Introduction to Taking Care

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[This text was originally published as an introduction to the Taking Care section of Truth is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics.]



In my book Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, I wrote about a group of activists who attend something referred to only as “the meetings.” What exactly the meetings are is never made entirely clear. However, a few things are explained. The meetings take place in a dystopian near future in which the activists in attendance have good reason to fear that, if they were to engage in effective acts of protest or civil disobedience, they would be arrested, tortured and perhaps killed. Their weekly gatherings are therefore a kind of refuge from this harsh reality. A place to talk, reflect, attempt to re-invent the left and prepare for a time when activism will be effective once again. When that time comes, because of the ongoing discussions that make up the meetings, they will have considered all options and be ready. Many readers saw these meetings as a satire on the ineffectiveness of the current left, but this was definitely not my intention. (In fact, at the end of the book, I break the fourth wall to explicitly state that I do not want the book to be read in only this manner.) The idea for the meetings had far more to do with my own personal frustration, with looking at the desperate state of the world and not knowing what to do, where to start, how real long-term change might begin and continue.

I remember first reading The Critique of Cynical Reason by Peter Sloterdijk, how I was fascinated by the concept of ‘enlightened false consciousness’, that we can clearly see all the structural inequalities we take part in perpetrating but still do little or nothing to change them. Or, on a slightly different register, I often think of an anecdote I once heard about Charles Mingus, who regularly began his concerts by playing the Duke Ellington standard Can’t Get Started. When asked why, he would apparently reply: ‘because that’s my problem in life, I can’t get started.’ All of this is a way of speaking around the fact that I have enormous sympathy for, and curiosity about, anyone who can get started. Who finds ways to break the inertia of relative privilege and set off on the endless and impossible task of improving the world. I don’t feel qualified to judge what might be more, or less, effective strategies in such matters. I fear that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ but, at the same time, also embody a much greater fear of my own ineffective paralysis.

We might say that all of the texts and projects in the following chapter take place on the other side of the line from where I stand. I am on this side of the line, along with much of the world’s population, where I’m definitely not doing enough (if I’m doing anything at all), and they are on the other side, where they are doing at least something, if not quite a bit more than that. On the other side of the line many strategies are invented and become possible. From WochenKlauser’s “concrete improvements of existing social circumstances” to Minerva Cuevas’s offering of “unexpected products”; from Michal Murin’s rehabilitation of his old friend Milan Adamčiak, assisting him from homelessness towards a renewed artistic practice, to Christoph Schlingensief’s equal treatment of superstar and differently abled performers; from the vacuum cleaner’s act of starting his own mental health institution and detaining himself within it to the necessary design-based paradigm shift that is Permaculture.

Again and again, I feel I am reading about events a little bit further along the path than I am. (Or, since I don’t particularly believe in progress, a little bit further around the circle that will endlessly continue unless our complete extinction cuts its short.) This feeling reminds me of the well-known last lines from Rilke about gazing at the Archaic Torso of Apollo: “for here there is no place
/ that does not see you. You must change your life.” It might be a simplified reading, but I have always seen these lines to mean that experiencing great art leads towards the realization that the way one is living is not nearly enough. ‘You must change your life’ doesn’t suggest that there is only one right answer, only one possible change, a right way and a wrong way and you must choose correctly. It is more about opening possibilities, opening up a window and letting in some air, wondering anew what can and cannot become part of our more general reality.

Notions such as care, kindness and compassion might help us find a basis for where such personal shifts can take place. Here we are in a territory of fragile humanism, about as far away from the ‘no future’ punk rock nihilism that was one of my personal entry points into art and creativity. If I can get past my anxiety that all punks become boring hippies in the end, I can see that conceptual strategies that allow for more generous social relations, to put it rather bluntly, often feel good when you take part in them. In their book On Kindness, Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor suggest that Freudian or Hobbesian conceptions of people as inherently selfish or cruel turn our gaze away from something we already know: that behaving with kindness towards others occurs continuously, on all levels of society, and is in fact highly pleasurable. We are capable of selfishness but equally capable of generosity. The suggestion that we are not, or that one quality is more prominent in human nature than the other, is little more than propaganda for selfishness.

The strategies suggested in this chapter are varied, at times in conflict with each other, very much open to every kind of criticism. When you mix art and politics you open yourself up to a barrage of difficult questions from all sides: that the work is not political enough, that it takes the wrong political position, is naïve, is only a band aid on the problem it seeks to address. Because so many projects along these lines step outside of the safety of an autonomous artistic position, the grounds upon which they can be criticized become increasingly unstable. If I criticize a painting or a novel, the forms my criticism might take are fairly well established and, most of the time, reasonable limits are adhered to. But if I criticize an art project in which addicted, homeless sex workers and politicians are placed together on a boat in order to engage in dialogue, other levels of questioning rapidly, often confusingly, arise. How do I feel about the rights of sex workers? How do I understand sex work in relation to other kinds of work? How do I feel about activists (or artists) engaging with the state? How do I understand the social role of the state? Is it possible, in a short time, to set the parameters for a long-term solution to such a complex, ongoing problem? Where does charity end and empowerment begin? For me, such works have multiple agency: they assist the people more directly involved in the situation while at the same time opening a space in the imagination, suggesting that every social problem has multiple imaginative solutions if only we change our habits of thought.

