What is agency and where does it come from?

The main thing that my research explores is agency. What is agency and where does it come from? How do individuals and groups shape society? How do institutions define “possibility spaces” that become the incentive environments that other institutions and individuals operate within? How can institutions shape a prevailing “common sense” (or “meta-ideology”) that almost everyone subscribes to? When do the resulting “hegemonies” deteriorate, and how do countercultural and dissenting groups and individuals gain agency against the dominant systems and ideologies? And how do dissenting groups lay the ground for future hegemonies by defining their own alternative “possibility spaces”? This series of blog posts seeks to cursorily address these questions by drawing on my theoretical and historical research.

This post addresses the first of these questions:

What is agency and where does it come from?

There are a variety of theoretical approaches to agency.

Systems theory approaches agency as a relational phenomenon that emerges from the interactions within a system rather than something that solely belongs to individuals. In this view, agency is less about individual choice or autonomous decision-making and more about how individuals are embedded within larger networks of influence and feedback loops. Systems theorists consider agency to be an emergent property, meaning it arises from the complex interactions and interdependencies within a system. No single part of the system "has" agency in isolation; rather, it emerges from the ways in which the parts interact and respond to each other. Systems theory also observes that systems interact with external environments, which influence their function and behavior.

Similarly, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) attributes agency not only to human actors but also to non-human entities (like objects, technologies, and even abstract concepts). This perspective moves away from seeing agency solely as a human trait, instead framing it as an emergent property of interactions within networks. In this framework, agency is not located within individuals or objects alone but is distributed across networks. This means that actions are seen as the product of a network of relationships rather than the result of any single actor's intentions or capacities. Both human and non-human actors are "actants" in this web of influence, contributing to the capacity to act. According to ANT, a bridge, a computer system, or a social norm can "act" in a way that shapes human behavior or changes outcomes. This does not imply that objects have intentions like humans, but rather that they can affect change through their role and properties within the network. ANT suggests that both actors and their capacities to act are products of networks. Thus, what an actor "is" and what they "do" are defined by the network they are part of. This perspective implies that changing the configuration of a network changes the agencies of the actors within it.

Immanuel Wallerstein applies much of this abstract theoretical insight within his analysis of what he calls “world systems”—the structural forces that shape social systems on a global scale. His perspective on agency is rooted in his understanding of capitalism as a world-system that operates according to specific economic, political, and social logics, constraining certain individual and collective actions, and amplifying others. He sees capitalism as a global system that reproduces certain power relations and economic disparities, primarily through mechanisms like core-periphery relations, economic-historical cycles, and hegemonic cultural shifts. According to Wallerstein, the world-system is highly resilient and resistant to fundamental change, because it self-regulates and has a strong momentum in its tendencies and directions of development, accumulation and deterioration. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, Wallerstein is skeptical about human agency. For him, most historical actors are "agents of structure"—their actions are often responses to structural pressures rather than purely autonomous choices. However, Wallerstein does acknowledge that actors can exercise some level of agency, especially during periods of systemic crisis or transition. He posits that these "structural crises" are moments when the rigidity of the world-system weakens, creating a temporary openness to change. During these times, human agency has more influence as actors can pursue alternative paths, challenging or even restructuring aspects of the system.

These structural crises are an inherent part of the expansion of global capitalism, which proceeds within "systemic cycles of accumulation," as the economic historian Giovanni Arrighi argues in his book The Long Twentieth Century. Drawing on world-systems analysis and on the work of social and economic historians from the French Annales School, Arrighi explores the history of capitalism by examining how global economic power has shifted across four main cycles, each centered on a different hegemonic state or region: Genoa, the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States. Arrighi argues that each cycle consists of an initial expansion phase, characterized by economic growth and productive capital investment, followed by a financial phase, marked by the dominance of speculative finance over production as economic returns decline. This shift from production to finance ultimately leads to instability, economic crises, and a new center of capital accumulation. According to Arrighi, the current period of economic crisis and instability, which has been reigned over by a “neoliberal” ideology of free trade, deregulation, and a breakdown of social welfare and social institutions, is part of the inevitable shift in the center of capitalist accumulation from the United States to China. Yet, unlike previous shifts, it is accompanied by new constraints, crises, and opportunities, arising from the global nature of the economy. For one thing, there is no remaining societal frontier to colonize and incorporate as part of the expanding capitalist economy. Furthermore, humanity faces unprecedented ecological and environmental crises, with climate change, mass extinction and pollution threatening to severely compromise humanity’s ability to inhabit the planet. In addition to this, new technologies—particularly the Internet, microcomputing, artificial intelligence, and blockchain—threaten the foundations of classical economics, and offer an opportunity to overcome the private ownership of capital while maintaining the dynamism and feedback mechanisms of markets. Finally, there is an ever-growing class of over-educated, under-utilized, and individualistic citizens in post-industrial societies, and these people pose a threat to the maintenance of undemocratic political and economic institutions. All of these factors threaten the smooth reproduction of the capitalist world system and could potentially facilitate major structural shifts in that system.

The particular direction that this change goes is difficult to predict, but the metemodernist political thinker Hanzi Freinacht offers a compelling framework for thinking about it—and for conceptualizing agency within the current world-historical situation. Hanzi, drawing in the ontology of Gilles Deleuze, presents a philosophical realism that accounts not only for the actually-existing, but also for the potentiality of likely future developments. As Hanzi puts it, “dev­elop­ments in the present in certain ways are pulled towards the unrea­li­zed potentials of the future. What happens in the present is namely just as much a result of what has been as what can become.” The way to increase your agency, then, is to analyze historical trends and to locate the ebbing and flowing tides of social, cultural, political, economic an technological change—information that Hanzi calls “attractors.” Attractors, in Hanzi’s definition, are patterns or equilibria “that under certain conditions [are] very likely to emerge and stab­ilize within a dyna­mical system, such as a society.” By identifying attractors, individuals, groups and institutions can enhance their agency, moving with, rather than against, the currents of history. While Hanzi acknowledges that “[t]he world is a chaotic place and the future is never predetermined,” he insists that “on the general level, some things are just more likely to happen than others, and some are very likely to happen.” https://metamoderna.org/attractors-the-guiding-stars-of-historys-winners/

The Metaverse Must Be a Pluriverse

In the past few years, there have been major advances in the development of VR (virtual reality) and AR/XR (augmented reality/mixed reality) headsets and glasses. Especially with Apple’s entry into the headset market, and Meta’s progress in developing viable AR glasses, more and more people are beginning to embrace the idea that an altogether new, and more immersive way of interfacing with our technology is right around the corner. This comes on the heels of Facebook’s rebranding as “Meta”—they insist that they no longer are a social media company, but a “metaverse” company. This announcement drew ire—especially from people who are skeptical about big technology companies. However justifiable people’s skepticism about big technology companies is, it would be foolish to reject the concept of the metaverse altogether.

As a number of writers have pointed out, the “metaverse”—the spatialization of digital information and experiences—holds out quite a utopian potential for humanity. By offering a digital sphere in which people can enact their fantasies, build, create, explore and interact without the need for vast amounts of energy or materials, and with few limitations, virtual reality could be the medium within which human beings create some of their greatest and most profound creative expressions and experiences. On the other hand, it could just become an extension of our flawed society—a more effective medium to control and manipulate people with. How can the metaverse be something other than a dystopian extension of social media and a numbing psychological escape from a deteriorating planet and devolving society?

Something I’ve been contemplating a lot lately is the question of how the concept of the metaverse relates to the concept of the pluriverse.

As you’ll likely be aware by now, the concept of the metaverse is fundamentally about the way that digital environments are becoming increasingly immersive—both in terms of their spatial and temporal omnipresence in our lives, and in terms of the ever-advancing interfaces that we use to connect access consoles (Internet-connected devices) to our sensory organs.

The pluriverse is a concept that describes a world composed of many worlds, where many different ontologies (or concepts about and ways of being) are able to coexist. Drawing inspiration especially from the many traditional and indigenous cultures whose ways of being are/were flattened in the twin processes of modernization and industrialization, many advocates of the pluriverse seek to restore “vernacular wisdoms” as a solution to the ecological and sociological crises of that modernization and industrialization process. For advocates of the pluriverse, these vernacular wisdoms should be used to create many worlds, rather than a single, homogeneous one. As the Zapatistas put it, “Queremos un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos” (“We want a world where many worlds fit”).

Generally, those who embrace the idea of the pluriverse are completely disinterested in the promises or politics of the metaverse. The advocates of the metaverse generally position its rise as an apotheosis point of economic and technological development, wherein computers facilitate the rise of some ultimate frictionless, limitless human experience. For them, development can only be a great thing, since it brings about the technological capabilities to create this digital paradise. In contrast, the concept of the pluriverse, deriving as it does from “degrowth” and anti-globalization political discourses, tends to eschew economic and technological development as pathways to many forms of what Ivan Illich termed “modernized poverty,” denoting a slavish dependency on an abusive economy.

Personally, I think that these beliefs are both wrong, in a way. Something that neither viewpoint tends to consider is that perhaps there are—and indeed ought to be—alternative modalities of development. The metaverse’s optimists don’t seem to be realistic about the self-destructive flaws of an economic system that is both crisis-ridden and materially polarizing—tendencies that may ultimately threaten and altogether undermine our ability to create a functioning and sustainable digital utopia.

As anyone familiar with the various fictional depictions of the metaverse (and here I’m thinking of “Ready Player One” and “Snow Crash”) will be aware, the context for the rise of the metaverse concept in these depictions is one of massive economic and political failure and catastrophe. In these stories, the metaverse becomes a digital substitute for a ruined real world. To escape the curtailed freedoms and enjoyment of a world riddled with pollution, overpopulation, dysfunctional economies, and overbearing (and/or corrupt/ineffectual) governments, people seek refuge in a kind of digital oasis of infinite possibility. The point here is that the metaverse, as a concept, has a complex relationship to development. In the first place, the metaverse requires the overcoming of immense engineering hurdles: ubiquitous access to technology; equally widespread high-speed connectivity; massive computational power; the invention, production, and distribution of interfaces that create a fully immersive user experience; and the presumed leisure time to spend inside of a digital reality. And yet, the fictional context of the metaverse is, if anything, one of “overdevelopment.”

As for the pluriversal pessimists, they tend to be a bit too down on development, as if its outcome can only spell extinction and destruction. Marx—who many don’t realize was quite the accelerationist—thought that the utopia of communism could only be reached after a long slog through capitalist development, which would have severe consequences for those who endured the transitional stage. But the transition would not be a smooth, linear one; it would involve crisis and revolution, as an economically-faltering capitalist economy systematically failed to unlock the very prosperity and utopian potentials that it itself made possible. Development, for Marx, was both necessary and insufficient. At some point, political struggle needed to intervene in the process of economic development.

Perhaps an effective way to conceptualize development is in infrastructural terms. Infrastructures change our environments in ways that are simultaneously alienating and empowering. A key dimension of this is the way that infrastructures free us from needing to think or worry about details and logistics that preoccupied cultures that preceded these infrastructures. We don’t often think about the way that terraforming and medical innovations and various grids and networks compose a sort of “second nature” that raises the overall “floor” of human existence by pushing once-insurmountable problems to the peripheries of our consciousness. “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking,“ the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead claimed. Once a generation of problems are solved, they drop from both our consciousness, and from our aspirational dreams, appearing as a pre-given world within which we move on to bigger and better problems and aspirations. As Sigfried Giedion put it, “Dreams lose their fascination when frozen into naturalistic terms.” When these things work well, we tend to take them for granted.

Something that the pluriverse framework seeks is the freedom of autonomy. Yet autonomy, as Benjamin Bratton insists, must be reconceptualized in infrastructural terms. “[A]utonomy,” he tells us in his book on terraforming, “is less about free will than what aspects of action can be done without full deliberation or even without choice.” The routinization of tedium that used to dominate our consciousness; the taken-for-granted safety and security of worlds and spaces that once were terrorized by disease and/or conflict and/or famine is nothing to be sniffed at. We stand on the largely invisible, infrastructural shoulders of giants. Indeed, our very species, Bratton insists, “is the result of its co-evolution with its ancient automated landscapes.“

This infrastructural way of thinking about development suggests that humans can remake their world(s) in progressive and positive ways. Development can be the process whereby this floor is raised—and it needn’t necessarily involve economic “growth” or exploitation, even if it has tended to do so within our current political economy. I don’t imagine anyone actually begrudges the raising of the “floor”; they begrudge the side effects and externalities deriving from this process. But perhaps the former doesn’t necessarily require the latter.

Before thinking a bit more about how to reconcile these differences over the status of modernity and development, we should explore the many resonances between the pluriverse and the metaverse. Both valorize the plurality and immateriality that we see haphazardly emerging in our world and in our culture.

