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highimpactsexinstead of doing visual novels like some aniblogger, i've come across an opportunity to write about indie video games on a pretty legit magazine read by dank leftists i admire. the commissioning editor's suggestions took me by surprise, but it was so compelling that it required me to reorient my research.
since i'm approaching the subject matter back at square one, i figure i should outline my research philosophy as i've been asked by folks about how i do things. i'm going to use what i'm researching -- settler colonialism -- as my case study.
i am familiar with settler colonialism the same way many internet leftists are familiar with socialism: all sound and fury, signifying nothing. while i may have read some works that do bring up the concept, it's not something i've researched very deeply into. like yeah, i know it's Manifest Destiny and "Homestead Acts" because i've read several thinkpieces, but i haven't dug into the actual literature about it.
likewise, i've never been a fan of reading papers, microblogs, articles on the web that go "listen to black and indigenous voices" without linking to such voices. extreme cop-out move IMO. what should be a critique of an ideology waters down into some moralizing preaching about how we should elevate marginalized voices. to that, i say: "i FUCKING hate the Content Creation Philosophy encroaching into real political issues that affect us everyday."
what i want is substance, not people wagging fingers. i can only be at ease with any article if i see citations everywhere. dank claims need to be properly referenced. i want delicious substantiation, not some hot take.
so my perfectionism often requires me to mentally do a Literature Review. i'll collect literature on the subject and read through articles/books from cover to cover (unless it sucks hard, so i skim). i want to be familiar enough with the discourses on settler colonialism that anything i say will be backed up by books/articles/podcasts/videos/lectures if people ask me stuff.
i strive therefore for a deep familiarity with what's hip and new in the studies of settler colonialism. this includes grabbing some new books like The World Turned Inside Out: Settler Colonialism as a Political Idea by Lorenzo Veracini. while reading this book, i would also check the annotations/bibliography to note down even more reads. this way, i should accumulate a backlog of new things to read: Domestic Colonies: The Turn Inward to Colony by Barbara Arneil, The Machine in the Garden by Leo Marx, and an entire journal dedicated to settler colonial studies, just to name a few.
this can be overwhelming for a subject matter as well studied as settler colonialism. for the purposes of this writing project (1.5k words to 3k words), i'll limit myself to a few books and articles that seem very pertinent to my writing scope. however, in more ordinary circumstances like my blog posts, i would try to read so much that i feel like i'll be able to speak up in relevant academic/political circles without spaghetti-ing. in other words, my usual termination point of my "mental literature review" is when i don't feel like i'm bullshitting to people who've done their research.
in that case, what do i mean by bullshitting?
well, i'm taking this idea from Harry G. Frankfurt who wrote an entire short book, On Bullshit, which is inspired by thinkers like wittgenstein. for frankfurt, bullshit is different from lying because at least with lying, the liar knows the truth and is intentionally deceiving the victim. with bullshit, the intent is non-existent because the truth doesn't matter.
spewing bullshit is therefore a callous disregard of truth. liars research, bullshitters just say whatever. the bullshitter may be saying some truth in their nonsensical statements, which leads to more toleration for the bullshitter than outright lying. this is, in frankfurt's and my own views, more harmful than lying.
because you can't tell if this person knows what the hell they're saying.
this isn't frankfurt's observation but my own: i think once radical concepts like "decolonization" and "abolition" have lost meaning and power not to overuse, but people bullshitting the meaning from reading headlines and microblog posts they saw without looking further into it. in other words, the commentariats are Making Up Definitions on the words and ideas they see without doing their due diligence.
bullshitting is how you would create strawmen: take the recent attacks on degrowth. you have right-wing free market losers claiming it is merely austerity and therefore hurt the poor. or what about family abolitionism: those damn sjws are taking away my grandma!!! why bother with the research and literature when you're bad faithing anyway.
and i think this applies to even well-intentioned leftists and liberals. i know i've caught myself doing this many times: i would bullshit about how sex work was really about sex positivity until i read Revolting Prostitutes and learned that sex work ain't that at all. it's still labor, kasucchi. people need food and shelter, so they have to do sex work in order to survive. there's a lot i don't know about sex work, so i've resorted to wittgenstein's "Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent."
so if i don't have anything meaningful to add/say, then i'm clearly bullshitting. i genuinely have no idea what i'm saying. if that happens, i've failed my own standards. sex work won't be the first or last time i bullshitted about!
