On the Limits of "Action"

I'm a theory-head. I'm just going to put that on the table right now: confession- I loooooove theory.

When I hear from students and activists (and student-activists), and anti-intellectuals of various stripes that theory isn't action, and that somehow there's a need to turn theory into action, or that the theory we do in the classroom isn't action-y enough, or the ever earnest, "what can we do about it??????", I have to admit that I do get a bit irritated in defense of the very important, real material and cultural work that theory achieves.  In some worlds, people say, "words matter," or "ideas matter." Indeed, many cultural norms exist to remind us that words have greater heft than sticks and stones, which my culture always told me break bones worse.  But I've seen words do worse.  

Ideas pack punches.  Words matter.   I just finished reading Patricia Hill Collins' On Intellectual Activism.  In it she discusses the false binary between hate speech vs. hate acts: "This division between speech and actions is part of the ethos of violence" (192), she writes.  She continues, in a "framing context that severs acts from ideas, speed can never be violent."  Thoughts vs. actions, theory vs. practice, doing vs. thinking, words vs. deeds-- the illusion many of us hold that these are binaries is itself a kind of violence, to Collins.  What would it mean for the social justice work we do in our classrooms if we broaden our notion of what counts as an "action"?

One of the problems with students asking for immediate actionable plans is that they ignore the broader relevance of information that doesn't have immediate and obvious impact on their own daily lives.  So, for example, an article that comes across their Facebook feed about the credibility of Scott Pruit, or the role of natural history in promoting eugenics, or the spread of Zika in Latin America, all seem unrelated to their most pressing question: what does it have to do with me, and what can I do about it?

Pushing aside for a moment the relevance question-- "what does this have to do with me?"-- might help our students grasp a larger context of the problems they face, understand their own experiences within social and historical structures, and recognize their efforts within broader regional, national, and even international movements.  Also, forcing students to make connections between these seemingly unrelatable news events helps them learn intersectional and structural analysis better--this is what I take Collins' theory of "critical consciousness" to mean.

Another thing is that students often feel that there is "no scholarly research" on the current events they care about, as if they're making up the first ever analyses of climate change that ever existed.  Forcing them to make connections between the things they think are valuable, important questions that they feel they came up with themselves, and the world of scholarly research that has been thinking about these issues forever and in myriad nuanced ways, is really important for fueling the movement with the best intellectual resources available.  The impasse between intellectual work (e.g. scholarship) and "action" is further exacerbated when we don't creatively demand that students see the connections between academia and action.

Collins insists that "academia is activist politics, where struggles over the meaning of ideas constitute the primary terrain of action."  Any view of academia that separates mind, body, and passion, she continues, "separates out truth and knowledge from politics and ethics" (146-7), which is a world that I, like Collins, reject.  Students need to imagine a world where "objectivity and activism" are linked, because "to be intellectual and activists is to be knowledgable, critical, passionate, and caring, all at the same time"-- thus, "intellectual activism" (147).

So, can scholarship, theory, and the academy bolster students' activist and action-oriented fantasies?  What happens to the academy, the life of the mind, the humanities, if we fail to do so? 

The myopic focus on "action" at the expense of thinking, theory, and the realm of ideas runs parallel to the anti-intellectual wave in America right now, as well as the moves toward rejecting the arts as superfluous to a functioning, productive society, and the move toward corporatizing and vocationalizing higher education.  I would argue the aversion to theory in favor of "action" is part of this broader cultural shift away from valuing the world of ideas, recognizing their material impacts, and associating them with liberation.  I love Timothy Morton's essay title, "Don't Just Do Something, Sit There!" precisely because it feels like a rejection of the assumptions privileging action over thought, and a defense of cogitation over just diving in and screwing things up before you've thought enough about it.  As Collins puts it, "learning to think for oneself"--e.g. gaining critical consciousness-- "often leads to action" (131).

What's at stake here if we don't make robust cases for the value of theory as a kind of action, or ask our students to challenge their assumptions about how awesome "action" is?  At best, we continue to make ourselves irrelevant.  Worse, we are complicit in hoarding ideas in the ivory tower and ignoring the ways that they have always been and continue to be the fuel of grassroots social change.  The academy and certainly the humanities need to do better at making their ideas meaningful in our current climate, but also, we can do a lot to explain to students why a knee-jerk impulse to make scholarship "relevant" can be dangerous too.  We should discourage them from being seduced by visible actions they are accustomed to seeing in heroic films. If they think that's how social change works, they will be ill-equipped for the actual work of social change.  Can we cultivate in our students a love of the hard work of thinking about, theorizing, and contextualizing "action"?

