An
interview with sociologist
and writer Avery F. Gordon about her
book “The
Hawthorn Archive: Letters
from the Utopian Margins”
Avery F. Gordon’s “The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins” (2018) is an impressively kaleidoscopic and genre bending book based on Gordon’s more than two decades of research into utopian traditions that have been systematically excluded from the Western canon. Organized in the form of an archive of actual and fictional experiences of living and working together differently, Gordon’s book makes a vast array of “subjugated knowledge” (Foucault) visible and available for appropriation. “The Hawthorn Archive” unearths neglected utopian traditions that are less about some distant future place that would have to be built according to people’s ideals and more about living and working differently in the here and now of the communal. Here, those who were struggling for the Commons (and against enclosures) in 17th-century England are a major reference point for a variety of other movements, including those who struggled for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in the Americas and those who struggled for decolonization in the Global South.
KW:
The
recent rise of right-wing populism consolidates the work of
post-financial crisis austerity politics: the shrinking of access to
existential resources
and
economic participation in general
is
nowadays being compensated with the
promise of national
membership. Unsurprisingly, the right-wing populists too
propagate
the logic of less: ever fewer people are supposed to
benefit from
the forms of membership that the nation-state represents; ever fewer
impulses from the world out there are supposed to influence the
nation-state. In
short, while austerity rhetorics suggest that “we must tighten our
belts”, the rhetorics of right-wing populism claim that “we must
tighten our border controls”.
This
particular brand of “less
world”
politics
obstructs
access to the world. As a consequence, not only is access to the
world as it is
blocked, but also access to the
world as it could be.
It is high time to reverse this trend. And
your book “The Hawthorn Archive” (2018) is a very
important source for this endeavor that the Berliner Gazette is
pursuing
in its 20th
year under the programmatic title MORE
WORLD.
As the political-discursive “world shrinkage” and the false
utopia of the homogeneous nation-state are becoming increasingly
normalized under right-wing populism, “The Hawthorn Archive”
provides practical models not only against world shrinkage but also
for alternative utopias, and, above all, for alternatives to false
utopias. Your
book convincingly
shows that world shrinkage – such as that
currently engendered by right-wing populism – is always to a
certain degree transcended in the everyday practices of the communal.
Making
the history of communal practices accessible by “raising documents
not as witnesses but rather as voices” (Meessen), enables you to
situate contemporary struggles in a wider context and to understand
how to detect them in the here and now. After all, many of the
contemporary practices of living and working together differently are
simply taking place at the communal level, rather than being declared
and recorded as explicitly political, or even utopian, projects.
Thus, these undeclared acts tend to be overlooked when we are
collectively making sense of the world in general and globalization
in particular. The richness of communal practice and imagination
remains buried in the “utopian margins,” as you put it following
Ernst Bloch.
Collecting
the voices of people who are meant to be systematically shut up, your
book
enables them to speak up in an unheard-of choir of dissenters. “The
Hawthorn Archive”
thus suggests that archiving and sharing overlooked and subjugated
knowledge about communal practices is becoming key to making visible
undeclared movements as well as key to engendering a collective
political consciousness across communal boundaries. How did you
actually
come up
with
this project?
AFG:
Let me start with the point you make about the many “undeclared”
alternative practices of living and working that are overlooked.
The
impetus for the book, which I began thinking about some time ago, was
two-fold. One impetus was a desire to pick up where my book “Ghostly
Matters”
ended, with those “historical alternatives” that “haunt a given
society,” as Herbert Marcuse wrote; to find the place where, as
Patricia Williams put it, our “longings” are “exiled.” In
this book, I call that place, after Ernst Bloch, the utopian margins.
The
other impetus was to challenge the twinned
triumphalism of the Right’s “End of History” claim and the
Left’s claim that the political universe had closed shut after the
failures of 1968. Both positions seemed completely out of touch with
the remarkable wave of anti-capitalist resistance by diverse peoples
across the globe, which remained invisible to many until first the
Zapatistas in 1994 and then more widely the Seattle WTO protests
(1999) woke them up. The Right’s
end of history claim was also a “utopian” one which went by the
name “globalization” – the brave new fourth industrial
revolution with its global assembly line, free trade, and boundless
privatization –
while dismissing any alternative notions of worldliness
as TINA (There is no alternative), as Margaret Thatcher famously put
it. The left kept to its Marxist-inspired tradition of treating much
of this opposition with the rejectionist epithet: “That’s not
realistic, that’s utopian!”