there were many myths that i was taught in school and elsewhere, which cloud my understanding of reality. i was taught about how crime was bad and the police was there to stop it. prisons locked the bad people up. then, incidents like the murders of michael brown, breonna taylor, and george floyd caused me to realize "maybe, my education is kinda crap".
i am grateful to my petite bourgie parents putting me in an international education, but i've come to realize that it's at best misleading and at worst just outright wrong. this is not to say i blame my teachers for spreading FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS because i recognize they were getting owned by the PTA trying to ban otherwise innocuous books like Catcher in the Rye but rather my education wasn't fantastic.
i only felt like i started learning when i entered graduate school. this was where i started learning about how shitty economics was without reiterating the "dismal science" claim (which by the way is about how depressing economics was since it's all about that proto-eugenicist ideology of handling populations and slavery and not just it being a shitty science) or that racism was more than just "people of color BAD". i had to Unlearn Everything, restart my education, and not succumb to temptations on bullshit.
old habits die hard as i mentioned about my example on sex work. same goes for settler colonialism, which i just thought was "a bunch of dudes settling in the americas and australia to exploit the indigenous people". like yes, that's definitely a thing, but settler colony studies actually argue that settler colonialism was a way to avert the crisis we call revolutions. by suggesting that the proletarians can go elsewhere to make a new living, the unrest is therefore displaced from the metropoles of europe to these "undeveloped" lands of the new world. this is an extremely compelling thesis that also explains socialist counterrevolutionary thinkers like robert owen who wanted to avoid class warfare as much as possible: displacement, he saw, was the way to go. we just need to displace more "ethically" for the workers.
reading through this literature is making me glad that i'm putting in the time to do a "mental literature review". it gives me more to say than regurgitating/bullshitting basic and unqualified assumptions about settler colonialism. whether i agree or disagree with these ideas remain unknown but discovering these new ideas is making me rethink a lot.
indeed, i can only come to the conclusion that any prior instance of me saying "settler colonialism" is bullshit. i can only cringe at my previous misunderstandings/over-simplifications and i'm sure there's more to come with other subject matters. unlearning and relearning these concepts is part and parcel of abolition thinking, of building new ideas, of actually being progressive without turning into some moralizing cop.
this ethic of research is very exhausting, but i do believe in its goals: to be as radical as reality itself, as lenin would say but fail to follow. are these high standards? yes, and i don't expect people to follow this. but it is these high standards for accuracy and precision that make writing about anything worthwhile. i can stand by my words without hesitation because i've done the research. i care about how people evaluate my interpretation of the literature and not the rhetorical qualities, how "intelligent" i sound, or how "respectable" my political statements are.
this knowledge would have to be so Deep and Familiar that i wouldn't actually need to go to the books for specific quotes for everyday conversations. i would be able to go "oh yeah, X Academic and Y Activist said this and that" in my own typical language. if i find myself falling to jargon, it's a symptom of me not familiarizing with the discourses enough. i want to embrace these ideas like they're my friendly neighbors.
all of this will let me be as close a contributing member to these discourses as possible: to avoid bullshitting and becoming a fake ally to these important causes by marginalized people. i want to be their accomplices by listening to these voices and thinkers who've done their research.
what i'm doing is just homework as a budding accomplice.
of course i recognize this is still a lot, especially if i have deadlines and a ton of research to go through. i have a job! games to play! and so on. and for this writing project specifically, i make sure to limit myself so i don't just burn out.
indeed, this Accomplice Grindset can easily lead me to burnout a lot. i just feel very ignorant and complacent whenever i realize i don't know that much. that kind of defeatism can be very depressing and presses upon my mind a lot. this can develop into something unhealthy and i'm still a "Recovering Academic", to steal sophie lewis's twitter bio, especially in the context of post-covid symptoms.
this is perhaps why people think i'm like some macho hard worker. trust me when i spent this morning doing my blue archive dailies and watched rimworld let's plays. i am also technically procrastinating from this research by writing about my research methodology. reading this, you could say i have developed some sophisticated procrastinating methods that synergize well with my ridiculous research methods.
but if i know how to balance rest, work, and research, this is my Ideal Life as a budding accomplice. i want to be serious about things like settler colonialism, so i am taking this opportunity to widen my horizons and challenge my preconceived beliefs.
and i know i'm not fatigued anyway, it's more a sense of Dread that i have so much to learn. i am terribly ignorant about the workings of the world i'm in. there's much to do, but it makes every day very exciting and worthwhile to live for.
