• • • low end theory

Anonyme vous a demandé: how have you developed your ability to think critically? are there certain pivotal texts, conversations, positions, experiences, etc.? i’m curious because the depth and clarity of your writing is rare - i crave more! it’s challenging yet accessible enough to inspire attempts to engage more deeply with shit. i’m trying to figure out how to use my life but get stuck by emotional reactions to fucked up shit. maybe theory can bring peace & guide action that’s more useful to the world.

i’m trying to figure out how to use my life. what a beautiful sentence. i kept reading it over and over. i feel like all critical thinking probably starts from, and returns to, one or another version of that statement.

so: that’s a huge question, and one i’m not sure i’m equipped to answer very well. i could say that i’ve been both privileged and blessed to have had a lot of amazing teachers, friends, and interlocutors over the course of my twenty-eight years. i could say that as much as i’ve written about how wack graduate school has been at times, what it has afforded me is the real opportunity to meet and encounter a lot of these people, and to sit with ideas a great deal. and i could say that if i have had anything worthwhile to say, it’s in part the result of the fact that I’ve had the time to learn to make the time to think, and because i’ve been placed in spaces where critical thinking has been encouraged. this blog, of course, has also been one of those spaces. i don’t believe that critical thinking can truly come into being without a certain amount of time and a certain kind of space, or community.

i could give you a syllabus, of course. angela davis’s writing—especially women, race, and class and the series of essays collected in the angela y davis reader—has been massively influential to me. i appreciate especially the way that she is insistent in making connections between issues that have been raised by a whole range of activist struggles past and present—from antebellum abolitionism to welfare rights to feminist antiviolence struggles to prison abolition—as places where knowledge is produced an circulated. since it’s insistent about the need to speak to a number of constituencies at once, davis’s work tends to offer an analytic depth and clarity that academics and non-academics can both gain a great deal from. also, as i’ve said in a few places recently, i learn a lot from adolph reed’s work, especially his book on w.e.b. du bois and his collection of essays, stirrings in the jug. sometimes i find reed’s analyses a bit too tidy, but they are always brilliantly composed and analytically precise. and, hilarious: what distinguishes reed as a thinker is the way that his critical acumen is always about mocking whatever is the object of his critique. other folks i’m reading all the time: michel foucault, charles taylor, édouard glissant, elaine scarry, manthia diawara, avery gordon, hortense spillers, wendy brown, frantz fanon, buchi emecheta, cherríe moraga.

in a way, i think that’s the trick and also the real difficulty: just reading and reading indiscriminately and reading not in order to fill a set of specific details into an already-existing container, but reading instead to develop the willingness to actually un-learn what you think you know already. the point i’m trying to get at is that there’s no one text or set of texts that will teach you to think critically. it’s unlikely, but nevertheless possible, that you could read everything by everyone i named in the last paragraph without learning to think critically at all. that’s because critical thinking doesn’t result from just absorbing information; it’s about how you read—what you learn to read for and what you become attentive to and sensitive to and aware of in the process of reading. if you go to a text with the plan that all you need to do is absorb information, then what you lose is the possibility that reading will be a transformative experience.

i think i learned to think critically through the long process of realizing that i read in a really strange way. i have ADHD, and sometimes it takes me hours to read just a couple pages of a book that many people i know could skim in the same amount of time. i don’t recommend that anyone try to replicate this. but it forced me, in a way, to be aware about how other people read, and recognizing that oftentimes when i’m reading, i’m reading something very different and immersing myself in different details and letting my imagination fly at different moments and writing marginal notes on different sections, etc. as i began to examine my own habits and develop a critical relationship to them, i began to recognize other people’s habits as well.

on writing: i got to a point, toward the middle of last year, where i was feeling increasingly bored with everything that i wrote. after a long period of thinking about why that was the case, i began to sense that the boredom had to do with the fact that everything i wrote was saying the same thing over and over in a different way. i was repeatedly transcribing what i already knew too well. so i gave myself the task this year that i wouldn’t share anything—at least not anything of substance—that i wrote unless i genuinely felt as though i had learned something in the course of writing that i hadn’t known when i started.

here are some practical tips: whenever you read a sentence that you think is beautiful and brilliant, write it down. whenever you like a turn of phrase, whether written or spoken, write it down. make yourself a collection. make sentences and phrases and words that you love into your own. some people will call this plagiarism. i’d just call it…writing. use those sentences to structure your own thoughts and incorporate them into your own writing. think about what makes them beautiful and brilliant to you and return to them every few months and see if you still think they’re beautiful and brilliant. and if you no longer think so, ask yourself why, and as you begin to answer, write that down. try not to write yourself into a static position; rather, write yourself into transition and transformation. document moments when you are surprised to learn something and try and account in a complicated and honest way for why you were surprised. writing really is not about transcribing thoughts as much as its about representing yourself to yourself and to others. you don’t write what you think; writing is thinking.

i’m struck by the fact that you say you get “stuck by emotional reactions to fucked up shit.” because i hear you. but i think that, at least for me, learning to think critically has never been about rising above emotional reactions. it’s really been about trying to negotiate and to move from the stuck-ness, about trying to be less stuck and more strategic. it’s been about trying to push back against a world that allows you only a limited range of responses. critical thinking, for me, is first and foremost about calling your own habits of thinking and responding into question. not in order to navel-gaze, of course, but because you are starting from the understanding that if systems of oppression and exploitation weren’t extremely complicated, dynamic, and intertwining, it would be a lot easier to rid the world of oppression than it is.

so the first thing i’d say is that the fact that you have “emotional reactions to fucked up shit” is probably a good thing: those reactions suggest to me that you’re already in the presence of a kind of knowledge that is important to hold onto, even if it feels like a reflex. the question is, what do you do once you’re in the presence of a “that’s fucked up!” response in order to learn something meaningful from it?