Plurality is something we all already experience, both culturally and psychologically. Globalization, for all its flaws, has done a lot to accelerate multiculturalism (in the developed “centers” of global capitalism anyway), bringing people from all over the world into regular contact with each other. With the rise of the Internet, we also are increasingly aware of what is occurring in other places, and, despite social media “bubbles,” we are also frequently made to encounter people who are very different from us. As our national cultures—which were always merely partial anyway—dissolve into a vast array of subcultures, our own localities (perhaps even out own families) become increasingly pluralistic, for better (diversity) and for worse (fragmentation and polarization).

This cultural plurality is mirrored in our psychological existences. We increasingly inhabit a highly partitioned digital existence, which takes place in a variety of “containers”—often apps and websites—which hybridize with our physical settings. We all know the experience of carrying on an intimate conversation—perhaps even multiple—while simultaneously navigating transit or an in-person social experience. We also all know the frustrations of distractions—the fragmentation of our own continuity of experience, and that of those in our proximity. Yet, there is something deeply rich and dynamic about connectivity, and switching rapidly between containers of experience and relationality.

I think that the pluriverse should be something that we demand from any putative metaverse. If it’s not a pluriverse—in the sense of empowering multiple ontologies to thrive—then it’s not actually a metaverse. Perhaps by seeking to hybridize metaversal and pluriversal theories and political aspirations, we can begin to imagine alternative forms of development and modernity. An indeed, this is precisely what I think that political metamodernism is doing (though the key authors of this concept are not framing their thinking in terms of its relationship to the metaverse or the pluriverse).

Advocates and theorists of the pluriverse emphasize the importance of the idea of “conviviality”—the virtuous outcome of an operative political philosophy that does not require economic growth to produce prosperity, since prosperity is reimagined in immaterial terms of flourishing social and cultural dynamics and the shared life and joy that these are able to create.

This immateriality has a parallel in the metaverse. At its most utopian, the metaverse promises to valorize immaterial goods such as connection, expression, and experience, rather than remaining tied to material accumulation. Granted, in its more dystopian modality, the metaverse is imagined as a place where material inequalities and hierarchies are reproduced symbolically, through the unnecessarily exclusive ownership of digital assets such as NFTs and cryprographically-secure online “real estate.” Yet, even here, immateriality ultimately reigns. As Andre Gorz pointed out in his final book on the immaterial, perhaps capitalism’s final act will be the desperate (and ultimately fruitless) accumulation of symbols and knowledge, before sharing, zero-cost exchange, and infinite reproducibility render it obsolete once and for all—a prospect that becomes far more likely in a world where culture and sociality occur in the “metaverse.” In this context, while new hierarchies and modes of exclusion are likely to emerge, there is likely to be far more space for social and cultural life to unfold unhindered.

In order to truly be “meta,” the metaverse must actually empower the vast majority of human realities, cultural logics, and practices. It must operate as a kind of grid, or substrate that hosts and powers these many worlds. An important requirement of this meta-infrastructure is that it must be accessible and sustainable, which requires that the cultures and worlds that it hosts must not seek to destroy it or impede others from accessing it. The fictional political metamodernist Hanzi Freinacht, drawing on the “open society” concept of Karl Popper, explains that a functioning metamodernist society can only tolerate cultures that are themselves tolerant of other cultures.

This version of political metamodernism aspires to create a “trans-culturalism” that is simultaneously in favor of societal development and wellbeing while avoiding totalizing and stifling cultural homogeneity. A crucial part of this is establishing a minimum set of rights and duties for all cultures—particularly the demand that they not prevent individuals or other cultures from enjoying full access to the diverse offerings of trans-cultural, metamodern life itself. And what makes this possible is that the underlying political, economic, and cultural infrastructure of metamodernism acts as a kind of enabling/empowering substrate that guarantees material and psychological wellbeing.

In terms of the pluriversal metaverse, the the meta and the plural should keep one another accountable in a productive tension. On the meta side, there should be a guarantee that users—whether they are individuals or groups—be guaranteed the ability to create worlds and partake in cultures, so long as these worlds and cultures do not affect the ability of others to do the same. This is how the “meta” harmonizes the “plural.” And at the same time, the plurality must demand its right to build and inhabit worlds—to have what Arturo Escobar calls “design autonomy”: a full panoply of “tools, interactions, contexts, and languages” that facilitate the creation of ontologies and their worlds. This would constitute an unprecedented degree of freedom. This is the accountability that the plural demands of the meta.

If we demand that the metaverse be a pluriverse, might that demand extend to the physical world as well? In other words, perhaps the many worlds of a pluriversal metaverse would spill out of digital space and into physical space, constituting a new kind of built environment. We already see immaterial logics completely reshaping physical geographies, from data-directed movement patterns to algorithmically-designed spaces and sensor-controlled environmental parameters. Could the metaverse become a new routing switch to physical spaces and places in the analog world? If the pluriversal metaverse contains countless, interwoven “worlds,” perhaps an analog layer of this metaverse would involve a tapestry of different geographical realities; a maze of many urbanisms and their metabolic processes.

Most of the universe is empty space. What’s rare is density and complexity. If one of the things that makes a metaverse (or indeed any human creation) worthwhile is its complexity, then perhaps our goal as a society should then be to build worlds that contain practices that are extremely unique and intense. Places of 24/7 activity; thriving subcultures; profoundly customized rituals and emotional experiences. This is the polyvalent futurism that I believe a pluriversal metaverse can produce.

In the Aftermath of the Storming of the Capitol

Over the past 24 hours, as the political/media frenzy about Wednesday’s events at the Capitol have continued to evolve, I’ve been noticing a lot of parallels with the dark days after 9/11, when in our blind bloodlust, we were duped into backing illegal wars, forfeiting civil liberties, and alienating dissenting voices. As a good friend of mine (who is an astute political theorist and commentator) pointed out in a post today, the current vindictive cultural atmosphere is very similar.

The first valence of this is the way that vengefulness toward Trump supporters displaces systemic critiques. By focusing on how “deplorable” the angry mob was, my friend wisely cautions, we evade asking ourselves tough questions about our own complicity (as urban, educated people) in maintaining and extending the neoliberal economic conditions that have played a part in creating this discontent. My own feelings about the Trump supporter demographic are complicated, but in brief, I don’t see a lot of reason to go out of my way to defend them or justify their actions or ideologies. I don’t see them as more marginalized or vulnerable than the immigrants or minorities or people living in other countries who they detest and who MAGA policies harm. And it’s difficult not to resent a group who are simultaneously so deeply ignorant, so spiteful, so immune to critical thinking, so blindly trusting of a corrupt demagogue, and so blatantly selfish. But I think we need to reckon with the social, cultural, environmental, educational and economic desolation that is the backdrop of many of these people’s lives. It would be difficult to overstate how dysfunctional America is right now—this was true even before the pandemic. It's a dangerous, polarized, unkind, backsliding nation with a ton of endemic problems. If you’re not endowed with social, educational, cultural, and/or economic capital, and the other people in your life don’t have these either—especially if you’re living in a violent, racist, superstitious, anti-intellectual culture like the one that pervades most of the country—you’re probably not going to be a kind, decent, lovable person with good ideas or a clear understanding of your own plight. In short, you can be deplorable and a victim of your circumstances at the same time.

The second valence of our vindictive frenzy is that many have, literally overnight, embraced the very institutions that only recently were the object of our concern and criticism—many of them carceral and militaristic in nature. We see CNN commentators chanting “Lock them up! Lock them up!” about Capitol protestors; we see reports of subreddits full of young people collaborating to identify protestors on behalf of the FB!; we see political dinosaurs like Nancy Pelosi emerging as vindicated heroes; and we see calls for heightened securitization. We hear statements like “Where was the National Guard?” “When are these people going to get arrested?” “Should the protestors be placed on the no-fly list?” etc. It’s difficult to argue with the call for accountability and safety—especially since people were killed—but this could take many forms, and needn’t exalt the security state and its penal apparatus. Unfortunately, the main significance of events like this is that they increasingly ratchet up the surveillance, harassment, and punishment of people that the powerful don’t like—even (and often especially) those who have nothing to do with the initial impetus for this expansion of state power. If you think the events of January 6th won’t materially affect how BLM, environmentalist, or other protestors are treated going forward, you’re being naïve.

The final valence is that by demonizing Trump and his supporters, our leaders in politics and the media are steadily shoring up our confidence in themselves as the “good guys.” The most blatant example of this is the veritable crowd of Republican politicians, cabinet members and media figures who thought everything Trump did and stood for was totally fine until two days ago, and who now want to save their careers by distancing themselves from him now that he’s in hot water and his tenure is over anyway. But scanning slightly closer to the center of the political spectrum, it’s clear that the incoming regime is going to ride this scandal as a wave of legitimacy. But the “good guys” are not in charge! If we didn’t have the devastating mess of the Trump years to compare it to, Biden’s presidency would clearly be seen for the imminent danger that it is! In spite of the incoming administration’s performative woke rhetoric, in the middle of a pandemic, we are about to swear in a president who doesn’t believe in medicare for all. In the middle of a police brutality crisis, we’re getting an administration that wants to increase the funding for law enforcement. In the middle of a climate emergency, we’re getting an administration that still isn’t aiming high enough to avert catastrophe. And as inequality (not just economic, but cultural, educational, and social) grows, we’re getting an administration that advocates the same old political and economic practices that got us here.

In the face of these deeply troubling developments, we’re going to need huge amounts of activism and resistance—operating not from a place of America-first nationalism, but from a place of global and existential solidarity. By displacing systemic understandings of our social, economic, cultural, and political conditions; by bolstering the security state; by shoring up the support for woefully inadequate political figures who intend to fight tooth and nail for the status quo, we’re undermining our capacity to perform the hard work ahead.

Why I Don't Post Slogans (reflections on declarative politics)

In the summer of 2020, a friend wrote to me, asking me why, during the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, I hadn’t been posting #BlackLivesMatter slogans or imagery. The following is (a slightly expanded version of) the response that I gave to that question.

* * *

Let me say that my core mission in life is to create a utopia without poverty, war, racism, sexism, horrendous inequality, unnecessary toil, systemic boredom and scarcity, etc. My politics are animated by this utopianism. Everything I do intellectually and politically is intended to be in the service of this.

And as part of this, I can hardly think of anything more pressing than the plight of African Americans (though poverty in the developing world and various existential risks are also there at the top of the list). Anyway, this sounds cheesy, but I feel committed to this on not just an intellectual, but a visceral—perhaps even ‘spiritual’ (if you want to call it that) level, and it’s been my goal for a long time.

I say this because I hope to convey that most of what I do is based on the hope of not just promoting, but actually achieving deep systemic changes in the world. It’s embarrassing to say in the era of virtue signaling, so I try not to make a big fuss about this.

I was there for the protests in 2008 when Oscar Grant was killed by the Oakland police, and have been at countless protests over the years demanding justice for police murders. But, I became a lot less declarative about my politics after the Occupy movement in 2011—not because my politics changed, but because my strategy changed.

In 2013 I distilled this non-declarative political strategy down into a (badly-written) essay, the basic contours of which are these:

-I see no strategic value in declaring my political identity—to do so would automatically mark me with suspicion among those who do not already agree with me, who I might otherwise have been able to influence.

-Another reason is that I want my identity to follow from my politics, rather than the other way around. Slogans, as declarative statements, demand a resolved and resolute figure standing behind them, and these days, I prefer to see myself as a complex, compromised, inconvenient and inappropriate cluster of deliberating voices—a static-ridden, Dr. Seussian machine of many functions that appear not to add up—at least not directly—shrouded in an aesthetic vapor cloud that further obscures a multiplicity of intentions. (As an aside, it’s my view that a better world may require certain nefarious elements to temporarily prevail at times, and others to be ascendant in strategically-useful ways, while other, more straightforwardly progressive and democratic forces win other battles and debates. I never back or support the reactionary side of a debate or a struggle, but sometimes I make my arguments strategically vulnerable to their incursions, while in other moments, I refrain from wading into a politically controversial morass—either because it is gridlocked and hopeless, or because it seems that the preferable side of a cause is gaining ground without my help.) Declarations are often barriers to critical, nuanced thought, and nearly always a foreclosure of strategic planning.

-Declarations are generally based upon critiques, and I do not want to over-rely on critiques, because critiques have some major flaws: first, critiques tend to rely on the very logic that they aims to criticize, since they are a reaction to an existing injustice or imbalance. If the main thing we do is critique the things we dislike, we will hardly have time to project how things might be better.

