"I would prefer not to..."

Talk prepared for The Gramsci Society UK 22.2.23

The title of this talk comes not from Gramsci, or Spinoza, but from the work of Rosi Braidotti, with whom I studied for four summer schools at Utrecht University. “I would prefer not to…” is as revolutionary as anything else in this society, where drama and fake truths are all around us. It is a forthright, yet slightly exhausted, resistance, a patient and persistent refusal of the misery of life during times variously referred to as advanced capitalism, the anthropocene, the sixth industrial revolution and, with increasing justification, the end of the world. 

So Braidotti is here with us tonight and so are Fred Moten and Stefano Harney who write about the misery of the academy, and Gramsci - of course - and Spinoza, who doesn’t get a slide, but whose joyful potentia powers everything I’m able to do.

So let me begin with an apology - and a disclaimer. The apology is for repurposing my slides from the last Gramsci Society talk I did, with new quotes and a refreshed cartography - I’ll post a link to my slides below so you can pick up the references (they should click through but this is a new trick of Canva’s so I haven’t tested them yet). Francesca reminded me that these events are not about exhausting ourselves even further. The disclaimer is to let you know that I am not a Gramsci scholar, or even a scholar of Spinoza, really. Philosophy exists for me as a stimulus to praxis, or else what’s the point in doing the thinking? 

I should also say that the last talk I did for Gramsci was based on my PhD - seven years’ thinking. This is less formed and more speculative, so please bear with me.

And now, for a proper introduction by Antonio Gramsci himself, written from prison in 1929. His letters to his wife Julia, to his sons Dalio and Giuliano, and to his mum really would break your heart. 

“You must realise that I am far from feeling beaten, it seems to me that…a man ought to be deeply convinced that the source of his own moral force is in himself - his very energy and will, the iron coherence of ends and means - that he never falls into those vulgar, banal moods, pessimism and optimism. My own state of mind synthesises these two feelings and transcends them: my mind is pessimistic, but my will is optimistic. Whatever the situation, I imagine the worst that can happen, in order to summon up all my reserves and will power to overcome every obstacle.”

I just got back from 36 hours of radical rest. I was physically exhausted and mentally overwhelmed. I walked the Norfolk coast and slept in a little cell room at the Shine of Our Lady of Walsingham. It was perfection and it would have seemed like luxury to Gramsci. Tonight I’m interested in exploring exhaustion and resistance, in Gramsci’s time and our own. 

We face very different challenges. Tom Shakespeare is a brilliant go-to around Gramsci’s disabilities - thank you Francesca for pointing me in his direction. Whether or not he was dropped on his head by a nanny, it seems likely now that Gramsci had TB in his bones from an early age (Pott Disease), no doubt exacerbated by the family’s subsequent poverty and his own prison experiences. He could barely have been comfortable for a moment in his life. And yet, he retained an “optimism of the will”, and a joyful appreciation of roses and lizards. We heard echoes of that in Patrick McKenzie’s beautiful reading of Pasolini’s ‘Gramsci’s Ashes’ at the last Gramsci Society UK meeting. 

Spinoza has been lambasted by the left for his rejection of revolution, yet the revolution of his times was a Puritan one, and a brutal one at that, which sought to oppress many freedoms and human joys. If we are going to draw on the ideas of historical thinkers we have to pay them the respect of not applying our sensibilities to their times. I may be slightly defensive about the guy, but when Spinoza is also accused of elitism I do reflect that philosophy for all is as unlikely in our times as it was in his. We have to work with organic intellectuals where we find them; even Gramsci was suspicious of everyday “commonsense” and who can blame him at a time when so many people around him, already oppressed, desired the security and power they thought fascism would bring. As do many today.

Spinoza and Gramsci would have rolled their eyes at the privilege of the problems that drove me to the Norfolk coast, yet we face challenges they could not comprehend, not least the climate change train hurtling towards us. We are exhausted in a way that those men of letters would not understand. We are bombasted, assaulted and overwhelmed by advanced capitalism. We have no time to pause and consider any other possibility than staying on the treadmill of graft and grift. 

This is Gramsci’s hegemony writ large. We are complicit in capitalism, too exhausted to resist. We are too miserable to resist facism. And so we are controlled by the ideology of others. 

I started researching the concept of Radical Rest last summer, as part of my exploration of “I would prefer not to…” I’m indebted to black scholars Shawn Ginright, Karen Walrond and, above all, The Nap Bishop Tricia Hersey for compelling me to position rest as resistance and to conceptualise it as intergenerational, reaching backwards and forwards in time and informed always by those who lived and worked on the land which was profiteered by others, including indigenous peoples. Ginwright, Hersey and Walrond’s perspectives as descendants of enslaved people in the United States and Caribbean is fundamental, because their thinking is not entangled in the axioms of the white, European Marxist tradition, which only offers one - discredited - alternative. They don’t appear on my cartography tonight only because I wanted to reference directly to Gramsci and Spinoza. Their thinking underpins my broader work and I cite them often. I’m always happy to share if you want to know more. 

So what I’m doing tonight is bringing together a number of threads; the affirmative golden thread that links Gramsci and Spinoza, Braidotti’s genealogy from Spinoza via Antonio Negri and Gilles Deleuze, and the work of black scholars in the US tradition including, of course, the irreplaceable bell hooks. And I’m applying that thinking to ways in which I and others, via various movements, are attempting to bring about wholescale culture change in further education: a largely working-class education service in the UK where we educate “other people’s children” (thanks to Kevin Orr and others for that quote). 

It’s a work in progress.

I have been unable to definitively find out whether Gramsci ever read Spinoza - there may be people here tonight who can help me with this. It seems likely, because Spinoza was popular in Russian Bolshevik circles around the early 20th century, up to and including the work of Lev Vygotsky which has a prominent place on teacher education courses, or at least it did in my day. I’m not sure I find much to agree about with these ‘Soviet Spinozists’, who seem in my reading to be obsessed with establishing Spinoza as part of a genealogy for Marxism, rather than for his own sake, but I’m pretty confident that their work would have brought him into Gramsci’s orbit.

The two of them have a lot in common. 

They share a capacity for joy in the toughest of times. This comes through most strongly in Spinoza’s work, naturally, because joy for him was a kind of god, a god that is in all of us and which finds its apogee in connection with each other and non-human others (not just animals but other life forms too). We literally become capable of ideas because we affect and are affected by others (and the more we are, the more ideas we have). Spinoza called this ‘conatus’, or, as we might say, ‘making an effort’. The echoes in secular Gramsci are around his call to “educate yourselves…stir yourselves…organise yourselves.” One of my favourite Gramsci quotes is the waspish, “the whimpering of eternally innocent ones annoys me.” It calls to mind Brené Brown’s refusal to engage with anyone who doesn’t have the courage to “step into the arena”: I would prefer not to.

Culture for Gramsci was essentially thinking for yourself…then acting on it. They are both praxis people, even if Spinoza never used the word. Instead, his equation was cogitandi potentia = agenda potentia: the power of thinking corresponds to the power of acting.

This talk is part of my broader collective work, because I’m not a scholar but a philosopher of praxis in a Gramscian sense, and a 21st century context. If you take a look at any review of Dan Taylor’s latest book, Spinoza and the Politics of Freedom, you’ll get what I mean about the relevance of this thinking for now. And if you read the actual book let me know, it was slightly out of my price range at £80! Thank goodness for the generosity of his blog and the attention to detail of his reviewers.

Another of the links I’ve shared with you is an interview with Belgian thinker Chantal Mouffe, who draws on Gramsci’s differentiation between “war of movement” (a big push which suddenly brings power, what we think of when we think “revolution”) and “war of position”, the construction of a hegemony which takes longer. 

This is our work to do and we are doing it. A “war of position”, though I certainly don’t want to call it any sort of war. The patient construction of a new hegemony is literally culture change.  Dan Taylor refers to it as, “thinking strategically and pragmatically about how forms become hegemonic in the first place and then, perhaps, how they can be dismantled and transformed.” 

We can live, learn and relate differently by building up small, patient, persistent, acts of Spinozan revolutionary joy, doubling our energy by channelling Gramsci affirmative vision too. We can relate, we can connect, we can affect, finding the best ways to live in harmony with each other and with the earth, creating what Dan Taylor refers to as a “reasonable republic” - which should be the point of politics, surely? This is what we need in modern thinking, a collective desire to reassemble the fragments of popular myths and reclaim ‘culture’. And where better than the point where we all agree - that we are exhausted, that what we need is radical rest. It’s a powerful intervention point.

My job here was to get you thinking philosophically. I hope in your questions you might want to drill down into some of the ways that I - and others - are doing this work practically, saying “I would prefer not to…” to be so exhausted we cannot think.

After the talk, we had a brilliant discussion, which covered:

• ‘Endurance’ as a collective recognition of all that’s bearing down on us vs ‘Resilience’ as a victim-blaming “it’s on you.”

• Changemaking work as a leadership practice to collectively resist (see FE Constellations).

• Loyalty to the organisation/colleagues and above all “the students” used as a stick to beat us with; the exhaustion of goodwill.

• The “I would prefer not to…” impact of Possibility Questions and the Thinking Environment in general (see Thinking Cultures and JoyFE).

• The self-responsibility necessary for any collective movement to gain momentum: conatus. Dan Taylor:

“Whereas the radical individualist might…recycle, the collectivist recognises that effective political change must be more ambitious…working with others of a common nature to figure out how we can transform the nature of work and the economy for all to live more sustainably and powerfully together.”

Link to slides - feel free to click through from the cartography https://www.canva.com/design/DAEOfqpt964/aI9F7EXmvk3nTkN5z3dEFg/view?utm_content=DAEOfqpt964&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton