Policy as memoir, memoir as policy

I

Remember when those orbiting twins of freedom and necessity shone brightest on the intellectual horizon? Now it’s capitalism all the way down. And yet the minute you differentiate that capitalism you are back to limits and affordances, constraints and enablements–in a phrase back to the varieties of freedom and necessity. Or if you prefer: back to when blindspots are also strengths.

None of this would matter if the macro-doctrinal and micro-personal were nowhere alike. But the doctrinal and personal are conflated together in at least one major public domain: namely, where stated policies become more and more like memoirs, and where memoirs are cast more as policy statements.

II

Sallie Tisdale, writer and essayist, draws the upshot:

Today autobiography seems to be a litany of injury, the recounting of loss and harm caused by abuse, racism, abandonment, poverty, violence, rape, and struggle of a thousand kinds. The reasons for such a shift in focus, a shift we see in every layer of our social, cultural, and political landscapes, are beyond my scope. One of the pivotal purposes of memoir is to unveil the shades of meaning that exist in what we believe. This is the problem of memoir; this is the consolation of memoir. Scars are fine; I have written about scars; it is the focus on the unhealed wound that seems new.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/11/mere-belief/?src=longreads

Memoir in this shift ends up as a “grand reveal.” Now, of course, policy and management should be concerned with abuse, racism, abandonment, poverty, violence, rape, and struggle of a thousand kinds. It’s that exclusionary focus on the unhealed wound that is the problem, at least for those who take their scars and wounds also to be affordances, enablements and strengths as they move to the way-stations in-between macro and micro.

To collapse this complexity of memory and experience into “identity” and/or “politics” is to exaggerate one set of meanings at the expense of the others. To quote Tisdale again: “I used to think that I would be a good eyewitness. Now I no longer trust eyewitnesses at all.”

III

So what? To update a once-ubiquitous expression, both freedom and necessity are the recognition of how unreliable we are in eyewitnessing what is right in front of us.

Other sources

David Caute (1971). The Illusion: An essay on politics, theatre and the novel. Harper Colophon Books (New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London).

Katharine Jenkins (2023). “Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Reality” (accessed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW4-VT_ZTJw)