Longer notes from current books
Pacific Edge
A post-revolutionary eco-utopia set in Southern California, but focused on the everyday lives and relationships of its inhabitants.
Kevin lives in El Modena, working as a carpenter, serving on the town’s council, and breaking records for the local softball team. The two forces of drama in his life are attemps by the town’s mayor, Alfredo, to develop a local hillside against the wishes of some of the people, and his pining for Ramona, a teacher and Alfredo’s on-again-off-again girlfriend. These forces play out in Kevin’s life in overlapping and competing ways, as he learns more about Alfredo’s motivations for developing the hill as well and as his relationship with Ramona waxes and wanes. Interspersed in the story are chapters from some at-first unnamed character, describing their time in a prison camp somewhere on the east coast, and how they became radicalized and focused on transforming the world.
Overall, the book is mostly a mundane exploration of interpersonal and community dynamics, but playing out on the backdrop of a world made new after a period of political and ecological disaster. The development politics of El Modena inject a notion of complexity and dynamism into this melodrama, pondering whether the forces of modernity and capitalism will disappear completely in some better possible future.
Elite Capture
A call for a constructive politics that recognizes difference but sees it as a means to build, rather than a means to divide. Taiwo juxtaposes such a position against what he calls a politics of deference, which foregrounds the experience of difference and privleges it as a stopping point in politics. Taiwo uses a number of metaphors to get at this difference, particularly the idea of a room as a created context of our actions and interactions. Under his reading, deference politics locates why difference exists in the room, and centers or priveleges the most marginalized and oppressed people within it. Conversely, a constructive politics seeks to mobilze across lines of difference, towards the goal of building a new room. Taiwo argues that the former is particularly succeptible to “Elite Capture”, meaning the takeover of resources, processes, and even language by the powerful (in effect, constructing and controlling a house that supports their interests).
His primary concern with deference politics is that it tends to use somewhat facile notions of difference that are then rhetorically amplified with the goal of centering the marginalized. To quote Taiwo, such centering “has usually meant handing conversational authority and attentional goods to whoever is already in the room and appears to fit a social category associated with some form of oppression–regardless of what they have or have not eactually experienced, or what they do or do not actually know about the matter at hand.” This means, for Taiwo, that the conversation “stayed in the room, while the people most affected by it stayed outside.” His examples of this largely come from American politics, where candidates who share phenotypic characteristics with populations that have been marginalized for those characteristics are treated with deference and allowance, even if their actual political goals will cause harm to those same populations. Even the lofty and idealistic vision of deference politics, in which we ask people who have some experience with marginalization to speak about it, falls flat for Taiwo, because in its quest to equalize attention and authority within a narrow social space, it leaves the overall structure that created the categories of marginalization in place. In Taiwo’s words, “The facts that explain who ends up in what room shape our world much more powerfully than the squabbles for comparative prestige between people who have already made it inside.” Such squabbles are, for Taiwo, essentially performative, easily captured by elite interests as a means of derailing activism, and provide little potential to change or move the world towards equity and justice.
This book is a call to action, and laced with fascinating histories from colonial African and South American uprisings and decolonization efforts to lend support to the need to build coalitions across lines of difference, construct new alternatives, and re-think older assumptions. These are the models that Taiwo draws to counterpose constructive and deferential politics. At the same time, I found myself wanting to understand how to make sense of that difference at the level of interpersonal relationships. How does one negotiate the interactions of competing lived experiences in a way that promotes curiousity, creativity, and decisive action towards equity and justice? In other words, how do I know, if I’m in a room with people who are marked as different from me in some historically structural way, whether I am lazily ceding attention and authority to them, allowing elite capture to take place, or just being a decent person and trying to build conversational space for planning and action? It feels easy to say that there are two kinds of politics (constructive and deferential) and we should do the good kind and not do the bad kind, but I don’t have a good sense of how to know the difference in any given situation, and I don’t feel like this book helped me think through that except in a very abstract way.
Martian Sands
A kind of Jewish Dickian mind-melt, in which time-travel allows Jews to avert the holocaust and create a new Israel on Mars. Featuring androids of Golda Meir, blurred lines between pulp fiction and reality, and splitting personalities. I found it kind of bewildering and hard to follow, but the concepts were cool.
