Good faith vs Bad faith

i realize i have an entrepreneurial spirit which is oft associated with capitalism and i apologize for suggesting silbs expand his domain to the dormant subboard of I Love Computers

the profit decreased sharply with the advent of the misogyny

my brief googling seems to agree. I didn't know before. I was just making a joke which has obviously failed terribly.

ha joke was fine

Sara Ahmed - "Rolling eyes is feminist pedagogy".

This got missed at the time. I'll have to read this in context to see what it is - but something here about the role of non-verbal communication. That which is communicated intentionally, and that which is elicited as reaction. Watching debates in foreign languages is interesting to see, because the dynamics are familar. Even if the topic is alien and unknown the positions of the protagonists are guessable

Answering the original question I don't know that responding to good faith and potentially bad faith actors in different ways really leads anywhere

Here’s the original essay, Anvil:

https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/12/05/complaint/

Thanks, I was confused by this at first because its a reversal of roles from what I was thinking (right wing guest says something like racism doesn't exist, with at least partial intent of eliciting an eye roll). The principal difference being that seems to be done with the intent of goading, whereas the ones in the piece are defensive responses. But in both cases a form of moving from the verbal to the non-verbal.

The racism isnt real guy they'll role out on the BBC is equally likely to eye roll himself or goad the guest into it, the end result is the similar (us vs them, we are enemies) but the path there isn't. The elicited or goaded eye roll is meant to diminish the roller by separating from audience, the intended roll to bond with audience. But thats a level of performativity not present in a domestic situation (at least not on same level)

body language so important!

But this is also the problem with body language - there really isn't such a thing as a universal gesture, that always means the same in every case? How body language is read depends so much on who is performing it, and in what context.

That the eyeroll of performative white supremacy, is different from the eyeroll of feminist solidarity. And it matters who is making the gesture, and with what intent. (Intent is not always clear, depending on the viewer's subjective position to the gesturer.)

And so much of good faith / bad faith is about intent. And intent, like eye-rolls, looks different from where one is sitting.

Absolutely, body language a language like any other. In some ways the most performative, but also the most involuntary and unconscious.

I was struck in the piece by where the author says about being judged before you even say anything (but also in any exchange we can be as liable to do the same). Which leads to exchanges where everyone has already decided and judged others before, not after, they have spoken. Viewed through this lens I want to back away from the idea of bad faith, at least on practical terms (even when I know it to be true, to try and not take that shortcut and let go of pattern recognition)

That's why I thought you would appreciate the piece - that she writes about that pre-judgement, of judging before the speech act has even happened. In some ways, the speech act doesn't even *need* to happen, it has been pre-determined.

I've read this intensely valuable / frustrating book recently, by Sarah Schulman, called Conflict Is Not Abuse, and I think it's both hugely important to this discussion (but also so inherently flawed by her own 'OK boomer'-ism that any reccommendation would have to come with a million caveats that she is trapped in her own generation's ways of thinking) - how she talks about the same actions (eye-rolling, fragility) can come from either place, from a place of Supremacy Ideology OR from a place of fragiligy-from-having-been-abused, and still look and function and behave in the same ways. It's not always clear which is which, especially to the person having the fragility-reaction, let alone to onlookers.

I really want to discuss the book somewhere, because there's so much *deeply wrong* with it, and also so much *deeply right* about it, often at the same time, that she is almost an example of the Thing She Is Trying To Describe.

I don't know that ILX is that place, tho.

I think there are some ways around the pre-determining! Depending on the context. One thing I notice is she talks about how it doesn't matter how you deliver the critique/content/answer. Whether its 'shrill' or 'pleasant' doesn't really matter (and associated questions of tone policing etc which is sort of a red herring)

This is well covered ground, but I think misses something crucial. These are all variants of delivering Answers (to people who don't want to hear them?). The style and format may change but the mechanism is the same. Leading with answers is really tough and generally doesn't work! I think you have to lead with Questions where possible, open questions with interest in the answer. This is how guards are dropped, where the 'ins' are. That you have to show you're listening to someone else, before expecting they're going to listen to you

I was thinking about the guy that wrote the Trump Train song there was an interesting piece on him, will try find it

I really want to discuss the book somewhere, because there's so much *deeply wrong* with it, and also so much *deeply right* about it, often at the same time, that she is almost an example of the Thing She Is Trying To Describe.