-Second, critique tends to abandon efficacy in exchange for purity. The radical theory collective Tiqqun puts it this way: “Critique would. . . claim to be all the purer and more radical the more it alienated itself from any positive grounding for its own verbal fabrications. In exchange for renouncing all its directly political claims, that is, in abdicating all contestations of the State's monopoly on politics, critique will be granted a monopoly on morality. It will now have free reign to protest, as long as it does not pretend to exist in any other way. Gesture without discourse on the one hand and discourse without gesture on the other—the State and Critique guarantee by the techniques specific to each (police and publicity, respectively) the neutralization of every ethical difference.” The critic is immediately visible because her intentions are the first thing out of her mouth. When we do declarative politics, we essentially inoculate the potential effect of our politics by making them unpalatable to those who do not already agree with us: “By revealing my hostility to a thing whose functions and determinisms I have grasped, I protect the very thing I want to destroy from myself, from my practice. And that—this innocuousness—is exactly what THEY expect when they urge me to declare myself a critic.”

My social media presence and political writings seek to reverse this. Instead of declaring (which I try not to do very often), I make demands and suggest reframings and solutions. This doesn’t mean that we can afford to have a world where nobody declares. I’m very glad that people are out there declaring, because it unleashes energy and makes struggles visible. I just see myself playing a different role (or series of roles).

All of that being said, I have specific thoughts on racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination, which are that they demand material, rather than rhetorical solutions. No matter how much we promote tolerance and educate people not to be racist, we will still be stuck with the material conditions that create racialized oppression, systemic deprivation, and antagonistic interests that lead to more racism, etc. unless we remake our political and economic systems. In a similar way to how my dear kin and comrade Zarinah, instead of declaratively condemning rape and sexual violence or sexism, runs a transformative justice project that seeks to actually solve the underlying problems that lead to sexual (and other forms of) violence, I’m aiming to offer demands, provocations, and aspirations that change systemic conditions.

To be clear, then, I think declaration is extremely important, and if declarations were not already being made, I myself would probably be making them. If we’re going to change systems, we need many approaches (many angles of approach), many voices, and many strategies, all working at the same time.

Prompt for Imagining the Post-Work City

The following is a prompt delivered at the beginning of a design charrette, where we invited participants to brainstorm and design visions (whether designs, art, or writing) imagining what cities could be like in a pos-work world. The charette was part of a larger project called Imagining the Post-Work Future (in collaboration with Andra Bria), which arose out of a blog post I wrote a few years ago on the topic.

We invite you to imagine and design art and design projects and proposals that envison what cities could be like in a world where we no longer have to work in order to sustain ourselves.

Cities of industry: Such a prospect demands a total rethinking of the existing spatial organization of society, since contemporary cities are designed with one particular universal in mind: the pervasiveness of work. Work has not only dominated our political imaginaries (from so-called “right to work” policies, to political platforms of “job creation,” economic security has tended to be unquestioningly tied to employment), but also the very landscapes in which we live our lives.

“Idleness”: Of course, at the heart of this spatial question is the matter of time: The way people spend time in a society fundamentally shapes the forms and functions that the city must take on and perform. In their present form, cities are plagued with a paradoxical combination of stressful and existentially challenging ways of experiencing time. On the one hand, you have so-called “idleness” among the unemployed and underemployed. This is for those in our society who have lots of time, but no money, and therefore no way of accessing the pay-to-play pleasures of leisure, or paid employment. If you have lots of time and no money, the metropolis is a hollow, cold series of streets, bounded by impenetrable facades, fences, walls and windows.

“Hyper-busy”: On the other hand, many people have money, but no time. Rushing from job to job, chore to chore, task to task, social event to social event; with no time to really play and explore. Drowning in an “attention economy,” that competes for headspace and emotional bandwidth, those with money but no time tend to superficially traverse the city in Lyfts and Ubers—a big, gridded series of transit corridors, stations and airports.

The pandemic: Recently, however, there has been a major interruption to our usual flows. Between economic turmoil, the pandemic’s forcing of “non-essential workers” to stay at home, I think many of us have really been relating to time and space quite differently. And in this disruptive moment, I think it’s so telling that so many people with money and the flexibility to work remotely have opted to leave the city to go roleplay rural lifestyles in remote Airbnbs. The cities aren’t worth their time. But the pandemic has also caused many of us to wake up to the fact that the ideology of perpetual work is itself inherently flawed; that shoveling our living hours into the furnace of production is no way to live!

Technology and economic crisis: Of course, major changes have been taking shape well before the pandemic, and continue to take shape alongside the pandemic. As Andra mentioned, there are the technological innovations in artificial intelligence, low-cost networked sensors, and robotics, and all sorts of innovations in fabrication techniques. These offer the utopian potential of making the marginal cost of goods waaay lower, while at the same time threatening a dystopia of mass unemployment. At the same time, there has been a prolonged economic stagnation for large swaths of the population in de-industrializing, developed countries. For many people, the recession of 2008 had barely ended when the pandemic struck, and now it looks like we face another recession.

Universal basic income: In the face of these changes, there has been increasing interest in policies such as universal basic income as a means of ensuring the economic welfare of all people. The idea is not new, but suddenly it’s becoming a mainstream idea. Cynically, a universal basic income could just be a modest check that doesn’t make up for widespread loss of employment, or the cutting of public services. Not offering enough to live on, it could just prolong the current economic experiment with capitalism, by propping it up and easing the severity of its systemic failures. At their most pragmatic, such proposals imagine themselves as a mere “leg up” to help people to gain the prerequisite qualifications necessary to become useful in the formal employment economy, as well as a stimulus injection to that economy.

Fully-Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism: But such proposals also have a radical utopian dimension that begs the question of what society could be like if all production was automated, the material abundance produced was equitably distributed, and nobody worked (in the employment sense) at all. Here, everyone would be paid a living income, no matter what, meaning that nobody would need to work, whether they were unable, or just didn’t want to. Certain socialist thinkers have theorized such a society for almost a century, and there has been a recent bout of literature on the topic, and the evocative handle “Fully-Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.” (if you want to read up on this literature, here are some places to start: Aaron Bastani, Fully-Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto; Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, "Chapter 2: Communal Luxury" [the last half of the chapter is the best bit]; Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism, "Chapter 3: Parasites on the Body of Capital"; Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, "Chapter 1: Communism: Equality and Abundance"; it is also worth checking out the Situationist artist Constant's utopian urban city design "New Babylon," and some of the writing about it, which tried to picture a world of no work and all play.)

But what about the post-work city? And yet, as this political possibility is contemplated by more and more people, there has been no significant discussion of the way that our built environments would have to change to accommodate this change in the way that we spend our time, effort, and attention. What could cities be like, if you and I and everyone else weren’t working (or expected to work) all the time? We think this is a profound question to ask, and one that demands a lot of imagination. Today’s design and imagineering charrette is about exploring this possibility.

Aspirations guide behavior: Before we dive into some of the themes and prompts that can perhaps guide our imaginations in this charrette, I want to say something about the power of design, imagination, and envisioning alternatives to the current reality. Much of what we do is oriented by a desired future as its endpoint. Generally, this is a culturally-produced idea of the “good life” that serves as an aspirational compass for present decisions. In my country, this guiding vision has, for the last century or so, been the idea of the “American Dream”—a suburban consumer paradise built around the nuclear family, individual wealth and career success. This vision continues to determine so much of how Americans behave on a daily basis, from their educational choices, to their financial choices, to their romantic choices. So many behaviors are oriented by the goal of the American Dream.

From futurism to nostalgia: And yet, this vision is beginning to crumble. The belief that hard work will pay off, and lead to the American Dream is proving to b an illusion for millions and millions of people. Increasingly, this dream appears not on the horizon, but in the rear-view mirror. As Svetlana Boym says in her brilliant 2001 book, “The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia.” Increasingly, we speak of “returns”—on the right, there’s a nostalgia for a previously “great” America, and on the left, there is a nostalgia for the Keynesian economic policies of the New Deal and the Great Society. Both are backwards-looking, and both are delusional. There’s no going back.

Architects of the future: The engineer and futurist Buckminster Fuller famously said that “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” With this charette, we hope to turn boldly toward the future, to imagine what cities could be like, precisely in order to update the aspirational visions that people use to orient their everyday actions. Here, we invite you to engage in what Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel call “futurecraft”—positing future scenarios, entertaining their consequences, and sharing these ideas widely to enable public conversation, debate, and imagination. Here, perhaps the discipline of “future studies” can serve as a guide, which explores not just technological innovation, but social innovation. It’s crucial to remember that while we may shape our cities, they, too, shape us. An architect of the future must therefore constantly be prepared to imagine not only how our cities and spaces can be different, but also how we, as the people living in them, can be different. How might daily life, relationships, aesthetics, life ambitions change, in a different built environment? How might we cease to be human in the familiar sense, and become post-human? Of course, we’re always already cyborgs; our tools are extensions of us, and we are extensions of our tools, with no rigorous way to think about one without the other. But when our tools become environments, we tend to start perceiving the dynamics that they encourage as nature. All of this is to say: in your explorations, we hope you won’t just design for the naturalized person of today—the inhabitant of industrious, work-oriented built environments. We hope you will design for a humanity that could be.

Prompts

There are a number of dimensions that one might consider when they imagine what the post-work city could be like. We have written a prompt for these dimensions. They are as follows:

Public spaces: What kinds of public spaces might exist in the place of offices and factories and stores that currently dominate the landscapes of our downtowns and central districts? What facilities and attractions might exist to occupy the time freed from work? How might people interact with the forms and functions of the city, and determine its uses?

Housing: What kinds of dwellings would people have in such a world? Would people even continue to have “homes,” in the traditional sense, or might they drift—either from fixed place to fixed place, or else become sort of “urban hunter-gatherers,” eating, sleeping, playing, etc., entirely in public spaces, never claiming these spaces as their own, because the entirety of urban space has become a “benevolent machine” that provides all of the material necessities, functionality, safety, comfort, and entertainment that the home once did?

Regional distribution of the population: Economic opportunity has been the key driver behind migration and settlement throughout history, and has been the primary determining factor behind why human settlements are located where they are. How would a non-work world alter the geographical distribution of humans? Would certain regions depopulate, and others grow? Would existing cities dissipate, as people became free of the economic tethers of employment binding them there, and sought to live in smaller conurbations and rural settings? On the other hand, would society perhaps move its entire population into concentrated megacities, as rural and peri-urban production ceased to require human involvement?

Infrastructure: How might infrastructure work in such a world? How, especially, would people and goods move around, and for what new purposes, for not for work and commerce? How might automated and de-commodified distribution infrastructures function? Would there be pilotless drone deliveries, pick-up points, and driverless ground transportation, as is already developing now? Or might a population freed from the time constraints of employment return to simpler methods of transportation and brick & mortar “shopping” for goods and necessities? What, moreover, might be done with the vast existing infrastructures of work and human-powered production (offices, factories, etc.). 

Institutions: How might institutions function differently, and what kinds of formal/spatial conditions might this call for? How, for example, might education function in a post-work world where education no longer must be rushed into the early years of one’s life, to make time for work? How might the city accommodate alternative educational practices, perhaps with students of diverse ages and backgrounds? How might healthcare function? Government?

Care, friendship and socialization: A world without work is likely to be a world with more rich, complex, and considered social interaction. What might social spaces be like in such a world? How might people spend time together, meet new people, seek entertainment, conduct their sexual lives, etc., and what kinds of places might accommodate these activities? How would care (either supportive care for children, the elderly, the disabled, etc., and/or everyday care between people) function in a world where nobody has to work? What kinds of spaces might be set aside for these various types of care?

Time: How would time function in a society freed from work? Would we all continue to sleep primarily at night, and to move around during the day? Or would there be new kinds of nocturnal worlds, new kinds of 24-hour spaces, new explorations of what is possible and desirable at night? Relatedly, how might cities and their spaces relate to seasons differently? How, for example, might activities and spaces be designed to relate to seasonal changes in weather, climate and lighting conditions, where the productive city sought to defy these changes in order to keep the wheels of commerce moving? Might the city come to resemble seasonal resorts? Or might cities be altogether abandoned for a nomadic migration between seasonal resorts? At the scale of a lifetime, how might the removal of work lead to a reconfiguration of the way one organizes their lifespan—with career concerns typically dominating this organization—and how might this change the kinds of activities that cities are designed around (schools and play spaces for children, workplaces and entertainment-oriented leisure for adults, and eldercare and retirement activities for the elderly, etc.)?

Energy, food and waste/urban metabolisms: How might the organic metabolism of the city work in a post-work world? How would people participate in the capturing and use of energy? How might the interrelated management of food supply and waste be handled? Would humans become more or less involved in the capturing of energy, the production of their food and/or the disposal of their waste?

Creativity and aesthetics: Would there be a coherent or consistent aesthetic to the post-work city? How might art, design, music, and other forms of creative practice and production be accommodated? Might creativity shape and reshape the city on an ongoing basis?