Marcuse called it “the merely utopian,” which is often used as a
bludgeon to manage proposals and people and actions that have gone
too far out of bounds, so to speak. Both prompts suggested the need
for a more capacious language suitable for what seemed to me a
significant historical moment of political-economic retrenchment and
resistance to it.
There
were good reasons to distrust and even dismiss the term utopian,
although in my opinion, the main problem was not idealism and
futurism, but rather the term’s deeply racialized historiography
and narrow set of literary, aesthetic, philosophical, historical, and
sociological references. Not too
put to fine a point on it, the extant meaning of the term treated the
genocidal settler colonialism that founded the so-called New World as
a successful utopian enterprise while absenting
entirely what Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker call the
“many-headed hydra” of the seventeenth-century “revolutionary
Atlantic,” those slaves, maids, prisoners, pirates, sailors,
heretics, indigenous peoples, commoners, etc. who challenged the
making of the modern world capitalist system. Why hold onto a term in
which its best practitioners are excluded?
There
was a another kind of utopianism entailed by slaves running away,
marronage, piracy, heresy, vagabondage, soldier desertion, and other
illegible or discredited forms of escape, resistance, opposition and
alternative ways of life that continued, of course, to challenge the
modern racial capitalist system over time. This other utopianism
lends to the term utopian a very different meaning, one rooted much
more in the past and the present, and a very different notion of
politics, one rooted in ongoing social struggles, in various forms of
non-participation, and in an autonomous politics hostile or
indifferent to seizing state power.
It
is always easier to see one’s historical moment after the fact than
in the midst of it, so I hesitate here. But I think that we are still
in that cycle of worldwide resistance and opposition that emerged in
the 1990s. The triumphalism is gone, of course, and the Left, if it’s
possible to even speak of such a thing, which I now doubt, is less
dismissive of utopian “hopes,” even as the term hope is another
somewhat patronizing reduction. Capitalism now lurches from crisis to
crisis more frequently and is incapable of resolving them without
ever increasing financial and military assistance from the state,
even as its anti-state ideology sounds louder and louder. The ongoing
redistribution of resources from social property to private property
in this context of enhanced militarism and securitization has led to
more widespread social abandonment and more entrenched inequalities
within and between countries. The major capitalist powers in the West
seem either not to understand or to be in denial about the decline of
western hegemony and the quiet but definitive shifting of the world
system east.
The
capitalist democratic state, what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the “anti
state state,” or most people know by the name of the neoliberal
state, is also weakened, internally conflicted to the point of
incapacity, nowhere more evident than in Trump’s belligerent
shutdown of the US government or the UK’s Brexit debacle. The
legitimation crisis that besets the viability of a capitalist
democratic state is real and the authoritarian alternative quite
further advanced than the notion of a populist surge implies.
Yet
or also, there is
widespread, daily, active open political opposition to all this at
the scale at which people can contest it: protecting this group of
migrants from arrest, confinement and deportation; organizing this
strike among teachers in this city; defending this territory from oil
drilling; filing law suits against a police department and so on;
gathering in public to swear, shout, shake fists, confront the
inevitably helmeted riot police. There is also widespread, daily,
active, infrapolitical and even secret political opposition, which
needs and wants to remain hidden. And there are also so many people,
more and more in the western wealthy countries, looking for ways to
think and live on different –
better
terms –
and
doing it in small ways, whether in local collectives, or in extended
family units, with illegal housing and electricity, alternative
currencies, in cities and on old tribal lands.
What
will happen we don’t know, of course. But more and more as people
cannot participate in the existing economic and governing systems,
they must find another way. Many people in the global south, poor
people of color in the global north, and indigenous peoples
everywhere are the most experienced at this. Solidarity, assistance,
fellowship will be needed. I am not invested in the term utopian –
whether
it’s used or not matters not a great deal. I care about what I call
in the book being in-difference. Being
in-difference is a political consciousness and a sensuous knowledge,
a standpoint and a mindset for living on better terms than we’re
offered, for living as if you had the necessity and the freedom to do
so, for living in the acknowledgement that, despite the overwhelming
power of all the systems of domination which are trying to kill us,
they never quite become us. They are, as Cedric J. Robinson used to
say, only one condition of our existence or being.
