Rehearsing the Future with Michael Doan
Mike 0:03
Grace would often speak of education as a way of putting our heads, hands, and hearts back together, right, as sort of facilitating a kind of reintegration through which, through which we can, I think, more come alive, right, and our thinking can begin to matter to us and to others.
[theme music plays]
Kristin 0:28
Welcome to thinking bodies, a feminist philosophy podcast.
Mike 0:33
Western philosophers have separated the mind and body, and here on thinking bodies, we're pulling on the threads that have always held them together.
Anna 0:42
To do this, we crowdsource voice clips to discuss works in feminist philosophy that deserve more attention. Our podcast collages with these clips as a feminist DIT experiment. That's right: this is a do-it-together podcast, sharing the sounds of feminist philosophy.
Kristin 0:59
Today we're doing something a little bit different. We have friend of the pod Michael Doan to discuss his new book, Rehearsing the Future: The Thought and Practice of James and Grace Lee Boggs, which is due out right away from AK Press (October 27, 2026). Mike, thanks so much for being here.
Anna 2:25
Kristin has already read this book, Mike, but I have not. I am very impatiently waiting for my copy to arrive when it's released, um, so I'm sort of in the same position as many of our listeners and I have a lot of, um, like methods questions about your work on this project, which I'm so excited to ask you about.
Kristin 2:44
Now, listeners, you might remember Mike from our very first episode on Sue Campbell's ‘Being Dismissed.’ This episode is a little different from our previous episodes. Uh, we're discussing a book that's not out yet. Uhm, the topic and the figures of the book are just super influential and important thinkers in the United States. They are really important for this moment, for many moments, uhm, thinking about revolutionary change.
Mike 3:12
Yeah, a lot of people, especially in the Canadian context, might not know of them. Um, well, uh, Grace Chin Lee was born in Providence, Rhode Island, to a pair of Chinese immigrants who had opened a restaurant there, uh, and her family eventually moved to New York City, uh, where her father opened another restaurant, and, um, in New York, Grace graduated from Barnard College, uh, with an undergrad in philosophy, uh, before going on to earn a PhD in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in 1940.
Anna 3:44
Whoa. Okay. So a PhD in philosophy in 1940, not just, you know, a woman of color, but like a woman, like that must've been a very impressive feat and not at all easy.
Mike 3:58
No kidding, no kidding. I think, and I'm not exactly sure on the age when Grace first went away to college, but I think it was, like, 15 or 16, too, so she was, she was an outstanding student.
Anna 4:01
Mmm, super bright. Yep.
Mike 4:02
Yeah. But when she graduated in 1940, she was unable to land an academic gig as a young Chinese American woman, so she just packed up and moved to Chicago, where she got a job at the University of Chicago's Philosophy Library, um, and someone offered her a place to stay rent-free, and from there… so, I mean, she describes this in her autobiography and other places, there was… she had to face down a wall of rats to get into her place [Kristin and Anna emote], and, and so, partly from those experiences, she became involved in tenant organizing. [Anna and Kristin emote] And that introduced her to the Black community. She was living in a predominantly Black community in Chicago, um, and it also started also introduced her to – and she also introduced her because the tenant organizing group that she became involved in, um, was actually a front for a group – a party, the Workers' Party, uh, that was part of the nascent American Trotskyist movement at the time. And so she eventually found a political home in that movement in a dissident formation within the Workers' Party that became known as the Johnson Forest Tendency. It was led by C. L. R. James, which I imagine many people might know, from his book, The Black Jacobins, but also, like, many other, um, amazing books, and Raya Danaevskaya, who was a Ukrainian-born Marxist who moved to the States as a young person and came and became involved in revolutionary politics.
So it was called the “Johnson Forest Tendency” because those were… “Johnson” and “Forest” were the, um, the pen and party names of C. L. R. and Raya. It was “J. R. Johnson” and “Freddie Forest,” so it was, so yeah, I would say, like… it kind of sounds like a progressive rock trio or something like that…
Anna
Yep. Totally.
Kristin
[laughs] Ha! It totally does!
Mike
…but, like, no, it's a political tendency. And it was through her work with this, with the Johnson Forest Tendency that Grace first met James Boggs in 1952.
Kristin
Yeah. I feel like we need to bring back tendencies, you know? Yeah. Like, what, like, can we, we can be part of a party or part of a group of ideas, but then say, “no, I'm more… I tend this way.”
Anna
Yeah, as an organizing structure. Yeah.
Kristin
“And do you tend in that way?” Or we can have different tendencies within?
Mike
Or just, or just different prog rock, prog rock… expressions. Yeah.
Anna
Also that, yeah.
[all giggle]
[sound of book pages flipping]
Mike
Alright, so let me say a bit about Jimmy. So, uh, James Boggs, who is known to his friends and comrades as “Jimmy,” was born and raised in the small farming community of Marion Junction, Alabama. And during the Great Depression, when there was a serious rise in white supremacist terrorism in the South, he traveled north, really all around the country, you know, kind of riding the rails, uh, and landed eventually in Detroit, the Motor City. And, uh, the Second World War put him to work in, eventually in the Chrysler-Jefferson plant, where he'd remain for the rest of his long, 30-year career as an auto worker. And there, he was exposed to revolutionary politics through union organizing, and he joined forces with Grace when the Johnson Forrest Tendency morphed, changed, into a different organization, this time totally separate from, independent of, the broader Trotskyist movement. Um, so they formed an independent Marxist organization called Correspondence, and this was really their opportunity, along with C. L. R. and Raya, to sort of strike out on their own and develop ideas unfettered by, you know, being constrained by a larger party apparatus. Um, and so Jimmy became the editor of the group's newspaper, and that really helped him to hone his skills, not only as an organizer, but also as a budding revolutionary theoretician.
So the two of them got married in 1954, right, which, notice, is just a couple years after they met. Um, and they went on to enjoy a 40-year partnership as revolutionists in the labor and Black Power movements. Um, and along the way they developed their own revolutionary philosophy, which they called “dialectical humanism.” And this is really important to understand, but the primary impetus to this new philosophy wasn't just their own preoccupations or their own thinking. Um, but they took inspiration for this philosophy and actually saw it emerging through the self-activity of Black Americans responding creatively to the harsh realities of urban living after the Second World War, especially as more and more African Americans were being expelled from, or just prevented from being involved in production jobs in factories altogether. And so the Boggses described the responses of Black Americans to those circumstances in terms of, and this is a quote here, a “new revolutionary struggle for new human values and new human relations.”
Kristin 9:31
Hmm. “New human values and new human relations.” Like, there's so much in what you've already said, Mike, that's foreshadowing or, like, giving structure to the project of the book, which is sort of looking at what's happening on the ground, how people are involved in activist struggle, like social change, but then also sort of philosophizing from those spaces.
Mike
You know, I've just, I was just saying how dialectical humanism really emerges out of the action of ordinary people responding to their life circumstances. And, but it's also a method of thinking about and seeking to develop those responses into more and more… um, more and more complex and impactful ways of changing the world.
So the main purpose of my book is to just kind of unpack dialectically, explain what it is as a method of thinking and being, so that it can be taken up to date by a new generation of radicals and revolutionists who don't have opportunity to learn from and with the Boggses.
[thoughtful transition music plays]
Stephen Ward 10:47
My name is Stephen Ward. I've been studying the work of James and Grace Lee Boggs since the 1990s, and I've been a member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership since 2002. From this I've learned that political struggle is an ongoing process of learning, action, and reflection, and I've come to see revolutionary change as grounded in and driving towards the continued evolution of humanity.
