Complaint!

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Ahmed begins Complaint! by emphasising how ‘complaints are not heard or how we are not heard when we are heard as complaining’ (3). Those who follow Ahmed’s work will be well aware that she traces the genealogy of words – verbs, nouns, as subjects or as objects – and how their meanings may change depending on their uses. Complaining as a speech act may have negative connotations, but Ahmed draws our attention to complaint as a form of feminist pedagogy.

In her powerful new book . . . Sara Ahmed builds on a series of oral and written testimonies from students and employees who have complained to higher education universities about harassment and inequality. Here, she asks readers to think about some inescapable questions: What happens when complaints are pushed under the rug? How is complaint radical feminism? And, how can we learn about power from those who choose to fight against the powerful?" — Rebecca Schneid, Indy WeekThese insights help to quell my fear that is it not always immediately apparent what is political about complaint. After all, as Ahmed identifies, complaints are often made by perpetrators just as readily as victims. We live in an age where language no longer feels sufficient. Like the language of social justice, the language of victimhood is endlessly co-opted, recombined and re-purposed by individuals adept at DARVO. As Ahmed notes, although race and gender scholars are deemed complainers, they are more likely to receive complaints against them. This issue is most pronounced when complaints emphasise hurt feelings rather than pointing at material power relations. I think of the case where a union was penalised for publishing a poster identifying employees who worked during a strike action as scabs, making it a more serious offence to call someone a scab than to be a scab. There was a lot of media coverage of your departure from academia, but I’m curious to know more about your early relationship to it. What promise did the university hold for you as a young person? Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. It was like: note this it. A complaint as something you are doing can acquire exteriority, becoming a thing in the world; scratching away; a little bird, all your energy going into an activity that matters so much to what you can do, who you can be, but barely seems to leave a trace; the more you try, the smaller it becomes, you become, smaller; smaller still. I think of those birds scratching away and, I think of diversity work, described to me by a practitioner as a “banging your head on the wall job.” When the wall keeps its place, it is you that ends up sore. And what happens to the wall? All you seem to have done is scratch the surface. There is a genealogy of experience, a genealogy of consciousness in my body that is now at this stage traumatised beyond the capacity to go to the university. There’s a legacy, a genealogy and I haven’t really opened that door too widely as I have been so focused on my experience in the last 7 years.

The second strand is the escalating ‘war on woke’. The government is actively encouraging and facilitating litigation against universities under the aegis of ‘free speech’: anyone who feels their freedom has been infringed – by not being invited to give a talk, for example, or having students protest against their giving one – will soon be empowered to sue universities. The Office for Students will have powers to fine institutions for such breaches (as determined by a Conservative-appointed ‘Free Speech Champion’). The white paper proposing these changes claims that ‘conservative’ students may feel uncomfortable expressing their political views in class. In this context, it isn’t hard to foresee an increasing number of complaints against left-wing lecturers for failing to provide ‘balance’ (complementing the false panic about political ‘bias’ and ‘indoctrination’ in schools) or for ‘discriminating’ against right-wing students. This toxic brew of marketisation-plus-culture-war can be expected to exacerbate the pre-existing tendency, noticed only in passing by Ahmed, whereby those who teach in ways or on matters deemed ‘too political’ (gender and race, Palestine etc) are at risk of attracting complaint: ‘You are not only heard as complaining; you are likely to have complaints made about you.’ References can be doors: how some are given a route through, how others are stopped from progressing. When the door is closed on her complaint, and also on her, she will not be there, bringing to the institution what she might have brought to it, the door is kept open for him. When the door is open for him, he can keep doing because what he has been doing where he has been doing it: behind closed doors. W]hiteness can be just as occupying of issues or spaces when they are designated decolonial” (158). If you complain you end up confirming a judgment that has already been made, you are not from here, you do not belong here. A lesbian academic describes: “if you have a situation and you make a complaint, then you are the woman who complains, the lesbian who complains. And then of course you get witch-hunted, you get scapegoated, you become the troublesome uppity woman; you become the woman who does not fit; you become everything the bully accuses you off, because nobody is listening to you. And you don’t like to hear yourself talking like that but you end up being in that situation, again. You can hear them saying, ‘oh there you go.” We both laughed when she said this. The feminist killjoy comes up here; she comes up in what we can hear. We hear each other in the wear and the tear of the words we share; we hear what it is like to come up against the same thing over and over again. We imagine the eyes rolling as if to say: well, she would say that. It was from experiences like this that I developed my equation: rolling eyes = feminist pedagogy. Harassment does not just behind doors, it takes place around doors, those doors we sometimes call promotion. I am listening to an indigenous woman academic. She tries to make a complaint after a senior manager sabotages her tenure case as well as the tenure cases of other indigenous academics. When you are harassed and bullied, when doors are closed, nay, slammed, making it hard to get anywhere, it can be history you are up against; thrown up against

