Unthinking Freedom

In my last post, I discussed how some forms of injustice are treated as being about hurt feelings; it is a way of making them seem smaller as well as subjective. We need to find a way to resist this reduction whilst pointing to how feelings matter. Because they really fucking do.

I am so grateful for the responses! I want to pick up on a comment by

nightingaleshiraz

who wrote “asking someone to stop a making a microaggression is never considered to be a request for a microadjustment. If everything about this behavior is so micro/trivial, then it should be micro/trivial to change it, no?”

An adjustment: yes, it should be treated as small if the behaviour is small.

But no, it isn’t treated as small. So nor is the behaviour.

I am reminded of Lauren Berlant, that’s a good hap, to be so reminded.

They wrote, “Even the smallest claim, such as not to be addressed by one’s state-sanctioned name and the pronoun conventionally attached to it, has been called ‘too much’.” In asking for minor modifications in the routine of address, we become, in Berlant’s terms, “inconvenient to the reproduction of normative life, the conventions and institutions of that life.”

In The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, I turned Berlant’s observation into a killjoy commitment.

I am willing to be inconvenient.

Also, inconvenienced.

Perhaps it is assumed that in the past you could tell the difference; there she is, there he is, hello, sir, madam; she with he, he with she. We open up the world, open ourselves up, by refusing to make such assumptions whether about the past or not. We don’t assume we can tell the difference, or assume that she or he are all that are available; we don’t assume who is who or who is with whom.

We ask each other how to address each other.

That question can be treated as an imposition, a restriction on other people’s freedom, no small thing.

As anyone involved in trying to challenge norms and conventions to enable them to be more accommodating to more people quickly discovers: you will be judged as imposing restrictions on the freedom of others.

Or just being a plain old imposition.

A norm is a restriction that can feel like freedom to those it enables.

To challenge a norm is thus almost always treated as restricting other people’s freedoms. Even asking for such small changes, such as being asked to be she or he or they, can produce such big reactions, as if you are asking for a world change.

So maybe, just maybe, we are.

To loosen as to change.

Refusing to make an assumption about another can be how we loosen our attachments to a world. An assumption is also a habit. When something has become a habit, you don’t have to think about it. Habits can be useful: that you don’t have to think about driving the car allows you to think about other things when you are driving the car. But if we think of social assumptions as habits, we learn how they might seem natural, obvious, inevitable, how we do things as how they are, because they have become unthinking.

To challenge an assumption is to ask us to think about it, to turn every word, every term through which we communicate with each other, into something to be thought through or thought about or thought out.

Resistance to change can sometimes be resistance to thinking. Thought itself: treated as the loss of freedom. Hence my use of the term unthinking freedom.

Consider how much hostility is expressed to EDI/DEI, a laughing contempt at the effort to create institutions that are more open and inclusive and accessible.

That performative cruelty.

EDI/DEI is treated as “compelled speech” or “ideological capture,” so that freedom, defined negatively, becomes freedom from diversity, freedom from the need to respond to people who have different needs.

That might include freedom not to respect other people’s pronouns or the freedom to stop other people from putting their pronouns in their signature. Or just freedom to stop other people.

Words matter because of how they are embedded in worlds. I wrote in my last post that one way of failing to recognise demands for structural change is to make them appear as being about symbolic change.

Some freedoms can be expressions of that resistance to structural change.

Translations of unthinking freedom:

The freedom to appoint the same old people in the same old way.

To keep doing what you are doing without thinking about doing it.

To stop other people (who stop us doing what we are doing).

Once an institution has formed, reproduction does not require much thought.

We are back to habit. A book keeps falling open on the same page as if it has a will of its own. History: borrowed will.

It takes a conscious willed effort not to reproduce an inheritance. And then: reproduction itself becomes a moral task. The same sort of task as that of stigmatising the diversity worker. Or the social justice activist. No, they are not the same. You can embody the same crisis without being the same.

That is why it is not time to abandon our critiques of diversity. They help us to explain what is going on.

Black feminists and feminists of colour such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty and M. Jacqui Alexander in offering critiques of diversity, teach us to notice what it does not do, did not do, what diversity has not done, what it has not stopped.

Diversity can be a way of picturing institutions rather than changing them.

We recognise images of diversity in an instant.

That we can do so tells us something about how institutions work.

How we are told to get in or to get on you have to adapt yourself.

People of colour become useful: we are photographed more, helping institutions appear more diverse than they are. Yes, it is tiring.

Diversity can still be harder work. Not so many smiles.

To teach in a classroom with students from many different backgrounds, educational, as well as cultural, you have to work harder because of what you cannot assume: shared reference points.

Some might call that feeling of having shared reference points, common sense. Stuart Hall wrote “What passes for ‘common sense’… feels as if it has always been there.” When something feels real, it becomes part of the background. It is what you don’t have to notice, let alone question. A solid rock, a bedrock, “the wisdom of the race” (also Hall).

There it is.

There, there.

It sounds almost reassuring.

What goes without saying. Or so they say.