I
think the key challenge politically is to promote and develop that
being in-difference, to learn to stop appealing to the system itself
for redress, to stop believing the forces that are killing you
can/will save you. This doesn’t mean that we don’t engage
politically in struggle. It does mean preparing for being ready and
available, possibly at a moment’s notice, to live autonomously from
the system one wants to abolish. The goal is not greater
participation or assimilation into the given terms of order. The goal
is to overturn that order or displace it or live otherwise than
within it. The balance between
withdrawal/separation and engagement in social struggle is what has
to be determined and there are, unfortunately, no clear rules for
this.
KW:
In
“The
Hawthorn Archive”,
your take on the utopian margins focuses largely on the conditions of
dispossession and on the ways out of this predicament. One of the
recurring mechanisms that your book tackles is ‘dispossession by
enclosure’. This allows you to make a connection between different
struggles, such as struggles in the England of the 17th
century and in post-Katrina New Orleans, which in turn links
different phases of globalization (or capitalism, if you will)
and, moreover, links two different geo-cultural spheres of conflict.
Your
work establishes links and emerges from within a web of unheard-of
connections that widen the spectrum of our thinking when it comes to
tackling key political questions. When talking about these links, we
are close to what you call “abolitionist feminism.” You define
this approach in your book as a “way of seeing, thinking, and
acting that above all makes connections.” What I find most
compelling about this methodology as you deploy it, is that it
contributes to undoing the shrinkages of the world (that are always
also shrinkages of the We, meaning shrinkages of the social world)
and simultaneously contributes to the possibility of creating
connections. If the abolitionist approach emerges from within the
history of enslavement, if it – at its core – demands the
abolition of the very structures that create the possibilities and
conditions of enslavement, and if it is in the eyes of many an
approach directed towards a distant future which seems as far away as
the potential scenario of, for instance, a post-capitalist world,
then you remind us repeatedly in your book that it is precisely in
this perhaps most severe situation of dispossession (enslavement in
all its forms and variations) that the only way out is to create an
abolitionist stance in the here and now. Does this enable us to
expand the discourse of the Commons as a discourse on utopia in the
here and now? What role does solidarity play? What kind of support
structures are needed?
AFG:
Abolition feminism, whose best-known theoretical practitioner is
Angela Y. Davis, is a part of the Black radical internationalist
tradition. Although it is often associated with the movement to
abolish police power and the carceral state, it names a set of
positions and standpoints which understand that in order to abolish
the prison system as we know it today, it is necessary to eliminate
the political, social and economic conditions that produce it, to
radically transform our present social order, which cannot be grasped
in national or nationalist terms. As she writes, “Prison abolition
is a way of talking about the pitfalls of the particular version of
democracy represented by U.S. capitalism.” What’s distinctive
about abolition feminism is this deeper vision and the analytic,
political and human connections it makes.
Perhaps
the most succinct articulation of this connectedness as it comes out
of the Black radical tradition is the idea of the indivisibility of
justice, as expressed by Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1963 in the
letter he wrote from jail in Birmingham, Alabama. He famously wrote:
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are
caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single
garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all
indirectly.” The notion of the indivisibility of justice – and
remember very soon King himself will come to identify militarism and
capitalism as what must be fought to achieve racial justice –
suggests at least two dimensions of what it might mean to talk about
the commons or the common.
One
dimension follows directly from the idea of the indivisibility of
justice, from a situation in which we are each and every one directly
or indirectly impacted by each and every injustice or threat to
justice. This
network of mutuality or commons is another way of describing
solidarity or fellowship, and its existence gives us what King called
standing, as well as a certain obligation, to know and to act in
concert with others and on behalf of each other’s needs.
This
is a beautiful ideal of our connection, of what we have in common –
an escapable network of mutuality, a single garment of destiny.
Sometimes
these connections are strong and powerful and sometimes they are weak
and fractured, but they are, in effect, abolition’s political
commons. At the Hawthorn Archive, friendship and fellowship are
highly valued, and in the documents published in the book there is
quite a lot of discussion about the nature of the common cause
friendship and fellowship enable (and also did
not).
The
second dimension refers more directly to regimes of property,
ownership, and governance. Here, all the various references in the
book that you mentioned constitute a genealogy of a certain kind of
communism, with a small c. This genealogy begins in the efforts to
prevent racial capitalism from being established (for it emerges as a
counterreaction to social struggles too) and continues on into the
present bringing together a variety of diverse visions and practices
of living without greed-based economies in which economic, social,
political and cultural power and resources are privately hoarded and
managed hierarchically. In 1649 the Diggers linked a critique of
private property, consumerism and money worship to self-organized
democratic governance without war, without policing, and without the
tyrannical state. This is an old struggle that we keep reinventing
anew. In 2019, these connections are also being made.