[thoughtful transition music plays]
Kristin 11:27
Yeah, and I'll say as someone who's been through the book, it's, it's accessible, but it's not like, uh, you know… I don't know what the right word is. It's not, it's not brought down to a non-theoretical level, right? Like, you've got the ideas; It'll serve a lot of sort of activists for reading around thinking, but also philosophers.
Mike 11:46
Absolutely. And I think that's also largely, Kristin, a reflection of how the Boggses wrote. I mean, I've sometimes heard people describe their writing as kind of like, um, I don't love this, this way of putting it, but like “low theory.” And they were very self-consciously trying to reach, you know, folks in their own neighborhood, right? Just like ordinary Detroiters like working, working in the plants, you know, taking care of house, going to school, and that kind of stuff. So, um, I think they were tremendously gifted at bringing really complex ideas down to earth so that ordinary people could, could grapple with those. Cause of course not everyone has a PhD from, you know, in philosophy from, from Bryn Mawr College! Right?
Anna 12:31
Right.
Mike 12:31
Right?
Anna 12:32
And if that's low theory, then “up with low theory!,” right? Like, that's...
Kristin 12:36
And I was gonna say we could call it “grounded theory” or like…
Anna 12:40
Yes!
Kristin 12:40
There's other ways to, yeah. And let's just, I want to just take a minute too with this, with the title, “Rehearsing the Future.” I just, I just love this title. [Anna agrees] Like I love, I love, I'm a big fan of temporality and any kind of theory that has to do with time. But also about like improvisation and that kind of open-endedness. Um, but also because I think a lot of people who are involved with, or [sighs] at least who have a kind of oppositional consciousness to the way that things are, it can be really hard to think about a different future. And I think thinking about it in terms of “rehearsing” might give us a way of thinking about, “we don't have to get this right. We don't have to know everything. We're trying something new.” And I just, I love that as a title and I love that, um, I just think it kind of captures a lot of what the Boggses were doing. And even frankly, like your approach to writing with them in bringing these ideas forward.
Mike 13:52
Um, I mean, one of the, one of the reasons I feel like it's an important way of framing the project is just that I feel like for so many of us now, like the horizon of the future is, is seeming dimmer and narrower. And, you know, especially here in the United States where we're, you know, literally living under a fascist regime that is not really offering even their own base, um, a compelling narrative about the type of future that they're building. It's just sort of, it's more like, um, you know, “you get to be part of and revel in the brutality we're unleashing as we kind of like bunker down into this survivalist mode and, you know, where only the chosen, uh, you know, the “real Americans” will get to survive” and that kind of thing. So I feel like, um, reminding the rest of us that, you know, there is a future and that that future isn't predetermined, you know, that it's not just sort of inevitable and that it's something that we need to self-consciously build together.
Um, and as you're pointing out like in an inevitably improvisational kind of way, um, that that's, uh, I, I hope that that's a message that will resonate with a lot of folks. And so that title, “Rehearsing the Future,” I actually borrow it from an essay, um, by Bunyan Bryant, who helped to build Michigan's environmental justice movement while he was teaching at the University of Michigan in the department of, I believe it was like Sustainability and Environment or something along those lines. Um, and he used to hang around the Boggs Center a good deal. And he used that phrase, “Rehearsing the Future,” to describe the style of organizing, um, that he was witnessing kind of emerging out of that space.
Kristin
Ah!
Mike
Um, and it's people often refer to it nowadays as visionary organizing or as visionary place-based organizing. Uh, and it's really all about, just like we were saying, building the futures that we want now, but also in a way that's deeply mindful of the particularities of people and of place. So it's really focused on, you know, empowering all of us everyday folks to deal with the very particular problems that arise in very particular social contexts. Um, and through working through those problems, right, create a different, a different kind of future for ourselves. So that's sort of the general idea.
Anna 16:33
Mike, what you're describing is, uh, such an interesting approach, in part, because, like, I was thinking about, you know, being part of, um, performance rehearsals, like actually rehearsals in that very literal sense. And one of the things you're doing there is kind of “working out the kinks,” right? But so you, you can't know ahead of time what some of those kinks are going to be. And so you have to rehearse, right? That's kind of the point. But also, yeah, I think this really puts me in mind of, um, what, you know, some philosophers like to call, like, “non-ideal theory,” right? We're not imposing from above. This, this is, like, um, a ground-up, building-up, or from-below. Um, and it's from below that we get the… the material to, to rehearse with. Something like that. So yeah, I love this language. Yeah, it's fantastic.
Mike
Well, and as, and as any, anyone who's been involved in like a theater troupe would be well aware too, like when you're rehearsing things, it's not just that you're ironing out problems that were already there, but there are also sometimes like new problems come up when you're, [Anna agreeing] you know, when you're, and, um, and I feel like that's, that's really important point to remember when we're thinking about organizing for social change, too. That like, um, that in working out or resolving contradictions that we're confronting right now, we also inevitably create new ones that we couldn't have anticipated. And so it kind of ensnares us in this ongoing process of, as you're putting it, like rehearsing, learning, ironing out things, and then realizing that, you know, out of our struggles, we've created new problems.
Anna
So, [smiling] normally we give a bit of, um, preamble about the author, but Mike, you are right here. So without any, especially probing questions, um, we'd like to have a bit of sense of you as a person.
Krisin
Yes. [smiling] Who are you, Michael Doan?
Anna
Who are you?! [chuckles] Or maybe: what are your questions? Like, how did you come across the thinking of the Boggses? Or, what are the, what are the questions that seem pressing for you that sort of brought you here? Yeah.
Kristin 18:46
[laughing] Yeah! Yeah! And we are not professional interviewers, so take it, take it away as you like!
[Anna and Kristin laughing]
Mike 18:55
[chuckles] Well, okay, where to start? I mean, um, I'm a dad, I'm a father to two wonderful kids. Um, I'm an educator and a lifelong learner, and I am an activist with a philosophical bent. I was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, um, in the Canadian Maritimes, and I was raised mostly between there and Toronto. My family moved around a bunch when I was growing up. Um, and as a student, like, when I came to my college years, I made my way back to the Maritimes and enrolled in a doctoral program in philosophy at Dalhousie University, because I really wanted to work with these really sharp feminist philosophers who were there, especially Sue Campbell, who we talked about in an earlier episode, but also, especially after Sue passed, also, Sue Sherwin, has been, uh, been, like, super formative in my thinking, and we've worked together a lot as well.
And, I first learned about the Boggses when my partner, Ami, who was also a grad student at Dalhousie, she got a job teaching philosophy just north of Detroit in, um, at Oakland University in 2012. So we moved to Detroit. And I remember this was around the time of the Occupy movement, um, you know, which I had participated in a bit in Halifax. And I can remember when we moved to Detroit, I watched this video, this interview with Grace. And I'm just going to read a quote from that interview because I, because, uh, it really stuck with me. She says–this is Grace speaking–she says:
“this enemy of ours is not just Wall Street. It's a whole culture. It's a way of looking at and valuing ourselves and each other and how you're going to move beyond challenging Wall Street, how you're going to move to become part of the solution is not going to be easy. You're going to have to do a lot of thinking. You have to look at how you yourselves have become part of this culture. You're going to have to look at how many of you would be happy if you could become part of Wall Street and become part of the corporations. [Kristin and Anna laugh knowingly] If they would just give you jobs, right? It's a long road ahead. She says, because you have the opportunity to create something new based on completely different values, but you're going to have to be thinking about values and not just about abuses.”
Um, and so look, I mean, I was still in graduate school at the time and I was writing my dissertation, which was about really massive problems like climate change and mass incarceration. And you know, hearing Grace say these things and reading the Boggses’ work, while at the same time becoming a part of the networks of activists that they helped to build in Detroit, really helped me to move from a life focused on study to a life that's more focused on action. Um, and also back and forth between those. Yeah.