I read an article about the author and the book recently, and I actually have been meaning to get the book and read it. ... I must have been on a sociological bender that day because it also reminds me of that thing I read that people were sharing about "ask culture" vs. "guess culture" -- which definitely plays a role in conflict and assertions/assumptions of abuse

Couldn't work out why I'd also read that piece - someone linked it on the I May Destroy You thread
Sounds interesting!

This one, yeah? https://www.thecut.com/2020/08/sarah-schulman-conflict-is-not-abuse.html

It ended up on a couple of ILX threads (I thought it was posted on this one, but I guess not).

I was really expecting to enjoy it, because we've read a lot of Sarah Schulman in queer theory reading groups, and she's generally very smart. But reading this book was such a frustrating experience - I got out a pencil and started arguing with her in the margains. Just skip the first chapter, it is *terrible*, but there is a lot to be gained out of the rest of it, but what you can get out of it is generally better absorbed (for someone of Gen X or below) by reading Captain Awkward and living the maxim of "Use Your Words". (pretty sure Ask Culture vs Guess Culture is also something that came out of Captain Awkward, and super useful as a way of understanding or avoiding conflict.)

1) Her insane Boomer insistence that telephone calls are 'real' and 'authentic' and 'totally unmediated' but emails, texts, chat, blogging, etc. are somehow 'inauthentic' and 'over-mediated' and ~inherently problematic~. Please understand how people communicate today, rather than blanket dismissing any technology that arrived after you turned 35.
2) She flat-out accepts without interrogating in any way, the shitty right wing boomer assertion that 'triggered' means 'mildly upset, annoyed or uncomfortable' in a way that totally diminishes the impact of the more proper and specific psychological usage of 'triggered' in a PTSD sense. In a book about overcoming collective trauma, this kind of mis-use of terminology *MATTERS*.
3) Because of number 2, of course she doesn't understand what Trigger Warnings are, or what they're for. No, they don't mean that students can refuse to read things they find 'upsetting' - it means you provide context and warning, so that people with trauma backgrounds can choose when and how and in what state to interact with material that may cause damage if they are blindsided by it.
4) The level of accountability and authenticity that she demands from even casual friends sounds, frankly, exhausting! No; a person who has cancelled a lunch date during a busy trip does NOT owe you a 20-minute FEELINGSCONVERSATION via telephone. She seems to think that boundaries are something bad, used to punish people, in a way that often sounds... wow, Sarah Schulman seems like a small doses friend.
5) Her repeated insistence on privileging spoken speech acts over written speech acts is... really, super autistic unfriendly. Not everyone is neurotypical, Sarah!
6) just reproducing verbatim arguments that people had on your Facebook wall is a lazy bad way of rounding out a chapter. Ugh.

And it's a shame, because she is actually getting at the core of something important - *dealing* with collective trauma, among marginalised people, and explaining the mechanics of the victim-bully switch, how people who have been frequently bullied, traumatised and victimised, *DO* often turn around to lash out at others. This is a real and genuine psychological phenomenon - however, the psychological term for this phenomenon is not 'Triggering', it is a form of 'Projection'.

People who have a history of being traumatised or abused *are* often lacking in the psychological tools necessary to handle normal conflict. When your life has been one long series of events of being unjustly attacked, any kind of conflict *does* start to look like an attack. And learning to use your words, ask questions, go back and re-read (and I *do* mean re-read, it's much easier to get distance and re-read written text, than it is to ask someone to please re-state what you just misheard.) is a big part of recovery from trauma, and learning skills to discern Conflict from Abuse (good faith from bad faith, in the context of this thread) is a neccessary skill to learn.

The chapter on domestic abuse (what is abuse? it is "power over") is great. The chapter on the abusive dynamics that can develop in queer and specifically lesbian relationships, is phenomenal - in a way that heterosexual advice paradigms just do not fit. Her reflections on collective shunning as a form of abuse are absolutely on point, and reflect a lot on ILX during the Suggest Ban era. Her comments, as a Jewish woman, on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, seem, to a total outsider, really astute, and show a complex and nuanced understanding of the issues.

