KEEPING GOOD TIME
Great Barrington Books
Bringing the old and new together
in the spirit of W. E. B. Du Bois
An imprint edited by Charles Lemert
Titles Available
Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power, and People
by Avery F. Gordon (2004)
Going Down for Air: A Memoir in Search of a Subject
by Derek Sayer (2004)
The Souls of Black Folk
100th Anniversary Edition
by W. E. B. Du Bois, with commentaries by Manning Marable, Charles Lemert, and Cheryl Townsend Gilkes (2004)
First published 2004 by Paradigm Publishers
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright 2004 by Avery F. Gordon
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.
ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-014-4 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-015-1 (pbk)
Keeping Good Time is a collection of writings I have done over the past twelve years.
Thankfully, I have changed and grown over the years. I have gained greater knowledge and experience, as well as extremely precious collaborators and friends who have helped me to become a much better version of myself. Hopefully, I have gained some wisdom too. But these themes in my self-definition and in my work have remained constant, as have the public struggles and conflicts within myself they inevitably generate. I have worked on and also worked through questions about the politics of knowledge and culture and the role of education during wartime more than anywhere else through the medium of the form predominantly represented here: essays written for specific occasions and to be read aloud. In fact, I decided to put this book together when I realized that I didnt just sometimes write occasional pieces separate from my main line of research and publication, as the official university language has it, but when I realized that often I write for the occasion.
I used to think the reason I wrote this way was because I didnt have the time to do otherwise given undergraduate teaching and graduate advising and administrative meetings and professional service and a weekly radio program and political activities and given having whats known in our business as a life. Since many people I know are in exactly the same or far more demanding situations, this seemed a reasonable and plausible explanation. Certainly, time for writing books is an issue for those academics, far greater in number than are credited, who routinely juggle multiple responsibilities without the infrastructural support every other profession takes for granted. And theres no doubt that the seemingly intractable problem of time management and writing is profoundly gendered, impacting women severely and symptomatically in ways it has proved extremely difficult to solve humanely. There is also a highly ritualized professorial discourse about busy-ness and time, which often defensively acts out the rather low regard in which academic labor and its products, especially those not fitting the normal science model, are held. So, to be sure, time has had something to do with my use of this form. But I think that the reason Ive worked in it has not been entirely because there wasnt enough time for something else or something better. After all, I have spent a considerable amount of time on this type of writing. Rather, I think that my habit of rising to the occasion, of writing to and for the occasion, has been how I try to keep good time. As the title essay suggests, keeping good time is about knowing how to tell the time, even if you dont own a real watch, and simultaneously about knowing whose time it is. In a phrase, keeping good time is about taking sides.
More than anything else, what has motivated the work presented here and what threads its shared thematics together has been my effort to accomplish the tasks Chuck Morse sets out for the politically engaged radical critic. He writes, It is the task of the radical critic to illuminate what is repressed and excluded by the basic mechanisms of a given social order. It is the task of the politically engaged radical critic to side with the excluded and repressed: to develop insights gained in confrontation with injustice, to nourish cultures of resistance, and to help define the means with which society can be rendered adequate to the full breadth of human potentialities. Id like to be clear that Keeping Good Time is not a guide or a model for how to be a politically engaged intellectual. It couldnt possibly be such a thing because these are ambitious and humbling tasks one devotes a lifetime to practicing cooperatively with others. Indeed, in my experience, to be a politically engaged intellectual in Morses precise and expansive terms, requires an everyday life practice which instantiates the values attached to the cooperative commitment to take such a side or a stand(point).
Morse distinguishes between two distinct and valuable types of critical intellectual, the former more numerous than the latter in universities. Ive chosen to be the politically engaged type out of temperament, because of formative experiences, and for intellectual and ethical reasons which a good deal of my work tries to explain. I do not mean to suggest that these essays should be treated as merely self-justification; such a judgment upon them would be distressing. I grew up needing to and wanting to CHANGE THE WORLD, as young people like to say, often loudly and with intense serious urgency. While I work in a profession in which this desire is treated at best as a naivet youre supposed to outgrow, I have never been ashamed of the need, and I have never abandoned it. Nonetheless, these essays, in their own small way and as part of a larger body of writings and activities by myself and others, do try to authorize the warrant for siding with the excluded, for nourishing cultures of resistance, and for finding in confrontations with injustice precisely the diagnostic insights and the imaginative means to render society adequate to human life.
The opening and closing essays of the bookKeeping Good Time and Exercisedset the tone for presenting the warrant for politically engaged scholarship in an internationalist context. Each comments on an allegory told by the great writer Eduardo Galeano, and each locates the source of crucial social knowledge about poverty and culture and about whats called globalization in the allegorys Indeed, I turn again and again to writing to understand its power to animate the social life of discounted and disregarded people, to show in a complex way and not just tell how things are, and to transport or move both the writer and the reader. For better or worse, I have clung to the pedagogical belief in the power of the word.