So I open my book, Rehearsing the Future, by saying that it's “the book that I wanted to study when I joined the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership in 2016.” And for folks who haven't heard of it before, um, the Boggs Center is a political organization on the east side of Detroit, actually housed in Jimmy and Grace's former home.
Kristin
No way! [impressed]
Mike
[in agreement] Yeah! Um, the place, the place that they lived, yeah, since they moved into the house in 1962 and like towards the end of Grace's life, some friends fundraised a bunch to buy the house to secure it in her, in her old age. And they turned the upstairs, which had been the landlord’s flat, into a community space. And so for 30 years, right, the Boggs Center has been, you know, operating as a community space, a kind of like think tank where activists from the city and beyond can come and reflect, um, on their practice and, and develop new ideas and so forth.
[sounds of book pages flipping]
Kristin 23:10
There's this quote that I pulled out from your book, Mike, where you say the Boggses are saying that “we need to do things to show people what we think.” “Do things to show people what we think.” So it's how we do them, where we do them, who we do them with, all of these things to demonstrate ideas, to be able to think those ideas, I think. And I think that this, this book is kind of that for you, right? You're putting that into action through making this accessible… for others.
Anna 23:43
Yeah. It seems, too… I'm just thinking, like, my inclination is to say, like, everything we do shows people what we think.
Kristin 23:52
[chuckles] Yeah!
Anna 23:52
And so… Grace is asking us to attend to that, and then to sort of maybe even rehearse the future in that light.
Mike 24:01
Um, like, you might be wondering, "Well, why can't we just read, read, you know, what Jimmy and Grace argued should be our approach to revolutionary change from, like, the late '60s or early '70s?” Really, that would be a totally wrongheaded approach, like to think that we can just, that what it would mean to learn from Jimmy and Grace would just be to sort of implement the ideas that they elaborated in the 60s or 70s, implement the revolutionary ideology that they, uhm, that they developed then, because that ideology is no longer suited to the times that we're in, right. The world has changed, reality has changed to such a point that, uhm, really our challenge today is to figure out, you know, what ideology is appropriate to guiding change in our own context right now.
Anna 25:09
That makes me wonder, maybe I can ask you, Mike, about how you orient yourself around the boxes and their work and their lives and their legacies. And… how does that maybe, um, “show us what you think”? [laughs at her own question]
Mike 25:10
And one of the really great things about my political home at the Boggs Center is that it's a super intergenerational space. So some of the folks that I work with are old enough to have worked with Grace and Jimmy since the 70s. Others only met them in the 90s or the aughts [2000s], you know, like much, much later on, like after the Boggs Center was formed. Some were quite, quite literally raised by them in community. So like, for example, the Principal of the James and Grace Lee Boggs School, which is located on the east side of Detroit, was one of the first people to become involved in, um, the youth program that the Boggses started in 1992, which was called Detroit Summer. So, like, they're literally kind of like raised up in, in this, in this community of supportive elders, you know, who were trying to pass on lessons to the next generation.
And some, like me, who didn't get to Detroit until 2012, didn't arrive on the scene until, um, Jimmy had joined the ancestors already, and Grace was nearing the end of her life. Grace passed in 2015 at the age of a hundred years and a hundred days.
Anna
Oh!
Mike
[agrees] Yeah! So, like, right around the time when I was just getting involved in this, um, uh, the network that, that she and Jimmy had helped to build, um, you know, we were holding memorials for her and, and thinking about, you know, how the Boggs Center was going to continue, um, in the absence of their namesakes.
So, um, I feel like I'm just really fortunate, like to be learning from comrades who vividly remember working with them in a variety of ways, as well as those who have, you know, spent a lot of their life, you know, studying and teaching their writings or, um, you know, like, like we were saying before trying to learn from them and apply lessons from them in ways that are more suited to our contemporary moment.
Kristin 27:14
Mike, I think our listeners might be interested in how you're navigating all the…like, it's very apparent from reading the book that you're, you're talking to people. So some, sometimes you're just saying something is a personal discussion, right? Like, “this person told me this,” you know? But you're also reading pamphlets and correspondences and archival material, right? And so you're going through a lot of that and navigating that. And, you know, that is something that, you know, not everybody can do.
Mike 27:54
I feel like it’s not a totally alien way of learning, just given my background in feminist philosophy, like, I feel like a lot of work in feminist philosophy is more self-consciously connected to, a history of, you know, developing movements, even just movements that are largely, like, in academic spaces, but at least, you know, there's a sense of, “who did so-and-so, who was so-and-so learning from, how are they trying to draw upon and build upon their work?” And so it's a way of doing the work that makes time and relationship really part of the foreground instead of just like the unspoken background of what's going on.
Anna 28:34
Yeah, or even as, um, even as opposed to the, the sort of, um, legacies we do sometimes see in the intellectual tradition that are more like “pedigree,” like lines of pedigree, as opposed to like being in community in the way that you're describing. And yeah. You're not doing pedigree work, Mike.
Mike
Yeah. Yes. [Mike and Anna laugh] This is not, this is not, “I'm the son of, of Thor.” Right. “Who is the son of [Odin].” Yes, yes. Yeah. Right, right.
[thoughtful transition music plays]
Triniti 29:10
Yes, my name is Triniti Watson. I'm a Council member at the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center. And I would say the biggest impact the Center and the philosophies of James and Grace have had on me is really thinking about the utility of vision, how vision is something that is crafted through a cultural lens and how that lens can provide us with a framework of what it takes to actually be a collaboration. How to impact our realities and I think the biggest, uhm, quote that often stays in my head that I've learned from the Center is that “in order to transform the world, we must first learn how to transform ourselves,” and that, yeah, continues to guide my own evolution when thinking about being a member of the center and then also just a member of broader Detroit communities.
[thoughtful transition music plays]
Mike
[Grace] says, "Had I not been born female and Chinese American, I could not have realized from early on that fundamental changes were necessary in our society. I might have ended up teaching philosophy at a university, an observer rather than an active participant in the humanity-stretching movements that have defined the last half of the 20th century."
Kristin
Hmm.
Mike
In her view, and we could talk about Jimmy as well, but, you know, in her view, just because she spoke more about this sort of thing, the university is an institution where thinking quite literally goes to die.
Anna
Oof!
[all three laughing]
Mike
Um, and I remember saying that, I remember saying that at, like, an academic talk once, and of course, everyone was, like, you know, squirming in their seats or whatever, or just, uh, or just, you know, yeah, whatever, whatever.
Kristin
“But, but, not me, not me!”
Anna
Yes! That's right. “But not me!”
[all three laughing]
Mike
Right, right. “I'm still alive!”
Um, and Grace was pretty clear about this. Uh, first of all, it separates thinkers from real world struggles just by the nature of the nature of the occupation. Um, it discourages the exercise of creative thinking and responsible action, and most importantly, kind of precludes direct engagement with a dynamic ever-changing social world.
[book pages flipping]
Anna
Did the way that the Boggses moved, moved in the world, their, their way of being in the world serve as a model for your writing, for your thinking, or for the work that goes into writing a book that's not the actual act of writing? Like, is there a sort of recursiveness, uh, there for you?
Mike
Like, a really challenging part of entering into conversation with the Boggses was just to figure out what kind of questions I'd need to ask as someone who's eager to learn from comrades who could no longer answer me directly, right? They're not around anymore to like, to be like, “oh no, no, this is what I meant when I said this” or “you know, this was really the point” or “this is, you know, less important” and so forth.
So in the end, I needed to pose a whole bundle of related questions to be able to kind of reconstruct their thought and practice in a way that could be usefully taken up by a new generation. And that's really always been my goal, just to make what is a living legacy of thought and practice more accessible to a wider range of people, so that we can more self-consciously continue building toward the next American Revolution in their spirit, in ways that, like, take seriously the lessons, both positive and negative, that we can learn from their lives.
