Abstract
I am reading these reviews from Gadigal land. I have just returned to Australia from my first home Wales. While I was there I contracted Covid-19. The continuing threat of Covid colliding with other global problems such as poverty and climate change made me consider the urgent need to think, live, and research ethically. Surrounded by death, political incompetence, and lack of resources for health, hygiene, and liveable wages, the scale of change and action required seems out of reach. The continued work to resist inequality and oppression is urgent. It means living differently and organizing differently. Our book taught me the importance of interacting differently and the work continually required not to slip into ways of being and living that threaten corporeal ethics.
I also read the reviews on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, where I both live and work. So far, I have been lucky to have been spared from Covid, a virus that so many others have suffered and died from. Both for those who did and did not get the virus, people around the world were put into lockdown and social isolation. We learned new technologies like Zoom as both social and work life, for many, became virtual rather than physically proximous. Amidst this apparently disembodied existence, with some irony, there was a heightened awareness of human physical vulnerability and our interdependence with other people, a point that Emmanouela Mandalaki draws attention to in her review. Essential workers weren’t doing immaterial labour—it was the embodied materiality of healthcare professionals, funeral workers, food retailers, and waste management workers that we relied on the most. Covid was a tragic reminder of the physical and material interdependence that characterizes humanity.
For those of us that experienced a lack of physical and material presence at home and work, the corporeal ethics that we wrote about in the book as the basis for living more liveable lives, became more complex. This raises questions around the ways ethics surfaces between people, and how intercorporeality might be experienced in a state of physical isolation.
In her review, Silvia Gherardi observed that our book was “crucially concerned with the body and the specificity of one’s embodiment and in real encounters between different people in actual situations.” Covid provided what for many of us was a new modality of that specificity, as we worked with colleagues and students to navigate through the crisis. The ethics this involves, Silvia goes on to say, is one where “forms of resistance are complemented by forms of affective solidarity.” Organizations can be cruel, heartless, and ruthless places, filled with humiliation and trepidation. The corporeal ethics we wrote about in our book resists such tendencies with a spirit of generosity and solidarity. Covid saw instances of both. On the one hand those people that Oxfam called the “pandemic profiteers” capitalized on the hardship, misery, and isolation of others to boost their business bottom lines by exploiting the needs of a newly locked down populace. New billionaires were created and existing ones got richer as working people across the world lost their jobs and livelihoods. Elsewhere people supported each other through the hard times, comforting those who had lost loved ones, meeting people online to create new spaces of sociality and solidarity. I acutely remember watching the news in early 2020 when Italy was one of the first countries to go into lockdown. Neighbours would hang out of apartment windows singing together as a collective means to deal with forced isolation. It seemed to exemplify, in a quotidian way, what we were trying to write about in our book.
Emmanouela Mandalaki points out in her review that she would have like us to have further elaborated on the relationships between negative affects and political action. She makes a good point. Organizations, including universities, very commonly produce pain and negativity. Look at what is happening around is in Australian universities: job losses, precarity, continual restructuring, excessive wages for the minority, and threats against free speech. If universities do not positively affect humanity through knowledge and education I am not sure we need to be writing anything. But form many in universities affective solidarity between people is breaking down through despair over the state of our institutions. I am not generalizing; this is my personal experience. In my case Covid induced downsizing meant that I had to apply for my own job in what felt like a sinister game of musical chairs. My workplace became one where relationships between people were threatened. To Mandalaki’s point, this also led to certain politics of possibility as well as a solidarity amongst those under threat. In the book we placed great faith and passion in the potential of intercorporeality, people, bringing their bodies (each unique) together. Carl, your example of people assembling in Italy to be together, to overcome together, to remember together is powerful. Joy in all the despair. Connection over isolation. I am also thinking here of the ways in which embodied organizing, on the street for example, is the form of resistance against corruption, inequality, violence. The disruption, tension, and lack of solidarity is necessary for ethics.
