Turtleneck Confessions

I was sitting in my desk chair with a turtleneck on, listening to the LP of the first new Godspeed You Black Emperor record since 2021 (“NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD.”) As the record turned on the turntable, some barely decipherable memory pushed its way forward in my experience. It wasn’t a clear image. No, it was more like a gentle realization that I was creating a memory that had already been created before. Through the plaintive, mournful playing of Godspeed, it occurred to me that the only difference is that the person who created the old memories, wearing hoodies and listening to Godspeed, had different dreams than the person I am now.

Well, at least, I thought my dreams were different then. “I used to want to be a social theorist,” I thought to myself. This wasn’t the first time I had juxtaposed what my dreams are now with what they used to be when I was working toward my PhD. Every time I spin a record that I listened to while writing my dissertation, I am used to my mind settling into this clear demarcation of then and now. This rutted road is full of feelings that accompany lost aspirations and dreams: melancholic-tinged nostalgia However, this time, while listening to the gentle, undulating drones of the Godspeed record, things seemed much more complicated and not so easy to discern. For the first time in many years while wearing that turtleneck, like one of my social theory heroes Michel Foucault, I found that my dreams now are no different than the ones I held before.

For those who know me, this delineation might seem like a rather ridiculous statement to even make. However, I am feeling more generous toward myself and my career than I have in the past. I have been a practicing sociologist working within the bowels of bureaucracies conducting policy analysis for over 10 years. My dual specializations in my doctorate work were in analyzing the mechanics of how powerful people justify doing bad things and documenting race, class, and gender inequality. Just because I spend more time nowadays using one of my skill sets to document empirical trends does not mean that I am not always using the theoretical skills that I honed in my PhD work to make sense of the ever-shifting political quicksand that my work is enmeshed within. If anything, my ability to discern political opportunities and the shifting mechanisms of domination is even more important in this seemingly mundane context where I am unknown and of little renown.

Prior to listening to this Godspeed record with that turtleneck on, I wasn’t willing to accept that the sort of informal theory work I do everyday was real social theory . Yes, I had an extremely rigid conceptualization of who a social theorist was. Naturally, that theorist was the turtleneck-wearing Foucault debating a bespectacled Chomsky on French television. That theorist was the prominent, tenured professor who writes books about how the world works and why its organized the way it is. In my own shortsightedness, I mistook my own humble work in the nooks and crannies of the state and in this project as not being “theory enough” for being considered a theorist, because I lacked the renown that I thought would be connected to being a social theorist. I misunderstood that one does not have to have published long, dense theoretical tracts to be a theorist, nor do we need to be known at all. No, we are all theorists everyday, just some of us spend more time in considering what we want to theorize about and how much information we want to synthesize to build our theories.

Most folx are quite happy to just plug and play whatever ideological position they are handed. This isn’t being a social theorist. No, this is accepting the zombified passivity that late capitalism hoists on us, because we are not given enough time and space from laboring and reproducing our labor (eating, cleaning, sleeping, child rearing) to actually think for ourselves. Since its election season, I think it’s apt to note that many folx who present themselves as very serious about politics are just regurgitating what they read in the New York Times or whatever publication people on the right read. It seems the more that one just relies on a set of ideas about how things work that are handed to them the more they are willing to hold onto those ideas as some zealous set of immutable moral principles.

What distinguishes the typical person our society identifies as a social theorist then is just having enough time to think and read and the institutional support that affirms to them that their voice matters. Now before I get too critical on the average person, I gotta say that the deck is stacked against them. The planet is on fire and they are still required to work more than ever to provide for themselves and their families. If anything, we should diminish the cult of geniuses that our society maintains around people who are today’s renowned theorists to provide more time and training to advance the theories of everyday people. Yes, I think that everyone, if they wanted, should have the opportunity to get paid to get a PhD from a public, land grant university and train with a person writing theory about culture, power, inequality, and social movements, even if they don’t end up doing what we typically thing of as a theorist. That just seems fair to me and infinitely more helpful in a democratic society than the current nepotistic rat race that just recreates the same unequal society in every generation.

