politics of knowledge – Jana Bacevic

I’ve been in the US for about a week. The feeling of utter shock, panic, and disarray among people – qualitatively different from what could be discernible back when I was across the pond, qualitatively different from the previous Trump regime, qualitatively different from many previous instances of ‘unprecedentedness’ I had written on (the Covid-19 pandemic, the Brexit referendum, Trump’s 2016 election victory, the breakup of former Yugoslavia) – is tangible. Good centrist liberals and their projections are falling like planes out of the sky, the latter, by the way, not a metaphor at all.

It is easy to be both dismayed and cynical, but both are, ultimately, defense mechanisms. To give into collective panic/despair is (I guess) to at least temporarily redistribute anxiety by letting it dissolve into a collective feeling. To knowingly smirk with a “we have, in fact, told you so” may be easy for someone like me, who works on the politics of non-prediction, and is relatively protected from dismissal, deportation, or incarceration, but it is a way of insulating yourself from the collapse that is very real, and very present, for a lot of people. Given that I am, for better or worse, in a plethora of social networks that are dominated by academics, and give that academics are more

likely to be like this

than like this

let alone like this

the least I can do, then, is to offer some resources for resistance, from the perspective I have (east-central European/transnational, UK-domiciled migrant; woman*; educated, middle-class; some experience of movement, organising, etc.) and with the resources (and constraints) I currently have. None of this is meant to be exhaustive (maybe just exhausted :)) and hopefully only adds to the bountiful and excellent resources, networks and initiatives comrades in the US have been building for years.

The Emperor is truly naked – but still an Emperor

I think what most people are experiencing now is best described as cognitive dissonance about the state. On the one hand, they are becoming rapidly aware that what they believed are the stalwarts of liberal democracy (the rule of law, checks & balances, accountability and the like) are barely scarecrows that can be blown away overnight, and the crows are no longer scared. On the other hand, they are beginning to realise — if they had not before — what truly unchecked power looks like. (Every leader, potentially, is a dictator; the fact the US has a presidential system, with high weighting on executive power, just makes it more likely there will eventually be one not bound by convention to hide it). This means that, for a lot of people, the state is simultaneously all of a sudden very absent (FAA being just the most obvious, and immediately high-risk, case) *and* very present (both in terms of intrusion into domains most Americans are taught to associate with ‘privacy’ – finances – and in terms of threats of further deportation, incarceration, and retaliatory dismissal).

For those lucky enough to be able to think about (rather than just react to) these developments, this poses a problem because it places them in the uncomfortable zone most people have been politely educated out of: thinking about what to do when the state fails in a way that does not entail asking for more state. Surprise! There is a whole group of political theories that engages with exactly this problem. It starts with an A, ends with an M, and is not animism. Even better, many of the classical (and more recent) works in this line of thinking just end up being magically available, online, for free. Two particularly good websites for this are here and here. I know, wild. Worth thinking about, if nothing else, because it also turns out many of these will probably give you good ideas for how to face the next couple of years.

In addition to or beyond this, or if you just want to get the hang of self-organising without having to confront your own ideological limits (but if you do: try here, here, or here), these are some of the handy reading tools I’ve selected a few from the list of my favourite books in 2024, and added a few I believe to be most useful for the present situation.

For brief inspiration: To change everything (CrimethInc)
To see the work done by collectives across the world, including during the previous Trump administration: Constellations of care: anarchafeminism in practice (ed. by Cindy Barukh Milstein)
To remember that anti-neoliberalism does not equal nationalist protectionism: Fields, factories and workshops (Petr Kropotkin)
To learn from organisers who have been doing it for a long time: Shut it down: stories from a fierce, loving resistance (Lisa Fithian)
To learn how to organise and not burn out (and also not be terrible to other people if you do!): Let this radicalize you: organizing and the revolution of reciprocal care (Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba)
To not forget that there is no way to address a political crisis without addressing the climate crisis (and, of course, capitalism as the root cause) – but that there are so many ways (already tried and tested) to do it: The solutions are already here: strategies for ecological revolution from below (Peter Gelderloos)
To recall that some people have, in fact, foreseen this: The Parable of the Sower & The Parable of the Talents (Octavia Butler)
To acknowledge that when you say “someone should do something” that someone is, in fact, you: Mass Action (Rosa Luxemburg)
To remember that there are many other places where this, and worse, had been true for a long time: We are not pawns, we are people who rose against the regime (Jwana Aziz)
Again, CrimethInc: tools and tactics

This should be more than enough to start from. Get reading.

