This blog is about chance gifts; about the way attempts to enact change, in ourselves and in our communities, should not be understood as programmatic or automatic but as inspired by chance occurrence.
Maurice Blanchot has a wonderful quote about this in regard to writing:
the opposite of automatic writing is a dread-filled desire to transform the gifts of chance into deliberate initiatives.
Blanchot points out how any attempt to create is not simply dependent on your own will, but on the unexpected interactions that occur every day. Creations often only seem deliberate after the fact. It is the same way with attempts to create social or personal change.
I have never liked the dichotomy between passivity and agency. So often there seems to be the idea that you are either a sheep following along with society or you are an activist – self-directed and sticking it to the man. If you are not doing something obvious and extreme and if you are not being motivated completely by your own opinions (whatever they might be) then you are not part of the solution. There are many dangers in this understanding of acting for social change, including arrogance, dominating behaviour, single-mindedness and becoming narrow-minded and judgemental.
So instead I want discover a way of understanding action which is somehow between passivity and activity. Let’s see how I go.