I think our theory be better off for if we had everyday people as an equal partner in the creation of theory. There is something decidedly odd that the people writing theory about the ossification of our relations of inequality in the US have tenure-protected jobs that buttress them from the real difficulties of American life. Likewise, its a bad look for tenured professors, whose most difficult portion of their work is their teaching requirements, are the ones trying to help us understand the alienation and dehumanization in 21st century work. We would be better served having someone on the shop floor or behind the counter tell us how the suits try to turn the screws on them. Real theory would be best served come from those voices, trained in social sciences, who have the experience of having the boot on their neck. There won’t be any way that such theory could get perverted from raw, unabashed truth: all killer, no filler.

What we need is more freedom in our everyday lives to decide what course we will take. At the end of his book Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber put it perfectly:

Yes, we should let everyone decide for themselves how best they will benefit humanity. We shouldn’t just hold the ability to write theory for a small group. No everyone should be able to be a theorist if they want to. I think if we had that sort of freedom that a lot of the current problems we face as a society would be much easier to navigate. Until we get there, I am just gonna wear my turtleneck, listen to Godspeed, and scrawl my little love notes to the universe for y’all to read.

Ok, I am done. I swear. I had to get that off my chest. I’m gonna start calling these theorist diatribes my “turtleneck confessions.” It’s one of those little spurts of text I have to write or else my own perception of my lack of freedom will eat me alive. I even pushed aside my original plan to just work on my fiber projects, cook my food, and pay my business taxes to write it. Well, I still did my cooking and fiber art. I just pushed off my taxes for the umpteen time, which isn’t anything new. There is magic to be found in how we navigate the limits and constraints we face. This is so resonant for me as I, for the 95,000th time, write my way into a different understanding of my own position with regard to my goals and dreams. This turtleneck confession, as all of them that you have read, is just my way to intellectually make a little bit more room for me to be with and among my dreams. Well that, and to shake my fist angrily at the sky for all the limits and constraints that push to hard on my neck and don’t allow any magic to flow. There are certainly enough of those.

Aside from this turtleneck confessions, I got all my little handworks into different degrees of completion this week. First up, I got some rows done on my wee little boundary weaving that I will put above my door. specifically, I working on weaving a fence pattern with my nettle-dyed boundary yarn that will serve as some of the principle magic that will animate this piece. This fence pattern is based off of a boundary sigil tattoo that I got from Leah Samuels of Moonlight Offerings based on a a birth chart reading she gave me that changed my life. Yes, it changed my life.

Secondly, I am working on natural dyeing yarn with nettle that I harvested from my yard. I’m in a little bit of a different spot with my natural dyeing this season, because usually I’m done for the year by now. I am not a huge fan of burning gas to dye my yarn. I much prefer solar dyeing in the heat of the summer, because the sun is so strong here that I don’t need any burners. However, with half a year lost to the wilderness of recovering from my bike crash, here I am dying yarn in late October. This whole project is pushing me to learn new skills like how to tend dye pots and mordant pots while they are on the burners. I also am experimenting with ageing my dye baths by extracting the color from the nettle leaf and stalk over three days of extraction. UGH, I am so excited to dunk the skeins of my handspun Shetland into my dye baths later today.

I am enjoying this way of pushing myself to learn and be. It’s much better than the sort of endless athletic approach to pushing myself I was exploring on the bike. It turns out that I really just am not interested in riding a bike for five hours just to have some more guy friends to hang out with. I would much rather ride much slower one to three hours and stop a bunch to look at things, take photos, and be in the landscape, even if that means I do it by myself. I think Grant Peterson from Rivendell Bicycle Works was right in Just Ride when he said that you should bike a maximum of two to three hours in a day. There truly is just so much other stuff to work on and enjoy.

Ok, I gotta go. I am burning the midnight oil on this one to finish it up. Thanks for being here, dear reader. Consider a free or paid sub if you aren’t signed up yet! I appreciate each and everyone one of you.

Until Next Week,

James