Of course, changing our habits of thought is not nearly enough. Capitalism is a way of thinking, but is also a system that enriches the lives of few at the expense of the lives of many. To state the obvious: where there is suffering, most likely there is also economic profit. I suggested earlier that ‘kindness towards others occurs continuously, on all levels of society.’ I believe this to be true on an interpersonal level, but it does little to ameliorate the fact that structural inequality will put profit before kindness each and every time. If we start with the metaphor that I am on one side of a line, and on the other side are those who have taken at least the first step towards making small or large improvements; we might also suggest that along with me, on this side of the line, are many who take a considerably more vicious self-interest in maintaining the current status quo, who are working towards building up this metaphorical line into a totalitarian-capitalist prison from which they hope we will never escape. (And who likely wouldn’t put the matter in these specific terms.) Still, obsessing over these cruelties will get us nowhere. We are clearly not going to solve all the problems of the world in one fell swoop. Perhaps the only way is to start is as close to ourselves as possible, one small step after another, working towards situations in which possibilities might increase over time, looking around and feeling where our natural desire to care might be put to best use.

Criticality has become such an unquestioned staple of theory and art. However, it seems to me, a caring attitude does not require us to call upon our most critical selves. A critical outlook is often a defensive position, a desire to rip off the veil of surface appearance and get to the real stuff underneath. Yet not all truths are hidden. At times, surface appearances might be speaking to us so clearly and directly that, obsessed with what else might be there, we do not hear them. An art project that helps a friend in need, a friend who has fallen on hard times might, in offering another alternative, reveal some of the hardness present in this constant need for greater critical insight. To see someone in need, to try to help them, does not require the sophisticated critical apparatus that is so often celebrated as the only basis for complex thought. It only requires a belief that change is possible, the very belief that certain strains of critical thinking so often undermine.

Coming full circle, returning to Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, I can see now that part of the problem, part of the shortcomings within my own thinking, can be found in the title, since the characters in Revenge Fantasies are not truly dispossessed. They are dispossessed in the same way I feel myself to be, as a reasonably privileged, straight white male living in a wealthy country (Canada) currently being run by a government I completely disagree with. I have a certain amount of power that I could direct towards social change but cannot feel exactly what this power is or how I might use it, what other people I might form coalitions with and what specific issues we could organize around. I feel myself to be dispossessed but I don’t see how to bring myself into solidarity with those even more dispossessed than me. If I were to do so, it seems I would be setting off on an unknown path: most likely some (or many) of the people around me would change, as might my worldview. What are the things closest to me to which I can most usefully contribute? How does my misguided sense of dispossession, of alienation, prevent me from doing so? How does it short-circuit my compassion?

By each dealing with one small, yet specific, situation (and in the process bringing themselves closer to it), the projects and desires in this chapter remind us that focusing on immediate concerns, caring about someone or something within reach, can be a way of grounding ourselves. Reality is never just one thing. Luc Boltanski writes: “Reality suffers from a species of inherent fragility, such that the reality of reality must incessantly be reinforced in order to endure.” So many of the images and words that surround us continuously enforce and suggest the idea that, as Thatcher famously pronounced, ‘there is no alternative.’ There is certainly no heaven on earth we will all someday achieve. But there are as many alternatives as we are able to imagine, little pinpricks of hope, shifting moments for potential change. All we need to do is step over the line, take the first step. I wonder if some day I might.



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Jacob Wren Links

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PME-ART Links
Essays and Stories here on A Radical Cut


A few things I wrote:
On Painting in Canadian Art
The Infiltrator in Maisonneuve
Big Brother Likes This in Maisonneuve
Resistance As Paradox and Two Other Texts in VerySmallKitchen
Be But Could If Is Not What for YYZ
Nature doesn’t love me yet at The Wild Bush Residency 
The Year 2017: A Collective Chronicle of Thoughts and Observations
SpiderWebShow Thought Residency
The First Chapter in SDUK (The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge)
In Spite of Defeatism in SDUK (The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge)
Things That Insist (in three parts) in dance+words
from Desire Without Expectation in atmospheric quarterly
from Desire Without (1-4) in the International Times

Reviews of I wrote of others:
Review of Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars in mRb
Review of Little Blue Encyclopedia (For Vivian) in mRb
Review of Apple S in mRb

Interviews:
Malcolm Sutton at the Bookhug Blog
Catherine Lacey at HTML Giant with ten sentences and a short interview
Kathryn Mockler at The Rusty Toque
Will McCarry in NANO Fiction
In Different Situations Different Behaviour Will Produce Different Results: Yaniya Lee in Conversation with Chris Kraus and Jacob Wren
Satu Herrala at ESITYS
Puneet Dutt Bookhug Interview Part 1
Puneet Dutt Bookhug Interview Part 2
Writer's Block at All Lit Up
Tobias Carroll at Vol.1 Brooklyn
Arielle Bernstein in The Sunday Rumpus
Shannon Tien in Sadmag
Rob Mclennan in Ploughshares
Saelan Twerdy at Canadian Art
Heather Jones in Contemporary Art Stavanger
PuShy Questions with Jacob Wren

Interviews with others:
True Lovers are as Rare as True Rebels: An Interview with Masha Tupitsyn

Audio interviews:
Alissa Firth-Eagland and Danica Evering on The Secret Ingredient
Mark Clintberg interviews Jeanne Randolph and Jacob Wren at Luma Quarterly

