Through the Interstices
Civil society is the hidden ground of social movements, and emotions may be used strategically to mobilize
I’m writing to you from the corner office, pictured above. That’s what I’ve dubbed my perch here at a well–appointed library in a small city in Midcoast Maine. Unlike the nearby coffee shop, which I also favor heavily, I don’t have to pay to be here.
I’ll unabashedly say that I’m here to use the WiFi, as I was yesterday. I don’t have it where I’m staying, and my provider is throttling using my phone as a hotspot. Yesterday, also, I was able to book a conference room five minutes before a Zoom meeting began, before which I was set to go outside to take it.
My goal here is not to enumerate all of the other public functions of libraries, like providing meeting space or after–school space for youth. Rather, it is to suggest that the vehicle for this post is akin to other vehicles for change.
I want to make a small pitch for broadcast radio. Yes, it is possible to consume a great deal of radio in the form of podcasts. A recent visit to Peaks Island, a part of Portland a 20 minute ferry ride out into the harbor, put me onto the podcast of their local station. For a long time I listened to a podcast from Australia, an island across the world. But radio occurs in realtime, and I daresay it might not grab my attention were it not so.
So it was with Acoustic Café this past Sunday morning.
While I appreciated Sting talking about his craft, what I suppose I most appreciated was the surprise of learning about the song “A Saving Grace,” by Rahill Jamalifard, of the band Habibi (an Arabic term of endearment).
The song was written to accompany a story “Two Mournings,” about individual and collective grief, specifically of the loss of a beloved pet in the context of the genocide in Gaza. This was explored so beautifully in SongWriter, a sibling show to Acoustic Café.
“My name is Naz Riahi, and I am first and foremost a writer. It's the foundation of my work. But in addition to writing, I'm also a filmmaker and a performer of mostly monologues that I've written.
I knew I wanted to write about this grief, this personal grief, but I felt, how can I be suffering this personal grief that is minuscule compared to this global grief? And what right do I have to write about it? And what right do I have to be sad?
And what right do I have to cry? And what right do I have to be angry about the small thing that happened in my world, when there's this bigger thing, this devastating atrocity happening in the world at large? Miraculously, I came across a short story by one of my favorite writers, Ann Carson.
It's called One Equals One. And the title of the essay, These Two Mornings, is a play on a line in the Ann Carson short story in which she says, my mornings are the grief kind of morning, and her mornings are daybreak kind of mornings.”
From SongWriter: Naz Riahi + Rahill, Oct 8, 2024
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We all have personal grief, and many sage words have been poured upon it. I have grief over some recent personal losses. Someone close to me has a more profound grief than I. How do we reconcile our grief with the enormity of the world’s grief, especially over the genocide in Palestine? The story and the song grapple with this, each in their respective economies. I love poetry’s brief yet visceral economy commands our attention, so I love some lines from Rahill’s song.
another child gone too soon
a mother’s aching
seems the world been split in two
I feel it breaking
how am I suppose to grieve
I feel so helpless
It bears mentioning that in our hyper–individualistic culture, it is difficult to see emotions as collective. Sociologists of emotion do precisely that, arguing that emotions “unite the inner and outer worlds.” Matt Remski is sponsoring some interesting discussion of “what conspiracy theorists get right,” and how Naomi Klein’s formulation of this has become individualistically dismissive of emotion (Left “F—- your feelings”?)
Making space for the collective nature of emotions and their range is liberatory. Deborah Gould is a sociologist with a monograph Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS. In related work, she explores how in contrast to the rage of ACT UP, the NAMES Project made space for grief.
This is a key takeaway: emotions do not simply “arise,” they may be mobilized strategically.
In the interstices of the internet, seeping up from below or filtering like light through the leaves outside my “corner office” of a public space, through grants from foundations comprising civil society, emotions may be mobilized for collective action. If reactionary forces “flood the zone” with misinformation, then so too, may we use these interstitial spaces to resist.
To develop this further, I would like to read up on the notion of “third spaces,” and their relationship to older ideas of civil society, and ultimately to Jürgen Habermas’s idea of the “lifeworld” in his theory of communicative action (as against Pierre Bourdieu’s idea that resistance is futile).