The Dimensions of Social and Emotional Ecology

I have been thinking and speaking for a long time about “emotional ecology,” which refers to the way that care, sex, trust, etc. in one’s social life are distributed. The concept really crystallized for me as I began having “alternative” (non-monogamous) sexual relationships, and started living communally, and found that this altered my emotional needs, and the way that I invested in friendships, and showed up for, and participated in new relationships—both sexual and non-sexual. It’s a rather obvious point, but the relationships one has are impacted by the other relationships they have, and the composition and distribution of emotional connections within that set of relationships is a complex series of balanced and interrelated parts—like an ecosystem. If a close friend dies or moves away, or a sexual partner drifts or gets more busy, it affects one’s needs and availability in ways that affect one’s other relationships. Some emotional resources are relatively unlimited (or at least in abundance), while others are more finite and/or limited (time being a prime example). Here, I consider some of the dimensions of emotional ecology—mostly to map out my thought on the subject, and to offer a framework for others to begin thinking about and using the concept.

Emotions are historically and culturally contingent

In the first place, it must be said: emotions are not fixed or universal. Too often, we rely on rigid biological explanations for our desires and emotional responses to things, when, as the burgeoning field of emotional history brings into the foreground, though, our emotions are historically variable, and contingent on changes in culture, politics, economics, and other factors. While there may be immutable instincts, the actual expression of instincts changes across time and space. The field of affect theory explores this distinction, when it investigates how affects and emotions are not the same thing. As some affect theorists posit (though there’s still some debate about this), while affects may be “pre-discursive” (or, unshaped by culture), emotions certainly are shaped by cultural narratives and forces. In other words, I might immediately feel a lurch of feeling when I see my brother for the first time in over a year, but the emotion I have around that feeling is shaped by the meaning I give to my brother, to our relationship, to his status as a man in our culture, to social norms and conventions around masculine affection, etc. The history of emotions traces the way that feelings have been given meaning and expression in different cultures, in different places, at different times.

Because our emotions are historically contingent, the concrete form our relationships take is also contingent. The idea of a “girlfriend,” or a “mom” or a “sugar daddy” or a “friend with benefits” is made up. We invent genres for relating to one another in order to streamline communication, solidify and shore up social expectations and norms, and often to achieve various personal or societal goals. But just because these relationship genres are clear and recognizable does not mean that they are fixed, immutable categories that cannot be changed.

Social ecologies as the basis for emotional ecologies

We tend to think of relationships quite individualistically, often asking people about their preferences and ideals. But people’s desires and ideals are often shaped by what is available to them in their social milieu. Here, relationship genres shift from being immanent, freely-chosen behaviors, to transcendent, imposed institutions—and this belies the idea that preferences and ideals are purely a matter of individual choice. If you’re the “only gay in the village” (as the Little Britain skit jokes), this is going to hamper your prospects for living your ideals. Perhaps even more importantly, if you’re only one of two “gays in the village,” the preferences, ideals, and expectations of the other gay person will likely influence (if not altogether define) the way you think about and express your desires. Scaling up and out, if all of the people you’re potentially interested in sexually are holding out for marriage, then marriage will likely dominate your imagination about how and when sex happens, and may even lead you to see marriage as your ideal. This is how social ecology tends to structure emotional ecology, since emotions are often relational.

One of the things I have discovered from living in intentional communities—especially communal living environments—where community members are surrounded by numerous strong and enduring bonds, frequent social contact, and a relative surfeit of sexual opportunities, is that one’s desire and availability for other relationships in the wider world morphs. I often hear from people (and I felt this way myself), that they suddenly feel like they have more compatibility issues with people in social and romantic relationships, since there is a mismatch between the other person’s underlying bed of social and sexual relationships and their own. Coming from a dense and supportive social ecology, the communal resident’s social, sexual and emotional needs are often slighter than the standard person on Tinder, or friend from the office. To their friend, the communal resident comes across as confident, independent, and perhaps even a bit blasé, but their apparent independence is a direct result of their interdependence with a resilient group of friends, housemates and partners—and this can be perceived good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, confidence and independence are often viewed as attractive—they signal that a person has a good life and won’t become codependent or clingy. On the other hand, in a world where many social relationships are coercive and/or secured by the threat of loneliness (reinforced by the social desolation of much of contemporary life), the person with a robust and resilient social and emotional ecology can represent a threat; they don’t need you, and will be ok if your relationship ends. If your usual dating/friendship strategy relies upon the gravity of fear/insecurity, this can be a dealbreaker.

On the flip side, to the communal resident, the person with fewer social ties can seem overly needy and/or clingy and/or jealous (in a negative interpretation), or refreshingly loyal, conveniently available, and highly invested (in a positive interpretation). Here, different social ecologies can cause compatibility issues, or they can offer different and perhaps complimentary virtues.

What’s interesting about this is that it offers a means by which people can think about—and transform—their relationships in a holistic manner. By changing the overall composition of their social ecology, they can strategically alter the kinds of relationships they have. The only barrier is: it takes a village—specifically, one with other “gays”.

Social ecology and identity

By embedding oneself in different social and emotional ecologies, one can change their role and identity in the world.

To return to the personally-familiar example of communal living, what one finds is that behaviors are able to be disaggregated from the normative relationship genres that tend to bundle them into predefined types. One can have sex with a partner without being a “boyfriend” or a “girlfriend;” one can bring in financial resources to support others without being a traditional “breadwinner,” or birth and care for a child without being a “mom.” Indeed, within such a context, many of the most important cultural markers of gender cease to have relevance. Life timelines also cease to be rigidly defined, as shared resources and an abundance of care and love relieve come of the social and financial pressures to build a traditional “career” or fit oneself to one of the standard founder roles of the nuclear family.

At the same time, altering one’s social and emotional ecology and/or identity can be alienating. Widespread cultural tropes cease to have purchase or personal resonance; stigmas and stereotypes—designed to motivate people to be (re)productive in our post-industrial society—can be applied to those who don’t conform themselves; social horizons and opportunities can be limited because it’s difficult to find compatible people to fit into a non-standard social/emotional ecology; one can also feel “unseen,” as they slip out of the normative modes of cultural intelligibility (of which gender is a very powerful one), etc.

Nevertheless, as Lauren Berlant insists, “It is a time for using the impasse that we’re in to learn something about how to imagine better economies of intimacy and labor.”  It seems that, as the rewards for playing by the existing norms diminish, there are many who are exploring alternatives, and therefore, there are likely to be growing pools of people who emote, love, identify, and see in new ways, by virtue of the fact that they are arranging the ecology of their relationships differently.

The Personal is Political . . . Right? (Balancing Personal and Planetary Thrival)

We’ve all heard some version of the saying that “you can’t pour from an empty cup,” meaning that the person who isn’t taken care of will struggle to take care of others. In recent years, in response to both the traumas of living in a world such as ours (with its unique blend of turmoil and denialism; stresses/harms and pervasive gaslighting), and the burnout experienced by many activists, there has been a growing emphasis on self care and healing. Adjacent to, and sometimes sharing space with these are calls for personal growth and transformation, based in therapeutic, spiritual and cultural practices that, at their most emancipatory, wage a “microrevolution” against the harmful conditioning that a hierarchical society instills in all of us. Healing, taking care oneself ourself, and transfiguring one’s subjectivity are all indispensable features of any truly transformative project, and without these in place, one cannot expect to get very far in their efforts to remake the world. But on their own these are insufficient, and can even be downright harmful. Against the idea that self-care is always inherently a revolutionary, we agree with the rejoinder that “self care is only revolutionary if you’re a revolutionary.” Like other kinds of care and collectively-produced value, like domestic labor in the household, emotional labor and all kinds of care work, these social resources can just be used to prop up hierarchy, disparity and systems of exploitation by reproducing the labor power, vitality and morale that keep everything operating smoothly. Today, massive industries dedicated to bolstering the physical, social, spiritual and emotional needs of the elite and the high-value cognitive laborers increasingly appropriates the languages of self care, healing, and self-improvement in order to make the system run better and its beneficiaries more effective and secure in their equanimity. All sorts of products and services offer wellbeing-for-a-price to a population weary and overworked, while, on a perhaps even more deleterious level, a variety of drugs offer temporary sanctuary from the stresses of the world. We should reject any approach to personal transformation that ignores societal transformation, just as we should reject supposed societal transformation that ignores personal transformation. We should view these as inherently interlocking processes, which can elevate and empower one another, or, if one or the other is absent, undercut and undermine one another.

Why Your Love of Nature May be Destroying Nature

A few weeks ago, I posted, in a rather cavalier fashion, that I dislike spending time in nature. As the horrifying fires rage all along the west coast of the United States, I’d like to elaborate a bit on the ethics and aesthetics behind that post.

Ethics: If You Love Nature, Don't Live In It

First of all, let me just say that I love the earth, its geological and meteorological systems, its bountiful ecosystems, and all of the nonhuman life that we share our planet with. I think we should look after these systems, not only because they have intrinsic value independent of us, but also because we depend on these for our own survival.

But this love of the earth is not the same thing as an aesthetic love of being *in* natural spaces. Let’s remember: loggers and hunters and frontiersmen have all professed their own love being in nature. Not only is an aesthetic appreciation of being in nature not the same thing as loving the earth and its systems; a strong case can be made that the aesthetic appreciation of nature is actually exacerbating the crises plaguing the earth’s ecosystems, since it inspires humans to abandon cities and take up residence in rural and/or semi-rural settings.

The most pervasive example of this is suburbia. Suburbia is an unequivocally destructive type of conurbation whose appeal is located precisely in its pseudo-pastoral aesthetics (there’s the old joke that suburbia cuts down trees and names streets after them). And this is just as true for rural development. As human settlement sprawls outwards, it not only displaces and disrupts ecosystems; it also increases the carbon footprint attributable to transportation of goods and people over longer distances. Moreover, as the recent fires in California have demonstrated, the blurring of the boundaries between the built and “natural” environments has meant that naturally-occurring processes (such as the small fires that should ordinarily periodically clear out the accumulation of dead vegetation in places with wet winters and arid summers) have been interrupted, leading to greater crises and more serious habitat destruction.

What would be much better is for there to be hard boundaries between urban and rural settings, with minimal infrastructural incursions into habitat. This would be the aim of a truly worthwhile preservation movement: clearly delineated cities, energy- and material-efficient lifestyles, and a re-wilding of rural land. Unfortunately, the trends are moving in the opposite direction (and this will probably be exacerbated by the lifestyle choices of the middle class in the wake of Covid)—most recent development in California has been occurring in fire-prone areas, and this trend is projected to continue, due to the pervasive affordability crisis in urban housing markets. But this is yet another reason for why we should be *solving* our urban affordability crisis, and making cities more interesting, beautiful and livable more generally. If you’re in a position to think about ethics (many people aren’t!), and you love nature, you might consider living in a city and leaving it alone.

But let me address another dimension of this issue: the very concept of nature is flawed. The concept of nature creates an artificial distinction between nature and human culture, as if the latter is not part of the former. To escape to nature is to fool oneself into thinking that they are escaping culture, as if the practice of aesthetically elevating and spending time in wilderness is not cultural or ideological (it is!). Perhaps even more perniciously—from an ecological perspective—is the fact that, as Benjamin Bratton has explained, this “nature/culture divide didn’t [even] protect what it called nature, even as it elevated the notion to a transcendental ideal.” Not only has this elevation of nature to a transcendental ideal not protected the sphere of activity we call nature; it has actively harmed it, in the ways I have already mentioned.

Aesthetics: Retreatism vs. ”architects of the future”

In my post, I stated that I specifically find spending time in nature to be boring. The implication was not to say that cities, by contrast, are particularly enjoyable. On the contrary, we've utterly failed, especially over the last 200 years, to build cities as places "fit for human habitation," to appropriate Hannah Arendt’s phrase. My aesthetic boredom with nature, then, is not a favoritism for “really-existing cities,” then,  but for what cities could be. Our capabilities to make dreamy, complex, dynamic, labyrinthine, even sublime urban environments has never been greater. And yet, as a culture, we continue to foster a pervasive pastoralism and nostalgia in our aesthetics.

The love of nature aesthetics, in 2020, has a certain defeatism inherent to it. My worry is that the latest wave of nature-loverism is symptomatic of the abandonment of ambitious and audacious human bids to shape their own environments, because the built environments of late capitalism are so barren, sterile, dangerous, uncomfortable, and highly stratified. As Rem Koolhaas’s brilliant essay on “junkspace” makes deeply palpable, we’ve squandered the resources of the world, yet done so little of value with them. “Junkspace,” he says, “is the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than all previous generations together, but somehow we do not register on the same scales. We do not leave pyramids.” What we have instead is “a low-grade purgatory,” an “ornamental afterthought on hurriedly erected superblocks,” “flamboyant yet unremarkable,” built of lightweight and impermanent materials, and crisscrossed with traffic-congested highways. In addition to this, our digital cities have also proven themselves to be a dystopia of misinformation, Twitter mobs, scams, targeted advertising, status posturing, and an endless news cycle of horrors. In the face of all of this, many have elected to retreat into a conservative/primitive therapeutic "returning" to the land, rather than engaging in a direct confrontation with society’s problems.