Consider Hannah Arendt’s discussion of common-sense in The Life of the Mind. Arendt observes, “In a world of appearances, filled with error and semblance, reality is guaranteed by this three-fold commonness: the five senses, utterly different from each other, have the same object in common; members of the same species have the same context in common that endows every single object with its particular meaning; and all other sense-endowed beings, though perceiving this object from utterly different perspectives, agree on its identity. Out of this threefold commonness arises the sensation of reality.”

This phenomenologically rich description of common sense, building from a classical conception of common sense as a sixth sense, certainly points to its complexity: what is shared is not just the object, nor the context, but an agreement that the object, seen from different perspectives, is the same. I will be working closely with how Arendt thinks the relation between thought and commonsense in my project on commonsense (now No Is Not a Lonely Utterance is in production, I am finally returning to this project!).

Just for now, note:

Hannah Arendt suggests that if common sense gives us “that sensation of reality,” the activity of thinking is about losing it, “thinking can seize upon and get hold of everything real- event, objects, its own thoughts; their realness is the only property that remains stubbornly beyond its reach”.

Thinking: can be the loss of that relation to realness. Which is not, of course, a loss of any relation to realness.

The task is still to get hold of something.

So, here’s a thought:

A question brings something to the front.

You make what is there stand out.

Another way of getting hold of something.

Paulo Freire, also working phenomenologically, called the task radical pedagogy: “That which had existed objectively had not been perceived in its deeper implications (if indeed it was perceived at all) begins to ‘stand out,’ assuming the character of a problem”.

Perhaps those of us assumed to be alienated from reality are in fact considering its “deeper implications.”

It is those “deeper implications” that might be threatening when reality is confused with a sensation of it. Some confusions are strategic. Because then, of course, those who confront reality, bringing it to the front, “assume the character of a problem.”

And then, so many of us, queer and trans folk, are understood as having lost not just the plot but reality.

No, the loss is not ours. But we can still be made to pay for it.

Pay for their loss or what they frame as a loss.

Because what they have lost is not reality as such but a sensation of it or an unthinking relation to it.

We can be blamed for what other people are not willing to give up: their investments.

They might not want to think about what they previously had not have to think about.

Conventions, so many spared thoughts. And thus, so much spared time and energy.

They might not want to learn to use preferred pronouns or to pronounce different or “difficult” or “foreign” names.

Yes, what they call microaggressions.

Stop being so difficult, dear.

Or maybe some people keep being told this: that asking people how they would like to be addressed would mean losing something.

Rather than learning something.

That learning is everyday life, so many comings and goings.

Ideology: them coming means you going. That it is hard because of them.

Not because of the shitty system. That takes your soul with your labour.

And it is a frame: the association of being unthinking with being free.

Speaking of unthinking, let me quote from former British prime-minister, Rishi Sunak.

He said, “We want to confront this left-handed culture that seems to want to cancel our history, our values, our women.”

The argument that women are also being cancelled expressed with that old sexist possessive (“our women”) draws loosely from the “gender critical” argument that the term gender has replaced sex.

Sex as commonsense: that history, that habit.

Sunak has since said, “A man is a man and a woman is a woman – that’s just common sense.”

When man is the answer to the question of what is a man, the answer is there is no question. Think of how little is being said here; how little we learn. If I was to say a tree is a tree or a table is a table, I would not be saying anything, or learning anything about trees or tables.

I want to learn about trees.

Also, tables.

There is more to learn. More queer tables.

To declare this is “our culture” or “our history” or “our women” is to defend an unthinking relation to the world, what I am call an unthinking freedom.

Questions are made strange. A questioner, a stranger.

Some of us don’t even have to ask questions.

We are questions.

All you have to do to throw something into question is to arrive, to try and to take up a seat at a table or to become a chair.

Heidi Mirza in her contribution to the important collection, Inside the Ivory Tower, describes a conversation, “a white male professor leaned into me at the celebration drinks and whispered bitterly in my ear, “Well they are giving Chairs to anyone for anything these days.”’

When a woman of colour becomes a chair, chairs lose their status and value.

The value of some things is dependent on the restriction of who can have them or be them.

You are not really a chair so you damage a chair.

You are probably also damaging the university whilst you are at it. Making it be something other than it was, or is, or is meant to be.

You might be told you are not really a professor.

I never cared too much about being a professor when I was one. In fact, I was rather glad to unbecome professor. I learnt more about being a professor from not being seen as one than I did from being one.

I would walk into a room with a white man professor and watch the gaze fall on him, plop, plop.

Sound can be a story.

Snap, snap.

We know more about reality by not measuring up to it.

The judgment “not really” is mobile.

It migrates.

You might be told your relationships are not really relationships.

That your families are not really families.

That you are not really from this country.

That you are not really who you say you are or as you say you are.

That you do not really belong here.

That your subject is not really a subject.

You might be questioned, who are you, what are you, where are you from, no really.

The one who throws things into question is questioned.

We turn it around, questioning the question, questioning who is made questionable.

Who is not: what is not.

That’s how we think freedom. The beauty of holding onto something by questioning it. And so, we feel for freedom. Fighting for it.