One of the things we wrote in the preface to the book was that, despite the potential for people to be selfish and how this is fuelled by a culture of individualism, “we retain hope that the fundamental act of caring for other people in the context of material and embodied relations can still animate human life” (p. xii). This hope doesn’t stem from a rational assessment of what people have done in the past. Hope is a feeling, a sensation, that rises up from the experience of love. It is relational and pre-reflective, as we argue. Knowing that love is possible, having felt it, experienced it, and having seen it in the faces of others, is enough to retain hope in a ragged and worn out humanity. In Gina Grandy’s review of the book, she hones in on generosity as one of the central themes we connected with corporeal ethics. Grandy writes that the “notion of generosity accounts for a more inclusive and equitable ethics which serves to challenge the politics of embodied difference and categorization. It is an ethics of care and compassion, absence of moral judgment.” Grandy also points out this form of ethics, or we might say “ethics-as-love” is, as far as Western cultural norms are concerned, conceived as feminine. Sadly, the nature of our culture also means that corporeal ethics is too often dismissed or relegated in favour of more masculine, utilitarian, moralistic and rational approaches. Ethical hope has grounds in rationality, however. It is more easily seen in acts of generosity that (irrationally!) expect nothing in return. We wrote in the book, ethics begins with “pre-reflective embodied interaction [. . .] where to be ethical is to embrace a desire to respond to the other with generosity before thinking about one’s own advantage and before imposing organizational schemes” (p. 26).
An ethics of love has the power to change the world, of course. From the women demonstrators offering a flower to the military police at an anti-Vietnam War protest at The Pentagon in Arlinton, Virginia on 21st October 1967, an act of inextricable love and dissent, to the recent use of sunflowers as a symbol of resistance in the Ukraine. Sunflowers, which were already the national flower of Ukraine, took on a more defiant meaning after a Ukrainian woman was filmed berating Russian soldiers, telling them to put sunflower seeds in their pockets so that flowers would grow after they died in battle. These examples offer femininity as a response to masculine war. Hope through feminine alternatives to hegemonic and toxic masculinities required in the pursuit of violence. At a more interpersonal level the need for hopeful dissent in ethics itself is worth re-stating. Striving for more generous inclusive encounters changes organizational contexts. We see it on the street, from the global #MeToo movement to protesting the anti-abortion sanctions, where women’s bodies assemble. As we write, bodies have taken to the street against the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a woman’s right to an abortion. The same forms of political assembly are being staged against soaring inflation in Argentina, rising prices in Delhi and climate inaction in Sydney.
Earlier today (16 August 2022) I was at a conference and listened to a panel discussion about “indigenising the University.” The convenor was Professor Emma Kowal, a cultural and medical anthropologist from Deakin University, and the panelists were Professor Reuben Bolt, Deputy vice-chancellor of First Nations leadership at Charles Darwin University, and Associate Professor Te Kawehau Hoskins (Ngāti Hau, Ngāpuhi) from the School of Māori and Indigenous Education (Te Puna Wānanga) and pro vice-chancellor (Māori) at The University of Auckland (Waipapa Taumata Rau). In my notes I wrote that they were explaining how indigensing the university means asking who we are and why we matter to each other and how we are responsible to each other. I had jotted down a quote: “think of yourself as a series of relationships.” It seems that what we were trying to get at in our book by reflecting through western knowledge systems was already well established in indigenous knowledge in this place where we live. Academic work is often judged by the acid test of its “contribution to knowledge.” Contribution to whose knowledge, we might also ask. I think we are both glad that the reviewers were so generous in their positive comments about our book, but reflecting on today, perhaps too generous. Our book has its limits!
Relationships between reviewers and authors extend relationally, and it is wonderful to read the ways in which each reviewer refracts the ideas of corporeal ethics. This prevents a violence often conducted between authors, reviewers, and editors. Different formations are possible. I feel so very fortunate that feminist thought guides ways of working productively, against a tide of hegemonic toxic university relationships and managers. Importantly, given such times this involves an ability to wonder what is possible, to see hope in the darkness, to be free from constraint, then the power of the pre-reflective basis for ethics, becomes grounded in attentiveness however fleeting. To know that someone has seen you, to be able to feel you, however fleeting. Given my roles in society this is through education and community, but most importantly in the proliferation of relationships that defy oppressive norms. Dealing with loss and grief encourages me to ask how attentiveness can enable us to live more liveable lives, not for ourselves, but for others. This is the basis for solidarity and for ethics.
