Sunday! And that means it’s time for this week’s #Lifehouse thread. Last week we talked about the #pragma; this week I want to cover something that I see as at least as important to the idea of a functioning Lifehouse network or federation, which is the distinction between formal openness and a quality I think of as “invitationality.”
For me, the distinction arises out of my very first moments of involvement with the Occupy Sandy #mutualaid effort, in the last days of October 2012. My partner & I – wanting to volunteer to do recovery work in some capacity, having been outright rejected by the Red Cross, & having rocked up at the 520 Clinton distribution hub with little more than desire & energy – were immediately greeted & welcomed as we approached, in a way that would put most customer service-oriented businesses to shame.
It was made clear to us very quickly that, if we could but agree to a few basic principles of mutual respect, our efforts would be welcome in Occupy Sandy, and more than welcome. Whatever it was that we might have to offer would be put to use. We would be able to “plug in” to what was already an impressively large and sophisticated effort, but as whole human beings as much as people with an inventory of skills and capacities. It was electrifying.
But this was far from the only way this sprawling disaster relief and recovery effort made space for people as whole human beings. This quality was also, and every bit as importantly, expressed at the other end of the process, in interactions with the individuals, families and communities that had been hit hardest by the storm and were in most acute need of relief. The way Occupy Sandy approached this stood in the sharpest contrast with the way top-down relief agencies went about doing so.
Where agencies like the Red Cross distributed generic aid packages impersonally, and in a manner that inscribed a vertical savior/saved relation between people, the Occupy Sandy approach started with a natural conversation. (There were other salient differences in approach, too, as you’ll see in the book, but this is the one I want to drill into today.) When OS volunteers met someone who’d been displaced or otherwise injured by the storm, they started by simply asking: “How are you doing?”
They didn’t assume that people needed help. They didn’t arrogate to themselves the task of deciding what form that help should take. They didn’t impose themselves on the situation like a savior come down from above. They inquired – that I saw, with surprising gentleness and attention to the right moment – if the people they met needed anything. The power of this pivot cannot be underestimated. To put it in somewhat technical terms, it transformed the subject of care from passive recipient into
an active, agential co-creator of their own safety. And many of the people who’d experienced this did in fact go on to join the Occupy Sandy effort themselves, as volunteers. This is the key to that effort’s widely-noted effectiveness, or one of them, anyway. This is what allowed people who were very possibly undergoing the worst moments of their lives, in objective terms, to experience them instead as woven through with a sense of purpose, power and possibility.
And this, I believe, speaks to a real deficit in what are otherwise some of the most inspiring intellectual projects of the past half-century or so: those loosely clustered around the ideas of “open” and “openness.”
However unwise it may be to present such a broad diversity of projects and aims with such brutal schematicity, I think it’s fair to say that most “open” projects – whether Wikipedia or the open-source hardware community or even many nominally “participatory” political formations – are merely open to newcomers in a formal sense. And very often, as I’ve seen & heard directly & for myself, the convenors of some such project wonder why there doesn’t seem to be the community uptake they’d hoped for.
I do not mean this as a judgment upon these projects or their initiators and maintainers – just the opposite, in fact: as I say, they are some of the most inspiring developments of my adult lifetime, and involve some of the best people I’ve ever met. But neither can we pretend that there aren’t very severe challenge gradients in place, that prevent all but a relatively small minority of people from availing themselves of the offer of openness.
You know what this challenge gradient consists of, because we speak about these things all the time hereabouts. Folks are exhausted by the necessity of earning a living under the conditions of late capitalism. Their time is already spoken for: they are bound in a web of obligations to people who need them. They may physically be unable to access the project space, or find it uncomfortably homogenous when they get there. They may feel othered, from the moment they walk (or roll) through the door.
They may not speak the dominant language in the space fluently, or feel anxiety at the thought of doing so. All of these situations, and many more, function as real, material barriers to participation. There is, in short, what @inquiline refers to as “the burden of participation,” and that burden is distributed unequally among the bodies who compose the participatory project. Again: you know this.
But if we want to make good on the (very considerable) promise of nominally “open,” participatory institutions, we have to do the work that Occupy Sandy did seemingly effortlessly: the work of meeting people where they are, in dignity and respect for the whole human being. We need, in other words, to transform our open institutions into invitational institutions.
I do not suggest this will be easy, or unvexed by any of the complications that invariably attend human sociality & collective endeavor. But it’s not optional, either. In fact, a large part of the reasoning behind bothering to articulate the idea of the #pragma in the first place is to unlock the invitationality of the Lifehouse as a space & an idea. Each local hub has to be free to vary in its presentation and affects, in order to feel authentically like the effort of the people who make it up.
Anyway, you can read more about invitationality, and the other qualities that I think made Occupy Sandy so successful and such an excellent example, in the book. And I hope you’ll let me know about examples of this quality that you yourself have experienced, and maybe together we can try to identify some of the principles at work so we can put them to use elsewhere. See you next Sunday for another thread on the #Lifehouse, and how I see it working to support us in the time of troubles we face!
I want to pick up on one final aspect of the way Occupy Sandy worked, beyond the practical difference it made in the lives of the people who interacted with it in the course of the storm and its aftermath. The orthodox sociology of social movements defines such movements in terms of the claims they make on power. The moments I’m interested in are those at which the movement stops appealing to those in power, and instead moves to directly supplant that power as it manifests in people’s lives.
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