Audio interviews with others:
Dayna Danger on the Momus Podcast

Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim
Ian Colford in The Seaboard Review
Jean Marc Ah-Sen in Quill & Quire
Alison Manley in The Miramichi Reader
Ariane Fournier in Maisonneuve
Samuel Wise in the Montreal Guardian
H Felix Chau Bradley in the Montreal Review of Books
Greta Rainbow in The Walrus
Carl Wilson in 'Crritic!'
Khashayar Mohammadi Called to Fiction
Tom Sandborn in Rabble
Caroline Noël in Literary Review of Canada
Lisa de Nikolits in A Turn of Phrase
Writer’s Block at All Lit Up
Possible Politics: A recommended reading list at 49th Shelf
Interview with Open Book
Sruti Islam in Cult Mtl
Read an Excerpt at: Send My Love To Anyone
Order: Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

Authenticity is a Feeling
Stranger than Fiction: In Conversation with Jacob Wren
Lucy Bellwood in The Seattle Review of Books
Klara du Plessis in the Montreal Review of Books
Jade Colbert at The Globe and Mail
Feature Friday at Bookhug
Sylvain Lavoie in Canadian Theatre Review
rob mclennan at rob mclennan's blog
Order: Authenticity is a Feeling

Rich and Poor
Jeff Miller in the Montreal Review of Books
Jacqueline Valencia at The Rusty Toque
Jade Colbert at The Globe and Mail
Kelly Duval Interview at Bookhug
Melita Kuburas in The Toronto Star
Ian McGillis in the Montreal Gazette
Mark Sampson at Quill and Quire
J. C. Sutcliffe in The Times Literary Supplement
Karina Irvine in Canadian Art
Richard Derus at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud
Alex Good in Canadian Notes & Queries
Anne K. Yoder: A Year in Reading
Catherine Vendryes in Hot Pepper Latte
Ian McGillis, Madeleine Thien heads class of 2016
One of The Globe and Mail's best 100 books of 2016
Rich and Poor Audiobook
Order: Rich and Poor

Rich and Poor - The Single
Mark Medley in The Globe and Mail
Suzanne Alyssa Andrew in Now Magazine 
A Literary Listen to Chaos & Star Records at domesdaynotebook
Order: Rich and Poor - The Single

If our wealth is criminal then let’s live with the criminal joy of pirates
Rob Mclennan at Rob Mclennan's Blog
Richard Derus at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud
Bookhug presents: a special limited edition of two stories and an essay
Order: If our wealth is criminal then let’s live with the criminal joy of pirates

Polyamorous Love Song
Shannon Tien at Cult Mtl 
Liz Worth at Quill and Quire
Jade Colbert at The Globe and Mail 
Featured book in Maisonneuve
Lesley Trites for the Montreal Review of Books Blog
Letters we wrote to friends after reading "Polyamorous Love Song"
One of The Globe and Mail's best 100 books of 2014
Polyamorøs kjærlighetssang (Translated into Norwegian by Sindre Andersen)
Order: Polyamorous Love Song

Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed:
Eugene Lim at eugenelim.com
L. J. Moore at Porchlight
Plus A bizarre mention on the Business News Network blog
And an excerpt 

Families Are Formed Through Copulation:
Aaron Tucker at Lorem Ipsum Dlor Sit
Blake Butler at HTML Giant
Jacquelyn Davis at Bookslut
J. A. Tyler at Elimae
Andrea Nene in Broken Pencil
Kathryn Mockler on 7 Tragicomic Books That I Love
And an excerpt

Reviews and articles in French:
Paul Kawczak in Spirale
Paul Kawczak Interview in Spirale
Alban Lefranc / La paranoïa, sa nécessité, ses puissances
Daniel Letendre at Liberté
Nayla Naoufal in Le Devoir
Alec Serra-Wagneur / Discours fragmenté d’un esprit inquiet et paranoïaque
Yvon Paré in Quebec literature
Audrey-Anne Blais in La Presse
Christian Desmeules in Le Devoir

Other Performance Work
Stephanie Bunbury in The Age on An Anthology of Optimism
Ekkehard Knörer in Der Taz on Der Tod in Rom
L’idealismo infranto di Jacob Wren by Manuela Pacella in Italian Fash Art

Videos:
TPAM in Yokohama 2012: Jacob Wren + Tori Kudo/Maher Shalal Hash Baz
DO TANK Intervention: Jacob Wren / Relay-Interview
Paul Kawczak Interview at Centre Bang in Chicoutimi
Jo Braus for Do Tank/Spielart
All Our Bad Ideas with Jordan Tannahill and Jacob Wren
Public Recordings, New Dramatics: an editorial meeting
Polyamorous Love Song Launch Reading
Polyamorous Love Song Interview
Rich and Poor Launch Reading
Rich and Poor Interview
Authenticity is a Feeling Launch Reading
Jacob Wren Introduces Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim
Claudia La Rocco and Jacob Wren at Tanz im August
Interview about Un sentiment d'authenticité.
A Conversation: Margaret Dragu & Jacob Wren
Virtual Author Coffee Chat with Jacob Wren and Julia Lee Barclay-Morton
Jacob Wren em discurso direto sobre a importância da autenticidade na performance



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Chicago Center for Literature and Photography

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A review of Revenge Fantasies from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography.