It’s very understandable that people would desire a kind of escapism from the terrifying world of pandemics, high-fructose politics, asinine crowd behaviors, and all the rest of it. But that escape doesn’t necessarily have to be the (colonially-constructed) aesthetic category of nature. Personally, I prefer the realm of utopian projection, fiction, and design. Rather than backing out of our crises, I want to find a way forward—up and over the horrors of contemporary life. To contradict the common sense of a generation of disenchanted members of contemporary society, I would posit that perhaps our problem is not that our lives are too artificial and too disconnected from nature; perhaps, instead, the problem is that they are not artificial enough. Inhering in this idea is a wilderness far vaster than all the Yosemites and Yellowstones and Grand Canyons, with infinite aesthetic experiences to be had, and infinite versions of ourselves and our society to perform. Here, I stand firmly with Buckminster Fuller, who said that “We are called to be the architects of the future, not its victims.”

Left Criminological "Ultra-Realism" and Defunding the Police

There’s a left/liberal fantasy that crime is just a name we give to desperate poor people seeking to get their needs met. There is an implicit respectability politics here, which tries to make the case that those committing crimes are perfect, innocent victims who we can conjure middle-class sympathy for. But it’s out of touch with the realities of criminality in our society, since it tries to conveniently bypass the prospect that many individuals are flawed (*we made them that way*), and that crime is a truly destructive force in our society.

A more rigorous approach comes from the “left (criminological) realists,” who recognize that crime disproportionately affects the poor and the working class, and that, because of this, conservatives have gained a lot of traction among working-class constituents by being “tough on crime.” Left realists do not downplay crime or its consequences (like left idealists tend to do), *nor* do they ignore its causes (as right-realists do). They continue to be “tough on crime,” *but* this does not necessarily mean being tough on *criminals*. It means changing the economic and social factors that tend to lend themselves to high crime rates.

A related part of left realism is a willingness to acknowledge that the victims of injustice and oppression are often not spontaneously just or virtuous, as many left/liberals wish they were—essentially deserving, innocent victims with good intentions. Here, I really value Slavoj Žižek's position, which is basically that one of the *worst* things about oppression is that it actually tends to create flawed, traumatized, hurt, dependent, self-interested people (with many exceptions, of course). A lot of people steal to afford luxury goods (and this shouldn't be surprising given the cultural value that we place on these), and commit violence for narcissistic and/or passionate reasons. Lots of violent crimes are basically abuse and domestic violence. Because of this, the respectability politics that tries to conjure middle-class sympathy for those committing crimes has been super easy for conservatives to rebuke. But it does not pose a threat to a left-realist program of tackling crime at its deep, structural sources. The fact that people who are caught up in cycles of harm are not always virtuous isn't justification for ignoring their needs; indeed, it points to an even more urgent need to make sure that everyone in our society is looked after!

What I'm trying to say is that we need a more resilient foundation for our bid to create universal care—one that can swallow up the conservative cultural critique, rather than ignoring it, and one that can supersede the failed, individualizing version of “tough on crime” that has, if anything, exacerbated the problem.

References:

Article on left realist criminology: https://revisesociology.com/2016/09/06/left-realism/

Podcast episode on the left "ultra-realism": https://aufhebungabunga.podbean.com/e/65-bunga-gets-ultra-real-ft-steve-hall/

Oppression vs. Discrimination: Why You Can Have Racism Without Racists

The way you pose a problem determines the kinds of solutions that you will seek. Suddenly, the world is paying attention to race and the awful tolls of racism—perhaps in the most significant way since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. In the face of enormous pressure, the powerful in our society have made the first round of concessions ostensibly addressing the demands of the protests and movements that have gripped the world. Now, more than ever, it is imperative that we continue to refine our framing of the problems we’re up against, and that we maintain a fidelity to this framing, so that politicians and corporations cannot manipulate or sideline the solutions that will make real, meaningful change in our society. The purpose of this post is to suggest that frameworks (and the policies designed after them) that approach racism as primarily a matter of discrimination are liable to fail. What are needed are diagnoses and solutions that highlight the ways that institutional and structural oppression has created racialized disparities, inequality, and brutality—conditions that demand systemic and institutional solutions. There are amazing voices speaking and writing about structural racism, (sometimes even in the language of discrimination , i.e. Michelle Alexander and bell hooks), yet these voices have tended to be drowned out by mainstream liberal perspectives that highlight personal bigotry, prejudice and “white fragility”—all of which intuitively leads to corporate sensitivity training and anti-racism workshops (operating almost therapeutically and cathartically at the personal level, rather than the structural level). The current crises of pervasive police killings, mass incarceration and mass death from the coronavirus and other preventable diseases—all of which disproportionately affect black Americans—demand frameworks that transcend accusations of discrimination and highlight structural inequality and systemic, institutionalized deprivation and cruelty. Oppression, not discrimination, must be the target of our critiques, and the basis of our demands and struggles.

Our society is a supremely individualist one, and this has fundamentally shaped how we frame the issue of racism. Our political movements tend to frame their claims in terms of rights and protections from discrimination, rather than economic, political or environmental justice. In recent weeks, the liberal left has been quick to diagnose police killings as a matter of police misconduct, while much of the “cultural left” has diagnosed them as a product of white supremacy. Countless memes of police as fascists or as KKK members or as pigs lend themselves to the idea that police are evil, corrupt, hateful, bigoted, etc.—charges that may indeed often be true, but which miss the systemic role of police in our society. In the first place, the implicit assumption is that there are more humane and less corrupt ways to run the policing and carceral apparatus that maintains public safety. In the second case, the implicit assumption is that people need to stop being hateful and bigoted and racist. The problem, in both cases, is a personal failing to be a good person. The solution embedded in this individualist framing effectively amounts to a demand for less racist, “discriminating” police. What all of these individualizing approaches to police violence miss—and here, they are consistent with much of our broader social justice discourses—is that you can have racism without racists; sexism without sexists, etc., because oppression is embedded in material institutions that will not go away, even if discrimination disappears.

The political theorist and feminist socialist Iris Marion Young has carefully drawn out the distinction between discrimination and oppression in a magnificent article entitled “The Five Faces of Oppression,” where she writes that, “[i]n its traditional usage, which most people retain, ‘oppression’ means the exercise of tyranny by a ruling group.” Such a definition misses the ways that oppression may occur in the “everyday practices of a well-intentioned liberal society,” often “in the absence of overt discrimination.” While “the tyranny of a ruling group over another . . . must certainly be called oppressive,” Young explains, the term can also designate “systemic and structural phenomena that are not necessarily the result of the intentions of a tyrant.” This framing of oppression without intentionality is key—not only to Young’s argument, but to solving our problems today, as we address—albeit too often in the language of discrimination—the forms of oppression that are pervasive in our society. Because “[o]ppression in the structural sense is part of the basic fabric of a society, not a function of a few people’s choice or policies,” Young continues, “[y]ou won’t eliminate this structural oppression by getting rid of the rulers or making some new laws.” Unlike discrimination, oppression does not merely exist in intentions and laws, but “are systematically reproduced in major economic, political, and cultural institutions.” To solve oppression, we must dismantle and replace these institutions.

Yet, in a bizarre hybrid development, a generation of liberal advocates of social justice have mixed up the meaning of oppression and discrimination, using the word “oppression” when they really mean discrimination. Remaining within a liberal ontology, these advocates of social justice are unlikely to adequately theorize and address the truly systemic causes of oppression, as they struggle in vain to call out and isolate individual transgressors, since the injustices that they oppose have deep structural causes. As Young explains, one reason that political struggles have tended to be framed in individualistic terms of discrimination is that in “our society . . . the prevailing political discourse does not have a place in its social ontology for structuration and social groups.” Liberal society—built on the rights and protections of individuals—is unable to recognize oppression, Young explains, and therefore tends to default to “using instead the term ‘discrimination’ to refer to [societal] injustices.” Unlike oppression, discrimination requires a discriminating agent—it “is a methodologically individualist concept”—and it is therefore apparently much easier to diagnose and call out. But without a fully-developed conception of oppression—the structural, institutionalized ways in which exploitation and deprivation are managed in a highly stratified and extractive society—we are unlikely to succeed in preventing or reversing the harms that our social justice movements rally against. The distinction between oppression and discrimination needs to be posed and made operational—not just by academics but by everyone struggling for a better future.

Evidence of the inadequacy of a discrimination framework (even if it uses the term “oppression”) may be located in several places. For one thing, discrimination continues to persist, despite the best efforts of those aiming to stamp it out. Despite society becoming increasingly politically correct and tolerant of different identities, white supremacy is out in the open today, in ways not seen in decades. What’s more, those who discriminate often disavow their own racism as they engage in it, as seen in, for example, this video of a Cambridge cop who continually insists, in effect, "I'm not racist; I am just rationally profiling you on the basis of your skin color.” Here, the quest to demonize racism has caused a kind of disavowal for those engaging in discriminatory behavior, whose reasoning goes: “the thing I’m doing can’t be racist because I myself am not racist.”

I don’t need to rehash the figures here, but, despite the increases in “awareness,” “representation” and struggles against discrimination, there continue to be enormous disparities between the lives and financial prospects of black and white Americans. Black Americans are 5 times more likely to be incarcerated than are white Americans, while the average white household has ten times the net worth than the average black family. These material facts are, or course, the products of long-standing legacies of exclusion and discrimination, but they can continue to persist in the absence of discrimination. This is what people mean when they refer to “systemic” or “institutional” racism: whether or not individuals in positions of power and privilege hold racist views, these pervasive conditions continue to persist in and through institutionalized arrangements in the way that wealth and property are accumulated, valued and defended.

If you can have oppression without discrimination, it follows that you can eliminate discrimination without eliminating systemic racism (or sexism, or classism, etc.). This would is a special dystopia, where bourgeois liberal sensitivity polices language, corporations affirm the many different identities of their consumers, there are no individual hate crimes, and yet, many people are still poor, uneducated, in prison, and/or prevented by their circumstances from having decent or fulfilling lives. Here, anything but encouragement and celebration of those living “subaltern” existences would be off-limits (“we must celebrate their identities,” the moral diplomats would insist in such a dystopia). To critique the fundamentally unjust conditions of poverty and deprivation would violate the dictates of sensitive speech, where the priority is not justice, but to merely not offend. Structural antagonism and disparity would continue to exist, but everyone would be “heard” and told that they are “valid”—tendencies we already see on social media.

The worry that gains are being made on purely cultural grounds has led a growing minority within the left to become disgruntled with so-called “identity politics:” the ambition, they insist, should not be to make an inherently oppressive society less offensive and more inclusive; it should be to create a world without oppression. While I myself stand firmly committed to cultural struggles and to intersectional conceptualizations of oppression, it is true, as many within the anti-identitarian left point out, that too often, “sensitivity,” “awareness” and “representation” serve as a cover for institutionalized exploitation, inequality, extraction and destruction—a phenomenon that, in our times has come to be called “woke neoliberalism.” Cynically, this is what is occurring when companies like Nike and McDonald’s and Pepsi jump on the bandwagon of campaigning for (deliberately ambiguous) racial justice. As a friend recently posted, “Who knew that every company with my email address is committed to #blacklivesmatter?” These companies realize that doing so is, in the words of the senior VP of a prominent marketing firm, a “business imperative.” Yet, as some journalists have pointed out, the actual actions of such companies suggests a hollowness to their communications of solidarity. Talk (and, I might add: representation and sensitivity and awareness with it) is cheap.

An additional risk posed by an overemphasis on discrimination is that it fails to resonate for those who do not experience or witness discrimination in their everyday lives. There are, of course, still many explicitly racist people and institutions who discriminate and engage in hate crimes, but for many—especially those disproportionally powerful people who exist in the privileged bubbles of self-congratulatory liberal tolerance—overt discrimination appears to be a fringe phenomenon. While white supremacy rallies and racialized police incidents make headlines from time to time, the reasoning goes, this is a sign that we have mostly moved on from all of that. Headlines, they reason, highlight exceptional occurrences. Racism is therefore now the exception; not the rule—a position seemingly confirmed by their sanitized Facebook newsfeed. Such a person can only feel alienated and confused when charges of racism are hurled around. Most of us know a few of these “rational” privileged people who, in recent days and weeks have stepped back to say: “Isn’t that a bit overblown? Why all the animosity and outrage?” Such apathy and antagonism to contemporary struggles might be counted as a casualty of overly discrimination-oriented conceptions of racism and accountability.

The over-reliance on discrimination as a framework of understanding and explicating the problems of racism runs the risk of fostering empathy and understanding only for those who are perfect victims or archetypical villains. When they hear about discrimination, the first question many ask is: how deserving of my empathy is the victim here? How innocent was the victim, and how evil was the perpetrator? There are a number of problems with this. For one thing, conceptions of victimhood and innocence (and their converse) are deeply gendered and racialized, and exist on a hierarchy—a fact that is borne out by the long and terrible history of lynching in the United States.