Adrienne Maree Brown also suggests that the need for spectacular, visible action is a symptom of patriarchy; perhaps a feminist approach to my students' obsession with action is to ask them to consider whether action is to theory as male is to female.  Whether we agree or not, the conversation does hint at the futility of this binary.  Feminists indeed have long argued that the theory/praxis relationship is dialectical, not hierarchical.  So when my students want action and reject theory, I'm tempted to go back to some of these foundational essays, and make the point that this binary has already been rejected.  Regardless of whether it's boring archival work or feminist theory, I do think it's critical to contextualize students' over-emphasis on action within a broader historical and social framework; who else has been thinking about action/praxis?  How have these debates unfolded in different moments and under different pressures?  What makes our context unique? What makes it similar? Might we need to put the action question aside in order to think clearly, without a constant leaning toward action, about a topic? Might our need for immediate action derail us from grasping a problem with an open mind?



This is problematic too because social change, like Rob Nixon's notion of "slow violence," is slow.  Robert Bullard reminds us that "it's a marathon, not a sprint," and Rebecca Solnit's essays "One magical politician won't fix climate change," and "Acts of Hope", help student-activists take the time to learn how to sustain their idealism over the long-haul, and to not expect to see immediate, spectacular evidence of their efforts.  I love Solnit's description of how watershed moments are results of countless hours of labor and a synchronicity of events leading up to a visible moment of progress.

Here, Adrienne Maree Brown's theory of Emergent Strategy (see my previous post on this fabulous book) is beautiful-- if we see our efforts in a collective and not through the American individualistic lens of the atomistic self, we can rest assured that our efforts are contributing to a massive swell of a force, instead of be anxious about how little our individual actions mean in the enormity of the problems we face.

When I was a professor at University of Alaska Southeast, I learned a lot about Alaska Native cultures that has profoundly shaped my theories about things like action, words, discourse.  I remember one elder explaining to me that the reason she has a piercing on her lip is to remind her to choose her words carefully. Over the years I was there, I learned that words have material consequence and value in the real world for Alaska Natives.  I learned for example that you cannot retell an Alaska Native story without permission-- the words of the story themselves are a matter of possession-- it's a weak comparison to say that they are property, because of course the idea of property is part of the entire colonial myth that exploits and destroys indigenous knowledge. But to imagine words as a form of material reality is not the way I have been educated.

This insight is valuable here as I convince students of the value of chewing on discourse, close-reading texts, creating art and other cultural products, finding and appreciating the heft of their own voices.

Students are going to want to act; I'm not suggesting here that we hole them up in the library and remove them from the real world (again, a problematic binary, but I'm using it precisely to make the point).  On the other hand, we could do better to make scholarship, ideas, theory, and the life of the mind seem much more relevant to their goals, more clearly support their work, and complement and make more powerful their activist/action/agency ideals.

What I'm Reading Now: Emergent Strategy, by Adrienne Maree Brown

I learned about this book through my work on a collaborative CSU/UC network project through the University of California Carbon Neutrality Initiative, called the Transformative Sustainability and Climate Education Knowledge Action Network (KAN).  Our workshops were facilitated by Abigail Reyes, whose approach to facilitation is inspired by emergent strategy principles.   Emergent Strategy just blew my mind.  I have so many ideas about how to use it in my life, research, teaching, collaborations-- all my work.

My "pie in the sky" dream would be to use the facilitation principles and processes outlined in the book as pedagogy.  The entire point of that process is to identify vision and translate it into actions we can do to achieve the vision we want.  Students are always seeking a salve for the doom-and-gloom of the content of climate change, environmental injustice, critical science studies, and the challenges to their positionality that happens in environmental studies classes.  They always want do-able "actions" to address those problems.  Below, I take issue with those impulses, and write about this at much greater length elsewhere, but one way to give students what they seek is to facilitate a vision/change/action workshop for them during class time, or build in transformative student leadership workshops somewhere into the curriculum, or make them a co-curricular opportunity.

Otherwise, for me, the book emphasized the value of:

·      cultivating community and relations (committing ourselves to span an inch wide and a mile deep rather than the other way around).

I am so strapped for time, that relationships with colleagues and anybody in my various communities seems superfluous, not on my to-do list, and so I rush away from social interactions so I can keep working on my task list. I always work from the principle of spreading myself an inch deep and a mile wide, covering a ton of ground, but superficially.  I'm notoriously late everywhere, because I'm always squeezing things in before other things. I'm happy doing half-assed work because I live by the motto "just get that shit done."  So cultivating relationships in ways that don't feel like I'm achieving immediate items on my to-do list has definitely not been a priority to me.  However, Emergent Strategy makes such a convincing argument for the value of relationships, that I am committing myself to letting myself actually enjoy my colleagues, appreciate the languid feeling of just talking to people, and seeing the immeasurable but crucial work of conversation as part of my work.