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A short interview I did with Catherine Lacey for HTMLGIANT

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Catherine Lacey: Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed has this backdrop of a disenfranchised political movement, which was so dead-on. Was this based working as an activist of some sort? If not, what spurred the decision to have a book set in this way?

Jacob Wren: I’ve had a little bit of experience with activism and in the anarchist community, mainly when I was much younger, but that wasn’t exactly what made me write about these things (though it most likely affected my take on it.) In some ways Revenge Fantasies, and my previous book Families Are Formed Through Copulation, are both responses to the shock of the Bush years, to my feeling that the world was sliding into some new kind of fascism (perhaps I was over-reacting but I’m still not sure, time will tell) and there seemed to be so little one could do. I kept reading the papers, wondering what was possible, how to fight against everything that was happening. I continue to feel so pathetically overwhelmed by the injustices that rule the world: the ever-growing chasm between rich and poor, the ways in which our daily consumer choices contribute to the evisceration of the natural world (of which we are in fact only a small part), more prisons and more profitable prisons, the pure evil that is Monsanto, wars being fought for corporate gain… all right, when I write such lists I basically feel like a fucking dreadful Marxist bore. Everyone knows and then what can you do? Well, the obvious solution is to get together with large numbers of other people and fight. But how to find the common purpose and solidarity, and how exactly to fight, is by no means easy or clear.

And then I started thinking about fidelity. The fight will be long, difficult and often painfully discouraging. It requires something like an infinite patience and overwhelming fidelity or conviction. Well, fidelity has never been my strong suit. In that respect I’m of my generation: a bit ADD. And I started comparing different kinds of fidelity: fidelity to a political cause versus fidelity within a romantic relationship. (I’ve never been called upon to test my fidelity to a political cause but I have experienced questions of fidelity in and around romance.) Somehow, along this path, I ended up with a love triangle, some strange kind of juxtaposition between a more political question (fidelity to a cause) and a classic soap-opera device (broken fidelity to a lover). What happens to the fidelity of the original relationship in a love triangle, how does it evolve, disintegrate, become more paradoxical? And how is this analogous, or completely different, from fidelity to a political cause? I wanted to write about these questions in ways I had never seen them written about before – full of doubt, confusion, curiosity, precision, cynicism and joy.


Catherine Lacey: While writing it, did the direction the book ended up going surprise you at all?

Jacob Wren: Yes, as I wrote, most of the time I never really knew where it was going (and even now that it’s done I’m still not quite sure I know what it is.) There were so many times when I was completely stuck. Most often the way it came unstuck was I would spontaneously write something so terrible and unexpected I couldn’t help but follow it a bit and see where it led. (I now think a lot of this ‘being stuck’ was simply being hampered by various unexamined notions of good writing and good taste.) Sometimes I felt the trick – like some sort of fucked up alchemist – was to magically transmute the bad taste into good taste, and that this alchemy had something to do with what it means to write about politics today, though I’m still not sure exactly what. I love it when I’m writing and something completely unexpected comes out. There are also a lot of things in the book I ripped off, but hopefully ripped off in such a perverse way they have also become something new.


Catherine Lacey: What’s next for you? I know you’re in Lisbon (and I’m jealous); what’s that all about? Are you working on something set there?

Jacob Wren: Over the past year I have had writing residencies in Denmark at Hald Hovedgaard, in Belgium at Passa Porta and currently here in Portugal hosted by the festival Alkantara. I have been trying to finish a new novel called Polyamorous Love Song. I am very excited about it, I think it is some of the best writing I’ve ever done, and yet, as I’ve been working on it steadily for the past four years, I was starting to worry I might never manage to finish it. I’m just starting to realize that my life is considerably busier than it’s ever been before and I needed to find a way to carve out some additional time to write. These writing residencies were my first attempt at a solution and I honestly can’t believe how helpful it’s been. The new book doesn’t have anything directly to do with Denmark, Belgium or Portugal, and yet, undeniably, all of these places, and the people I’ve met while there, have now influenced it. If you’re curious, here is my first attempt at a description:

Polyamorous Love Song is a novel concerning the relationship between artists and the world. Shot through with unexpected moments of sex and violence, it is written within the strict logic of an absolute dream, a dream that is both the same and opposite to the world in which we live. It is a novel of many through-lines. For example: 1) A group of people who wear furry mascot costumes at all times fighting a revolutionary war for their right to wear furry mascot costumes at all times. 2) A movement known as the ‘New Filmmaking’ in which, instead of shooting and editing a film, one simply does all of the things that would have been in the film, but in real life. This movement has many adherents. 3) A group of ‘New Filmmakers’ who devise increasingly strange sexual scenarios with complete strangers. They invent a drug that allows them to intuit the cell phone number of anyone they see, allowing phone calls to be the first stage of their spontaneous, yet somehow scripted, seductions. 4) A secret society that concocts a virus that only infects those on the political right. They stage large-scale orgies, creating unexpected intimacies and connections between individuals who are otherwise savagely opposed to each other. 5) A radical leftist who catches this virus, forcing her to question the depth of her considerable leftist credentials. 6) A German barber in New York who, out of scorn for the stupidity of his American clients, gives them avant-garde haircuts, unintentionally achieving acclaim among the bohemian set. And yet such stories are only the beginning.



[The accompanying ten sentences I wrote can be found here.]



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I settled my bill rather than become the first against the wall.