Kristin
Ya.
Anna 33:03
I’m just thinking about, uh, yeah, you trying to, um, trying to think with people who are not with us anymore, but also about the Boggses’ elevation and valuing of face-to-face conversation, and so I’m also sort of thinking about what the Boggs' would think of our, like, sort of radically online life.
Kristin 33:24
Oh, yeah. So online. And like, even, you know, we're talking on Zoom right now, you know, and we're having a conversation, you know, it's, it's synchronous and everything. But, you know, before we kind of move on, I remember this part of the book, and I pulled this quotation. It's, I think it's from the Pacesetters, which is an organization in Philadelphia that worked with the Boggses, but this is a quotation from, from Mike's book: "No longer using our hands or our heads. Americans have been transformed into consumers and crass egotists. A mass of passive outsiders, our eyes glued to the TV screen in our own living rooms, desperately hoping to extract some life for ourselves from watching the lives and activities of others." And I thought, wow, would that be interesting to have a conversation about that when it comes to social media? And how so much of life is now about making content or so much of life can be content-ified and is. And what, you know, Grace and Jimmy would think about that.
Mike 34:37
Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is part of why I think we have so much to learn from Jimmy and Grace, because they not only, like, in the course of their long lives experienced a number of sweeping historical changes, but but they also sought to understand, intervene in, and self-consciously steer those processes of change, right? So precisely the opposite of what you were describing earlier, right? They were not... They wouldn't allow themselves to be just passive observers of, like, the whirlwind of change unfolding around them.
So, Jimmy would often say that he had managed to live through three, as he put it, three stages of human evolution, from agriculture to industry, right? And think here about him leaving the sharecropping South to come work in the auto plants in the North. And then from, um, from industry to automation and cybernation, which was something, a transition in the way that material production was organized in the factories…
Kristin 35:41
Hmm. Right. Hmm.
Mike 35:42
… that he experienced in real time, like, especially in the, um, the early 50s and right through the 60s. Like, as an auto worker, he witnessed firsthand how the introduction of automation into the plants brought about just really profound changes in the nature of work, of people's attitudes towards their own work.
Kristin 36:03
Right.
Mike 36:04
So for example, as the production process in the factories came to be dominated more and more by machines, auto workers like Jimmy were progressively stripped of knowledge and skills…
Kristin 36:15
Hmm.
Mike 36:16
…that previous generations of producers took for granted. Right. Like when we think of the stereotypical, like skilled trades person, um, they were, as Jimmy put it, a kind of “vanishing herd” in the auto plants by the time of the, certainly by the time of the, of the sixties. And more and more people working in the plants were simply performing routine machine-driven tasks where all the work of conception planning and decision-making was carried out somewhere else, and in advance, right? By engineers and managers who had designed those machines that they were using. And over time, this has meant that like more and more of us have either lost or never had the sense in the first place of making stuff daily through our own work and like through our own ingenuity. We’re really paying close attention to like, what does this do to people when we go from being a society that makes stuff to a society that increasingly just like, as you were putting it before, Kristin, like what watches other people live their lives on TV?
Kristin 37:22
We be scrolling.
Mike 37:25
We be scrolling y'all.
[Anna and Mike Laugh]
Kristin 37:25
Scrolling… hours and hours… You know?
Mike 37:30
[sings to the tune of “Ridin’” by Chamillionnaire] They see me scrolling…
[Anna and Kristin Laugh]
Kristin 37:40
yeah. And I, so these digital technologies, I'm sure they're just like deepening this sense that…yes, of course you can make a digital thing, right? We're making a podcast. But the technology facilitates a certain kind of alienation from physical material work, I think.
Anna 37:57
yeah, yeah, I was thinking about people kind of making content, uh, which is a kind of, as you're saying, a kind of making, putting it into the world, but it's kind of not, maybe not abstract, but also not the same sort of output as like a car or a piece of furniture, or…
Mike 38:15
Totally. And to think of the analogy to the, to the production process, right? Like people don't just make content in a vacuum. They make content geared towards, you know, gaming algorithms that other people are designing.
Anna 38:27
Ya, yup. Right.
Mike 38:27
And so, you know, in a lot of ways, the game is sort of structured in advance by people who aren't also playing it, necessarily.
Kristin 38:38
And like, you know, how exactly is the camera taking a video of you getting up in the morning? You know, like the artifice of it [laughs at her own observation] is so… anyway,
Mike 38:49
Totally.
Anna
Yesss…
Kristin 38:49
it just sort of seems like, you know, like being is being monetized,
Anna 38:53
Mm-hmm.
Kristin 38:54
you know, like who I am is now a product, you know?
Mike 38:59
M-hmm.
Kristin 38:59
The ideal is no longer like good work or like
Anna 39:04
Mm-hmm.
Kristin 39:05
rewarding work or even flexible work, right? It's no work, right? It's passive income and making money off of yourself as a brand. It’s so interesting, right?
Mike 39:14
Or Crypto.
Kristin 39:21
yeah, oh yeah, that's… oh my god.
Anna 39:24
Yes.
Kristin 39:24
It seems like we're all in, like, here, I had this quote from, I think it's Grace. That we're all, “desperately hoping to extract some life for ourselves from watching the lives and activities of others.” And maybe that's exactly because we're not making things in a kind of really materialist way, right?
Mike 39:46
M-hmm.
Kristin 39:46
Like, making a difference in the world through craftiness and competence. So we watch others do it, maybe. [laughs]
Anna 39:52
Right.
Mike 39:53
Yeah.
Anna 39:53
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Mike 39:54
Or like you're pointing out like one of our main, uh, one of the main things that we're making is just sort of styling ourselves. Styling ourselves and making that available to others so that they can scroll it or whatever. [laughs]
Anna 40:06
Mmm.
Mike 40:07
Yeah, that totally resonates, Kristin. So this is, anyway, this is something that Boggses really put their finger on. They suggested that we're experiencing this kind of ever-widening gap between the work of the head and the work of the hand.
Anna 40:20
Yeah, that's so interesting. Mike, I think a lot about, um, craft and concrete making, and you're reminding me of this, um, bit in a book called The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford, where he notices that, certainly in the American context, um, knowledge and expertise are about things that are increasingly abstract. We think of them that way. And we can think of the education that, like, we provide to students in university as opposed to the education provided to students in the “trades,” right?
And he [Crawford] says that the usual way of understanding this is to say that university education, um, makes us “free” and makes us individual by making us, he says, following, um, Sennet, “willing and able to give up established reality.” And Crawford sort of – this always makes me laugh – Crawford says, like, “yeah, the thing about surrendering an established reality is that it's, I'll quote him, “Best not indulge around a table saw.” [Mike laughs] For obvious reasons, right?! You might hurt yourself. And yeah, I'm just thinking about Grace's thought that, right, universities are where thinking goes to die. And so I'm thinking about the way that we seem to sort of treat intellectual freedom and the freedom of the individual as being associated with having the ways that we think kind of float free from what the world is concretely like.
Kristin 41:51
Hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mike 41:52
It makes me think of, like, well, if the, you know, if the university is where thinking goes to die, like, where could thinking come alive? Like, where could we really come alive through thinking?
[thoughtful transition music plays]
Mike
You know, Grace was really deeply involved in the community control of schools movement, especially in the early 70s. And because of that, she was deeply involved in rethinking the purpose of education, specifically in an age of automation and deindustrialization, because that's what Detroit was going through, or beginning to go through at that time. So she wrote, for instance, and this is a quote from a pamphlet called Education to Govern that was published in, I believe, 1970 or 71.
She writes, “Our children are not learning, because the present system is depriving them of such natural stimuli to learning as exercising their resourcefulness to solve the real problems of their own communities, working together rather than competitively with younger children emulating older ones and older children teaching younger ones,” and this is super important: “Experiencing the intrinsic consequences of their own actions.” Right. “And judging issues.” So, in other words, like, learning through the experience of changing their own communities, right, in, um, in ways that help to increase their investment in and sense of ownership of, you know, what they're changing.
[book pages flipping sound]
Kristin 43:29
You know, Anna, this isn't something we've really gotten into on the pod quite yet is sort of the question of human nature. You know, this is big philosophy, you know, these are big philosophy questions. [Kristin chuckles] Like we talk about sort of like a biological understanding of human nature. There's a lot of philosophy that's a spiritual understanding of human nature as being like a soul, you know.
Anna 43:54
… [thinking] Yeah, not just like, do we have a human nature, but also what is it, what it means? And also here, it sounds like the Boggses are saying that human nature is or involves possibility or possibilities, some of which can't come forth under present social conditions. Under current conditions.
Mike 44:17
Jimmy used to say that, and I love this, that “just coming out of your mother's womb doesn't make you a human being.”
Kristin 44:23
Hmm.
Anna
[chuckles] yes
Mike 44:24
Um, so it's immediately, right, distinguishing his view of what it means to be human from a biological understanding, um, he insisted that people become human rather through the choices that they make, um, and choices that are always, always situated, always selecting from a range of options that have been made available at a particular time. Um, and this is, um, what the Boggses thought of as a dialectical conception of what it means to be human, as, as opposed to an anthropological or sociological or biological one.
Kristin 45:03
Hmm.
Mike 45:03
So the idea is that here we become more human, this might sound kind of paradoxical, but we become more human, human beings in and through what we do, both individually and collectively, and, importantly, what it means to be human is itself a work in progress.
Kristin 45:23
Hmm, yeah, and so to get to this question of dialectical humanism, I feel like people can use “dialectic” to just mean sort of dialogue sometimes…
Mike 45:33
Right,
Anna 45:36
… Yeah, like, there are different, maybe different forms, but maybe also different uses of dialectic, even according to philosophical traditions, right? Like, you have a Socratic tradition and a Hegelian tradition, and of course, you know, the Marxist tradition. So, yeah, that's a good point.
Kristin 45:53
Yeah.
Mike 45:53
So, let's talk about dialectical humanism then. Dialectical humanism begins from the observation that everything in the world is constantly changing, um, and that that change occurs through a process of working through contradictions.
Kristin 46:09
Right.
Mike 46:09
Um, and so rather than simply pointing out the obvious fact that certain ideas stand opposed to one another, um, dialectical humanism posits that there are real living contradictions internal to organisms like you and me, um, and also internal to entire social systems, and that the working out of those contradictions is integral to the emergence of new forms of organization, new forms of life.
Anna 46:39
Mm-hmm.
Mike 46:40
So, dialectical humanists are committed to conceiving of the development of humanity in this way, as a kind of evolutionary process that takes place through the resolution of contradictions internal to our ways of living together.
Kristin
Huh
Mike
And as we were saying earlier, right, like, as we are rehearsing how to be human in the future, that also often introduces new contradictions that, like, that that either we or future generations will need to grapple with.
Kristin 47:09
Yeah.
Anna 47:10
Mm-hmm. Yeah, maybe we need an example here. So I'm wondering whether, like, I'm thinking about women being put on a pedestal, right? [Kristin laughs] Like, “ladies first!” And yet, that, you know, “women's work” is generally work and skill that's, like, necessary, essential for human existence and comfort and maintenance and all that stuff. But also so undervalued that it often isn't even noticed, let alone…
Kristin
Yup
Mike 47:40
Mm-hmm. Celebrated, compensated, yeah, yeah.
Anna 47:44
…even valued, I guess, in a more basic sense or something like, right, “the truth is I need you, but in my mind you're nothing,” right, like, uhm…
Kristin 47:55
And, and like, that, this way of finding these contradictions is looking at our daily material tasks, sort of looking at how we… what we have to do? You know, the basics of like, what do we need to do to make our bodies and lives work in the world that we have now? So like, how do we get the stuff that we need to do to do the stuff that we need to do? And what's the stuff that we need? And what is the stuff that we need? That's that material focus.
Anna 48:18
Yeah.
Mike 48:23
Yeah.
Kristin 48:23
that's where a lot of these contradictions are sort of found.
Anna 48:28
Mm-hmm.
Mike 48:28
Absolutely. Yeah. And for the Boggses, this way of theorizing is really crucial to sorting out what it would take to usher in a new way of life, especially, like, in an advanced capitalist country like the US. So, in their view, American revolutionists, really the first task of American revolutionists, is to start with the question, what is the fundamental contradiction in this country, and how does that contradiction, continue to shape social dynamics to this day?
Anna 48:57
Is the idea that to say how the US currently is at all of those levels, we have to say something about how, like, materially how it was built, like, equipment and factories and something like that?
Kristin 49:15
Yeah. Um, I'm, I'm gonna throw it to Mike, but I'm gonna try and see how I do here. [laughs]
Mike 49:21
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Go for it! [encourages Kristin]
[Mike and Anna chuckle]
Kristin 49:21
Let's see how I’m learning!
Mike 49:22
I love it.
Kristin 49:22
So this is part of the history that I took from the book. So, just starting with Americans, they fight against England, right? They don't want to have a monarch. They rebelled against the monarchy. They said, “we don't to be British.” Right? So this is the George Washington stuff.
[Mike and Anna chuckle]
Kristin
This is..sorry everybody.
Mike 49:41
Okay.
Anna 49:41
mm, mm
Kristin 49:42
Whoops. Establishing the 13 colonies’ independence as the United States of America. And my understanding from the book is that it's really important for us to notice that this founding was a freedom from.
Mike 49:56
Mm-hmm.
Kristin 49:56
Instead of a sort of freedom to, or a right to, it was a freedom from. So it was a negative rebellion based…
Mike 50:02
Mm-hmm.
Kristin 50:03
… not on, on building a collective good, but on an individual pursuit of freedom from, there was no robust idea of collective good sort of baked into that founding, the freedom was itself then untethered from responsibility. So we don't have a responsibility for each other.
Mike 50:22
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a really nice, that's a really nice way of putting it. You’re doing great! I love this. [Mike laughs]
Kristin 50:27
Yeah. Okay. Woohoo! Yeah.
Anna 50:32
[laughs] that or maybe they're thinking is that – I don't know – the individual… the individual's good is all that's needed or something like that. [questioning]
Kristin 50:39
Yeah. It's foundational. So the, the, the foundation of values really is the individual and that individual's good. And that good is just exercising your freedom.
Anna 50:51
ah
Kristin 50:51
So you have to have the most choice, choice is of the utmost value. Right? Yeah. And any responsibility that you might have just didn't trump freedom to do what you want to do economically. So to me, this is the diagnostic and the critique, right?
Anna 51:06
Mm.
Kristin 51:06
It's not 1963. It's not 1865. But these are the sort of generative roots that understand where values emerged specifically. But this, this is a, the economics here become the moral foundation. Right? And I think that that really bears repeating. To me, this was like a big underline in the middle of the book. Economic freedom is itself the moral foundation. And Grace thinks this is just upside down.
Anna 51:36
Mm-hmm.
Kristin 51:36
So, um, the Boggses are saying that the US put economics in charge of politics, and then supercharged all of it with colonial expansion and slave labor.
Anna 51:47
Yeah, so there's just like endless “unsettled uninhabited land” in the West and labour to exploit, to which you… you don't have to be accountable to the labour.