In addition to this, many of those who suffer from oppression are never presented to the public as convenient victims of discrimination. There is no “event” that we can point to in order to anchor empathy and understanding. Moreover, clear victim-perpetrator dichotomies fail to address one of the most unjust aspects of oppression: that those who have been systematically held back, policed, impoverished, exposed to disproportionate health risks and malnutrition and violence often are not spontaneously virtuous. For this reason, those who are most oppressed in our society often appear not as victims, but as perpetrators of harm. In a world that had a strong discourse about oppression, we would openly acknowledge, as “oppression realists,” that substandard conditions of life and the manifold deprivations of poverty and generational trauma have caused many people to be hurt and damaged in ways that are often anti-social, self-destructive, and societally costly. The absence of such discourses, I think, is contributing to new, devastating forms of intolerance (I’m thinking here of the so-called “race realists” who claim to use empirical evidence [but never history] to explain—and justify—racial disparities) that are quietly taking root among many who witness and experience the secondary consequences of oppression yet have no discourse through which to express these concerns in a heavily racialized and antagonistic society that no longer believes it’s appropriate to talk about race: ironically, the seeds of a new form of discrimination find fertile soil in these conditions. Where discrimination discourses can only find conversations about the consequences of racialized disparity to be, themselves, discriminatory, a discourse that centers oppression (especially when paired with an intention of abolishing the underlying causes) can address these issues head-on. In other words, discrimination discourses threaten to reinforce “particularisms” and new identity-based antagonisms by failing to address the ways that systemic oppression moves in the world. The way to combat this is not through doubling down on anti-discrimination measures, but through addressing and abolishing oppression.

In all of these cases, the emphasis, within prevalent social justice discourses, on discrimination without an accompanying emphasis on the structural aspects of oppression has not only left much to be desired, but actively undermined the cause of eliminating racism. Not only can you have racism without racists (that is: oppression without discrimination), but you can also have—and I believe this is occurring now—a situation in which the neglect of structural causes actually exacerbates the prevalence of racism and leads to even higher amounts of discrimination. The point of all of this commentary is not to disavow the importance of continuing to tackle discrimination, but to augment that effort with a struggle against the structural causes of oppression.

The Meaning of Autonomous Zones

In the last 24 hours, we have witnessed the erection of a so-called “autonomous zone” in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, whose unofficial mantra has been described as “free food, free speech, and free of police” by the New York Times. The barricaded neighborhood has drawn the ire of President Trump, who threatened to take the neighborhood back from the “Domestic Terrorists” if the local and state authorities don’t do so first. “If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game.” Trump demanded on his favorite social media platform. What the President doesn’t realize is that autonomous zones are a likely and logical response to a crisis of governance that he himself has precipitated.

Autonomous zones have a long history (most notably in places such as Christiania, Marinaleda, Chiapas, Exarcheia, etc.), as movements have sought to challenge the governing bodies and paradigms of their respective societies. In a world in which all territory is occupied by hegemonic nation states who claim to be the sole authority, self-governance outside of the state is effectively banned, since the state maintains both a “monopoly of violence” and also enforces laws and ensures rights. Under present conditions, there is nowhere you can go to exist outside of police power, capitalist relations of production and exchange, or private property ownership. There is nowhere you can go to experiment with new kinds of public accountability and public safety, or new forms of property tenure and use, or new kinds of political decision-making.

Many might find the state’s hegemony tolerable, if that state (and the economic, social and cultural paradigms that it enforces, encourages and regulates) was doing a good job, but that is certainly not the case.  Inequality, unaffordable housing, a variety of economic, social and medical epidemics, a breakdown of public services, a breakdown of social solidarity, pervasive racialized violence and environmental catastrophe—all of these threaten the stability, viability and legitimacy of our current government (and most of these have been in place for far longer than Trump’s presidency). At the same time, under present conditions of so-called “neoliberalism,” the government increasingly rejects its duty of care toward its citizens (as evidenced very clearly in the Coronavirus crisis, where the government essentially threw up its hands and said: “this isn’t our responsibility”). The result of all of this is a massive vacuum of governance that demands alternative solutions.

With this context, we should understand autonomous zones to be about much more than merely barring the police from entering. We must read the opening of these experimental spaces as a sign that existing governance and norms are failing to provide safety or the conditions for economic, social and/or creative flourishing. It is not just about eliminating governance and norms, therefore, but about experimenting with new governance and new norms that are better suited for safer, fairer, and more just ways of being. Autonomous zones are places where different kinds of governance and norms may be implemented—even if only temporarily.

What’s so powerful about these kinds of experiments is that they offer a glimpse into what the world could be like, if it was governed differently. They create the soil for new ideas and desires to take root. These experimental spaces, by giving rise—even in a brief or limited way—to new kinds of governance, norms, social relationships, solidarity, etc., shake us out of the crisis of imagination that causes us to believe that there really are no alternatives—a condition that the late Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism.” The economic geographer David Harvey has insists on the importance of “liminal social spaces of possibility where ‘something different’ is not only possible, but foundational,” and claims that this is always necessary as a precondition for broader social and political transformation. {Harvey, Rebel Cities, xvii.} By creating a temporary break from the status quo, people are empowered to “do, feel, sense, and come to articulate” another kind of reality in moments or bursts. These “irruptions” allow “disparate heterotopic groups [to] suddenly see, if only for a fleeting moment, the possibilities of collective action to create something radically different.” {xvii}

The temporality of autonomous zones is therefore very important to their overall trajectory. An autonomous zone may aspire to become a permanent fixture, or it may instead be instituted as what the anarchist theorist Hakim Bey called a “temporary autonomous zone.” As Bey explains, what is so powerful about temporary autonomous zones is that they can exist anywhere, without a lot of overhead. It is usually not necessary to fight the state or other hegemonic power structures tooth and nail (or to sell out and find ways to monetize the experiment in order to maintain it within a state-managed private property system and within the bounds of state authority) to hold on to them permanently. Moreover, it becomes less important to get governance and norms 100% right in a temporary autonomous zone, since their temporary erection does not lead to permanent, calcified structures whose potential flaws could persist indefinitely within the new social, cultural, economic and political spheres opened up. Finally, by making the zone temporary, the experiment is able to avoid the many kinds of exploitation, opportunism and corruption that are always a real risk when status quo governance and norms are suspended. It’s not that these factors cannot be overcome, but they each demand their own infrastructural solutions, which the people participating in a provisional experiment—maybe for the first time ever—may not be prepared to implement. By remaining ephemeral, the temporary autonomous zone is able to be relatively uncompromising in its idealism.

Permanent or not, the autonomous zone stands as a beacon for other experiments. It does not merely open the minds, hearts and imaginations of those who take part in it, but lays the groundwork and sets the precedent for other experiments—no matter how big or small. Even for those who were not there, the autonomous zone opens up a sense of possibility, a fidelity to which many practices may establish. Out of them, new “utopian” ideals can form in the imaginations of millions, and these, in turn, can serve as the basis of new kinds of demands on existing governments and institutions—effectively twisting their arms to have fidelity to the social possibilities opened up by the autonomous zone.

For too long, “revolution” has been imagined to be a kind of grand event—a kind of epic, singular struggle built on a unified platform on universal declarations. What autonomous zones remind us is that political, economic, social and cultural transformations must first take root in our imaginations—and that the first beachhead in the struggle to liberate our imaginations is in the collective appropriation of space and time for prefigurative experiments in what is possible. The “revolution” likely won’t occur in one fell, permanent swoop, but through the making of a thousand autonomous zones that establish collective life on a better foundation than that crumbling one that the state can no longer justify or defend.

Why Is Academic Language So Inaccessible?

I recently had a friend express her frustration about the inaccessibility of academic language and academic writing. My friend is not alone. In “The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing” written by Victoria Clayton in The Atlantic, there has been a growing cacophony of voices calling for an end to “opaque writing.” Clayton cites what she sees as an especially egregious example, from Barbara Vinken’s Flaubert Postsecular: Modernity Crossed Out, which reads as follows:

The work of the text is to literalize the signifiers of the first encounter, dismantling the ideal as an idol. In this literalization, the idolatrous deception of the first moment becomes readable. The ideal will reveal itself to be an idol. Step by step, the ideal is pursued by a devouring doppelganger, tearing apart all transcendence. This de-idealization follows the path of reification, or, to invoke Augustine, the path of carnalization of the spiritual. Rhetorically, this is effected through literalization. A Sentimental Education does little more than elaborate the progressive literalization of the Annunciation.

No doubt having been exposed to writing resembling that above, my friend (who is a talented podcaster whose public-facing work demands clear language) asked me (a PhD student in the humanities and social sciences): “Why is academia like this? Why must the language be so inaccessible to most of the world?” As a highly interdisciplinary scholar, I strongly empathize with the question, as well as the frustration. Each time I follow a footnote into some new niche of historiographic, theoretical, social-scientific, or philosophical discourse and struggle to get my bearings, I am reminded of Jean-François Lyotard’s argument, in The Postmodern Condition, that the accumulated knowledge of contemporary civilization is far too vast to be knowable by one person (for Lyotard, postmodernism is not some voluntary abandonment of truth, but a societal condition created by modernity’s surplus of truth—I’ll post more on this in the future). The fact is that we have researched, in depth and detail, a vast amount of subjects, and in doing so, we have had to develop some very precise methodologies and terminologies to both investigate and describe what’s there. These investigations have generally been undertaken by, and reported upon within extremely niche subfields of specialists. Within these specialist circles, technical and theoretical jargon has facilitated precise as well as succinct communication about findings and methodologies. Rather than having to explain context and use long-winded descriptive terminology for a concept, specialists can rapidly use a jargon term like Barbara Vinkin does above, when she speaks of “the progressive literalization of the Annunciation.” Ideally, scholars will define their terms during the course of their argument or report on their findings, but, over time, a subfield may begin to have an internally universal understanding of a particular word, such that it ceases to be defined within the specialist literature. As Cass Sunstein insists in an article entitled “In Praise of Jargon,” while academics may write “in ways that many general readers would find obscure,” this is because such writing “has precision, shorthand, and nuance that cannot be captured in ordinary language.” Sunstein insists that this type of writing should not be mistaken for, or judged in the same way as, non-academic writing. Yet the academic humanities and social sciences tend to receive a disproportionate amount of scorn on account of the complexity of their academic writing. When we smear academics for writing in “turgid” language, it is always this side of the academy that we are referring to. Nobody is out there making fun of mathematicians for writing inaccessibly, or for their “opaque” equations. If anything, their complexity appears elegant—perhaps even decorative—to the untrained observer. Indeed, some of this scorn comes from so-called “hard” scientists themselves, who scoff at the idea that investigations of art, politics, culture or social patterns would warrant levels of abstraction or sophistication that rival those used in the investigation of the laws of physics or molecular biology. Characteristic of this scorn is that offered by Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate, where he trots out a particularly wordy passage by Judith Butler and lauds the decision by the “annual Bad Writing Contest, which ‘celebrates the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles’” to award Butler first place in 1998. {415} On the other hand, Pinker celebrates “scientific” research, and even goes so far as to suggest that “evolutionary psychology and cognitive science [should] reestablish human nature at the center of any understanding of the arts.” {417} Setting aside for a moment Pinker’s nefarious attempt to colonize other fields with knowledge from his own, there is a blatant asymmetry between the way that we are apt to judge humanities and social science writing versus that of the “hard sciences.” This is because there is no obvious distinction between the “primary research” of the former fields and their final output.

For the academic who writes for highly specialized audiences, the question might legitimately be posed: what is the relevance of this work? What does it change? What does it contribute? All too often, the academic considers their job done once their article or book hits the press (a claim that is somewhat justifiable in some fields, such as history, where we write books that are at least theoretically addressed to the history-reading public). Yet, in my view, this is not good enough. While you might only be paid and assessed on the basis of your specialized academic output, one should also seek to be a “translator” of their own work for less specialized audiences. I often think about something that the infamous street artist Banksy said in an interview once, that he will produce two sculptures—one to sell and cover the cost of materials for both, and the other to illegally install somewhere public—a strategy that he wittily refers to as “buy one, get one free.” For some time now, I have been preoccupied with the question of how academics might translate—or even produce—their work to broader audiences, perhaps by writing non-academic books that offer the same arguments as their academic works, but in more accessible language, and with speculation of how the ideas might be applied. Such an academic “buy one, get one free” could lead not only to a broader appreciation of academic work, but a deeper understanding, on the part of the public, of the many complex and important concepts that academics contribute to human knowledge.

