the collective and the social is incredibly harmful. But understanding the world in social ways (and intervening accordingly, with an emphasis on collective efforts and on transforming social relations) doesn’t mean that the self is irrelevant. When I get up in the morning, as I figure out what I’m going to do that day, yes I am embedded in social relations, no I am not an atomized individual, but within that context, I’m still a self trying to make good decisions, trying to do what I need to do, trying to get through the day. So despite my vehemence at certain points in Listen!, I recognize that sometimes it does make sense to talk about practices and choices and actions at the level of the individual person who is doing them — the key thing is to figure out how to do that in a way that is useful and that pushes back against neoliberal fetishization of the individual.
I kind of do that in Chapter 8 of Listen!, though I suppose I’m not as clear as I could be about my rationale. The part that I do say directly is that I’m circling back to talk about some aspects of listening as individual practice in a way that is explicitly informed by all that I’ve said in the rest of the book about the social character of listening, the way the social world is to a significant extent built via listening, and the way that listening weaves through our collective efforts to make change. With all of that in place, in that chapter I say a few things about listening and knowing the world, including a few suggestions about how we can do that better.
I’ve been reflecting on that in the last few days because it feels like the book project that I’m working my way towards now will involve more attention to practices and conduct at the individual level than Listen! did, and if that ends up being the case, I want to figure out how to do it well. Part of that is what I already recognized in Listen! — explicitly ensuring that it is informed by an understanding of the social character of the world and a commitment to collective action. But there’s more to it, I think.
I’ve come up with two other things that I think are important in talking, and in some cases offering suggestions, about individual practices and conduct. One is refusing to do it in the form of simple rules. I think that’s important because “Do X” and “Don’t do Y” (which, btw, is the form of a lot of lay-focused listening advice) lends itself to exactly the kind of puritanical approach that is so often seen in neoliberal self-improvement culture. But I also think it’s important because it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works. The world is complex and messy, and trying to turn simple, rigid rules into action require either ignoring and denying all of that complex mess or engaging with it and applying your simple, rigid rules in contextual ways. The latter is obviously a better approach. But why put that downstream? Why pretend that simple, rigid rules are enough, when any genuinely useful application of them will require this sort of negotiation with complexity and mess? Why not bring that into how you talk about individual practices and conduct to begin with?
The other thing that I think is important is related to this inherent complexity in both the world and our engagement with it. I think that “Do X” and “Don’t do Y” embody a certain kind of pedagogy and a certain kind of relationship between the person who is saying those things and the people who are expected to take them up and act on them — a kind of hierarchical, directive pedagogy and relationship. I don’t like that. I don’t think it reflects how the world works, I don’t think it reflects how we actually learn things, and I don’t think it contributes to the kinds of relationships that I, at least, want to help build. I am much more interested in a pedagogy that offer messy complexity with no clear answers, that pushes the person hearing or watching or listening to do the work of taking up that messy complexity in a way that is inevitably itself going to be messy and complex, and that then requires further negotiation with — you guessed it — messy complexity as it is applied in their practices and conduct.
So I don’t like telling people what to do. But as this path of writing takes me into talking about things that are at least in part related to individual practices and conduct, I’m going to do my best to do so in a way that is informed a social understanding of the world, a commitment to collective liberation, a refusal of simple directives that might feed left puritanism, and a pedagogy of complex example rather than didactic telling.
