A shameless wholesale reblog from Nicolas Nova, here, as he’s done the service of transcribing a bit from a podcast interview with Anna Tsing which I have yet to listen to, but which chimed so damn loud with a conference paper abstract I’ve been writing this afternoon (as well as with, well, everything I’ve been thinking and writing about for the last couple of years, but the last year in particular) that I couldn’t let it pass unblogged. Plus, y’know, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?
Anyway—quoth Tsing:
As I continue to read about the challenges around us, I have decided that’s not enough, we also gonna have to tell stories where we’re not winning, where there’s just terrible things happening and we might not win, and I know anthropologists have been very critical of those kind of stories, particularly as paralyzing, as leaving one dead-end. Then it’s gonna be a challenge, how do write those stories in a way that they’re not paralyzing, that they bring us to life, that we notice the details, all that art of noticing is in there, that we ‘stay in the trouble’ as Donna Haraway puts it, that we get involved, so that’s our challenge. So that rather than saying don’t do it, I think the challenge of our time is: ‘how do we tell terrible stories beautifully.’
At the risk of coming across as a shameless fan, I could argue that Tsing has already found at least one answer to her own challenge, as illustrated by her magisterial and beautiful book The Mushroom at the End of the World. But it remains a hard case to make, whether in academia (where, while you may have a solid theoretical justification for futures that contain the grit of failure and unevenness, actually getting that past the tacit and largely unexamined institutional bias toward optimistic futures over hopeful ones can be an uphill struggle) or beyond (where attempting to end-run accusations of “being a downer” by means of theory is, nine times out of ten, merely to dig one’s own hole a few feet deeper).
But nonetheless: terrible stories are a prerequisite for hope, because hope, being active, requires some undesirable future (e.g. what Lisa Garforth describes in her excellent book Green Utopias as the “apocalyptic horizon” of climate change”) to be deployed against. Optimism is not enough; optimism is Business As Usual; optimism is centrism’s implicit endorsement of the status quo. Optimism is another operationalisation of the Someone Else’s Problem field.
Hope is a harder thing to sustain—and I don’t for a moment claim to be much good at sustaining it myself. As Garforth also points out, the “end of nature” and the sense of foreclosure upon the future are closely related, and have changed the shape of hope’s expression over the last six or seven decades: they’re exactly why we’re distrustful of blueprint utopias, as futurity (quite accurately) does not appear to have the space for such blank-slate thinking.
But hope persists—and the persistence of hope is itself utopian. I have often argued here that utopia should be thought of less as a destination and more as a direction of travel, and I hold to that now—but thanks to Garforth, and to Phillip Wegner’s Invoking Hope (the proper reviewing of which is one among many tasks against which this blog post is a procrastinatory displacement activity), I understand that utopia also resides in the very attempt to travel at all, in the acted-upon belief that change is both still possible and worth attempting.
Which is why even though I feel I suck at sustaining hope, I also feel it gets a little easier the longer I try. The point of the work is the work.