Now, back to the arrogance of someone like Steven Pinker seeking to castigate that which he obviously does not understand in a field that is distant from his own. We have to contextualize his critique—as well as the academic writing that has attracted such ire from him and others—as occurring in a moment that is experiencing a simultaneous (and interrelated) education bubble and an attack on higher education. As participants in the debate about academic language have pointed out, it is difficult to disentangle condemnations or defenses of academic language from the broader struggle over the role, meaning and scale of higher education in our society, as higher education is being defunded, subjected to nefarious and counterproductive competition (where sports, buildings and recreation facilities are valued over academic excellence) and disciplined by a growing army of managerial administrators. Even the hilariously-named “Shit Academics Write” Tumblr site has recently highlighted the importance of these interrelated crises of higher education (citing how “universities run on disposable scholars,” that universities over-admit students, resulting in a situation where “40 percent of recent Ph.D. graduates had no employment commitments [after graduating],” etc.). And much of this pressure has been disproportionately applied to arts, humanities and social science departments, who are viewed, through the “neoliberal” lens of market justification and economic rationality to be superfluous for the establishment of careers, and therefore disposable.

Under these conditions, it may be worthwhile to imagine new ways to produce work outside of the academy. I have made the case for such scholarship here, but I’ll write a blog post about this at some point in the future.

Consent and Beyond

Consent is obviously extremely important. I would never want to live in a world without it, and I don’t think any of us would. The critique I have of consent is not an attempt to get rid of it, but rather an attempt to theorize frameworks that we need in addition to consent, so that our sexual communities can be safe, inclusive, and just. We cannot do have safety, inclusivity or justice without interrogating and changing what we want, and therefore any framework that relies solely on our currently-existing preferences will be inadequate. We have to change what we want as a culture. My claims here are not intended as a guide for how individuals should ethically behave. Part of the problem with consent as a framework is its over-reliance on individuals to behave ethically, rather than looking, at the collective level, at how sex and power operate. Correspondingly, the critiques of consent cannot just imagine themselves as having implications for individuals. We need to change our culture—change how our culture excludes, and puts social pressure on us to enthusiastically consent to (or request) certain things and not others, with certain people and not others. As a consequence, our sexual choices often reproduce systemic exclusions, problematic social categories, and antiquated norms.

Various commentators have questioned the validity and/or efficacy of consent as a holistic ethical framework concerning sex. Some radical feminists have claimed that true consent is impossible under structural conditions of power imbalance (and these are highly pervasive in our society), while others have observed that consent fails to call into question the way that power relations frequently inform the very things we want and choose, and that consent fails to address how our very choices may be deeply racist, classist, sexist, ableist and/or otherwise exclusionary. Recently, Amia Srinivasan—a philosophy professor at Oxford—has observed how consent culture has tended to justify and reinforce what people already want, even when those things are racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, etc. 

There is a long, troubling history of how powerful governments, elite social classes, and other top-down institutions set about to shape sexual preferences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and these practices were pretty much a ubiquitous aspect of the development of industrial, colonial powers. What you had were all kinds of stratifications based upon race, class, gender of course, and sex—both measurements of people’s “self-control” and constructions of people’s sexual desirability—was used as a mechanism for making and maintaining these distinctions. For example, black men were stereotyped as being sexually unrestrained, and were persecuted based on the anxiety that they posed a threat to white women’s purity. Women have been policed in their sexual behaviors, and pressured to behave as if they lacked sexual desires, and deviation from these behaviors have been pathologized as “unfeminine.” Anti-miscegenation laws made it a crime for people to engage in mixed-race sex and partnership, and decades of stigma have brought sexual policing to the level of peer-pressure and self-enforcement. And these regulations, pressures, roles and stereotypes went on to inform our sexual desires and sensibilities. It’s no coincidence that much of the stuff that people feel comfortable (or enthusiastic) about corresponds with policed social roles, categories and hierarchies. We have a gendered, racialized and classed “political economy” of sex, where certain people are thought to be the pinnacle of beauty and desirability, while many others are lower down in the sexual hierarchy. We also have highly gendered expectations about who does the asking and who does the permission-granting, and this also highly limits our ability to venture out from socially-scripted roles and scenarios.

So the problem with consent is really part of a bigger problem in a culturally-manipulated democracy, where, in the words of Noam Chomsky, consent is manufactured by the powerful. Too often, free choice is not a reflection of radical autonomy, but of top-down structures that produce our subjective preferences and means of evaluating choices and experiences.

The result isn’t just unjust, but also very limiting for the chooser. When we insist that all sexual behavior should be pre-negotiated and enthusiastically consented to from the outset, we run the risk of confining people to doing the same stuff in an endless pleasure loop with the diminishing returns of desensitization. Of course, done well, consent practices can make people feel *more* open to trying new things because they feel safe and listened to, and we shouldn’t ignore this fact. But approached uncritically, the dictate that we always enthusiastically consent to everything may mean for many, many people that they are prevented from trying things that they’re a bit unsure about, or don’t know if they’ll enjoy. Instead of exploring new things, enthusiastic consent can be used as justification for endlessly exploiting what you already know, and most sex-positive people know that this doesn’t necessarily lead to a fun or satisfying sex life. Perhaps, then, in addition to consent (not instead of it), we need a culture that empowers people to try new things and to experiment. Experimentation doesn’t always lead to nice discoveries, but sometimes it does, and so ideally we can forge a consent culture that makes room for both safety/comfort, and also exploration.

What Is Radical Professionalism, and Can It Help Us Build Post-capitalism?

A great indictment of the way that we structure our society is that those who have the solutions to our problems are stymied from implementing them.

In the 1970s, the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas briefly mentioned the concept of “radical professionalism”—a phenomenon that he suggested might rear its head in a moment of “legitimation crisis,” when the state and other established institutions proved to be ineffective at providing the kind of leadership and producing the kinds of outcomes that they were mandated to provide and produce. During such a moment, people belonging to various professions might come to understand their own mandates as conflicting with the systemic totality of the state and existing institutions. To truly serve their mandate—as doctors or architects or social workers or civil engineers or public health experts—they would require deep structural changes to society. Such radical professionalism comes to question the deep nexus between professions and capitalism.

The term “radical professionalism” may seem like an oxymoron, because of the degree to which professions are embedded within the system of capitalist accumulation. Professions have not only tended to operate according to a for-profit, capitalist logic, but also have served a vital role in allowing capitalism to reproduce itself and overcome its various contradictions. To understand how such a relationship between professions and capitalism formed (which I will not do here), we need to look back to the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the 20th centuries, when many of the professions were born (or indeed reformed into something resembling their current form). It was then that the professions assumed their enduring alignment with the dictates of capitalist extraction—an alliance that would simultaneously allow for the proliferation of professions and, at the same time, sanctioned all of them with strict limitations. A profession could exist, so long as it operated within the for-profit straightjacket.

The result is that most professions have been forced to organize themselves in ways that are extractive, monopolistic and myopic. Professions have been forced to be extractive because they have tended to be constituted as for-profit means of extracting monetary value from paying clients. The implication is that you cannot have quality services or care or design without paying for them. We have, as a society, made many compromises to pay for the services of professionals, and often this has been a poor investment—one that the mainstreams within the professions have, for obvious self-interested reasons, refused to admit.

Professions have been monopolistic because many they have tended to keep their expertise scarce in order to increase its market value. Through gatekeeping professional accreditation organizations, many professions have artificially limited their membership partially in order to inflate the salaries of its members. Many professions have replaced methods of care and administration that existed informally before they were established, and at their worst, accreditation organizations (backed by a litigious army of lawyers) have insisted upon the dangers and risks of attempting to solve your problems on your own or within your community. “Used a licensed _______, “ says their ransom note, “or risk losing your ______.” While quality control is of course another important (and worthwhile!) dimension of accreditation, there are ways of ensuring that all practitioners possess high-quality education without establishing a scarcity-inducing cartel that gatekeeps expertise.

Professions have been myopic because they fail to account for the bigger picture, the far-future, or those who cannot afford to commission their services in a capitalist economy. Professions have been prevented from realizing how they might plan for better and brighter futures, or even prepare the way for their own obsolescence. The best they can do, under present conditions, is rally for greater financial assistance to those who cannot access their services—a mere band-aid for what is a larger structural failure to design and distribute what should be shared by all.

My hunch is that these three aspects of a stymied professionalism are the real reason for all of the conspiracy theories we see today: almost every person that our society elevates has gotten to where they are by virtue of their heavy buy-in to a regime of accumulation that drastically limits the ability of its participants from being effective. To the casual observer, it appears that there is a conspiracy to prevent progress, when actually there is a systemic logic that conditions what is possible and what is visible.

What we need is a rebirth of the various professions, on different footings—a radical professionalism, if you like. Experts should be more accountable to the stakeholders who have to live in the world that they shape and perpetuate.

Can we even imagine a world in which we valued the knowledge and skills of our experts differently? Where the foundational principles of our myriad professions were allowed to inform how we build society, and in which their expertise could actually alter the overall structure when it became clear that the status quo was creating unnecessary problems and/or preventing some crucial progress?

Perhaps in such a future—one that seeks to diminish rather than unnecessarily perpetuate human work—professions would be conjured up as temporary task forces for solving and addressing a key set of problems and/or realize specific opportunities. In such a mode of organization, the profession would not need to indefinitely perpetuate itself as a source of income and stability for the professionals who fill its ranks. It therefore would not result in the kinds of “industrial-complexes” that contemporary capitalism does. This would be a kind of profession that, instead of creating perpetual dependency, builds the infrastructures that empower our society to thrive in new ways—independently of the ongoing subscription service of that professional caste. Here, a profession could be a “one-shot” instead of a loop—rather than turning into a myopic, extractive monopoly, the radical profession would seek to render itself obsolete by solving the problems is was conjured to solve.

One advantage of this framing is that post-capitalist society will be extremely complex, and will be impossible to organize without many of the existing professions. Any societal transformation that altogether alienates, abandons, or leaves behind these groups will likely fail. There is a tremendous amount of institutional knowledge that will need to be inherited (and much that will also have to be reworked, rewritten and redesigned!), and that cannot be done by activists.

The Meaning of DISTROID

DISTROID is a subgenera of electronic music, arising out of an earlier branch of internet-based electronic music called “vaporwave.” Vaporwave takes the comforting noises and imagery of the 1990s and distorts it into a cheap veneer that simultaneously induces nostalgia, makes us aware--by making the interface between the past and present tangible (slowing down, static, record marks and other signals of retrograde reproduction technology)--of the past's ideological nature, and garners our disdain for the unfulfilled promises and abandoned hope of the pre-9/11 era. These elements and evocations (comfort and critique-via-contextualization) are something that the subgenera DISTROID separates out and holds in tension in distinct layers: on the one hand, the sounds and sights of the saccharine, “sugary onslaught” of popular music in 2018 (and this aesthetic, on its own, is accelerated and taken to its extreme by artists under the PC Music label), and on the other, the dark, dreary, tired, echoing mechanical sounds of disarray and degeneration (many of these having been pioneered and disseminated by dubstep and its predecessors).Vaporwave pioneered what might be thought of as an “anonymous subsidiary” production model of music, with digitally-veiled artists producing content under many different monikers, each deliciously named like a 90s product line, mall store, or bogus, patented chemical “technology” featured on a cleaning product (“SPF420;” “バーチャル Paragon ™;” “ECO VIRTUAL;” “R23X;” “waterfront dining;” “Windows 96,” “haircuts for men,” etc.). DISTROID continues to obscure the producer’s identity, but at the same time, it blurs the listener’s identity too. The clashing threads of comfort and critical contextualization are arranged in a way that leaves it unclear whether the creator made it for you, or for some AI observer who will use it as documentary evidence of how human governance and culture failed. DISTROID tracks feature unexpected cuts, often to thick, distant filtered sequences—blips, static, and interruptions. In this sense, DISTROID music sounds as if it is doing the double work of being musical for what’s left of humans, and also transmitting data for machines. It sounds as if data transmission is elbowing its way into the audio stream, reminding us of the saturation of transmissions between machines, as well as of the way in which we ourselves are increasingly hybridizing with machines. It thematizes the experience of little islands of comfort and joy in a dystopian sea of global chaos—a world that is out of our hands, and where people in positions of power run PR campaigns that insist that they are still in control of economic, political and technological processes, when in fact these processes dictate what people (especially the powerful) may do. Underneath the beeps, blips, and metallic file compression filters, DISTROID captures the atmosphere of chirpy advertisements playing in parallel on the gas pumps of an empty gas station; the cheap lighting of the freezer aisle; the endless empty analysis of the 24-hour news cycle; the out-of-order restroom; the narcissism on Instagram. It finds something drearily comfortable in its resignation to these familiar atmospheres. There’s something soothing in seeing the world in its actual form. DISTROID is the music of a world that uses its best technologies for porn and marketing and it is less industrious than distracted—cyborg music for a cyborg society in denial.