Kristin 52:00
No. [affirming] So, it's freedom without responsibility. And, any kind of responsibility in a way goes against your freedom, which is the fundamental value. So white land holding men are settling and expanding in this country.
Anna 52:15
Mm-hmm. Especially the freedom without responsibility, like that responsibility infringes upon freedom.
Kristin 52:21
Yeah.
Anna 52:22
That's so interesting.
Mike 52:22
Right. As though it just, like, another remnant of, like, monarchical restraints on your freedom or something,
Anna 52:29
Yes! Right.
Kristin 52:29
Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Mike 52:31
Yeah. And, you know, the Boggses are really clear that no other global superpower has this particular history. Like, even if you think of, like, the American Civil War, which many still claim, and was about freeing enslaved…
Kristin 52:44
Right.
Mike 52:45
… the Boggses, their view was that the Civil War was really about which group of white Americans would get to dominate the settling of the West over the coming century, right? Would they be, you know, would it be the white propertied dudes who were using slave labor or the industrialists in the North who were more interested in exploiting labor?
Kristin 53:04
Hmm.
Mike 53:05
That, like, even after the 13th Amendment, the Boggses argue that the country really morphs into having a kind of internal colony, where there are, you know – this is under the Jim Crow system, right? – you have two sets of laws, rules, and norms, and, you know, the formerly enslaved are confined to this internal colony where they can be superexploited for the purposes of economic advancement.
Kristin 53:29
Yeah. And I grabbed a quotation here where Mike is, is sort of, um, expounding on Jimmy's view. [to Anna] Can you read this quotation for us?
Anna 53:38
[agrees, noting the slight awkwardness] I'll read it back to Mike. [Kristin and Mike chuckle] Yeah.
Mike writes, “before transitioning to capitalism, no society had pursued the expansion of its own productive forces at the expense of its human forces through the systematic dehumanization and exploitation of entire races of people. This prioritization of technical over human advancement is especially glaring in the United States, where Jimmy contends that there exists an, ‘organic link between capitalism and racism.’ As Jimmy observes, ‘the United States is the only colonial country in the world which fought a war for independence from the mother country and did not free its slaves. Then, 80 years later, fought an internal war, which claimed to free these slaves, but having allegedly freed them, systematically set them aside on the basis of race as an underclass from whose super exploitation the rest of the population could benefit.’”
Kristin 54:34
And as you put it, Mike, quote “the successful social reproduction of predominantly white communities is integrally linked to exposing entire Black, brown, and immigrant communities to failing reproduction through technologically through technologically outmoded facilities, infrastructures, and public services, including everything from housing stock to streetlights and sewer systems” unquote.
Mike 55:01
Right, right. Exactly. So, like, just to give, like, a really quick example of that, think about, um, the period in the, sort of post-Second World War era when the US was rapidly suburbanizing.
Kristin 55:17
Hmm.
Mike 55:17
And you had all of these new houses being built out in the suburbs, and, um, families through the GI Bill and other sorts of federal programs were, um, being incentivized to buy new houses, right, with, like, um, cheaper mortgages and the like. Almost exclusively white families, um, mind you. And so they get all the shiny new stuff, and Black folks are left redlined in the city, right, using all of the increasingly outmoded facilities, schools, stuff, you know, all the stuff that the socially mobile whites left behind. So just, just to sort of illustrate that point. Um, so, and it's important here, it's not that Black folks are forced into the role of the “scavenger” everywhere, all around the world, right?
Anna 56:03
Mm-hmm.
Mike 56:04
This is a social function particular to the United States and its distinctive history.
Kristin 56:08
Yes.
Mike 56:09
Grace and Jimmy argue that the fundamental contradiction shaping the continued unfolding of the United States is, as we were alluding to earlier, the contradiction between its economic and technological overdevelopment and its social and political backwardness. “That is the contradiction which neither the US government nor any social force in the United States up to now has been willing to face,” the Boggses suggest, because, they go on, “the underlying philosophy of this country from top to bottom remains the philosophy that economic development can and will resolve all political and social problems.”
Kristin 56:47
Um, one thing I found really fascinating was sort of applying this to the case of education, which makes perfect sense why they have a school and a center for leadership and all of these things as kind of ways of rehearsing new modes. So, if you look at the US as having this unique history, right? This unique history and set of values and, and this, this idea of an internal colony. Schools and Black communities then become understood in relation to their function as the material basis for jobs for teachers, largely whites.
Anna 57:25
Mm-hmm.
Kristin 57:25
And they play the role of confining and containing Black children rather than kind of educating them for new futures or values.
Mike 57:36
Mm-hmm.
Anna 57:37
Whooo. Yeah.
Mike 57:38
Yeah. Schools as warehouses for kids, basically.
Kristin 57:41
That’s a lot.
Anna 57:43
Yeah. Yeah. That's a lot to feel through, actually. [feeling and thinking] Yeah…
Mike 57:48
Absolutely. According to Grace, this situation just really reflects the obsolete philosophy of education that's still undergirding the practice of schooling in urban areas of school. Especially, which you know, you know. So, you know, that's certainly what was going on with young people for jobs, whether it's assembly line jobs or service work, whatever it is. In many cases, jobs that are fast disappearing all around them, So, noting that the present educational system was organized to serve this very specific historical purpose.
Kristin 58:21
Hmm.
Mike 58:22
Just to train the children of European immigrants to fit into the rapidly advancing industrial framework of the US in the early decades of the 20th century. Grace argues that those engaged in the struggle to transform education will not only need to rid themselves of the associated idea that the purpose of education is to get and hold a job, but also begin reorganizing schools in accordance with a new philosophy of education of their own making.
Kristin 58:48
Hmm.
Mike 58:48
So this is a quote. He writes, "Today, particularly in the United States, the purpose of education must go far beyond preparing people for jobs. Education must be grounded in a totally new philosophy, one developed to meet the realities and the requirements of this stage of history in this country.”
Kristin 59:09
Right.
Mike 59:09
Right? So again, you can see the importance of we need to be able to think for ourselves, for our own time and place.
Kristin 59:14
My understanding of Grace's thinking at this point, is one of the things that needs to animate education is training and preparing students to believe and see themselves as responsible for their communities.
Mike 59:32
Absolutely.
Kristin 59:33
And that that is something that is particular to training them to do a kind of philosophy where they're thinking about themselves as moral beings, right? She's trying to undermine some of that moral underdevelopment, right…
Mike 59:52
Absolutely.
Kristin 59:52
… that’s gone into the founding of the US and to sort of train them to kind of work with others to bring a new vision to the world, really, is the only way to put that.
Mike 1:00:04
Yeah, that you can only be free through taking responsibility for yourselves, for your community, right? That like, there is no freedom without responsibility.
Kristin 1:00:13
Hmm.
Mike 1:00:13
Yeah, freedom without, you know, freedom without responsibility is usually just dependence, if not servitude of some form or another.
Anna 1:00:23
Right.
Mike 1:00:24
And this, you know, these ideas, they're reflected in the, the mission of the Boggs School today on the East side, you know, the mission of the school is to create “creative, critical thinkers who contribute to the well-being of their communities”...
Kristin
Awesome
Mike
…focused on, um, encouraging a kind of commitment to an investment and sense of ownership over the spaces where we all live, right?
Anna 1:00:50
Mhm.
Mike 1:00:50
And, and learning through trying to materially change those places, um, in ways that really necessitate engaging with complex philosophical issues. I mean, the Boggses were just constantly inviting people from their neighborhood into the collective philosophical work of elaborating a vision of a new society in and through like really hands-on work of assuming responsibility for the organization and administration of local institutions.
Anna 1:01:19
Mhm.
