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bloodygranuaile For the political book club we decided March's read would be Sarah Schulman's Conflict Is Not Abuse, a book I had heard recommended before. I had mixed feelings going into it because, while I'd had it recommended to me by a variety of people, many of whom are perfectly lovely, I had also had it recommended by a non-zero number of people whose understanding of conflict not being abuse was transparently "When I do it it's conflict and when you do it it's abuse," so, yeah, that's awkward.
The book was always going to be an uncomfortable read. It's specifically about an uncomfortable situation--watching somebody conflate conflict and abuse is also uncomfortable as fuck to witness. Whether it's seeing someone who was plainly an aggressor pretend to be the victim, someone who was plainly the aggressor absolutely hand-to-god believe they're the victim, someone in a messy situation where everyone's been not their best selves try to spin things so that they're 100% innocent and the other person's behavior is purely malicious, or someone in a situation that may or may not actually be a situation where something may or may not have happened because there's literally no story being told and no accusations of anyone actually doing anything but they're insisting they were victimized anyway, watching someone try to take advantage of whatever commitment to taking abuse seriously might actually exist in a space (which is not guaranteed to be very much) in order to insist upon a moral high ground, unquestioning community backup, or to not have to engage in conflict resolution. I have seen it happen and it sucks unbelievably, especially in a community where you are already struggling to develop procedures to take abuse and harassment more seriously and having folks pop up like "BY THE WAY, that guy I called an idiot called *me* an idiot, this entire organization should ban him immediately and if any of you ever speak to him again you're Not Taking Harassment Seriously" really muddies the waters! It can feel like a betrayal of political principles to even acknowledge to yourself what you're seeing and hearing, let alone discuss it.
On that front, Conflict Is Not Abuse is an essential read, because it looks into why some people do stuff like that in a much more reasoned and compassionate way than "I guess some people are just absolutely fucking shameless," which is what my reaction tends to be when I run into people whomst can dish it but can't take it. In organizing and in life, there's a sometimes exhausting balance to be struck between recognizing why some people overreact to things and understanding that overreaction happens and is a common part of being human, and, you know... overreactions being overreactions, and the importance of not letting overreaction run the show. It is, after all, very easy to see things from one's own perspective, but requires effort to see things from another's, so it's always easier to dish things out than to take one, and to justify one's behavior to oneself (if we couldn't justify our behavior to ourselves, we wouldn't be engaging in it, after all.
That said, there's a litany of Problems I have with this book that might be longer than the book itself. Some are substantive, and some are aesthetic, and some I'm not quite sure which it is, maybe a little of both.
Problem number one is that INTERPERSONAL FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN TWO INDIVIDUALS ISN'T THE SAME THING AS AN ORGANIZED COMMUNITY. Nobody owes it to you to put time and effort into building and maintaining a positive, purely social relationship with you, personally for any reason at all. Far too many (meaning more than zero) of Schulman's examples of "unjustified shunning" or "people cutting someone off for incorrect reasons" are just plain old declining to make friends. It sucks to not have friends, and it sucks when someone you want to be friends with doesn't want to be friends with you, but the whole goddamn point of this book is basically that just because something sucks doesn't mean it's objectively ~inexcusable~. At one point she spends like half a page meditating upon how many times she should try to make plans with someone if they don't respond, and how this all points to some larger old-man-yells-at-clouds type of point about how technology is ruining everything, and that this person owes her a response and is incorrect to not make plans, and I was like, "Two. The number of times you should try is two. After that the ball is in their court and they will get back to you someday or not. Please put the keyboard down and go read Captain Awkward." She also refers to any attempts to draw no-contact boundaries as "illegitimate" and says that it's fine to keep contacting someone after they've said not to contact you because "adults don't follow orders from other adults." To this, I say that Sarah Schulman should consider reading some Sarah Schulman; her book Conflict Is Not Abuse contains some great explications of the pitfalls of referring to a reaction or resistance to something as the action or attack in order to render it illegitimate. For the record: If someone explicitly tells you they don't want to hear from you again, just leave them alone. Even if you think it's wrong and they are only hurting themselves by giving up the pleasure and deep life fulfillment of a relationship with your wonderful self, other people have the right to make their own decisions even if they're bad ones. If a third party really, genuinely, and with actual knowledge of the situation really thinks that this is a conflict that can and should be resolved--and "You sought out this third party and begged them to triangulate" doesn't count--then they can broach trying to resolve the conflict with the other person after everyone has cooled off a bit. Other than that, it is the year of our lord two thousand and twenty and everyone has tons of shit to do and only 24 hours a day to do it in; if someone does something shitty to you that's probably by mistake it's good to let them know what the problem so that at some point they can learn to stop doing the thing, but no other grown-ass adult owes it to you to repeatedly spend chunks of their precious and likely very limited spare time hanging out with someone they don't actually like just to make very, very, very certain they actually don't like the other person and trying to mold them into someone who they like better. I don't know how much leisure time Schulman has, but it's obviously a lot more than I do. I can barely find the time to hang out with all the people I actually like. Maybe I know too many cool people.
