An anti-revolutionary approach?
The article below is a draft of one of the introductions to the upcoming edition of the Freerange Journal called FR Vol.11: Love your Institution. I thought it would be fitting to put this out as a draft first, and then people can comment, disagree, and contribute. I will publish a final version (to be released at FESTA 2016 in Christchurch in October) in which I will make changes and credit those that participate.
Through immediacy, variety and vibrancy our bodies are bound to the places that surround them: the crunch of breakfast cereals, the casual familiarity of a lover, the noise from traffic and TVs, the strange allure of a favourite song on repeat, and the clumsy interfaces with media and technologies that increasingly surround us. As beings attached to bodies it’s inevitable that we develop a sense of our worlds based largely on what we see and experience around ourselves.
The way we understand the world as being structured and made is formed, informed and influenced by thing things around us. This probably didn’t matter back in the good old days when our interactions and the effects of our behaviour were almost entirely with beings close to us. In the 1920s the great American philosopher Dewey and an upstart journalist Walter Lippman had a decade long debate about how democracy should function in a globalised world where our decisions cast shadows into different places. In the past, if you were an arsehole to your neighbour then you have to deal with the consequences of this. If you dump waste in the river then it pretty quickly means you can’t gather food from there.
However this relationship is untethered almost completely in our contemporary globalised world. With this comes great freedom and access to the cultural diversity and world mindedness that is the best of what it means to be modern. But it also comes with a terrible terrible risk. Climate change is really just the worst symptom of this risk. The untethering of our behaviour to its consequences enables us to be arseholes to people, beings and environments without ever having to take responsibility for it.
So the big question then is how do we manage this problem? What measures do we introduce to provide some kind of assurance that we and other people aren’t just living their nice lives while shipping of the consequences to other parts of the world (or those in the future)? Often people answer this problem with calls for personal responsibility and personal changes in behaviour. This does little harm but doesn’t and can’t, I argue, really address the problem. Firstly, we can only make changes based on the information available to us and because we inevitably live in bubbles that surround our bodies we all have a disability in getting access to ‘the rest of the world’. (This an idea ripped from Michelle Callon) Secondly, because of the shear amount of information, and the complex interwoven relationship between it all, it’s almost impossible to gather the breadth of knowledge needed to make informed personal decisions. This is what Lippman and Dewey realised back in the 1920s.
The other option, which is the theme of this edition of freerange, is to establish different kinds of institutions to do this work on our behalf. Most of the modern institutions that build knowledge, recommend policies and advise citizens on behaviour emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries as globalisation expanded and progressed. An institution is really just something outside of oneself that structures and acts on the world. They are far from perfect and require constant re-scripting, adjusting and developing. But it is I argue of critical importance to our well being as a species and planet that we recognize the critical role that institutions play on our behalf of ourselves as individuals.
The second half of this theme follows from this and is the idea that we need to love our institutions. This is a kind of counter revolutionary concept that calls for not for overthrow, or upheaval, or complete rejection of the institutions that fail. But instead for engagement, perseverance, faith, support, maintenance, and commitment.
The idea that we should not try and overthrow the government, not reject institutions or political parties, and even perhaps not destroy the corporations that dominate the modern world sounds both radical and lazily conservative. Perhaps even like the reluctant resignation of aging cynicism or a group running out of ideas.
Instead I think the love of institutions represents a much needed shift in activism. Revolutions are based on lazy thinking. They require a mere rejection of an unliked aspect of the status quo. The unloved part is almost always something negative that affects the life around oneself, and often interferes with larger more important problems. Revolutions require no complex thinking because they don’t have to trace and understand the interrelated parts of societies and economies. The burning of a single thread can ignite and destroy other vibrant parts if done without care and attention. The word radical comes from the latin for root, so even that word suggests that re-invention requires a return of some sort. (It must also share the same etymology as Radish.)
We can see the failures of revolutionary thinking in many places: The tragic results of the Arab spring evidence the danger of total revolution, of rejection, and the mad emptiness that results when civic society is destroyed. [need another example here]
One of my personal dislikes is the continuing desire of many people on the left to seek our communal land and lifestyles outside of cities, to create a safe haven away from the world where culture and good behaviour can be nurtured. This is just a different version of a suburban gated community that tries to control the world by blocking it out, by disengaging with it. At best it is an attempt to cut off the ties and return to a time before globalisation. But we just don’t live in that world anymore, we are too entangled in the future to go back in time now.