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A very strange mention of my book on the Business News Network Blog:


True story. I dropped the daughter off at dance class last night and, at my wife’s suggestion, set out for a “nice little wine bar just north of the school” she had enjoyed once with a famous classical pianist friend some years ago (that’s right, I said pianist). I knew I had the right place when the fedora-wearing guy next to me dropped a well-thumbed copy of Revolutionary Social Change in Colombia on the bar. Latin-inspired jazz played quietly and the barmaid told my drinking companion about a terrific novel she was reading about two people who were falling in love as they attended meetings to discuss the death of the “left.” I would have asked her the title but would have been revealed as an eavesdropper. Another man entered, ordered a beer and sat down in a care-worn chair, back to the wall, flipped open the New Yorker and appeared to focus on an article, not the cartoons. A woman with a beret walked in and was greeted by one and all. She ordered a glass of red wine. The air was bristling with intent. Thankfully I had changed out of my suit earlier and into a plaid flannel shirt. I recalled that this was Andy Bell’s neighbourhood, but the thought gave me no comfort at all. I was about to order another when I noticed the older gentleman on my left was reading something called Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed. I settled my bill rather than become the first against the wall. “Unrest Spreading” hollers the Wall Street Journal this morning. You got that right. Cairo today, Cabbagetown tomorrow. You heard it here first.

- Martin Cej



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Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed

A novel by Jacob Wren



Sept 27, 2010
Montreal Book Launch
(Launched alongside Fieldnotes, a Forensic by Kate Eichhorn, Tracelanguage by Mark Goldstein, The Little Seamstress by Phil Hall, Other Poems by Jay MillAr and O Resplandor by Erín Moure. Hosted by Angela Carr.)
Casa Del Popolo, 7:30 - 9:30


Oct 4, 2010
Toronto Book Launch, Relay-Interview & Dance Party
(Relay-Interview featuring Jonathan Adjemian, Marcus Boon, Eric Chenaux, Sheila Heti, Amy C Lam and Jacob Wren. Dance party DJ'd by Marcus Boon.)
This Is Not A Reading Series, The Gladstone, 9:30




"Jacob Wren’s work has always explored the dissonance between psychodynamics – which reveals the ambiguities and possibilities of human behavior – and the deadening psychic economy of capital. In Revenge Fantasies, he demonstrates how deeply literary these concerns are. Whether depicting the intricate mood-shifts of a triangulated romance, or chronicling the inchoate optimism of marathon group meetings designed to identify ‘what went wrong’ with the left, or recasting the recent political past as dystopian sci-fi, the novel is fascinating, lurid and highly accomplished, evoking the best of Colette, Robert Musil and Julio Cortazar."

– Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia and Torpor



Set in a dystopian near-future, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed is a novel – a kind of post-capitalist soap opera – about a group of people who regularly attend ‘the meetings.’ At the meetings they have agreed to talk, and only talk, about how to re-ignite the left, for fear if they were to do more, if they were to actually engage in real acts of resistance or activism, they would be arrested, imprisoned or worse. Revenge Fantasies is a book about community. It is also a book about fear.

Characters leave the meetings and we follow them out into their lives. The characters we see most frequently are the Doctor, the Writer and the Third Wheel. As the book progresses we see these characters, and others, disengage and re-engage with questions the meetings have brought into their lives. The Doctor ends up running a reality television show about political activism. The Third Wheel ends up in an unnamed Latin American country, trying to make things better but possibly making them worse. The Writer ends up in jail for writing a book that suggests it is politically emancipatory for teachers to sleep with their students. And throughout all of this the meetings continue: aimless, thoughtful, disturbing, trying to keep a feeling of hope and potential alive in what are starting to look like increasingly dark times.

Revenge Fantasies asks us to think about why so many of us today, even those with a genuine interest in political questions, feel so deeply powerless to change and affect the world that surrounds us, suggesting that, even within such feelings of relative powerlessness there can still be energizing surges of emancipation and action.


Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed will be published in English by Pedlar Press and in French by Le Quartanier.

An excerpt can be read here.



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Excerpt from Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed

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It is remarkable – in spite of feminism and the sexual revolution, in spite of the hyper-sexualized advertising culture in which we live and the relative openness with which our intimate personal lives can be talked about in certain contexts – that non-monogamy remains such a delicate and taboo subject, and here I am thinking of normal, polite society, even (or especially) its more liberal, open-minded pockets.

A taboo is something we want but cannot have. The reasons we cannot have it can tend towards the vague, and therefore the taboo is necessary to ensure that the thing we want remains forbidden. This is not to say there are no reasons or logic within any given taboo. For example, reasons behind the taboo on non-monogamy might include: the encouragement and development of jealousy, the necessity of maintaining stable family units in order to raise stable children, the spread of certain diseases, etc. However, these reasons do not necessarily feel convincing when placed next to the overwhelming force of our desire for the forbidden thing.


She was irritated by the book’s initial reception, as if people hadn’t actually bothered to read it, or read it so superficially as to make their insights negligible. But as time passed, considering the matter further, she realized her first impression was incorrect, too condescending. People had understood what she was getting at, often in a very deep and intuitive manner. They simply didn’t want to deal with it, instead focusing on aspects of the book they could most easily handle.