But you have to read through so much lazy-bad ok boomer assumption to get to those points that... well, I do wish that someone else I know and trust would read this and see if they had the same problems I did.

speaking of bad faith when this book came out i'd read rumblings that schulman had, in the past, been accused of abuse by a partner but of course i can't find anything about that anymore because every google variation of "sarah schulman + abuse" just brings up shit about her popular book

am i allowed to put that out into the world without proof and then leave this thread forever or did i just become a bad faith actor myself? discuss

The entire book is a series of representations of many-sided conflicts, and how in complex relationships - especially in queer relationships where there is not an obvious power asymmetry - where both parties have both victim-and-aggressor roles, accusations of abuse can *become* another form of abuse. Schulman is pretty obvious, that she has been in multiple situations where she was cast as the abuser, but felt the situation was far more complex.

But, it's so hard to discuss this, without lapsing into victim-blaming.

There is a lot of this book that does read like "*I* was falsely accused of abuse, in a situation that was about mutual conflict" - maybe in a sense of defensiveness, and maybe in a sense of trying to set the record straight. But she doesn't seem like she's trying to justify or exonerate herself, it sounds like she's trying to teach herself/others how to negotiate conflict situations, without either lapsing into abuse, or using abuse accusations as a method of punishing an equally conflicted partner?

I found it a good description of queer relationships *I have been in* where there wasn't always a clear-cut "power over" dynamic, there were complex, interlocking sets of traumatised people re-traumatising each other.

But these descriptions rarely translate well into heterosexual relationships where there usually *is* a very clearcut divide between which kinds of people almost exclusively have the financial, societal, legal, physical power over the other. This book does not cover the "Why Does He Do That" situations at all. It covers the kinds of situations that Schulman and her peers have been in. She tries to generalise it, but it's not a situation that *can* be generalised.

Thanks for that, branwell. The verbal vs written thing would wind me up no end so good to anticipate!

I would not have made it past the first chapter, unless I was warned it was bad beforehand & assured the rest of the book was worth it. surely someone must have questioned that stuff before it went to print

So it's not just me, that first chapter is just genuinely tone deaf and terrible and "learn what a soft No is, Schulman!!!"

(But I suppose some books do need warnings - like, everyone always tells people, "Read The Gift of Fear, but skip the chapter on domestic abuse")

However, there are enough good insights in the rest of it, that it's worth battling through the bad bits.

And it's a shame, because she is actually getting at the core of something important - *dealing* with collective trauma, among marginalised people, and explaining the mechanics of the victim-bully switch, how people who have been frequently bullied, traumatised and victimised, *DO* often turn around to lash out at others. This is a real and genuine psychological phenomenon - however, the psychological term for this phenomenon is not 'Triggering', it is a form of 'Projection'.

― Extractor Fan (Branwell with an N)

yeah that is like the #1 thing i struggle with - i am really acutely aware of collective trauma and i am really acutely aware that i struggle with personal trauma and i work my ass off to deal with the personal trauma but the collective trauma is bigger than i can handle and it's kicking my ass

and a lot of times i try to reach out and it always turns into a big fight, and i don't know if it's because i can't keep my personal trauma out of it or if it's because where other people are at they can't allow themselves to admit to the collective trauma or because they just conceive of the collective trauma differently, for them it's a different problem with a different solution

and dividing the world into Abusers and Victims doesn't really work well for me either, it's important to me that i've been both, that i'm capable of both depending, i see it more as a cycle of abuse, my tendency is to act in accordance with the behaviors that were and are modeled for me, and a lot of those behaviors were and are pretty fucking awful

Whitney Phillips is so absolutely great on this stuff:

http://bostonreview.net/gender-sexuality/whitney-phillips-whose-anger-counts

She's honestly one of the best people out there studying the internet at the moment, including the darker corners thereof.

Re: Schulman, she should stick to fiction— her theoretical writings, with the exception of her strident take on pinkwashing in Israel, are mostly awful, liberal garbage, afaict.

I was once attacked during a question-and-answer period during a roundtable discussion that involved her and some other queer reformist types because they basically were going on tirades against people who shop at chain stores— this was when Gentrification of the Mind had just come out— and I raised the point that a lot of people don't have access to the capital and resources that allow them to shop at many smaller, mom-and-pop shops, and people acted as if I'd shit in their breakfast. Schulman included! It was the most classist, tone-deaf shit I've ever experienced in that sort of environment.

I haven't read Conflict because of that experience. TBH, other than 'Rat Bohemia,' I kind of think she sucks!

