Listen to thisI recently went to hear Blues artist Ruthie Foster at an intimate venue in Atlanta. She played solo—just her and a guitar and it was an experience I will treasure. I have been a fan of Ms. Fosters for a long time, but somehow, I have never managed to see her perform live and it was a powerful and moving performance. Her voice is extraordinary, her lyrics inspiring, and her guitar work was beautiful and bluesy with all the right inflections.
As I listened, I found myself moved in ways I hadn’t been for a while now. I began to experience an uplifting of my spirit that was responsive to the music and lyrics, but also the comradery of my friends and everyone sharing in the performance. The uplifting of my spirit was oddly unfamiliar to me and refreshing, but also a bit nostalgic. It was joyous and unfettered by bitterness or resentment. I found myself noticing the shift away from the anger that has been permeating my spirit in these dark times as authoritarianism and brutality seem to have taken hold in so many places with such severe consequences. It was a fleeting moment of insight, but it has held on within my awareness for several weeks now and I have begun to wonder about what it might mean for my work and my humanity.
The question of joy is something I have spent some time over the years trying to make sense of as a force for fully living in each and every moment. At one point I began to call for only joyful revolts, absent resentment, nostalgia, or bitterness. I worried that political movements founded in reaction to the pain and suffering inflicted by systems of domination and hierarchies of control would never have the force to produce anything truly innovative or new that could offer an alternative rooted in life as creative force. It seemed to me that truly revolutionary responses to fascism, in its many forms, needed to be more than a negation. We needed to be founded in love and joy.
As I write that, I am well aware of how trite and even trivial such an assertion may seem in the face of the horror and brutality we face in a world gone mad. The death, destruction, modes of enslavement, psychological and physical trauma, lies and deceit that characterize our daily lives all around the world can seem so overwhelming and all-encompassing, that to talk of love and joy seems at least mildly delusional. Don’t we need to match force with force? Don’t we need to destroy those who would destroy us? Shouldn’t we hate the haters? Take back what is ours by whatever means is necessary?
Such a politics is tempting. It speaks to my deepest inner fascist who would dominate and control those who dominate and control. It speaks to my inner vengeful angel who would violently and in totality wreak violence of all kinds on those who are hurting those I love and care for. It speaks to my wounded and hopeless soul that feels as though nothing I can do will make a difference unless it is done with a sense of righteous fury. It speaks to the part of me that seeks nothing less than blood justice for the blood spilled by those violently assaulting others in all manner of horrible acts of war and occupation.
But the temptation of such a politics of resentment, anger, bitterness, and revenge can only lead to a madness of its own. It cannot offer us anything than more of the same song sung in a different key. So, does that mean that there should never be acts of resistance or violent responses to violent acts? For myself, I cannot rule out such actions in circumstances in which they are the only road to freedom. There is no totalizing formula for liberation that can be applied in every circumstance and situation. As Antonio Negri tells us, every struggle is unique and requires its own set of tactics and responses. The closer to the struggle, the more legitimate any critique we might have of which acts of liberation are necessary in any given historical moment.
That said, I would argue that any tactic rooted in the politics of resentment and hatred of the other is an inherent contradiction to the politics of liberation and freedom. We have seen this time and time again as liberators become dictators over and over again. As the 60’s band The Who says,
We'll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgement of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
It is Che Guevera the 20th century communist revolutionary who said “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” But what could we possibly mean by revolutionary love? Aren’t love and armed insurrection inherently contradictory? What could Che Guevara mean by love in this context? To understand this, I would suggest that we should focus our attention on the question of motivation, rather than to make assumptions about tactics. Revolution does not necessarily imply military action. It certainly can, and in the case of Che Guevara, it most certainly did. But violence as we have noted, inevitably backfires and turns against itself. So, what can we learn from the idea that revolution should be guided by “great feelings of love?”
If we focus on love as a motivation for revolutionary change, then we might find a definition of both love as a revolution that opens the door to a more joyful revolt. My partner, Kathleen Skott-Myhre and I, have written a few pieces about rethinking revolutionary love. In our thinking together we sought a love that holds political force against hatred and domination. We have suggested that such love is to be found in the collective capacity to act together to reshape our world as a site for infinite living creativity. In this sense, revolutionary love is collective action working together towards common goals that open avenues for the full expression of mutual creativity. It is what we do together and how we do it that shapes and forms the types of revolution that will bring forward a world to come.
In her book Methodology of the Oppressed, Chela Sandoval takes up the work of Foucault in his writing on what he termed anti-fascist living. Sandoval refers to Foucault’s proposals for an anti-fascist life as “principles of revolutionary love.” She argues that to truly deploy love as a revolutionary force we must become a new kind of social subject. A social subject that has the capacity to “move strategically and with agility through worlds thick with power.” The model for such an emerging subject might well be found in the ways in which subjugated peoples have negotiated and maneuvered across colonized spaces for hundreds of years.
The question here is one of persistence. It is the art of perpetuating an alternative way of life in the face of every effort to eradicate it. Foucault refers to this as the insurrection of subjugated knowledges and for our purposes in CYC he specifically mentions delinquent young people as holding alternative ways of knowing that might well be worth our attention in any efforts to find new ways forward through the accrued hierarchies of force being deployed against young people across the world today.
If we are to rethink revolutionary love and the possibility of joyful revolt, then it has to be premised on the emergence of a new social subject that begins with us. Foucault suggest seven propositions for an anti-fascist life that might be a decent starting place. Foucault proposes that we must
While there is great deal to say about each of these, it is the proposal that we do not need to be sad to be militant that caught my attention. Indeed, perhaps it is more than a repudiation of sadness. Instead, our militancy could be grounded in seeking to reclaim the hint of joy I felt at the Ruthie Foster performance. I don’t mean that in a narcissistic sense of indulgence in which I want to feel better (although of course I do want to feel better). Instead, I am looking for a way of living that challenges the profound death drive that characterizes the way we are living today. I am interested in Foucault’s proposals as a way of revitalizing my subjectivity, so that I am more open to a life without resentment and bitterness. This doesn’t mean avoiding the harsh realities of suffering and pain we encounter in our lives today. It means to face it all as fully as possible and to celebrate all aspects of the human condition.
For me, this kind of subjectivity might be found in the musical traditions of New Orleans. In a recent interview about his latest album “Second Line Sunday” Trombone Shorty tells us that even in the face of unbearable oppression, trauma, and disaster, the Black community in New Orleans finds a way to celebrate the full spectrum of life.
Even at the funerals, we second-line … We dance inside a funeral home. We celebrate life even in our saddest moments. We are very joyous people. It comes out through the music, but in a dancing way … If you're listening to solos and stuff, you can hear some stories being told in our souls. Some notes ... we might bend them a certain way that can be sad, but it's still on top of this happiness.
In another register, I find the words of the radical anarchist and revolutionary Emma Goldman to be an inspiration when she said. “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” A true revolutionary is motivated by love and by the capacity for celebration. I would argue that to do our work in CYC well and fully these days, we must be joyously militant and not forget to dance.