And then the horrible, ridiculous thing happened. There was a knock at the door, late at night, like in some mediocre crime film not worth renting. When she opened it, five police officers informed her that she was under arrest and if she resisted they had been authorized to subdue her using ‘undue force.’ She always remembered that phrase, undue force, how it implied a threat completely disconnected from the language being used. She did not resist. She did not even ask why she was being arrested. People were being arrested all the time, she knew this better than anyone. Once in the interrogation room they informed her she was charged with spreading seditious, anti-social ideas. That she would be given a fair trial, but first a panel of government experts (experts in contemporary sociology and theology, they felt it necessary to add) would be required to examine her book at length. Until the time they had completed their analysis of her text, and prepared a case against it, she would remain incarcerated. She feared they would torture her but they did not. For their purposes, at this juncture, it seemed intimidation sufficed. She was not allowed a phone call or for that matter any contact with the outside world. Her possessions were taken from her, she was given a loose-fitting one-piece jumpsuit, and locked in a small room for the night.


In one sense, non-monogamy seems to comply too well, fit too neatly, with the requirements of late capitalism. The imagery suggested by the term evokes a free market in which sexual partners come and go like so many obsolete commodities. It can be argued that the open possibility of many partners creates a competitive economy, a marketplace within which the intimacy of direct physical contact is downgraded, replaced with a series of encounters that, because they are numerous, are at the same time implicitly less important, more superficial. However, if we take friendship as a model, it is unlikely we think any one of our friends is less a friend to us simply because we have many. Sexual intimacy certainly complicates friendship. But it also generates another quality of connection, another strata where all kinds of new energies and communications have the potential to emerge.


She found it difficult to gauge the passing of time. She would sleep and think and cry and stare at the walls, in seemingly endless rounds of exhaustion and confusion. Her thoughts kept returning to the idea she found most disturbing, that this was what she had wanted, for her book to have an effect, cause a stir, bring some attention towards her. Such circular, obsessive thinking would always return to the same tepid cliché: be careful what you wish for. Her critical resources had shut down and she was unable to arrive at anything more complex.

Most of the time they left her alone. Meals came sporadically, or perhaps it only seemed that way. There were days when she began to suspect they had forgotten about her altogether. Then she would find herself being led back to the interrogation room where they would ask more questions, often the exact questions they had asked before, where they would read endless passages of her book to her, again and again demanding she clarify what she meant. “It doesn’t require clarification,” she would repeat. “It means exactly what it says.” So they would read the passage again, to the point where it came as a relief when she was finally returned to her small dark cell.


Capitalism thrives on a high degree of disconnection. In contrast, at its best, sexual intimacy is one of the most intense fields of connection two people are capable of experiencing. In this sense it might seem there are aspects to sexual connection that are progressive or subversive. Compare the value of heartfelt sexual connection with the overwhelming barrage of slick sexual imagery we are subjected to on a daily basis. Photographed and televised sexual imagery creates a continuous stream of low-level desires, desires that the corporations who produce such imagery have absolutely no intention of satisfying. They are designed to generate within us an infinite, gnawing dissatisfaction. In contrast, certain kinds of sexual intimacy have the potential to be satisfying, to connect us to each other in the long term, to generate ongoing solidarity. But I fear I am painting too rosy a picture of what is possible. Intimacy generates many powerful, conflicting emotions. With love comes the potential for jealousy. For every desire to assist and nurture there is a contrasting desire to possess or entrap. Opening a dialogue about how we might build on the emancipatory potential inherent in sexual intimacy might also generate insights as to how we might better manage the emotionally painful aspects that arrive alongside it.


It might have been weeks before anyone noticed, with any certainty, that she had gone missing, her life having become in many ways so isolated by that point. But in fact a good friend, on his way to meet her, happened to be just a few feet away from her building as she was being escorted out the front doors and into an unmarked car. He had heard enough stories by that point to realize what he was witnessing, and, fearful if he tried to interfere he would be arrested as well, he instead hurried home, picked up the phone and sounded the alarm as loudly as possible. Within a certain liberal circle she soon became a kind of rallying cry, a trenchant symbol for everything that was completely fucked about the current situation. It didn’t hurt that she was beautiful, that there were endless photographs of her already in circulation, that her books were still in bookstores and her publisher could seize upon the opportunity to get her latest book the attention they now felt it had always deserved, and finally that, unlike the ethnic minorities who were frequently subjected to such treatment, she was white, middle class and had spent many years in the public eye. Since the authorities officially declined to comment, journalists were free to speculate as to where she might be and why. The fact that the story was about sex certainly didn’t hurt.

Most of her time continued to be spent alone in that small, dark room, attempting, against all odds, to put her idle thoughts to some constructive use. However, during the now infrequent interrogation sessions, she felt something peculiar happening, some slight change in her interrogators’ attitude. She was sure she was only imagining it, but then again, how could she be sure of anything. While before they had treated her like some bit of garbage scraped up off the sidewalk, someone they could eliminate just as easily as release, now gradually they seemed almost to know who she was. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but something in the way they phrased certain questions made her feel she represented something for them, she had no idea what, a certain status within their limited world view. As she lay on her back in that small dark room staring at the ceiling, trying to mentally examine the situation with as much objectivity as possible, admittedly not so much, she came to the conclusion that something was starting to shift.