So, yeah, except for the bit where Sarah Schulman appears to not believe that you should be allowed to stop hanging out with annoying people unless you have put in enough work and your reasons are good enough, which is kind of a big huge glaring thing and I think I can see why some of Sarah Schulman's acquaintances didn't want to hang out with her anymore, the book is very insightful. God, that feels fucking weird to say.
Other quibbles I had with the book included the use of Significant Capitalization, which give the whole thing an uncomfortably judgmental, black-and-white air that belies the calls for nuance that the text is advocating for. Something is either Conflict or it is Abuse, Sarah Schulman is here to tell you precisely which one it is, there is no gray area, and apparently Conflict cannot escalate into Abuse, it can only Escalate into more Conflict. At times, the insistence upon the utter separatedness of these ideas reads like it's reducing conflict to "merely Conflict," as if the dividing line was that Abuse is harmful and Conflict is not, which comes off as callous and downplaying the fact that some conflicts are in fact very severe and damaging, even if they do not fit the dynamics of abuse. Other parts of the book do a much better job of addressing that conflict can be severe, harmful, and even violent, and yet still have different dynamics at play than abuse cases, therefore necessitating different solutions. The Significant Caps also just made the very serious tone of the book, which would otherwise have been perfectly appropriate given the seriousness of the subject matter, come off as more self-serious than regular serious, possibly because it reminded me of all the Discworld jokes about Significant Capitalization.
The last third of the book was about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and more specifically about the 2014 war in Gaza. The parts of this section that consisted of original writing were extremely good; unfortunately, that was about 40% of it. The other 60% were reconstructions of the author's Twitter and Facebook feeds at the time, thus defeating my intent to get off Twitter and read a real book. The good bits had a great discussion on the pitfalls of ethnic loyalty and settler-colonial mentality; to me, the parallels to Northern Ireland were striking, but that's likely just because I know more about Northern Ireland than I do about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I know this review is like 90% complaints but that's because the flaws in the book end up being really, really outsizedly disappointing when occurring in the same work as all the important stuff about self-image and defensiveness and eligibility for compassion and... well, really, there's quite a lot. I'm very interested to see how book club will go; there's a ton in there that is really useful that we could spend discussing about how to apply it to our own lives, and especially to not purely social spaces where "just stop hanging out with people if you don't like them" isn't the only consideration, but I honestly don't know if we'll have the discipline to focus on that--because it'll be real, real fucking easy to spend the whole time complaining about the various things that drove us nuts. Focusing on the negative is just one of those human tendencies, and, perhaps somewhat ironically in this case, tends to be one of the things that fuels normal conflict--there is some evolutionary just so story about it that makes a lot more sense than most evolutionary just so stories, but whyever we do it, it appears that we do, and it'll take a good deal of conscious effort to not do it.
Basically I wish that the Catherine Hodes person that Schulman took classes from had just written the damn book herself; the stuff from her social work is by far the best and most useful stuff there in terms of how to actually manage conflict and try to figure out what's going on when you're a third party who is being asked to take action in someone else's situation.
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Date: 2020-03-14 02:10 am (UTC)What really annoyed me, though, was the lack of contextualizing and distinguishing between scales. There's not wanting to be friends with someone, and then there's not wanting to be friends with someone but living in community with them. The latter does--I think--carry some social obligation. Not as much as friendship! But some! And Schulman never really distinguishes between different scales and closenesses of relationship. It's very black-and-white, everyone should do THIS all the time, no one should EVER do THAT...
I am pretty sure Schulman is coming out of queer (specifically lesbian) spaces with this, where maybe you only KNOW two dozen people who are safe to be yourself around and you're not all necessarily friends but you're community and everyone is always around and breaking up with each other and you have to work out some shit to be able to be good to each other. And if you kick someone out of the community maybe there really isn't anyone else for that person to hang out with, so you gotta have a high bar for doing it. This is less true now than it used to be, though!
All that being said, I do want us the general us to be able to work out ways to live in community--and in stronger, better communities than we do right now in 2020 America--and I think some versions of some of the stuff in this book is necessary to do that. What of it and in what permutations is the question, though. And Schulman does not seem to have the nuance to answer.