Social-spatial
enclosures have been used to establish control over territories and
people for a very long time and continue to do so, a process that
typically involves the reorganization of property relations and the
destruction of collectively held land, although it can also involve
the taking of private property. Enclosures are maintained by physical
boundaries – fences and walls and borders – by armed soldiers and
police forces and by social, political, and economic traps, what the
geographer Clyde Woods called “trap economics.” Enclosure is also
applied to thought and culture and to make an almost unbelievable
world sensible, desirable, and justifiable. There are many spatial
forms of enclosure, including colonization, slavery, reservations,
prisons, ghettos, company towns, gated communities, just as there are
many mechanisms by which wealth and human capacity are extracted for
private gain. What the example of New Orleans shows and what the
Diggers several hundred years earlier also understood is that
enclosure is not just about land or water or even labour in a simple
sense, but about the broader array of resources and capacities being
taken, contained, fenced in, and transformed into uses counter to
humane purposes. It may start with land, but it doesn’t end there,
nor is enclosure restricted to property in a narrowly defined sense.
We
have to build ourselves –
it’s
not going to be given to us -–
the
infrastructure for life without or despite capitalism, a life in
which we are not enclosed by values and modes of being together based
on money and exchange values, status hierarchies, violence and force,
alienation, racialization, and discipline to externally imposed
standards. That
job is enormous, complex, difficult and fraught with many seemingly
overwhelming obstacles and challenges. But it must start with each
individual, in common with others, learning to become “unavailable
for servitude, back stiff with conviction,” to use the African
American writer Toni Cade Bambara’s words. This is the heart of the
abolitionist imaginary, the work of developing that in-difference –
the
ability to be in-different to the system’s own benefits and its own
technologies of improvement – so that the struggle to transform the
world takes place immanently today now through the means that embody
and instantiate the values, practices, and institutional formats we
desire.
KW:
If
the utopian is always to some extent already lived in the everyday of
the communal, and if this experience occurs in the shadows of
dominant powers that persist in
pushing
world shrinkage and that rule out alternatives, then how does it make
its presence felt?
AFG:
In “The
Intimacies of Four Continents” (2015)
Lisa Lowe investigates the connections between the emergence of
European liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the
transatlantic slave trade and the East Indies and China trades in the
late 18th
and 19th
century. She
begins with an image, a photograph of a secret
memorandum from the British Colonial office sent in 1803 to the
Chairman of the Court of Directors of the East India Company.
It was written just after the Haitian Revolution by colonial
administrator John Sullivan and laid the groundwork for the
introduction of Chinese indentured workers into the British West
Indian island of Trinidad. The memorandum reads:
“The
events which have recently happened at St. Domingo necessarily awakes
all those apprehensions which the establishment of a Negro government
in that land gave rise to some years ago and render it indispensable
that every practicable measure of precaution should be adopted to
guard the British possessions in the West Indies as well against the
the danger of a spirit of insurrection being excited amongst the
Negroes in our colonies… no measure
would so effectively provide a security against this danger as that
of introducing a free race of cultivators into our islands who from
habits and feelings could be kept distinct from the Negroes and who
from interest would be attached to the European proprietors. The
Chinese people unite the qualities which constitute this double
recommendation.”
This
is an important document in the official archive of the intimacies or
relations among Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, a reminder of
what globalization means. It is also specifically one of several
documents that show the extent to which indenture – another system
of forced labor and captivity – was part of the liberal response to
the end of the slave trade. Lowe’s brilliant book is about the
intimacies of power, you could say, and the way they
divide not only to make money but to prevent or foreclose a different
kind of intimacy or solidarity among the colonized.
Her
interest is to “engage slavery, genocide, indenture, and liberalism
as a conjunction … as an acknowledged loss in the present.” She
quotes the African American 17th
century historian Stephanie Smallwood from her seminal book
“Saltwater
Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora” (2008):
“I do not seek to create out of the remains of ledgers and ships’
logs, walls and chains the way it really was for the slave waiting to
be sold. I try to interpret from the slave trader’s disinterest in
the slave’s pain those social conditions within which there was no
possible political resolution to that pain. I try to imagine what
could have been.”
There
are different ways of imagining what could have been and
acknowledging these losses in the present. We need all these ways.
Although these losses are always in my mind and in my heart, in this
book, I’m less focused on the slave trader’s disinterest in the
pain of the people he has captured, than in imaging the specter of
insurrection and its various excitements, the successes and also the
mistakes the English made in thinking that Chinese vagrants would do
this work for them. Lowe wants to work in the conditional past –
what could have been – to “reckon with the violence of
affirmation and forgetting, in order to recognize the reproduction of
this violence today.”