In the post-Fordist economy each worker is required to overidentify with their job. Work is no longer something you can leave at the office but rather something that can reach you at all times: through e-mail, your cellphone, company weekends and getaways. Even when you are not working it is expected that you will be thinking of work, or at the very least thinking of yourself as someone who works for a particular company in a particular job. The skills you bring to your job are meant to be varied and complex. When asked ‘what do you do?,’ your first answer will probably concern your job or at the very least something related to some aspect of your work. This is one of the most insidious ways capitalism weaves itself into our lives and into our fundamental sense of who we are.

Twelve years ago I began teaching. Since the tenure system has been more or less dismantled, like most of my colleagues around the same age I was hired on a contract-to-contract basis. I received no benefits and was expected to happily take on whatever extra work was handed to me. The students were drawn to my classes because of my celebrity and, from year to year, I generated a considerable amount of revenue for the university. It is one of the cardinal rules of teaching that the one thing you must never do is sleep with your students. Over the years directly preceding the writing of this book, I had sexual relations with at least four of my students. I intend to write about these experiences in the chapter that follows. I am choosing to do so, however ill advised, for a number of reasons. I feel my experiences – or, if you prefer, my lack of professional ethics – are far more common than anyone suspects or publicly acknowledges. When an occurrence is both widespread and covert I believe there are many good arguments for bringing it into the light and subjecting it to further examination. The main rationale behind the taboo on sexual relations between teachers and students is that it is an abuse of power on the part of the teachers. This rationale underplays the incredibly complex and intricate power dynamic, the degree to which students are able to wield power over their instructors, and the degree to which pedagogy is a process of exchange, performance and even seduction.


Slowly she got used to her life of incarceration, at times even finding it comforting. She began to see her predicament as a kind of modest vindication. While so much writing and theory passed through the world unnoticed, her book caused a stir, alerted the attention of the authorities, had an effect upon the larger system. Her work had been threatening, and this made it important. Then again, maybe prolonged solitude had only made her smug.

It was around this time she was assigned a new interrogator and the interrogation sessions became more frequent. Many things were unusual about her new interlocutor, most significant among them was the fact that this was the first woman she had had any prolonged contact with since her original arrest. The fact that it was now another woman asking the questions, another woman trying to grind her down, was unsettling, setting off biases within her previously invisible: that women didn’t do such things, that institutional cruelty was the sole domain of men. This new interrogator was also the cleverest, most educated, sympathetic person she had met since arriving at the detention facility. Against her better judgment she found herself looking forward to the interrogation sessions, those lively bursts of tension-riddled conversation about her book and its implications. She had to remind herself, constantly, that this new woman was also trying to break her. That this new kindness and intelligence represented only a shift in strategy, not a shift in their intentions.

Over the course of many sessions her new interrogator took her through the book, chapter by chapter, page by page, paragraph by paragraph, sometimes line by line. They were halfway through chapter two, the chapter in which she discussed sleeping with her students.


The sublimated erotic energy inherent within a classroom situation shifts into another register when played out outside the classroom. That academic learning can take place in the bedroom, and by moving to the bedroom be acutely intensified, is a fact that should be readily apparent to anyone who has tried it, or considered the matter at any length. Sexual intimacy generates an openness to learning that is, at times, unparalleled.

That said, I would be seriously misrepresenting the situation if I were to imply that the original reason I began sleeping with my students was to further their education. At the beginning, the situation was more pedestrian. During the early years of my teaching career the workload was all consuming. Between classes, lecture requests, requests for articles and the additional administrative workload there was little time for socializing outside of the academy. Since I was single and had been aggressively non-monogamous for many years, I was constantly at a loss for strategies to deal with the overwhelming loneliness my new academic life imposed. I was by far the youngest adjunct professor on staff, and the people I came into contact with closest to my own age were, generally speaking, students.


The interrogator stopped reading and looked up. She was standing with her back to the door. On the other side of the door were two armed guards, one on each side, the same guards who brought our author to this brightly-lit room and who would eventually take her back to her cell when the session was done. The interrogator continued to read.


When I first noticed a certain mutual attraction between myself and one of my students, I quickly dismissed it. But over the course of any given year such attractions continued to smoulder, and my earlier dismissal slowly transformed into the gnawing question: why not? Of course there were many reasons not to. Professionally it was highly stigmatized and, if I were to be caught, would put my job in considerable jeopardy. It also had the potential to reverse the power imbalance with any given student, creating a situation in which, if things did not go to their liking, they could threaten me with sexual harassment. In retrospect, I can see that the motivation for the first couple of affairs had more to do with the incredible discomfort I felt surrounding my new pedagogical position, my reluctance to embrace any sense of authority. In a sense, it was a prolonged attempt at self-sabotage. But the sabotage failed. Instead I discovered a continuous stream of new possibilities.


The interrogator looked up once again. “I read this aloud and I can almost understand why you’re here,” she said. “You encourage something quite explicitly, something you might be able to engage in within a certain ethical framework but others most certainly could not.”

“You can almost understand why I’m here…”

“If I really try: almost.”

“So if you were in charge, if it were your decision, I wouldn’t be here.”

“I don’t see any point in locking up writers.”

“But…I don’t understand…you do see the point of locking up those who encourage, quite explicitly, unethical behaviour.”

“As I said: almost.”

They often had such exchanges: repetitive, harsh, playful. A style of aggressive banter which, at times, verged on tenderness.

“I’ve never thought of asking this before…”

“What’s that?”

“What do you want from me?”

“It’s simple. You could probably guess.”

“If I could guess I wouldn’t be asking.”