·      valuing conversation over deliverables

Similar to how important I see the humanities as resisting the corporatization of the university, because it teaches stuff that cannot and shouldn't be monetized in our lives, conversation and relationship-building aren't seen as valuable aspects of "action".  Emergent Strategy argues otherwise, suggesting that the relationships are precisely what keeps a community or group resilient and sustainable for the longer haul.  The language of "action" and "deliverable" and "impact" misses so much important work.  In describing the work of a group called Ruckus, Brown discusses the "action" culture of their direct-action activism as "masculine action culture" and "penetrative"; "Rather than forming long-term partnerships with communities, Ruckus was in and out with mind-blowing, creative actions.  This was in line with a model of action grounded in spectacle" (61).  I spend a lot of time teaching my students that there are so many ways to define "action" that aren't just about marching in the streets, and even that could be argued to be not effective at bringing about "action."  In other words, the idea of "action" needs to be deconstructed, and the value we put on "action" over thought/theory challenged.  This insight from Emergent Strategy really resonated with me because I value the intellectual work of thinking so much, and try to convince my very action-oriented students to spend the time in the world of critique, thought, the mind, conversation, research.  Timothy Morton says something like "don't just do something, sit there!", and he encourages students not to get dirty in soil, but to "rub their noses in their own minds."

·      expanding our notion of  what counts as “action,” based on Brown’s nonlinear and iterative view of social change

Extending this broader argument about what counts as "action," Brown suggests that the messiness of nonlinear movement and iterative, incremental shifts is OK; that's 'emergent strategy.'  I love this.  This relieves us from feeling we have to save the world in one day.

·      shifting toward resilience as a priority over “problem-solving,” in both pedagogy and curriculum development

As an environmental studies person, I'm always hearing that environmental studies is all about problem-solving.  Students in this major think they're getting trained to problem-solve.  We have classes on problem-solving.  Michael Maniates' "Teaching for Turbulence," which I read with my students every semester, tells us that environmental studies is the 'problem-solving' field.  Problem-Solving is one of the Environmental Studies Program Student Learning Outcomes.  It's everywhere.  Yet, I have so many issues with this.  As my dear friend and colleague, Janet Fiskio, says, "I want my students to create problems, not solve them."  And Ted Toadvine's fabulous "Six Myths of Interdisciplinarity" examines the assumptions behind "problem-solving" (whose problem is it? Who benefits and who pays to solve it?  What about competing notions of solutions, definitions of the problem, etc?).  Also, sometimes environmental studies should be about other stuff.   Emergent Strategy is a beautiful antidote to the myopic "problem-solving" definition of environmental studies.

·      increasing appreciation for the theory of the fractal for understanding how change happens and for grasping the power we each all hold

This gives value to all our little steps and small work.  Brown's argument is that "small is all," which suggests that the MOST we can do is the small stuff we can do.  This is hugely relieving and empowering to me.

·      emphasizing the importance of self-care for ourselves and our students

·      shifting curriculum toward affective resilience and emergent strategy as opposed to just content or “marketable skills”

·      paying attention to what we want to grow, rather than all the things that are wrong (in life, pedagogy, how we spend our time and attention, in committees and other collaborations, etc)

This one is really mind-blowing for me, since I'm so keep to criticize and whine about everything.  I will make this a mantra of mine, so I can be buoyed and uplifted, not anchored, dragged down, by the things I spend my time thinking about.  Or at least I'll try to resist whining more than I do now.  For example, rather than sitting around biting our nails about climate change, we should be asking "what is compelling about surviving climate change? What do we need to imagine as we prepare for it? How do we prepare the children in our lives to be visionary, and to love nature even when the changes are frightening and incomprehensible? How do we cultivate the muscle of radical imagination needed to dream together beyond fear?" (58-9).

And also, she says "sometimes we put up the critiques to excuse ourselves from getting involved, to protect our hearts from getting broken if it doesn't work out" (112).  Ouch. I think that's why I intellectualize my grief.  Ouch.

·      doing work that fuels us.

I'm so driven by all the "shoulds" in my life.  I always say things like "I need to pick my kid up".  Should is shit, though, and I WANT to pick my kid up.  I want to do things in life that I desire.  There's no time to waste. Mary Oliver beautifully put it, "what will you do with your one wild and precious life?"; so Brown writes, "As an individual, get really good at being intentional with where you put your energy, letting go as quickly as you can of things that aren't part of your visionary life's work. They you can give your all, from a well-resourced place, when the storm comes, or for those last crucial miles" (72).  Brown says that saying "no" to things that don't fuel us allows us to open up to more "yes's" that do. I love thinking of no as a kind of yes.

I could go on and on, but I'll wrap up here by thanking a group of colleagues for reading this book with me-- Janelle Adsit, Christina Accomando, Janet Winston, and Renee Byrd.