As I've been progressing through my reading list, I have often reflected on what I read through the lens of a piece that was fairly formative to me, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading." The whole thing is great, but I keep coming back to the rhetorical question posed at the beginning:
"Sometime back in the middle of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, I was picking the brains of a friend of mine, the activist scholar Cindy Patton, about the probable natural history of HIV. This was at a time when speculation was ubiquitous about whether the virus had been deliberately engineered or spread, whether HIV represented a plot or experiment by the U.S. military that had gotten out of control, or perhaps that was behaving exactly as it was meant to. After hearing a lot from her about the geography and economics of the global traffic in blood products, I finally, with some eagerness, asked Patton what she thought of these sinister rumors about the virus's origin. "Any of the early steps in its spread could have been either accidental or deliberate," she said. "But I just have trouble getting interested in that. I mean, even suppose we were sure of every element of a conspiracy: that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes of the United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren't actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants whom it sees as enemies; that people in power look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes. Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things — what would we know then that we don't already know?""
Sedgwick goes on to pose the question of "what does knowledge do" and then expands on this at length to contrast between the "hermeneutics of suspicion" and the alternative suggested in the chapter's title. I've made clear that, in general, suspicion of others is bad, so Sedgwick's conclusions are right up my alley. Yet the hypothetical above still sits with me on a slightly separate plane of thought. Both a purposeful government plot or a catastrophic public health failure will induce the same suffering and material depravation on those affected. But when it comes to fighting back, knowing who to fight back against and how absolutely depends on finding the root causes. An apathetic force can (perhaps) be swayed and/or reformed; an actively malign force needs to be defeated.
As a lot of what I read concerns the machinations of capital and its lackeys like the CIA, this sort of dichotomy comes up all the time. People who do the bidding of capital range from committed monsters like Allen Dulles and George H.W. Bush to cheerleaders who may not ultimately be aware of what they're cheerleading (see all of the reputable names that received CIA money in the name of "promoting democracy"). Furthermore, because this dominant ideology filters down into the general populace, there are going to be plenty of well-meaning people that then parrot talking points that ultimately support the status quo. And so even though it very much matters whether or not someone is a CIA asset or on the payroll a lobbying group or whatever, from a purely rhetorical standpoint, that knowledge does not do anything. The lowliest person arguing for capitalism is as wrong to do so as the most mendacious CEO.
Enter the dreaded YIMBYs. With respect to housing policy YIMBYs are, generally speaking, people who support new housing development as the primary means of addressing the housing crisis. To be clear, building new housing is indeed good. But, the problem with the mainstream YIMBY position is that in reality, it leads to supporting private developers who almost exclusively build luxury units which are often immediately captured as stores of value by capital, which in turn dilutes the potential of increased supply to reduce rents elsewhere. If this dry description doesn't do it for you, imagine the "drill, baby, drill" Republicans from yesteryear, except for building apartments. Yep, it's that dumb.
I was on vacation this week, so I did not become aware of the latest dust-up involving YIMBYs and the left until I saw this tweet. It should go without saying that poor people moving to a place is not gentrification, but that's besides the larger point. Which is: Boy, this guy is a real shit-stirrer!
The people he's dunking on, both here and in the original tweet, are pushing back rightfully on the logical outcomes of YIMBY policies that I mentioned earlier. Instead of further defending his own positions, he is treating everyone else with suspicion, suggesting that either a) people on the left don't actually want to build more housing?, or b) someone who owns a home can't be anti-capitalist? It's almost enough to make me doubt his own commitment to the fundamental problems his politics are ostensibly meant to address.
But before I get too suspicious of others, I think this sort of conflict is a perfect place to apply the paranoid/reparative dynamic. I prima facie doubt this guy is materially tied to the interested of developers/capital, and furthermore, I have no specific reason to believe he is. But still, this is the exact sort of thing someone beholden to such parties would do. And if your argument fundamentally supports the interests of capital, why shouldn't we engage with it as such? At the same time, the reparative instinct should return us to the initial thought—this is just some guy, wrongheaded and combative as he may be, and we should try to build something positive out of this conflict.
Ultimately, I'm not sure how to perfectly square these two ways of viewing the phenomenon. There is work left for me to do on that front! But I do think that the rhetorical question at the beginning does provide a good way for us to avoid kneejerk suspicion in a case like this. He's quacking like a duck, but he's probably not a duck, but 80+ years of American ideology has maybe made us all ducks in some way? Maybe those of us who know of our government's misdeeds develop an instinct of suspicion that isn't necessarily wrong, but may not always be useful? Maybe we know we weren't always this knowledgeable and there but for the grace of God, we could be this guy? Whatever the answer is, I promise to write part two of this post when I find it.
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