*I realized, upon reflection, that this term is a bit inaccurate – I am comfortable with ‘woman’ or ‘she’ in languages where gender is primarily grammatical (so where chairs, stones, and concepts have a ‘gender’), both for convenience and because it is more difficult (but not impossible) to associate grammatical gender with hierarchical difference; but I have never felt any degree of affinity with the cluster of ideas around supposed feminine ‘essence’, even if they do not veer into biological determinism, reductionism, or transphobia. It is thus that in these languages – and contexts, UK being one of them – that I tend to use ‘they’ or ‘she/they’.

I’m reading Christine Korsgaard’s ‘Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity‘ (2009) – I’ve found myself increasingly drawn recently to questions of normative political philosophy or ‘ideal theory’, which I’ve previously tended to analytically eschew, I presume as part-pluralism, part-anthropological reflex.

In chapter 2 (‘The Metaphysics of Normativity’), Korsgaard engages with Aristotle’s analysis of objects as an outcome of organizing principles. For instance, what makes a house a house rather than just a ‘heap of stones and mortar and bricks’ is its function of keeping out the weather, and this is also how we should judge the house – a ‘good’ house is one that fulfils this function, a bad house is one that does not not, or at least not so much.

This argument, of course, is a well-known one and endlessly discussed in social ontology (at least among the Cambridge Social Ontology crowd, which I still visit). But Korsgaard emphasizes something that has previously completely escaped my attention, which is the implicit argument about the relationship between normativity and knowledge:

Now, it is entirely true that ‘seeing what things do’ is a pretty neat description of my work as a theorist. But there is an equally important one, which is seeing what things can or could do. This means looking at (I’m parking the discussion about privileging the visual/observer approach to theory for the time being, as it’s both a well-known criticism in e.g. feminist & Indigenous philosophy *and* other people have written about it much better than I ever could) ‘things’ – in my case, usually concepts – and understanding what using them can do, that is, looking at them relationally. You are not the same person looking at one kind of social object and another, nor is it, importantly, the same social object ‘unproblematically’ (meaning that yes, it is possible to reach consensus about social objects – e.g. what is a university, or a man, or a woman, or fascism, but it is not possible to reach it without disagreement – the only difference being whether it is open or suppressed). I’m also parking the discussion about observer effects, indefinitely: if you’re interested in how that theoretical argument looks without butchering theoretical physics, I’ve written about it here.

This also makes the normative element of the argument more difficult, as it requires delving not only into the ‘satisficing’ or ‘fitness’ analysis (a good house is a house that does the job of being a house), but also into the performative effects analysis (is a good house a house that does its job in a way that eventually turns ‘houseness’ into something bad?). To note, this is distinct from other issues Korsgaard recognizes – e.g. that a house constructed in a place that obscures the neighbours’ view is bad, but not a bad house, as its ‘badness’ is not derived from its being a house, but from its position in space (the ‘where’, not the ‘what’). This analysis may – and I emphasize may – be sufficient for discrete (and Western) ontologies, where it is entirely conceivable of the same house being positioned somewhere else and thus remaining a good house, while no longer being ‘bad’ for the neighbourhood as a whole. But it clearly encounters problems on any kind of relational, environment-based, or contextual ontologies (a house is not a house only by the virtue of being sufficient to keep out elements for the inhabitants, but also – and, possibly, more importantly – by being positioned in a community, and a community that is ‘poisoned’ by a house that blocks everyone’s view is not a good community for houses).

In this sense, it makes sense to ask when what an object does turns into badness for the object itself? I.e., what would it mean that a ‘good’ house is at the same time a bad house? Plot spoiler: I believe this is likely true for all social objects. (I’ve written about ambiguity here and also here). The task of the (social) theorist – what, I think, makes my work social (both in the sense of applying to the domain of interaction between multiple human beings and in the sense of having relevance to someone beyond me) is to figure out what kind of contexts make one more likely than the other. Under what conditions do mostly good things (like, for instance, academic freedom) become mostly bad things (like, for instance, a form of exclusion)?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in relation to what constitutes ‘bad’ scholarship (and, I guess, by extension, a bad scholar). Having had the dubious pleasure of encountering people who teach different combinations of neocolonial, right-wing, and anti-feminist ‘scholarship’ over the past couple of years (England, and especially the place where I work, is a trove of surprises in this sense), it strikes me that the key question is under what conditions this kind of work – which universities tend to ignore because it ‘passes’ as scholarship and gives them the veneer of presenting ‘both sides’ – turns the whole idea of scholarship into little more than competition for followers on either of the ‘sides’. This brings me to the question which, I think, should be the source of normativity for academic speech, if anything: when is ‘two-sideism’ destructive to knowledge production as a whole?

This is what Korsgaard says: