Title: “When We Are Apart We Are Not Alone”
Author: Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, interviewed by Zach Ngin, Sara Van Horn, and Alex Westfall
Publisher: The College Hill Independent
Date: May 1, 2020
Form: Interview
Keywords: The university, collaboration, study, COVID-19
When I was a TA for a first-year undergraduate English class, one piece of essay-writing advice that stuck with me went something like this: It’s easy enough to work out what issues a text is about. This is theme-spotting: we know how to recognize a poem about modernity or a short story about capitalism. More effective essays, though, don’t just explain what a text is about—they show how the text makes some kind of evaluative judgment about the thing it’s about. As a result, when you’re in the early stages of writing an essay about a piece of literature, one question to ask yourself is “OK, this is a poem about modernity, but does it think that modernity is good or bad?”
As a reader and an editor, I often find myself going through a similar process. I identify what a text I’m reading is about, and then I try to work out whether it thinks that the phenomenon it’s analyzing is good or bad. This approach is simplistic, of course—Capital is not reducible to “capitalism bad, communism good”—but it’s a useful first baby step toward understanding the outline of a text’s argument. As a result, I tend to like it when an author helps me reach this starting point. This kind of help often takes the form of simple, direct claims that use the words “good” or “bad.” Here are a few examples of the kind of statements I’m talking about:
“And this is good news.” (McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto)
“Ultimately, this turns out to be a good thing…” (Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community)
“Painting is bad because it’s boring and overdone…” (Kyle Chayka, The Longing for Less, recounting Donald Judd’s argument in a 1965 essay)
Once I’ve grasped the basic conceptual terrain of a text, I can better start to see how the actual argument is more complex. I’m grateful for an author’s helping hand here too—for example, when Anna Tsing cautions me against falling too easily into an “X bad, Y good” kind of framework:
“But it would be a huge mistake to assume that scalability is bad and nonscalability is good” (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World)
To summarize: I think the words “good” and “bad” are extremely useful, because they’re the plainest possible way to express an evaluative judgment—and, as the last example shows, because they can also (in the negative) be used to warn a reader away from an overly simplified interpretation of a text’s argument.
What got me thinking about all of this was the following passage from an interview with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in Providence-based alt-weekly The College Hill Independent; the interview was published in May 2020, but it was new to me when I came across it via Leslie Jamison’s recent New York Times essay about nostalgia. Harney and Moten write:
“Going to work in [a university]—whether you are a student or a professor or a janitor or a groundskeeper or a bookkeeper or a librarian or anyone else trying to live and eat and study and resist administration and the call to administer—doesn't make you a bad person or a good person. It makes you part of a workforce with varying levels of consciousness regarding the duress you're under.”
This passage functions similarly to the Anna Tsing line above: it’s a caution against reducing their critique of the university to “university workers bad” (or good). It’s also—helpfully, I think—an act of de-moralizing. One reason to be wary of “good” and “bad” is that it’s not clear what particular kind of evaluation these judgments are conveying: it may be aesthetic, or political, but it often slides toward the moral. Moten and Harney use these terms in the negative precisely to head off that ambiguity. They’re clarifying that the stakes of their analysis are not moral, but rather have to do with labor (“It makes you part of a workforce”), knowledge (“with varying levels of consciousness”), and power (“regarding the duress you’re under”).
Used in positive declarations, “good” and “bad” are effective ways to give a reader secure footing on your argument’s terrain. Used in the negative—as in a phrase like “doesn’t make you a bad person or a good person”—the same words can also set up the next step toward a fuller understanding of your argument’s specificity and stakes.