In my life I feel guilty for many things (while at the same time knowing that guilt is absolutely not productive, effective, or emancipatory). However, the main thing I most often feel guilty about is that fact that I’m an artist rather than an activist. Of course, it is completely possible to be both an artist and an activist, but I don’t believe I’ve managed to do so. When I ask myself why, my thinking often runs a little bit like this: It seems to me there are at least two parts to being an activist. (There are many, but here I’m thinking of two.) The first is seeing the problems. This I can do. And the second is believing things can change. This is the part I’m weakest on. When I’ve told people this over the years, they often explain to me that my position is a privilege, a luxury, that people who are oppressed have no choice but to believe things can change—their very survival depends on it.
Through these discussions I’ve gradually come to understand that activism entails fighting for positive, emancipatory change regardless of whether or not it is actually possible. Activists fight for such changes because it is the right thing to do, not because there is any guarantee—or even strong possibility—they will succeed. It might also be a matter of how one measures success. Small victories in the present can lead to greater victories in the future that cannot yet be assessed. Any sense of movement, any sense that the evils of the status quo are not fixed, that they can continuously be made to shift and change, even slightly, can be seen as having enormous value. And anything that helps people in the present, even in small ways, is certainly important. Why do I find these things so difficult to feel or understand? Perhaps it’s a certain lack of faith on my part, which also signals just how much ongoing faith one must possess in order to persist in activism.
Sometimes I tell myself one of the main reasons I’m not much of an activist is that I have no natural talent for strategy or tactics. (Other times, I chalk it up to simple cowardice. Both are true.) But I do spend a great deal of time thinking about strategy and tactics. In my first SDUK column, I suggested three areas I’d recently been considering: money, punishment, and competition. “If we could completely get rid of all our current ideas around money, punishment, and competition, what might our culture look like then?”11Jacob Wren, "The First Chapter," The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 9: DIFFUSING (June 2021), https://www.blackwoodgallery.ca/publications/sduk/diffusing/the-first-chapter. For some reason these three concepts draw me in, suggest for me real possibilities I’m still working to untangle. I was asked to expound on these aspects in my second column, but instead chose to replace it with a gesture of protest, leaving my column blank in support of Dr. Valentina Azarova and the Canadian Association of University Teachers Council’s censure of the University of Toronto.22Jacob Wren, "In Support of the Censure," The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 10: PRONOUNCING (October 2021), https://www.blackwoodgallery.ca/publications/sduk/pronouncing/in-support-of-the-censure. I’m still not certain this gesture was the right move on my part (perhaps I should have chosen a different strategy), but I also very much believe in trying things, learning as I go. So now, belatedly, a few thoughts:
Money: I have been anticapitalist my entire life and now wonder if capitalism is not stronger than ever. (It is only upon more recently reading the political theorist Cedric Robinson that I’ve fully realized the degree to which all capitalism is racial capitalism. How does our anticapitalism change when we understand all capitalism as racial capitalism?) These days I honestly wonder to what degree it is possible to get rid of capitalism without also getting rid of money. How might we undo the many ways in which money allows people (especially the rich) to hoard power in a manner that so far exceeds any connection to reality it becomes completely untenable? Of course, I have absolutely no idea how to get rid of money, but if that is the long-term goal, then what imaginative pathways are generated and how might we pursue them?
Punishment: As I have learned from reading the many amazing thinkers and activists currently working in and around transformative justice: everyone does harm. (So much information is available, but a book that really struck me on the topic is Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, edited by political strategist Ejeris Dixon and artist, writer, and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.) The world we live in tells us over and over again that the correct response to harm is punishment. But how can we work toward some other model of understanding harm, of people taking accountability for their actions and being welcomed back into the community if they are effectively able to change? How can we re-envision harm as a part of life we are able to learn from and, in doing so, work toward repair? Such things, it seems to me, could fully take place only in a considerably more equitable world, one that resembles nothing so much as the honest opposite of all that surrounds us.
Competition: I’m still not sure exactly what I want to say about competition. In our capitalist world, from such an early age, we are made to understand that competition contains some greater truth that cooperation does not. (Grades, sports, literary awards, etc.) What kinds of changes might be required to create real awareness—and capacity—around the essential value of working together?
As is probably the case for many reading this, now is a historical moment in which I find myself considering not only what is being said but also who is saying it. I often ask myself: Who am I to write these things? What is my social position and how can I justify speaking from it? I also know that your experience reading this might be extremely different from mine writing it. I write in the hope that, within this process, some transformation or opening might be in play. If what I produce is more literature than anything else, it is only because I can’t seem to help it: these are the places my mind goes when I sit down to consider strategy. Nonetheless, the forms of belief required for making art so often mirror the forms of belief required for activism. Such connections are always close.
Which brings me full circle, since when I look at the world today, I deeply feel what is needed is not art but activism. (And certainly some of this activism can take the form of art, and certainly art can be anything, including activism—but, nonetheless, I can’t help but feel, in our current moment, art might not be what is needed most.) So what kind of activisms am I really thinking of? I wish I knew. Since it often seems to me we require an activism that reaches so far beyond anything that current activism is able to achieve. (Then I tell myself: don’t write this, it indicates only unhelpful defeatism.) In my first column, I quoted educator and curator Mariame Kaba saying her activism is on “a five-hundred-year clock”: working hard to do things now that might fully come into fruition in half a century’s time. Setting off some more dominoes in a five-hundred-year chain. Thinking about this five-hundred-year clock is what brings me to the theme of pacing. Since, in both art and activism, whatever it is we’re going to do, we must both do it now and deeply consider the future.
The final essay in a serial column exploring the intersections of political action, ecological collapse, futurity, and writing.
Jacob Wren makes literature, performances, and exhibitions. His books include: Polyamorous Love Song, Rich and Poor, and Authenticity is a Feeling. As Co-Artistic Director of Montreal-based PME-ART, he has helped create performances such as: Individualism Was A Mistake, The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information, Every Song I’ve Ever Written and Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie. Most recently PME-ART has presented the online conference Vulnerable Paradoxes.
See Connections ⤴