Why did I get this book?
I have liked Ahmed’s other books and this seemed very timely and important.
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes and a quite bit more, in the sense that it’s not just a reading of institutional practices from their surface but an exploration of actual complaint processes and related experiences based on Ahmed’s engagement with many people who contacted her after she resigned from Goldsmiths in 2016. It’s vaguely repetitive by the late chapters, but that’s partly a product of the overflowing density of the testimonies shared by Ahmed and her interest in the full range of institutionality and its outcomes.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
It’s the most unlikely thing I can imagine, but I’d love to sit down with administrators who are the recipients of complaints and read this book together with them in an open-minded and exploratory discussion, nothing off-limits.
At a minimum, any administrative leader (or faculty member) who sincerely wants to think about why trust is hard to come by in contemporary academic institutions needs to read the book and not immediately set out to explain why it’s wrong in some way or why they’re going to make modest procedural reforms to address these issues etc.
Quotes
“You are more likely to share a story of complaint if you have been stopped from sharing that story.”
“Making a complaint can change your sense of self, what you can do, who you can be. She likened becoming a complainer to being ‘the problem child’: ‘In getting to that point, the complainer, you never shed it, it is like the problem child: having done it, you cannot go back.’”
“We learn from listening to those who do make formal complaints how hard it is to contain a complaint: a complaint becomes almost what you are in, a zone, a space, an environment.”
“Counterinstitutional work in Black feminist and feminist of color hands is also often housework, with all the drudgery and repetition that word entails: painstaking work, administrative work, care work, and yes, diversity work. Institutions become what we work on because of how they do not accommodate us.”
“If power is tricky, complaints are sticky. Those who make complaints and those who are heard as complaining are themselves more likely to be complained about, becoming what I call in chapter 4 complaint magnets.”
“Procedures are not simply there, available to be followed; they have to be talked about in a meaningful way before they can be taken up or in order to be taken up.”
“The person who makes the complaint—who is often already experiencing the trauma or stress of the situation they are complaining about—ends up having to direct an unwieldy process. The person who puts the complaint forward ends up being the conduit; they have to hold all the information in order that it can be circulated; they have to keep things moving. We sense a difficulty here given that many of the experiences that lead to a complaint can make it hard to hold yourself together, let alone an unwieldy process.”
“You have to keep making the same points to different people…When you make a complaint, you end up all over the place, even if all the different paths you follow lead to the same destination, even if all the materials you created or collected end up in the same file.”
“When you try to use a policy to do what it was meant to do, your action sends out an alarm or an alert. To make a complaint is to find out what policies are not meant. You are stopped from using the policy to do something, rather like a trespasser is stopped from entering the building.”
“Even though the procedures were clear, they did not determine the outcomes. She contacted the head of the university: ‘I drew his attention to this. I said it’s the university [that] is not following its own guidance, not us.’ However, she did not get anywhere—the head referenced the policy but the decision of the board as a ‘superior body’. She persisted not by filing a grievance but by finding evidence to support her understanding of procedure: ‘I didn’t see myself as making a complaint. I saw myself as identifying a problem that affected my school, which I had the power and authority to address and I was addressing it. And I think that the university saw me as challenging them, and I had suddenly become something other than a senior member of management and I was just challenging them.’ The more evidence she gathers to challenge their interpretation of the procedures, the more she is treated as being challenging. In other words, when you have evidence that something is wrong, that can be used as evidence that what you are doing is wrong.”
“It is not only that a shadow policy is not the official policy; the shadow policy is a reference to how as well as where deals are made.”
“If policies and procedures can be used as evidence of what does not exist simply by virtue of existing, it should not surprise us that institutions can use complaints as evidence of the success of their own policies.”
“The redefinition of equality as a positive duty has created more of a gap between how institutions appear and how they are experienced. In other words, equality and diversity are increasingly used to create the appearance of doing something.”
“To make a complaint often requires going against what are deemed your duties, including your duty to be positive about an organization and its commitments to equality and diversity. The negativity of complaint thus matters. That negativity is not only a feeling or an attitude.”
“Institutional fatalism tells you that institutions are what they are such that there is no point in trying to change them.”
“You can manage complaints by managing where and when they are expressed. Another tactic is to turn the complainer into an informant.”
“Is there a connection between the inefficiency in how some things are run and the efficiency with which institutions reproduce themselves?”
“When the effort to stop a complaint from being made fails, that is, when a complaint is made, there is an effort to stop the complaint from getting out. When you make a complaint, you are often warned not to disclose the ‘sensitive information’ the complaint contains. Warnings about complaint can convert very quickly into warnings about disclosure.”
“Complaints can come out as expressions of doubt. You begin to lose confidence in yourself; the boundaries become unclear; you cannot trust your judgment. Even if it has become this way because someone you trusted betrayed the boundaries, you can end up feeling that you betrayed yourself.”