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And so, we learn: occupation and dispossession are achieved by the same materials. Another story, more materials. A Masters student begins her new programme with high hopes and expectations. And then “it started.” Closing a door can sometimes be a survival strategy; she closes the door to the institution by withdrawing herself, her commitments, from it. She still does her work; she still teaches her students. She uses the door to shut out what she can, who she can. She takes herself off the door; she depersonalises it. And she pulls down the blinds and she pulls on a mask, the mask of her people, connecting her fight to the battles that came before, because, quite frankly, for her, this is a war.

There is also the phenomenon known as lip service. As one of Ahmed’s interviewees says, a complaint may be met with nods and promises only for nothing to happen: ‘He seemed to take it on board; he was listening; he was nodding. Ten days later I still had not heard anything. A space of limbo opened up.’ The act of nodding, Ahmed writes, can be ‘non-performative’, her term for ‘institutional speech acts that do not bring into effect what they name’. (The italics are Ahmed’s.) But as with strategic inefficiency, non-performative acts do perform a function, just not the one they suggest. Organisations often respond to criticism ‘by pointing to their own policies as if having a policy against something is evidence it does not exist’. And if showing off an existing policy won’t cut it, you can always announce a new one: ‘Creating a new policy to deal with a problem becomes another way of avoiding that problem.’ You can be kept out by what you find out when you get in. And yet consider how diversity is often figured as an open door, turned into a tagline; tag on, tag along; minorities welcome, come in, come in! Just because they welcome you, it does not mean they expect you to turn up. Remember the post-box that became a nest? There could be another sign on the post-box: “birds welcome.”

Ahmed does this by offering a ‘feminist ear’, a method she’s introduced in Living a Feminist Life (3): ‘to acquire a feminist ear is to become attuned to the sharpness of such words, how they point, to whom they point. To be heard as complaining is often attuned to sound, to how we sound, how we are heard as sounding, to how words sound, to how we sound, how we are heard as sounding, to how words sound, stories too’ (17). More specifically, Ahmed is observing complaints as testimony (13) and as ‘formal allegation’ (4) in the space of the university that, as I note in my own fragments and experiences, offers informal procedures that mimic legal language and formalities to avoid any real accountability. Complaint as feminist pedagogy: what you are told you need to do to progress further and faster in the system is what reproduces the system. Yet there is even more to this explicitly feminist pedagogy. Sara Ahmed’s Complaint! collective welcomes the reader in, reminding us that “we are not alone” (278). That doorways are populated, haunted. Even if we feel like a “lonely little ghost” (308). Even if Complaint! was “hard to read” (277). Sara Ahmed always has her finger on the pulse of the times as she assists us to explore the deeper meanings and philosophical nuances of quotidian concepts and practices. Beautifully written and thoroughly engaging, Complaint! is precisely the text we need at this moment as we seek to understand and transform the institutional structures promoting racism and heteropatriarchy.” — Angela Y. Davis