When I say this is a new kinds of activism, it isn’t really. There are many forms of practice that already perform institutional love. Almost all of us work away in our lives doing this very thing, trying to be the best teachers, run a good health system, care for our families, support our friends, vote for the politicians we think will do best. The target in this issue is not so much the practices but that the theories and rhetoric of the left, and the people that continue the disengagement politics of revolutionary actions of the 1960s.
More contemporary examples include the many NGOs that seek not to undermine government and corporates but make them stronger, better and more responsible. I’m also interested in the designers and creatives who practice activism without disengaging from the commercial worlds. The groups that work with existing habits and culture, with currently flawed corporates and governments to alter, elide, and effect changes and improvements. These are the activists that don’t take the easy path of money as its own indicator of success (it isn’t), or the opt out logic of many activists (this doesn’t change anything). Another good example are the plethora of emergent groups that seek to build and protect and promote new forms of commons. The non-commercial and non-government institutions that build and protect resources without destroying others. Also the groups that form and organise around causes to bring change to institutions such as the many feminist groups, environmental organisations, and peace activists.
While the imagining of utopias is a powerful exercise, we need to stop trying to build new worlds as if we can do it from scratch. As if there is ever, or was ever, the opportunity to start again. The world never goes away, the history and people and objects of this world are always there. All we can do is move them around and tweak them. To suggest otherwise is to perform a kind of violence of silencing and erasure that us in the west are all too familiar with doing.
In Christchurch we’ve seen this game play out in a counter intuitive narrative. On the one hand a powerful government agency claiming the status of the city as a blank slate as an opportunity to ‘start from scratch’. This is the radical act because it makes invisible the violence required with thousands of unnecessary demolitions, the dumping of waste (as if there was a place to erase and forget these materials) and the erasure of people’s memories and places. This was the revolutionary act, done by one of the benevolent dictators that people call for when engagement becomes hard. This is also neoliberalism as its cleanest and most cany.
In the issue we will ask the reader to consider the definition of an institution. When we call for institutional love we are asking for a new relationship with the big forces around us, such as governments, businesses, and universities. But this isn’t all. If we take the idea that an institution is an organisation that acts to structure the world beyond oneself then other less attended to examples emerge: the institution of the family and its cultural traditions and system, the role of the humble worm in building and protecting the institution of soil, (as theorised by Darwin and Jared Diamond), the complex ecosystems that provide so much of the clean air, water, and diversity that enables our lives, or the institution of a song or a music culture.
These other less obvious institutional modes can be seen in Christchurch. There are a plethora of hard work organisations, (including the local Council), and many emergent groups caring for, protecting and making new things while trying to care for city, its materials, record its shifting condition and encourage interventions.
The radical government and more local careful approaches also played out aesthetically. On one hand the logic of demolitions, blueprints and shiny renders. In contrast to this is an aesthetic characterised by leaks, rotations, cracking, splitting, and displacement, that instead of requiring removal affords repair. To repair something however requires an understanding of how it works, of which bits are broken, which can be changed, and what is critical to keep to maintain its essence. In the context of the broken post-quake city material care is clearly about trying to articulate and understand the nature of the damage, but it is also becomes a way in which certain issues are brought to focus by drawing attention to the presence of things in the city. When large business and government agencies suggest that these things don’t exist, or shouldn’t be present it creates conflicts and controversies.
There is present in this division a clear gender issue. The notions of thinking big, revolution, radical change, government intervention, clean slates have, historically been predominantly driven by men. While craft, repair, maintenance, alterations, and the sustaining of existing different forms of institution like the family, the home, and small business has historically been tended to by women. This illustrates not just a gender imbalance (that women are put in the role perceived to be less important by society) but also that society continues to prioritise logics of revolutions, newness, catastrophe, and invention.
So the question we are asking is what happens if we alter the language we use to describe the change we’d like to see. What if we stop talking about revolutions, utopias, clean slates, radical change, destroying things, and instead look carefully to structural shifts, alterations, repair, maintenance, preservation, conservation, and other words that bring a world into being that doesn’t invoke the accidental destruction of the things we do love.
What if we were to show the same level of care we show for own on bodies and families to the other things we encounter — the institutions that structure the world on our behave.
Please make comments and notes on this.
If you have any feedback please contact me on Barnaby@projectfreerange.com