Are Shitty Men Really the Problem?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m as bummed out about bro-ish, selfish, stereotypical dude bros as anyone else. We clearly have a culture that incentivizes men to behave in all kinds of horrible ways. But there is a danger that our frustration with bad behavior has displaced structural critique, and threatened to replace societal transformation with social behavior policing. When our grievances with the gender system become framed as a "shitty men" problem, the solution goes from queer and feminist revolution to an embrace of social conservatism. This is because “shitty men” are too easily understood from the perspective of the system of patriarchal social norms. The problem is not the gender system that assigns roles and creates antagonisms between the genders; it is the failure of one of the genders—namely, men—to live up to the norms. Norms go from being the problem to being the solution, because the problem is diagnosed as male deviation from norms. It is therefore not only possible, but rather essential, in my view, to eschew man-blaming *as* feminists.

I've been thinking a bunch about it in my historical work, where I've been grappling with the ways that women have often been pressured and coerced into embracing and reinforcing the very systems that oppress them. I've been reading queer and third-wave feminist theories that have analyzed the ways that women's pain and frustration is culturally channeled into non-threatening (to the system of patriarchy) avenues of grievances that actually threaten to reproduce the very system that produced their structural oppression. Lauren Berlant calls this the "female complaint": within capitalist "women's culture," women are encouraged, among other things, to experience the pain of their sexual oppression as relationship disappointment, rather than as their subjection within structures such as monogamy and socially-enforced sexual passivity. Rather than questioning these structures, they're inclined to blame the men in their lives for not playing fairly or living up to the norms of these institutions. Monogamy and enforced passivity cease to appear as sources of oppression here, and begin to appear as *solutions* to relationship disappointment, as the diagnosed problem correspondingly shifts from structures of oppression to "shitty men."

"No Scrubs": Deconstructing the WWI "Slacker," Sexual Manipulation and Gendered Power

Today, I'm thinking about the parallels between the World War I construction of the "slacker" (a man who wouldn't enlist to go fight in the war) and today's much-maligned lazy/unsuccessful male (typified by the 1999 TLC song "No Scrubs"). In my current dissertation project, I'm exploring the social construction of sexual desirability criteria, and the way that sexual desirability has been attached to conformity, productivity and risk/bravery/wealth accumulation—in other words, the way that sex has been used to influence behavior, and to pull weight in society. This, to follow Foucault, is not the same thing as sexual repression, but rather, the exploitation of the conditions of sexual opportunity, through the attribution of sexual desirability to certain qualities, behaviors and roles, and the promise of sexual fulfillment if one fulfills their social duties. Militaries, commercial institutions and political blocs have used sex as a tool for achieving their various goals, and the capitalist consumer economy of the post-WWI world has relied heavily on the social conditioning of sexual desirability to sell products and to motivate work and other productive behaviors.

The converse of desirability has tended to be stigma—particularly the stigmatization of those who do not play a normatively productive role, which is precisely the logic behind the concepts of the slacker and the scrub. In both cases, female sexual reciprocation is meant to be the reward for being productive/successful, and a clear message is broadcast that the man who shirks his responsibilities can't "get no lovin'."Anyway, these stigmatized social constructions offer a deeper perspective on the idea of "assertive modesty," whereby women are empowered specifically to say no--but not empowered in other, more meaningful ways. Before they were even granted the right to vote, women (and, perhaps more importantly, images of women) were conscripted to enforce social norms. What's interesting about this strategy is that it does not rely on women being pure, in the traditional sense of being covered up and shuttered away where they will not provoke temptation. Instead, it encourages women to come out into the public; to provoke desire; to entice and allure, but only in order to motivate conformity, hard work, and, in wartime, the risk of life and limb in order to gain access to women's sexuality and care. Historians have looked upon the period beginning in the 1920s as one of sexual liberation, but I see this recent stretch of history as being one of sexual economy, where sex was more available, it is true, but only to those who performed society's demanded gender roles.

As I’ve written about elsewhere, the 20th century witnessed the mass proliferation of what might be called “parasexuality“—a type of sexuality that “in which a person (or persons) commands the sexual desire of many without reciprocating that desire.“ This is the sexuality of the celebrity, the stage performer, and the fashion model. This type of sexuality, which stimulates (or, you might say, mass-produces) desire, without the fulfillment of the desired-for experience, has proven extremely valuable for both military and commercial purposes. Whereas the military uses sex to boost enlistment, and then motivates their sexually-frustrated troops to fight harder on behalf of the “woman you left behind,“ as I claim elsewhere, “[m]arketing rouses desire and entices engagement, while simultaneously associating that desire with products and services.“

My analysis of this phenomenon links two seemingly disparate struggles within one problematic. On the one hand, many post-liberal feminist thinkers have pointed out the shallow ways in which women’s empowerment under patriarchal capitalism has been, at best an empty gesture, and at worst women’s self-exploitation. At the same time, men’s rights advocates have insisted that the “manipulated man“ has been sent to do the dangerous, dirty work of society on the promise that he would be rewarded for his efforts. The primary thing I’m aiming to show with my research is that these claims are both quite true, but with the caveat that it is not men or women as some unified class exploiting the other sex; rather, there have been commercial and governmental institutions that have been quite invested in producing and exploiting gendered cultures of desirability in order to increase efficacy, power and wealth for the capitalist class. While individual men and women may benefit locally from their participation in, compliance, and perpetuation of this system, their interests as a whole are severely undermined.

Social Media and Post-Authenticity

What is the status of authenticity in the age of social media? I recently witnessed a small group of young tourists march onto a beach, stand by the water and take pictures of themselves appearing to have a good time, then leave immediately after--presumably off to another photo op. I myself have, at times, been more compelled by the images of my experiences—and what they convey about me, and the life I live—than the experiences themselves. I hear from other people that they feel the same to varying degrees. At what point does the act of representation surpass the act being represented? How much of our motivation for doing things—for doing anything at all—comes from the social validation we believe we’ll get when we tell others about it? When was the last time you did something amazing or important or accomplished something that you didn’t tell anyone about? (It’s been a long time for me!)

Perhaps this is nothing new (my observation of it certainly isn’t). For a long time, architectural critics have remarked on the fact that glossy design magazines like Dwell have incentivized architects to design photogenic architecture, whose actual experiential qualities leave much to be desired (I have a theory that this current in architecture has resulted in a dearth of small, dark, and/or labyrinthine architectural designs, because these do not photograph well--though we'll see whether 360º photographs change this). It is difficult to imagine the rise of spacious (vacuous?), minimalist architecture without photography, whose muse it has always been. (Perhaps for this reason, it is fitting that the iPhone is minimalist in design: the device that has encouraged everyone to make their lives more photogenic is itself designed to be quite photogenic.)

I wonder, though, if there’s a radical or progressive side of this accelerating experience modeling? Might our fictions about the lives we’re living and the experiences we’re having actually inspire the authentic pursuit of more intentional and/or experimental living? Can fictions inspire yet-unrealized realities? Can there be a kind of left-accelerationist desire creation machine that uses social media to generate post-capitalist, post-human, post-scarcity realities?

Becoming-Feminist: Consciousness-Raising and Social Ecology

“To be a feminist, one first has to become one.” This is one of the opening sentences of Sandra Lee Bartky’s seminal essay on feminist consciousness. (1) In the early days of gay liberation and second-wave feminism, it was generally understood that we—people living in advanced industrial societies, with their deeply-rooted norms—had internalized many of the oppressive values of those societies. If we were going to change the world, therefore, we were going to have to change ourselves in the process. For this reason, the gay liberation and women’s movements practiced what they called “consciousness-raising,” in which members of a community—whether this was a commune or an activist circle or the office workers who staffed the Gay Liberation Front office—gathered together and intentionally set out to reshape their views, emotional dispositions, and desires in order to become more compassionate, fair, revolutionary, etc. Yet this practice has faded out over the decades, as people have become increasingly wary of having their outlooks and desires questioned.

Since the simultaneous success and failure of the struggles of the 1960s, a prevailing cultural impulse has been the unapologetic valorization of one’s desires. This hedonistic appropriation of the rhetoric of liberation has been a boon to consumer capitalism, which continually molds and capitalizes on our desires. According to Amia Srinivasan, there are deep questions that must be asked about the politics of desire in our culture, yet contemporary feminism tends to skirt this issue. Perhaps out of a reaction to the moralizing of certain radical feminists in the 1970s and 80s, contemporary feminists have grown wary of questioning women’s choices—especially their sexual choices. Implicit in this rejection of critically evaluating outlooks and desires is the notion that one’s desires, ambitions, etc. must be the correct ones by virtue of their host’s belonging to a particular identity group. The problem with this is that tends to neglect the highly political formation of desire. Moreover, it fails to take into account the fact that oppressed and/or subjugated people are capable of effectuating further oppression and subjugation upon others. Therefore, according to Srinivasan, in failing to question one’s desires and outlooks, the non-self-critical political stance "risks covering not only for misogyny, but for racism, ableism, transphobia, and every other oppressive system that makes its way into the bedroom through the seemingly innocuous mechanism of ‘personal preference’.” (2)

Consciousness-raising, in the gay and women’s movements, began with the assumption that the personal is political. For the participants in these movements, if the personal is political, then the terrain of political struggle extends into oneself. “For many feminists,” Bartky reports, “this involves the experience of a profound personal transformation, an experience which goes far beyond that sphere of human activity we regard ordinarily as ‘political.’” Such a struggle involved a sometimes total transformation. According to Bartky, “the feminist changes her behavior: She makes new friends; she responds differently to people and events; her habits of consumption change; sometimes she alters her living arrangements or, more dramatically, her whole style of life.” (3)

Consciousness-raising groups resemble what Michel Foucault referred to as “local centers of power-knowledge,” in which “different forms of discourse—self-examination, questionings, admissions, interpretations, interviews” operate as a “vehicle of a kind of incessant back-and-forth movement” that produces both knowledge and subjectivity. (4) In the Preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Foucault emphasized the importance, in any political struggle, of forensically locating and excising the “inner fascist” that one develops in their engagement with power, and a major theme in Anti-Oedipus is the “micropolitical” struggle with internalized political and economic regimes at the psychological level.

Often, we hear commentary about the malleability of human beings. What we hear less often is the extent to which human plasticity is most apparent in social and collective settings. Consciousness-raising was highly effective because it sought, through “self-examination, questionings, admissions, interpretations, interviews,” etc. to produce new subjects in collective settings. Consciousness-raising groups in the Gay Liberation Front would invite “each individual [to talk] about his or her individual experience of oppression, growing up, coming out, etc.,” and in doing so, “a general pattern could be discerned, and so a cognitive leap could take place in the minds of the group. They would then come to see the oppression of gay people as part of the general gender system of our society, with common features despite individual idiosyncracies.” (5) Drawing from the experiences and desires of individuals, the consciousness-raising group would attempt to produce a new intellectual, emotional, social, and sexual ecology whose imperatives would then, if all went according to plan, become internalized by the individuals. The group would seek to generate radical solidarity and new kinds of interrelation and, ultimately, desiring, based on the aggregate experiences and desires of those present. Within these settings, imbalances, scarcities, power dynamics, surpluses and deficits could be identified and reworked. 

Yet this practice was difficult, and yielded different levels of reward for its differently-positioned participants. The benefits of participating in a collective project of reworking sexual desires would be less clear-cut for a person privileged by the undisturbed operation of social and sexual hierarchies, for example. At a certain point, the participants in both the women’s and the gay liberation movements began to recognize distinct and diverging interests, and, gradually, self-sorted into distinct, stratified identity groups (with middle-class gay men over here, radical separatist lesbians over there, and the Marxist-feminists over there). In these self-isolated communal settings, narrow concerns produced shallow and ineffective political practices that could not build a broad or comprehensive political movement, nor offer workable emotional, social or sexual ecologies with the power to challenge the normative mainstream. (6)

Here, I do not believe that the failure was consciousness-raising, but the allure of empowerment—not together, but separate. Rather than doing the hard work of cultivating new selves in response to the complex desires and resources and experiences of a broadening collective, the gay and women’s liberation movements of the 1970s eventually succumbed to desires they already had. Is there any reason to believe that our generation will be able to do better? Perhaps a first step in ensuring that we do would be to revive the fundamental ethos of collective consciousness-raising, and to use this as a tool in remaking our desires, and, in the process, remaking ourselves and our world.

Notes:

(1) Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination (New York: Routledge, 1990), 11.

(2) Amia Srinivasan, “Does anyone have the right to sex?,” London Review of Books, Vol. 40, No. 6 (March 22, 2018), 5-10.

(3) Bartky, 11.

(4) Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 98.

(5) Aubrey Walter, Come Together: The Years of Gay Liberation, 1970-73 (London: Gay Men's Press, 1980), 18.

(6) See my 2018 MPhil dissertation: “‘Engaged Withdrawal:’ Communal Living and Queer Spatial Politics in London’s Gay Liberation Front, 1971-1974” (University of Cambridge, master’s dissertation, 2018) https://www.academia.edu/37273032/_Engaged_Withdrawal_Communal_Living_and_Queer_Spatial_Politics_in_London_s_Gay_Liberation_Front_1971-1974.