“From complaints about power, we learn about power. We learn what it means for some to be holding the door to the institution, to the profession, to categories of personhood.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
One thing that this book drives to the heart of is that there is this vast domain of experiences in academia by people who work for universities and people who attend them which we know almost nothing about because they go into a vast procedural space blanketed by confidentiality. When we do hear something because a part of a particular complaint or grievance process has become public (someone has made a public statement, something visible has happened in terms of a resignation or a termination, some material has been made discoverable in a pre-trial process), institutions and their representatives will often say that what we know is not accurate or fair, but that they do not comment on personnel matters or on confidential processes and thus can’t tell any of us why it is not accurate or fair. That has to stop: it is a fundamentally unfair engagement with public knowledge. This book convinces me more than ever that all this has just got to change. Not to abandon confidentiality at the individual level, but what lies inside the archive of these processes needs to be shared in some vast if redacted way, for everybody’s sake—even for the sake of people who control or lead institutions. What this book makes knowable convinces me of the importance of knowing far more, in a far more systematic way. Silence just cannot go on as the norm of how institutions contain and know and speak to their own histories of being complained to and complained about. That makes the people who live in and work for and sustain institutions feel constantly as if they are going mad, as if everything that they know and have seen never happened, cannot be testified to, is unseen and unseeable.
There’s so much insight here, so much “oh god yes” description of experiences (personal and those related by others at many institutions), that I hardly know where to begin. For example, that to create a policy and an associated procedure is also always an unacknowledged acknowledgement that what is addressed by the policy is not otherwise being done—and then, as Ahmed puts it, “The effort to write that paper, to create a policy, becomes disconnected from the problem the policy is intended to address. This disconnection is cruel…Creating a new policy to deal with a problem becomes another way of avoiding that problem.” But this also puts a huge underscore underneath my own sense that the political problem of the 21st Century that no one has any good answers to is the problem of organizational cultures and structures at large scales. If I’m in a group of four or five people doing something collaborative or relational—a performing group, a family, a therapy group—there are going to be the silences and gaps that fall into all intimate or direct relationships but the knowledge we’ll have of one another is human-scaled and humanely situated. There is no mediating institutional apparatus involved that has to treat people as strangers even when they’re completely knowable. People in small groups may keep secrets from one another and gaslight each other and hurt each other and reproduce forms of inequality that extend vastly beyond those groups but still there is this raw real thing there, that you can say to the other person directly: you did this, this happened. (As well as, “Here is what is good about what we are”, “here is what we mean to do together”, “here is what we hold to and believe in”.) There is something so profoundly wounding about being treated as a stranger, as a thing, as an interchangeable petitioner or participant, by people with some institutional authority that you’ve worked with and known for thirty years.
It’s not the right response to the book—perhaps because I come from a positionality that can escape some of the traps of complaint—but I did keep thinking constantly about what an institution that was better comprehensively would be like. (It’s why I have my thought about scope and scale: I wonder if that is even possible at a certain size.) I have some thoughts, and so does Ahmed. I don’t think the better university in this sense is one that simply does the opposite of what Ahmed and her sources testify to—say, that has a single empowered caseworker who holds all the details of an individual complaint and does all the labor of investigation and documentation in a coherent and uninterrupted way without ever returning to the individual making the complaint, any more than an ethnography can be done from a duckblind—most of what complaints testify to is relational and experiential, the kind of things that we ourselves do not fully understand until we are asked to tell the story, and often not until we tell the story several times to different people. The difference is not procedural or processual as much as it is attitudinal, about alignments—when complaint is about making working life and academic sociality better rather than being something which is understood as a threat to the working of the institution or a source of risk and liability. The wrong answer from the outset is to see this as a matter of infrastructural design. It’s about how institutions think, value, believe, which is no more changed by changes in procedure than changes in laws have abolished racism or discrimination at a wider scale.
A far more unhelpful feeling or thought—a true “unfair complaint”—that I couldn’t help but suppress was simply, “but what if a complaint really is unfair?” Ahmed wonderfully captures the way that the complainer often becomes subject to institutional investigation that turns the complainer into the object of someone else’s complaint, which is one case where Ahmed finds a way to say there are valid and invalid complaints, essentially via a kind of historical unravelling of procedure. I find myself here absolutely bound up in so much of what she talks about—the injunction to silence, even if no one has enjoined you as such—but I can think of at least one complaint I know a fair amount about (not involving me or my department) where I’m really sure the person bringing the complaint was just wrong and arguably doing harm to someone else in doing so. But Ahmed is brilliant at pointing out that exactly this reaction is what is mobilized by institutions to divert, prevent, obstruct and disable complaint as a mechanism, that the obligation to “be fair” or “be even-handed”, to imagine that any given complaint might turn out to be unjustified. So perhaps this is something more for me to ponder on why it is so hard to put aside that reaction (which is rather like “not all men!” and so on in its form). Ahmed’s answer is not institutional design but collective and social practice, and maybe that’s all that needs to be said—though I think in the end activism does eventually have to envision what it is like to inhabit power and what power ought to do in facing complaint or petition. Otherwise, I think what will continue to happen is that people who have been part of social and collective understandings of complaint will find themselves suddenly enacting all of what is complained about once they are put into some position of managerial or administrative power, because institutions are in some sense inhuman, they are apparatuses whose technics work and continue even when human beings march into the gears determined to make them operate in some other fashion.