Thread by @amplify285

Starting my day at a talk with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (@rwgilmoregirls) & Paul Gilroy (@bungatuffie), two of my favorite minds and favorite humans.

I'm especially struck by Gilmore's response to the question, via Stuart Hall's thinking, of whether the study of culture is a luxury +

Is the study of culture a luxury? Gilmore describes how struggles through, about, and as effects of culture highlight a constant sense of human trying to improve social, political, and economic conditions. "All of that trying," she notes, "is part of the process." +

For Gilmore, the study of culture is also "the study of consciousness, the study of ideology," the study of how we live— or as I would gloss, of how we *manage* to live in our inherited worlds. @rwgilmoregirls: such study enables us to "see things we wouldn't otherwise see" +

Culture, for @rwgilmoregirls, "is the purpose of struggle, so that we can lead these lives" of luxury, for the luxury we seek is freedom.

In other words, she nailed it in the beginning to her response, "Life and death become luxurious, for those of us who fight for it." Indeed.

I should note that this conversation is also in celebration of Gilmore and Gilroy work as editors of one of the Stuart Hall volumes being collected and released by @DukePress | dukeupress.edu/books/browse/b…

Gilmore also identifies important complexities of social media use in relation to social movement. As I've noted before, the work of clicking, sharing, etc can produce or move in useful synchrony with other forms of action. Which is to say that I avoid reifying "slacktivism," +

Gilmore is not piling on slacktivism, but she asks us to make important distinctions between what she identifies as "recitation" and "rehearsal." I find this incredibly useful, especially after her description of some identifiable academic social media dynamics of recitation. +

Gilmore's "recitation" names how the repetition of academic ideas, quotes, and etc can interfere with the hard work of inquiry, as "the intellectual activity of theorizing our way through the conjecture" is reduced to a test of loyalty to a certain set of ideas. +

Gilmore's insight begs attentiveness to how acts of recitation can replace ongoing intellectual engagement. Highlighting "working through the ideas," for instance attending to a writer's use of "the phrase and what the phrase" asks of us, even as we might struggle and stumble. +

This reminds me of something I recently heard Katherine McKittrick (@demonicground) say in a talk in regards to her years-long study of Sylvia Wynter, which I paraphrase here as a reminder that study is hard and slow and *that* is okay bc that difficulty is itself important. +

I would add, natural human frustrations w/ frustration aside, that the need for scholarly study to be easier is attached to the academic-capitalist pressures to produce at all costs. We live in the tension between production & the requirements for care that texts set before us. +

I hear an argument for active care in Gilmore's request that we focus on "rehearsal" rather than recitation, the enactment and instantiation of ideas as part of our working-through, "opening out" models as we fight militarism, carceral racism, and environmental destruction. +

Gilroy picks this up, I think, in his own distinction between pessimism and fatalism. "It's sensible to be pessimistic," but we must also corral resources that keep us from being rendered inert by seeing/witnessing/knowing. "Hashtag pessimism" is not pessimism, it's fatalism. +

On that note (!), thanks as always to Gilmore and Gilroy, and via the spirits of course to Stuart Hall. Thanks also to @SBangstad & the other interlocutors. Also, I know this was Gilmore heavy, but I've been especially engaged with her work lately and needed this on a Thurs morn.

Missed it? I think there's a recording. I know that I will be returning to it. facebook.com/theoryfromthem…

.@hystericalblkns @MRogers097. Also, hello!