“The only reason you can’t guess is because it’s too obvious.”

“If you tell me then I won’t have to guess.”

“What fun would that be?”

“I haven’t had any fun in a very long time.”

A tense pause. The writer wondered for a moment if she had crossed a line, since often in their banter it seemed to be an unspoken rule that they would both pretend everything was fine. For things to be fine no reference could be made to the more negative aspects of her incarceration.

“That makes me sad. I thought we had fun every time you came up here: reading, thinking, talking.”

“You’re having fun?”

“Of course. I thought we both were.”

“All right.”

“You want to know what we want? I can tell you quite simply: we want you to admit that you were wrong and that we’re essentially right.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Probably because in actual fact you’re right and we’re wrong.”

“I don’t understand…what do you want me to do…sign a statement?”

As she said this, our writer looked up, so exhausted and drained by the prospect of some new process that might or might not lead to her release (was she only being toyed with?), that her interrogator almost started to pity her. But the interrogator had a job to do. And she knew that now was the moment to do it properly.

“Let me put it this way: if by some miracle we were to eventually release you, there are going to be a lot of people – friends, colleagues, reporters – wanting to know what happened. And together we can come up with a story. That you wrote some things you hadn’t put enough thought into. Some things that if you were to write your book again you would choose to leave out, or write differently. We noticed these things and investigated. However, after a thorough investigation, together we all decided that, while it would have been better if you hadn’t written such things, or had written about them in a more circumspect manner, since some concepts weren’t as deeply considered as you had first assumed, and others were downright misguided, in the end there was no harm done and in future both sides have agreed to be more careful. We will craft this story delicately, since it is the exact story you will repeat, with slight variations, every time you are asked, for as long as you continue to be asked. From the way you tell it, and from the way it is repeated by others, in the long run everyone will come to understand that in some sense you were wrong and the government was right. And that, while certainly everything isn’t perfect, some things are basically as they should be in the world.”

“To get out of here I tell a story? Concoct and repeat a story?”

“Of course it has to be good.”

The interrogator smiled. Calmly she continued to read.


The intimacy I felt with these students led to some of the most thorough theoretical investigations I have ever had the privilege of experiencing. The fact that such discussions were interspersed with kissing, with touching, stroking and licking, with wetness and stickiness, only leant intensity and resonance to the complexity of the matters under discussion. I was teaching and giving and taking pleasure both in the ideas being expressed and in the intensity of physical contact I was able to generate with these young men.

The almost complete, but temporary, loss of self that was involved – a loss of self present in all intense sexual encounters – doubled as an open door through which one could enter new areas of thought, as if one had left one’s old self behind, as if within this new, amorphous territory, in which one was no longer one’s previous self but had not yet become anything else, infinite modes of discovery became possible. The intimacy of our nakedness made us feel, or at least gave the illusion, that we were so much more directly engaged, both in dialogue with the larger world of ideas and with each other. This directness: of being intertwined, exhausted and sated, of drifting in and out of sleep and having the strains of our discussions, of our nightly lessons, freely intermixed with half-remembered dreams…


The interrogator stopped reading and looked up. “You must be getting pretty lonely,” she said.
The author nodded, almost in spite of herself.

“It’s strange, for someone who’s experimented as much as you have…you only ever write about fucking men. You never talk about sleeping with women.”

The author looked up, her hair loosely falling into her eyes. For a split second she thought that maybe this other woman, this woman who had been tormenting her all these draining, exhausting months, was about to make a pass at her. If this was the case one thing was certain, her interrogator didn’t lack gall.

“It’s true,” the author replied, “for some reason I prefer men.”

“You’ve probably guessed this about me already,” her interrogator said slyly, “but I definitely prefer women.”

“No, I hadn’t guessed that at all.”

“Really?” Her interrogator smiled. ”I thought you were more observant than that.”

“Must have had my mind on other things.”

The interrogator, without missing a beat, looked down at the book and continued to read.


…forms the basis for a different kind of learning, learning that enters not only through the mind but also through the skin and sweat and pores. In this way ideas are divested of their previously cold abstraction and instead gain heat, momentum and complicity. This is the deep learning, and there is no conduit for it other than one’s intimate and ongoing personal experience.

It might be said that the fact that such behaviour is forbidden adds to the intensity and complicity of such learning. Anything illicit brings with it a certain charge, a certain urgency and electricity. But, in and of itself, breaking the rules is never satisfying. Breaking a rule is only ever a test, to see what possibilities are created if one chooses to take the world not as it is but instead as it could be. What matters is not the charge of breaking any given taboo but the charge of generating new openings. Because to sleep with one’s students is nothing if not a commonplace practice, hidden, unspoken, the dirty little secret of professional academia. It is only in publicizing my activities without shame or embarrassment, in highlighting the positive aspects of such commonplace practices, that a real opening might occur…


The interrogator once again paused. “Perhaps there’s yet another taboo we could break,” she said.

“Perhaps,” the author replied. She had no idea. Could this turn of events offer some improvement? Or would it only suck her down into further constrictions of power, emotional mind games, desperation? Was fucking her just another way for her interrogator to fuck her over, manipulate, bend her to their will? Or might it represent some genuine opening, a subtle change in the power dynamic?



[The above is an excerpt from my currently out of print book Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed published by Pedlar Press in 2010. As well, some other Jacob Wren Links.]


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