I raised the point that a lot of people don't have access to the capital and resources that allow them to shop at many smaller, mom-and-pop shops,

it's tricky! Because poor people don't all live in the same type of places. Like, you used to live in West Oakland ... how many chain stores were even there? You probably remember when they put in a Subway sandwiches on 7th St .... that kept getting robbed. I was telling a colleague the other day, about when a Quizno's opened near the DIY space I ran (this was back in 2002), and I was able to walk to get a vegetarian sandwich on a Saturday afternoon, which was very exciting at the time. A few years back a Walgreens opened in deep East Oakland (around 78th and International iirc) and people were stoked! ... Like, in certain areas, the only stores you have are mom-and-pop shops, because of poverty and disinvestment, but these are probably not the types of stores your fellow panelists regularly patronize.

Like are they saying, the virtuous thing to do is eat cereal, nutter butters, and canned goods from the corner store vs. buying healthy groceries from Wal-Mart?

See, this is to me, an absolute classic example of a bad faith discussion.

Where we don't end up discussing the author's work, her writing, her Theory - but instead, we end up talking about the emotional feelings, reportage of an event that took place a decade ago, where none of the rest of us were present, there is no transcript, there is just this emotionally charged reportage, hearsay, academic gossip, from someone who has already acknowledged that they dislike her writing, and thinks she simply "sucks".

We don't have the context, there's no way of ascertaining of there was any more nuance to what Schulman or other unnamed panelists were actually discussing - there's only Table's sense of being "attacked" (was this an attack, or merely a disagreement? This is literally the meat of Schulman's most recent book - she literally describes, in the book, having an experience at a public talk where someone takes exception to a mis-hearing and mis-understanding of what she said in her talk - but she is actually able to walk the questioner and the audience through a group session of "what did other people in the audience hear me saying? did they hear me saying what you've just quoted back to me, or something more nuanced?" so that the questioner actually returns to *what was actually said* and not their ~feelings about Schulman~ or their ~feelings about the conversation~). I get what you're doing, Sarahell, but you're not getting to hear and address what Schulman actually said, you're shadow-boxing with Table's mental image of Schulman.

And we end up discussing, not Schulman's work at all - but Table's ~feelings about Schulman as a person~ - that she's mean, that she's attacky, that she was tone-deaf and not a nice person.

I really do prefer to engage with theorists' and writers *work*, not peoples' ~feelings about the 'kind of person' the writer is~ (and that goes double when the theorist is a woman, especially a *difficult* woman, because we all know the standards of acceptable niceness for women are already warped to start with.)

No one cares about Phillips, huh. I'm surprised there's not more interest in her work on ILX, given how much she has studied 'internet messageboard culture' and Trolling in general as a phenomenon. I always find it weird, the highly relevant work that people on ILX prove weirdly incurious about.

Just not had time to read it yet

nothing to take issue with in the Phillips piece. Schulman is more contentious in what seems like an intentional way and she seems to ask for charitable readings of things which seem cruel or dismissive or which themselves seem like uncharitable readings. there is a lot of seeming and a lot of what seems like plausible deniability. have heard second or third accounts of her work being used to defend abuse (beyond conflict) which is obv not (mostly or necessarily) her fault- but combined with the accusations she acknowledges (as accusations) I feel pretty uncomfortable with the whole project. which may be the point

haven’t read the book so I don’t know how accurate this critique is but I feel parts of it https://thenewinquiry.com/trust-in-instinct/

Yeah, see, "Here is an essay by a person who has read the work, engaged with it, and flagged up some important flaws in the book's arguments" is a good faith discussion, in a way that "I met this woman and found her personally disagreeable, therefore her work - which I haven't read - sucks" is not.

Like, it is the job of theorists, activists, reformers, etc. to disagree - to *be* disagreeable.

It's kind of weird to read Schulman dismissed as this kind of classist, ivory tower 'panelist' with no experience of ~the real world~, given her own background. She didn't come from inside academia - she was born in the east village when it was essentially still a Jewish ghetto, didn't finish college, became a teacher *after* having been a working writer and an activist, through a loophole that she is the first person to admit no longer exists - the latter half of Gentrification of the Mind is about what a pyramid scheme the MFA-ification of writing and the teaching-of-writing is. If she's blinkered about chain stores or food deserts, it is because she is a lifelong New Yorker, and probably cannot comprehend what it is to live in a place where one needs a car to exit the food desert, or get to a large chain store.