“The
Hawthorn Archive”operates
in a slightly different temporality:
what was almost or not quite yet or was
present and at the same time yet to come. It tries to represent the
traces of the remains of the past or the future yet to come as if in
the present. This is the future conditional or the imperfect past
tense, a combination of the past tense and a continuous or repeating
aspect, something that is unfinished.
The Chimurenga Library and Pan African Space Station put the question
thus: “Can a past that the present has
not yet caught up with be summoned to haunt the present as an
alternative?” What would happen if we
understood that what haunts from the past are precisely all those
aspirations and actions – small and large, individual and
collective – that oppose racial capitalism and empire and live
actively other than on those terms of order. These living haunts are
part of the past the present has not yet caught up with. This is what
I mean by the idea of the utopian margins – an
alternate civilization crossing time and place, accumulating a kind
of cultural or political surplus, as
Bloch called it.
KW:
But how can we
represent it?
AFG:
That’s difficult. I tried to follow Monique Wittig’s instruction
in “Les
Guérillères” (1969): “There
was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. Make an effort
to remember. Or, failing that, invent.” And this is one reason for
the book’s form, which I feel it is important to mention because
the book doesn’t read quite in the way we’ve been talking/writing
to each other, even though some of what’s here in this interview is
written in the book. Rather, the book invites
the reader into the world of the Hawthorn Archive, situated as it is
in that liminal place we can call the utopian margins, where then now
and soon we are, as James Baldwin used to say, better than what they
think we are.
KW:
Speaking of the book’s form, I find important to note that at first
glance the book
can be read as a monograph: the new book by sociologist Avery F.
Gordon, published by a conventional academic publishing house. At
second glance, it is something else entirely: an archive, or better,
an unconventional archive. At a third glance, its experimental
structure – the form of an archive – makes it an unusual
monograph. For me it is most interesting to understand or
misunderstand it in that way, because this reading brings the
question of authorship to the fore. More precisely, it prompts us to
think how traditional authorship – especially in the realm of
academic research – can or cannot come to terms with the subject of
subjugated knowledge.
In
my personal experience, when I started reading the book, I was almost
immediately reminded of films by Lucrecia Martel
(such
as “Zama” (2017))
or by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (especially “Mysterious Object at
Noon” (2000))
who also engage
with (post-) colonial archives by posing the question of authorship.
Who is able to
be an author? Who can be considered an author? And how can we expand
the limited notions of authorship even when using its traditional
formats that tend to support exclusive
notions of authorship? At the same time, I
felt compelled to read the book like a conventional monograph: from
first to last page (rather than browsing through it), as if this was
perhaps not the only but the best way to actively join the
deconstruction of authorship: following the author and un-following
the author at the same time, and thereby entering a third, spectral
space.
AFG:
A third or fourth spectral space –
the utopian margins! Welcome. And thank you for reading the book with
such care, concentration and support for its political project.
KW:
Thank you for contributing to MORE
WORLD.
Join
the MORE WORLD project!
The
BG’s 20th
anniversary project MORE WORLD invites you to explore together
communal tools for planetary challenges. To this end, the BG has
created a special section in the Internet newspaper
berlinergazette.de which is open for contributions from all over the
world. Moreover, the BG will organize a series of events and a big
conference at the end of the year. Further information on that can be
found on this website:
https://more-world.berlinergazette.de
Avery F. Gordon is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Visiting Professor in the Birkbeck School of Law, University of London. Her publications include “The Workhouse: the Breitenau Room” (with Ines Schaber), “Keeping Good Time. Reflections on Knowledge, Power and People” and “Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination”, which established Gordon as one of the most influential interdisciplinary scholars of the humanities and social sciences in recent years. The “The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins” was published in 2018 by Fordham University Press.
Video here
Krystian Woznicki is a critic and the co-founder of Berliner Gazette. His recently published book “Fugitive Belonging” blends writing and photography. Other publications include “A Field Guide to the Snowden Files” (with Magdalena Taube), “After the Planes” (with Brian Massumi), “Wer hat Angst vor Gemeinschaft?” (with Jean-Luc Nancy) and “Abschalten. Paradiesproduktion, Massentourismus und Globalisierung”.
Foto: Stefan Paulus
Der Beitrag Unshrinking the World erschien zuerst auf non.copyriot.com.