a new thing to learn and to write about well, that's the coolest life to lead IMO.
since i'm approaching the subject matter back at square one, i figure i should outline my research philosophy as i've been asked by folks about how i do things. i'm going to use what i'm researching -- settler colonialism -- as my case study.
settle down, colonialists
i am familiar with settler colonialism the same way many internet leftists are familiar with socialism: all sound and fury, signifying nothing. while i may have read some works that do bring up the concept, it's not something i've researched very deeply into. like yeah, i know it's Manifest Destiny and "Homestead Acts" because i've read several thinkpieces, but i haven't dug into the actual literature about it.
likewise, i've never been a fan of reading papers, microblogs, articles on the web that go "listen to black and indigenous voices" without linking to such voices. extreme cop-out move IMO. what should be a critique of an ideology waters down into some moralizing preaching about how we should elevate marginalized voices. to that, i say: "i FUCKING hate the Content Creation Philosophy encroaching into real political issues that affect us everyday."
what i want is substance, not people wagging fingers. i can only be at ease with any article if i see citations everywhere. dank claims need to be properly referenced. i want delicious substantiation, not some hot take.
so my perfectionism often requires me to mentally do a Literature Review. i'll collect literature on the subject and read through articles/books from cover to cover (unless it sucks hard, so i skim). i want to be familiar enough with the discourses on settler colonialism that anything i say will be backed up by books/articles/podcasts/videos/lectures if people ask me stuff.
i strive therefore for a deep familiarity with what's hip and new in the studies of settler colonialism. this includes grabbing some new books like The World Turned Inside Out: Settler Colonialism as a Political Idea by Lorenzo Veracini. while reading this book, i would also check the annotations/bibliography to note down even more reads. this way, i should accumulate a backlog of new things to read: Domestic Colonies: The Turn Inward to Colony by Barbara Arneil, The Machine in the Garden by Leo Marx, and an entire journal dedicated to settler colonial studies, just to name a few.
this can be overwhelming for a subject matter as well studied as settler colonialism. for the purposes of this writing project (1.5k words to 3k words), i'll limit myself to a few books and articles that seem very pertinent to my writing scope. however, in more ordinary circumstances like my blog posts, i would try to read so much that i feel like i'll be able to speak up in relevant academic/political circles without spaghetti-ing. in other words, my usual termination point of my "mental literature review" is when i don't feel like i'm bullshitting to people who've done their research.
avoiding bullshit
in that case, what do i mean by bullshitting?
well, i'm taking this idea from Harry G. Frankfurt who wrote an entire short book, On Bullshit, which is inspired by thinkers like wittgenstein. for frankfurt, bullshit is different from lying because at least with lying, the liar knows the truth and is intentionally deceiving the victim. with bullshit, the intent is non-existent because the truth doesn't matter.
spewing bullshit is therefore a callous disregard of truth. liars research, bullshitters just say whatever. the bullshitter may be saying some truth in their nonsensical statements, which leads to more toleration for the bullshitter than outright lying. this is, in frankfurt's and my own views, more harmful than lying.
because you can't tell if this person knows what the hell they're saying.
this isn't frankfurt's observation but my own: i think once radical concepts like "decolonization" and "abolition" have lost meaning and power not to overuse, but people bullshitting the meaning from reading headlines and microblog posts they saw without looking further into it. in other words, the commentariats are Making Up Definitions on the words and ideas they see without doing their due diligence.
bullshitting is how you would create strawmen: take the recent attacks on degrowth. you have right-wing free market losers claiming it is merely austerity and therefore hurt the poor. or what about family abolitionism: those damn sjws are taking away my grandma!!! why bother with the research and literature when you're bad faithing anyway.
and i think this applies to even well-intentioned leftists and liberals. i know i've caught myself doing this many times: i would bullshit about how sex work was really about sex positivity until i read Revolting Prostitutes and learned that sex work ain't that at all. it's still labor, kasucchi. people need food and shelter, so they have to do sex work in order to survive. there's a lot i don't know about sex work, so i've resorted to wittgenstein's "Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent."
so if i don't have anything meaningful to add/say, then i'm clearly bullshitting. i genuinely have no idea what i'm saying. if that happens, i've failed my own standards. sex work won't be the first or last time i bullshitted about!
why i do this shit
there were many myths that i was taught in school and elsewhere, which cloud my understanding of reality. i was taught about how crime was bad and the police was there to stop it. prisons locked the bad people up. then, incidents like the murders of michael brown, breonna taylor, and george floyd caused me to realize "maybe, my education is kinda crap".
