Feeling kinda useless right now. Wish I was a bit more helpful or had some means to be helpful. I am still a firm believer that formal education is one of our finest ways to avoid the state of affairs we find ourselves in. This education is unfairly constructed, serves the interests of established power, and is unfairly distributed. So even my best hope is hopelessly corrupted by the very thing that it purports to address.
I see around me the results of a world that has taught us to value facts above people. If you are a criminal, you cannot change. If you are a cop, you cannot change, situations are as they are. People are types. They are not going to change. People are bad or good. States are bad or good. All of this means persuasion is impossible. Time to replicate the truth until others get it.
Everyone gleefully shares the same posts on social media to accomplish this and it’s just sad, but I can understand that, because I too am feeling very useless at the moment, and it would be great to pretend that something like that – or something like this post – had any bearing or use on the situation. I love to think that by writing this I am being helpful when helpfulness – the very concept of helping out – seems so distant that it feels exhausting to conceptualize it.
Writing is often thought of as an alternative to violence, as a way to solve problems without resorting to violence. But rhetoric (writing is that of course) more often is complicit in violence as a masked form of violence, as coercion, as a way to hide power behind reason and force others into the position of rejecting reasonable objectivity when they want to make their position known. Rhetoric also requires practice, and time for such practice is predicated on wealth, status, and resources. Space. And time. All things that are deprived to those because of how we have chosen to organize things.
It feels good and is pleasurable to speak to a vanguard. It’s frightening and difficult to speak to a public. I wish this was the first line in every public speaking textbook out there, but it’s not. It immediately begins speaking to the vanguard, as a vanguard, preparing the vanguard for more conversation. I guess I would like a Public Cringing course, or another good title for a public speaking class, “Nervously Loquacious,” apologies to Kenneth Burke.
Uncertainty should be taught more than it is. Respect for it and life with it. Professors spend a hell of a lot of time degrading and discounting student work over citation form, but don’t comment on how few non-whites appear in the references. They don’t comment on how the use of Google reinforces the perspective of consumer, while searching in a library reinforces . . . what? Is it possible to think outside of consumer? Apparently not. The Minnesota situation is troubling because the only political grammar is consumer objects. Move over internet of things. Welcome, politics of things.
The only thing I can think of that might be helpful is to sit with the question, “why?” Sitting with one question, letting it think you as much as you think it, letting it explore itself and you observe that exploration, is, I’ve found, a good way to not get caught up in the machinery of power, to accept that feeling when it shows up and let it speak, but let other interpretations speak as well. We need more than a light switch for political conversation, but most things fall into the light switch model.
Sitting with “Why?” and letting it ask itself and preserving the space and time is an alternative political position. Why? Because stillness, quiet, and thought are not valued in consumer society. Speed, branding, PR, announcements, and ROI are valued. This is maybe not a good way to arrange things. But it’s all we have left as a political rhetoric.
Why? – the pentadic equivalent is “purpose.” So I guess I’m suggesting creating a pentadic ratio purpose-purpose here (if you are a Burkean). “Why ask why?” – perfectly fine. Letting the question lead is what is needed now so we can fully explore the roots, the situation, the scope, the entirety of why, the whole atlas of why, to begin to address the next question, should it ever appear.