Good morning!
Welcome to Digestable, your mouthful of things happening in the world.
Today’s ferments:
In 2020, I started skimming. Some things I’d read in full, mostly in bed, on paper; most things, I skimmed. There was, and is, just too much.
But as I was skimming We never gave public education a chance, a phrase stopped me in my tracks. Here it is, emphasis mine, context unnecessary:
“We know what schools are for. We just don’t want to live into the challenge of that answer. And I mean we in a very specific sense, the we of the perennial opt out, the we of Whiteness, the we of affluence, the we for whom the system was built, the we who know best how to game it.”
I read it over and over again. I love to opt out, to say no, to change the rules. Jenny Odell’s idea of the “margin of refusal” is often on my mind. This margin is the degree to which we can reclaim our attention from labor (work/societal roles) and distraction (social media). She speaks to it a bit here, explaining that:
“those with the smallest margins are often the ones who are already (even without having “dropped out”) existing outside the normative constraints of a racist, capitalist society – thus even just their existence is seen as a threat.”
One way I’ve seen this margin, this perpetual opt-out appear is: think about all the people you know working at a nonprofit, and how they’re all involved in some ‘diversity equity inclusion’ work at their jobs. That’s a big margin of refusal; many of these people have privilege and power and use it only sometimes. Then, think about all the people you know who work with their hands to do essential stuff (farming, building, really anything requiring technical training), often for government or for-profit entities. Those folks are much less likely to be asked to participate in this tap in, tap out examination of racism (if it ever gets that deep), but more likely to experience injustice at work, from conditions to compensation to treatment. Their margin is smaller, and per Odell’s framework, perhaps more potent. Perhaps this is why workers’ movements, mass refusals by the mistreated many, have been so powerful.
So the opt-out is neither wholly positive nor negative; it’s a moving target, informed by intention and context. As a white person with access to wealth, I get to opt out a lot. Sometimes this is unhelpful to the broader mission of a just world (not engaging deeply all the time with racial justice work) and sometimes it is (refusing to accept poor working conditions and raising my voice about it). Especially for us—the same us of the above we, the “we for whom the system was built”—it is essential that we perpetually examine how we leverage the power of our opt-out.
In 2020 (oddly has become a theme of this column?), suddenly a lot of people could opt-out of work. Not everyone, of course, but a critical mass of people—who then were unoccupied enough to have time for really being mad about the systematic criminalization and murder of Black people in this country. This is something we should be mad about all the time!
And, such is the structure of society that either you are comfy enough to be distracted from the suffering of others, or you’re consumed by your own toil/suffering to not have time for the big picture. Some of the most incredible organizers have overcome the latter; it’d be good if those on the comfy side also worked harder to overcome their ‘barrier’ to engagement in justice work.
But I digress. It was this mass opting-out of work that led to a mass movement in the name of finally, finally identifying white supremacy as the root of American government and society, by people with small and large margins of refusal.
When we opt-in by default, we hand over our power. To the algorithm, to the state, to corporations. How, and where, and when, are you opting out?
As I shared last week, a journal paid me to write something for the first time. Working with an editor is cool, but I also have Gabriel, the other, smarter half of my brain. Getting paid is nice, but I prefer having full agency over what happens to my work. I get to opt out, here, because I have other sources of income.
If you’re one of the many people whose homes I’ve showered at in the last month, you know that there’s been no hot water in my apartment. When the heater broke, I decided it was more important to me to convert to electric heating (which is taking awhile) than to quickly have hot water again, with a new gas tank. It shouldn’t be up individuals to opt out of fossil fuels, one of the hardest things to opt out of, but right now it is. I’m lucky to have the money for an electric conversion and a big group of people who let me come over and shower, so I got to opt out.
So: find your margin of refusal, and get to know it. How do your racial, ethnic, and religious identities impact your margin? Your gender? Your class? Within the margin, there is power. Know it, and use it.
[Important aside: Vermont peeps (and all peeps!), sign this petition supporting a global movement to end the F-35 program, which is a plague to our community here, where the sound of these planes tears the sky open many days of the week, and in Palestine, where they perpetrate atrocities on behalf of a settler colonial state, and around the world, delivering violence and terror.]
The Second Look
Half-baked cultural criticism from Gabriel Coleman.
First Glance
Last month I got the opportunity to participate in a music residency at the Gaudeamus festival in Utrecht. I want to spend this column unpacking that sentence, particularly the words opportunity and residency. But first, the bare-bones details about what this opportunity entailed:
I was given €800 to make a piece of music with two other artists over four days (not including the pre-residency meetings and post-residency work to translate the piece to the internet). This chunk of cash was supposed to pay for travel, housing, almost all of my food, and whatever equipment we needed to buy. That’s a fairly tight budget, but luckily I have a friend I could stay with in Utrecht, and kept equipment expenses to a minimum.
Double Take
I’m so grateful for the opportunity to participate in the program. It really is true, I’m very proud of the work we made (hopefully be online soon) and appreciative of the relationships I built with the artists in the program and at the festival. But still that sentence sticks in my mouth like I’m reading it from a script: I’m grateful for the opportunity.
The word opportunity does something to the labor of these four days; it flips the position of who gave and who took. Like when you finish a seven hour shift at a cafe you don’t say that you’re grateful for the opportunity to make so many flat whites because that was work, that was labor. But when you spend four days building a computer program and a soundscape and a reactive fountain to archive people’s memories of lost climates that was an opportunity—the laborer is indebted to the institution for the work they made.
Don’t get me wrong. Creative work, whether making music or writing this column, is fun and engaging. But unlike carpentry, or baking pastries, or climate modeling, which can also be fun and engaging, you don’t just do creative work because that’s what you found a job in. You have to be invited in, given an opportunity. This systematically devalues creative labor, forcing creators into positions where they have to accept and be grateful for whatever opportunities come along, no matter how temporary, ill-paid, and poorly organized they may be.
This brings us to the second word: residency. I salivate when I think about creative residency. I picture standing in the sunny window of a warm bedroom with a mug of herbal tea before shuffling downstairs to an upright piano or a worn writing desk to just create until I need to eat again or go to bed. To reside creatively, to live in the work. But this idea of residency also flips and devalues our relationship to creative labor. Often in a creative residency everything is provided: a bed and amenities, food, and space to work. Seen the other way round, all that a creative residency provides is a bed, amenities, food, and space to work. There is often little to no additional compensation, no opportunity to negotiate a contract extension or security between the end of the residency and what comes next. The expectation is that if you are living in the work, you must be okay living to work.
Thinking this way, my PhD program is this same kind of residency. I’m in residence at Trinity College Dublin, I’ve been given a computer and a desk, a stipend of €17,900/year to pay for my housing and food, and some professional development funds if I ask nicely. But there is no room to negotiate a raise, even to compensate for inflation, or to extend my contract if the research takes a new turn. I am grateful for the opportunity to research and write but I also know that my work is essential to the university, the country, and the planet, that’s it's worth a lot more than what Eric and Barbara Kinsella are paying for it.
Hindsight
Digestable is, like all the work we do, implicated in this. Lena and I have different experiences of how we contribute to this newsletter, and its relationship to the constellation of other things we each do. And I’m sure all the past and present Digestable contributors would agree that it’s an enjoyable process, it's helpful in our thinking, and that it is work. It would be more work, of course, for us to try to find grant funding or to put together a crowdfunding system. It would also change the relationship between writer and reader. But I’m also curious about what that relationship means in its current form, since I’ve been given the opportunity to share my thoughts and take up residence in your inbox.
For more on creative labor and financial insecurity, listen to Earlobe Calming.