A ton of the flaws of her writing, are about that - the specific contexts that she is discussing simply don't translate to other contexts. But what's important is to pull back and look at the context she *is* addressing, rather than dismissing her that she blanket "sucks".

The Phillips piece was well written, but was there anything new there? New information, new ways of looking at the landscape? It felt like a (long) rehash of discussions that have been had over and over, and everyone on one side is keenly aware of the parameters and is shouting "why won't you listen?" at the other side, meanwhile the other side (the David Brookses of the world, or the obtuse journalist Phillips mentions in her intro) is responding with bemused shrugs and keeping on doing exactly what they've been doing - making goo-goo eyes at Trump supporters, making sad faces about "cancel culture," and on and on unto the heat death of the universe. I mean, if I missed anything, by all means point it out.

I'm not getting into the Schulman thing because a) I don't have time to read an entire book this morning and b) Branwell, your own strong misgivings about her work expressed upthread make me think it wouldn't be worth panning through the slurry for one or two nuggets of gold.

I get what you're doing, Sarahell, but you're not getting to hear and address what Schulman actually said, you're shadow-boxing with Table's mental image of Schulman.

fwiw, I didn't intend my recent posts to be _about_ Schulman. I was changing the subject and wanted to talk to table (who I know irl) about the topic he was arguing about -- shopping at chain stores re classism.

Branwell, I just don't agree. If she's such an important thinker and her books get national of not international attention, then why should we engage with their arguments as if we all know she's talking about New York? That's ridiculous.

And it was audience members, not Schulman herself, who attacked me during that panel discussion. I don't have anything against her as a person, despite my saying 'she sucks' above. I just don't find much if the theory she's written worth talking about, BECAUSE it is so specific to certain geographies and situations.

Also, Branwell, for someone who claims that people create hostile environments for you on this board all the time, your denigration and questioning the reality of my experience is pretty rich.

i think her ideas about interpersonal conflict and how people's tendencies toward conflict avoidance are really interesting -- however, just because someone is otm in one area, doesn't mean they are universally otm. I have similar issues with David Graeber -- where there are certain things he's written that I think are great, and others where I am skeptical and people who are better versed in those areas are like, "he doesn't know what he's talking about."

still though -- the Graeber story and his analysis about the effects of someone donating a car to an anarchist collective is one of my favorite things and super insightful writing.

Re sarahell, yeah, you're right about the Bottoms, but this discussion was focused on SF. Took place in the old Luggage Store Gallery in 2012, I think.

Like many of these people were essentially saying that poor people shopping at Safeway or 7-11 instead of one of the local delis or Bi-Rite or the Co-op were wrongheaded.

hahahahahah -- so telling that a discussion focused on SF would not even consider the vast urban civilizations right outside its borders where the overwhelming majority of people that make San Francisco function actually live ... but the solipsism and arrogance of San Francisco is another topic ...

xp - didn't San Francisco only start getting a significant number of 7-11s only around 2012? Maybe a few years prior? ... Like, San Francisco's planning code is potentially one of the strictest in terms of banning chain stores in the country?

So Schulman’s work “sucks” because ... her *audience* disagreed with you?

Like, this is so far from a good faith engagement with Schulman or her work, it couldn’t even find one on a map?

Can you read?

Let's try and avoid a hundred-post pile-up, shall we?

It seems to me that table is going out of his way to separate his critique of Schulman from his critique of the hostile audience at a panel discussion where she was one of the panelists. His dislike for her work is detached from his anecdote about the event in question.

Am I right or wrong about that, table?

there are food deserts in nyc fyi

Over the course of several posts, I said I liked her fiction, which is actually quite provocative at times-- she wrote a novel about a precocious queer youth in a relationship with an older person that got her into a lot of trouble-- but that her theoretical writing seems mean-spirited and hyper-specific in its contextual framing. And that I don't feel the need to engage with it as a result.

And unperson, yes, that is what I was attempting

And re: BradNelson, I know that there are food deserts in the five boroughs, don't know who you were addressing.

just reacting to the idea that schulman is blinkered about food deserts because she's a lifelong new yorker

idk if it's a food desert issue and more about the prominence of mom-and-pop stores in NYC vs. in other parts of the country where there tend to be fewer of these, partly due to culture and partly due to population density