i am grateful to my petite bourgie parents putting me in an international education, but i've come to realize that it's at best misleading and at worst just outright wrong. this is not to say i blame my teachers for spreading FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS because i recognize they were getting owned by the PTA trying to ban otherwise innocuous books like Catcher in the Rye but rather my education wasn't fantastic.
i only felt like i started learning when i entered graduate school. this was where i started learning about how shitty economics was without reiterating the "dismal science" claim (which by the way is about how depressing economics was since it's all about that proto-eugenicist ideology of handling populations and slavery and not just it being a shitty science) or that racism was more than just "people of color BAD". i had to Unlearn Everything, restart my education, and not succumb to temptations on bullshit.
old habits die hard as i mentioned about my example on sex work. same goes for settler colonialism, which i just thought was "a bunch of dudes settling in the americas and australia to exploit the indigenous people". like yes, that's definitely a thing, but settler colony studies actually argue that settler colonialism was a way to avert the crisis we call revolutions. by suggesting that the proletarians can go elsewhere to make a new living, the unrest is therefore displaced from the metropoles of europe to these "undeveloped" lands of the new world. this is an extremely compelling thesis that also explains socialist counterrevolutionary thinkers like robert owen who wanted to avoid class warfare as much as possible: displacement, he saw, was the way to go. we just need to displace more "ethically" for the workers.
reading through this literature is making me glad that i'm putting in the time to do a "mental literature review". it gives me more to say than regurgitating/bullshitting basic and unqualified assumptions about settler colonialism. whether i agree or disagree with these ideas remain unknown but discovering these new ideas is making me rethink a lot.
indeed, i can only come to the conclusion that any prior instance of me saying "settler colonialism" is bullshit. i can only cringe at my previous misunderstandings/over-simplifications and i'm sure there's more to come with other subject matters. unlearning and relearning these concepts is part and parcel of abolition thinking, of building new ideas, of actually being progressive without turning into some moralizing cop.
this ethic of research is very exhausting, but i do believe in its goals: to be as radical as reality itself, as lenin would say but fail to follow. are these high standards? yes, and i don't expect people to follow this. but it is these high standards for accuracy and precision that make writing about anything worthwhile. i can stand by my words without hesitation because i've done the research. i care about how people evaluate my interpretation of the literature and not the rhetorical qualities, how "intelligent" i sound, or how "respectable" my political statements are.
this knowledge would have to be so Deep and Familiar that i wouldn't actually need to go to the books for specific quotes for everyday conversations. i would be able to go "oh yeah, X Academic and Y Activist said this and that" in my own typical language. if i find myself falling to jargon, it's a symptom of me not familiarizing with the discourses enough. i want to embrace these ideas like they're my friendly neighbors.
all of this will let me be as close a contributing member to these discourses as possible: to avoid bullshitting and becoming a fake ally to these important causes by marginalized people. i want to be their accomplices by listening to these voices and thinkers who've done their research.
what i'm doing is just homework as a budding accomplice.
impractical conclusions
of course i recognize this is still a lot, especially if i have deadlines and a ton of research to go through. i have a job! games to play! and so on. and for this writing project specifically, i make sure to limit myself so i don't just burn out.
indeed, this Accomplice Grindset can easily lead me to burnout a lot. i just feel very ignorant and complacent whenever i realize i don't know that much. that kind of defeatism can be very depressing and presses upon my mind a lot. this can develop into something unhealthy and i'm still a "Recovering Academic", to steal sophie lewis's twitter bio, especially in the context of post-covid symptoms.
this is perhaps why people think i'm like some macho hard worker. trust me when i spent this morning doing my blue archive dailies and watched rimworld let's plays. i am also technically procrastinating from this research by writing about my research methodology. reading this, you could say i have developed some sophisticated procrastinating methods that synergize well with my ridiculous research methods.
but if i know how to balance rest, work, and research, this is my Ideal Life as a budding accomplice. i want to be serious about things like settler colonialism, so i am taking this opportunity to widen my horizons and challenge my preconceived beliefs.
and i know i'm not fatigued anyway, it's more a sense of Dread that i have so much to learn. i am terribly ignorant about the workings of the world i'm in. there's much to do, but it makes every day very exciting and worthwhile to live for.
a new thing to learn and to write about well, that's the coolest life to lead IMO.
