This wasn’t where I went to the first mass protest in my life, but it was the very first one I went to consciously and after agonizing about what to do. We were all caught up in the mess of affairs, but we were not all parsing them the same way, and the pressure of choosing the right side of history felt visceral at that young age. I don’t think I’ve admitted this to anyone yet, but I cried the night before, frustrated by the contrasting narratives I was scrambling to absorb in order to understand what is to be done the next morning. Maybe that’s why I’m still sensitive to reductive narratives about our squares and cities and resistances and regimes; everyone wants the world to fall in line — to make the territories match their mappings while the boots on the ground twist and twirl in their dizzy dance.
“Nothing is by itself either reducible or irreducible to anything else.” That’s what Bruno Latour would “say of all those who reduce, destroy, replace, deduce, permutate, explain, cause, redeem, restore, involve, determine, exchange, and buy,” which is why he was so vilified on the left. He was misunderstood as a neoliberal when his analysis was way more historical and materialist and dialectical than their reddest ontologies.
He didn’t want to rob us of explanatory power; he just wanted to strip bare the very power entailed: “Does this mean there is fusion, ataraxia, or lack of differentiation? No, of course not! All the differences are there. Not a single one is missing. And all the attempts to reduce, produce, simplify, hierarchize, totalize, or destroy them are likewise there, like so many differÂences which add themselves to those that they wished to suppress.”
I remember feeling frustrations in grad school when people I liked decided that other people I liked were on the wrong side of history. Not because there are no sides, but because we’re often too quick in our judgements to realize that the barricades enclose way more of us than we’d personally prefer. I’ve gotten used to picking a team; I’m still not used to choosing an enemy.