Mike 1:01:19
So like, for example, helping to ensure that educators are taking responsibility for rethinking the whys and hows of learning for their own times and places.
Kristin 1:01:29
yeah
Anna 1:01:30
Mm-hmm.
Mike 1:01:31
An by collectively re-imagining the purpose of education in the context of the Black Power movement in the early seventies, they noticed that Black Detroiters started proposing and also practicing the idea that, and this is a quote, “education in the US can no longer be for the purpose of earning or for achieving the “goods of life,” quote unquote, or for fitting people into the framework of our present industrial society. For it must now be for the purpose of governing, that is, the purpose of changing society for changing society for changing ourselves simultaneously.”
[thoughtful transition music plays]
Kim
My name is Kim Sherrobi and I've been hanging out at the Boggs Center since about 2003. And, uh, as I think about what I have gained from being at the Boggs Center and from Jimmy and Grace is the importance of taking responsibility for my community. And I'm going to also say for my future as just a human being. I never took that idea, that concept seriously or even thought to take it seriously until I came to the Boggs Center. And so to think about it and to actually practice doing that has been a challenging journey, a wonderful journey, fulfilling journey that I am grappling with and learning about every day.
[thoughtful transition music plays]
Kristin 1:03:23
I want to go back to a quote from a moment ago uh this fundamental contradiction in the US, right? So Grace is making… is really pulling out this contradiction what's the contradiction between economic and technological over development right we have everything we need we have all the supplies…
Mike 1:03:44
[friendly addendum] In principle. In principle. Yeah.
Kristin 1:03:46
…we have all the resources… [takes up the friendly addendum] in principle, we have everything that we need in principle right um um but the social and political backwardness which she is talking about how we don't provide everything that we could for everyone um and and Grace reframes this by saying that we dehumanize ourselves by degrading others for the sake of that rapid economic growth so we dehumanize ourselves also through the degrading of others. And this is why the Boggses concluded in the late sixties when we're talking about the next American revolution, what does it need to be? It needs to address this contradiction. It needs to be a Black revolution. It needs to be one in which we address this dehumanizing of ourselves and the degrading of a population. And in that case, we need Black people as leaders, visionary leaders with experience. and they need to offer that leadership to the rest of the country on how to become more, like you said Mike, more more human human beings like that's what we need to address.
Anna 1:04:56
I'm thinking about how much and how often white folks need reminders and, like, guidance about how to be in struggle with people of color, and not to center themselves, to do the work, but, like, not be an asshole. And so, um, like, [chuckles] I'm kind of wondering, like, how do you navigate that, and how do you think the Boggses would advise us?
Mike 1:05:21
I mean, this is a great question. This is a great question, Anna. And as Kim, who we heard from earlier, is constantly reminding me, you know, we're all works in progress. [Kristin & Anna agree] So it's also just not as simple as, you know, taking leadership that's offered to you, because, you know, we're all we're all working on becoming more fully human.
And we're all products of this society, which means that, you know, to varying extents and in different ways, we're all damaged and dehumanized as a result of becoming, as the Boggses put it, “totally out of balance, totally out of proportion” with respect to the prioritization of economic over human values. But – and this is super important – as Jimmy and Grace remind us, this is a quote here, “potential revolutionaries can only become true revolutionaries, if they take the side of those who believe that humanity can be transformed. [Anna & Kristin murmur agreement] Those, those who have already given up on America, those who've condemned it as hopelessly racist and fascist, will never make an American Revolution.”
Kristin 1:06:32
That's awesome. And one of the things I really take from your book, Mike, is that, you know, it's going to take all of us [chuckles], you know, if we're going to build a new society. Right? It's going to take participation.
Mike 1:06:46
Absolutely. Absolutely.
[sound of pages flipping]
Kristin 1:06:47
You know, Mike, another thing I think our listener would want to take away is “two-sided transformation.”
Mike 1:07:00
This is a notion that Jimmy and Grace developed, um, and it was meant to contrast with a one-sided focus on changing “the system,” right? Or the economic structure of society conceived of as something that exists, like, totally independently of human thought and action. Um… and what they were really reacting to here is that some folks still seem to believe that if only we can change the structure of our society, then our hyper-capitalist, war-mongering culture will somehow automatically be changed along with it, right? Like, if you change the institutions, that… people's thinking and values will just sort of automatically change along with it.
Kristin 1:07:49
Like…[Kristin thinking] kind of like a trickle-down… “trickle-down” revolution!
Mike 1:07:53
I like that. I like that. I like that.
[all laugh]
Mike 1:07:55
Yeah. I mean, it's a really, it's a really kind of mechanical sort of picture of how change happens and ones that, that historically just doesn't work out, right? society. But anyway.
Kristin 1:08:03
Hmm
Mike 1:08:04
So, but… to change the world, right, we need to be transforming ourselves too. This is, this is the point. And this, I think this often gets reduced to a kind of overly simplistic idea, which is that, you know, “I just need to change myself first, and then that will equip me to go on to change the world.” But that's also kind of missing the point because the point is to understand objectively changing the world as having a kind of subjective correlate that are in dialectical relationship with one another. Right.
Kristin 1:08:35
Mmm!
Mike 1:08:35
So the system for one thing, isn't just “out there,” independent of human beings, like an objective fact in the world. It's something that we're participating in and partly doing that through our own subjective constitution. So, through the logics that we've been taught to understand, just like you guys were describing earlier, this idea that, you know, “freedom means the absence of responsibility.” Right. How does… how might that kind of way of thinking be integral to the ongoing reproduction of capitalist social relations? [Kristin and Anna chuckle] It turns out to play a pretty important role! Right? And so, if we're going to do something about that, we, you know, we might need to worry about our subjective constitution as well and reconstituting ourselves through changing our relationships and how we live.
Anna 1:09:25
Yeah! I mean, I'm just thinking, like… we know this, right? We changed the laws about sexual assault, like, 30 years ago, however long ago. We're still having to push against the way that our cultural learning solicits reactions in us, right?
Kristin
Yup
Anna
“Where were you? What were you wearing? Were you drinking?” Yadda, yadda, yadda, right? And the courts actually still bend over backwards to protect assaulters, even with those better laws in place.
Mike 1:09:47
The trickle down approach doesn't work!
Anna 1:09:49
Yeah!
Mike 1:09:49
And just, you know, such a great example. I mean, without self-consciously changing our own, not just particular ideas, but our whole philosophical orientation towards the world and who we are as human beings, and how we're related to other people in the world around us. In the absence of that work, which is really difficult, collective work, we're, you know, we're bound to just default to the basic philosophical outlook of the society we've been raised in. And in the case of the United States, right? That's a society steeped in individualism, opportunism, materialism, right? Exactly.
Kristin 1:10:23
… racism, militarism, selfish… you know, capitalism… I mean I read the book as really making an argument for two-sided transformation, as we rehearse a new future with others to forward those structures and try them out and see what it's like see who we become through that trying out…This is really great, from Grace: “we need to shore up and cultivate a new kind of political personhood.”
Anna 1:10:53
And so, what did she think that might look like? I love this! [laughs] But what did she think that might look like?
Kristin 1:10:59
Well, um, this is, I'm quoting now from your book, Mike. Uh, “it has to be developed in relationship with others with whom one feels a sense of community.”
Anna 1:11:12
mm-hmm
Kristin 1:11:12
So that's sort of part one. Um, it needs to be, and here's part two: “it needs to be done in the course of actual and continuing struggle and conflict with those in power.” So there has to be a
pointedness towards power and it has to be “working over issues in which positions taken or decisions made can be evaluated in terms of their consequences.” So, there has to be a real material difference that comes from what is being done.
Mike
Absolutely
Kristin
And last, “with the perspective of finally taking the power, which will bring both the authority and the responsibility to create new forms of social organization.”
Anna 1:11:53
mm-hmm
Kristin 1:11:54
It has to repair that moral problem. And it has to be done with others. And we have to have real evaluation mechanisms. You know, [laughing] it has to have feedback loops. These are good things, right?
Mike 1:12:06
Yep. So the question is always, “who will we need to become to be capable of building and maintaining the society we need to create?” Right?
[thoughtful music fades in]
Kristin 1:12:14
Hmm.
[thoughtful music plays]
Anna 1:12:20
So I think a note to end on, which could be really helpful, is that I know a lot of our listeners are philosophy graduate students. And, Mike, you've now got a book out there. It's all done. You're on the other side.
Kristin 1:12:29
Woo!
Anna 1:12:31
Yay!
Kristin 1:12:31
ha ha!
Anna 1:12:32
But I, so I'm wondering, like, what, whether you have some advice for someone who's completing a book-sized project or a bigger project… or a smaller project!
Mike 1:12:40
Oh, man.
Mike 1:12:44
That's a big question. We've all got our own things. But at least in my case anyway, I always come back to what I call “the three P's.”
Kristin
Hmm!
Mike
And those P's are Philosophy, People, and Place. And the reason I come back to those is because I don't really think we can, I mean, I'm using the language of “we” now, when I really said I was going to talk about me, but I am going to use the “we.” [Anna chuckles] So I don't think we can really afford to focus on only one or two. And I worry that young philosophers are typically encouraged more or less actively to kind of sever their connections to people and to place precisely for the sake of producing high-quality philosophical work
Anna 1:13:25
Yep, I think that’s right.
Kristin 1:13:26
[laughing] I think you're allowed to use “we?” if what you're arguing for is more relational approaches to projects!
Anna 1:13:31
It's a we. [laughing]
Mike 1:13:33
Okay! Okay! Fair enough!
Kristin 1:13:34
I think you can put that in action, Mike! Yeah, it's okay.
Mike 1:13:38
Um, but like I said earlier, like it took me 10 years to write this book, Rehearsing the Future, and I really couldn't have finished it earlier, partly because I just felt like a deep sense of responsibility, um, certainly to our ancestors, Jimmy and Grace, but also to all the people who are still alive and carrying on their legacy. Many of whom have given shape to the ideas in the book, right. In all sorts of different ways.
Kristin 1:14:05
Yeah. And I'm thinking too about “imposter syndrome,” you know, the ways that I think that we've had a kind of consciousness raising about it and we empathize with people who suffer from it. But I think we also need to think about it as deeply individualizing in ways that, maybe, like, part of the solution is given in the problem, in a way. You know, if you want to make it meaningful, you need to maybe get with people to make it more meaningful. We're trying to say, like, “get to… “get with others in doing your philosophy” at the same time as we're in a system that is individualizing and makes you take your one thing to a committee and defend against it as an individual.
Anna
Right
Kristin
…you know, the system itself requires us to do things alone. So we are doing a retraining here. [laughs]
Anna 1:15:00
Yeah. Yes.
Mike 1:15:01
Right. Right.
Anna 1:15:01
That's right.
Kristin 1:15:03
[laughing] I feel like we're asking you to, like, cure grad school depression.
Anna 1:15:08
Yeah!
Kristin 1:15:08
“Mike, just, like, fix it.”
Anna 1:15:10
“Fix philosophy, Mike!” [laughing]
[all laughing]
Kristin 1:15:10
Fix it! Fix it!
Mike 1:15:13
Well, like, look, I mean, writing just at the end of the day, like, it is, it is an individual task. But, you know, outside of that inevitable, the inevitable isolation of writing, I think there's lots of ways to more productively and healthily negotiate, more literal and pervasive isolation. Like, and that's something that grad schools kind of tend to do is to force us into a kind of isolated way of living and doing, which is certainly psychologically, like, to the depression point, but also, I think, epistemologically damaging. And that's where I find, like, Grace's thought really helpful here, like, just thinking about, um, the epistemic costs of that kind of detachment from, um, relationship, from community, from real world struggles, where you're learning from actually doing and changing things. I mean, how could I write in isolation about big problems like, right, climate change or mass incarceration? And, I couldn't, and I discovered that really fast.
Anna 1:16:19
Yes. Yes.
Kristin 1:16:21
Hmm.
Mike 1:16:22
So, and this is just my own path, but, like, I went and volunteered when I was a grad student in Detroit in the kindergarten class at the Boggs School.
Kristin 1:16:32
Aw.
Mike 1:16:32
I, you know, joined the struggle against mass water shutoffs in Detroit, and, you know, the Flint water crisis was going on at the same time. So I got involved in, resisting that in connection with Detroit water shutoffs and just generally spent a lot of time learning from others who, like, in some cases were, you know, in their 70s or 80s. And had spent the majority of their lives building organizations and institutions that could hold people through these ongoing, you know, increasingly overlapping crises that we're all living through. So, um, I found all of that really crucial to just figuring out how to connect my writing to what I was experiencing in the world, which makes it far more relevant to actually navigating that world with others.
[theme music plays]
Anna 1:17:28
And on that note, if you'd like to contribute or give us ideas for our next episodes, please go to our website, thinkingbodiespod.com. We're also on Instagram @thinkingbodiespod. We are trying to cultivate guest producers, like Mike! And as we said before, this is a DIT experiment. So we're happy for feedback, participation, and ideas. We are very happy to do it together! And we're very happy to have been able to do this episode together with Michael Doan!
Mike 1:17:53
Oh, thanks, y'all! I mean, it's been such a pleasure to share some of my writing and work. And I'm grateful to both of you for creating this incredible venue for feminist philosophy. It's really a gift to all of us, and I appreciate all the work you're doing.
Kristin 1:18:08
Aww.
Mike 1:18:12
And I will also say thank you to my comrades Kim Sherobbi, Stephen Ward, and Trinity Watson. All the references for what they mentioned on the podcast today, along with detailed transcripts of all of our episodes are on the website. So please like and subscribe.
Kristin 1:18:31
Yes.
Anna 1:18:32
Our theme music is by Seth Makes Sound and Joseph Press. Thank you so much to the Amplified Podcast Network for all of your mentorship and getting this podcast created.
I'm Anna Mudde, I'm on the Lands of the Michif/Métis Nation, on the lands of the nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota peoples, which is also called “Pile of Bones.”
Kristin 1:18:50
And I'm Kristin Rodier recording today from Amiskwaciwâskahikan, the homelands of the Plains Cree, the Woodland Cree, the Beaver Cree, the Ojibwe, and the Métis, also called “Beaver Hills House.”
Mike 1:19:02
And I’m Mike Doan, coming to you live from Waawiatonong, “where the water goes around,” on the homelands of the Anishanaabe: the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi.
[theme music plays]
[discussing highly abstract analytic philosophy]
Mike
… as I sometimes joke, like just working out the philosophical equivalence of Sudoku puzzles, which is what like… anyway, a certain kind of philosophy can end up feeling like. [Anna agrees, knowingly] But! You know! Not if you're seeking to engage with real people in the real world…
Kristin 1:19:31
But! [pause for emphasis] If there's anyone, if there's anyone out there that does feminist relational philosophy of mathematics… call us!
Mike 1:19:37
Right!
Kristin 1:19:37
We're ready for that episode!
Mike 1:19:41
Absolutely.
Kristin 1:19:43
I take your point.
Anna 1:19:43
We are ready for that conversation. Yes.
Mike 1:19:45
Yes. And… I want to hear more about like, n-dimensional space, but like, um, but I, but I also, I want to…
[Kristin laughs hard]
Anna 1:19:51
Totally!... Don't we all?! Yes.