embracing messy

I've been reading Jess A. Goldberg's new book, Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice for a an academic book club. The book proposes a lot of interesting ways of close reading through the lens of abolition in literary texts. I might gather my thoughts more completely once I've finished the book, but for now, I was particularly struck about the way that Goldberg writes about the difficulty of imagining abolition:

To think justice in excess of the law is not posited as a task with a definite answer, where ethics is a crude list of good and bad imperatives. Rather, to think justice in excess of the law is the messy project of abolition. In the words of contemporary abolitionist Mariame Kaba, “we’ll figure it out by working to get there. You don’t have to know all the answers in order to be able to press for a vision.” (Goldberg 22-3)

The task, again in the words of Mariame Kaba, the abolitionist writer and activist whose work first helped shape my thinking down this path, “is unleashing people’s imaginations while getting concrete—­ so that we have to imagine while we build, always both.”Abolition Time as a book and the excessive present as a concept are attempts at framing a space for imaging new possibilities through the concrete work of building. If the future is not only something out there on the horizon that we cannot quite grasp but something we can touch through what we do, today, how can we imagine it differently from the past in which we still live during this present? (Goldberg 23)

Probably most PhDs have felt, at one point or another in their degree process, that what they were researching or writing about or trying to imagine was much more "messy," or the other word Goldberg repeats: "unruly," than the rigors of academic scholarship, argument, intervention, and publication allow. Truly radical work can't fit perfectly into the prescribed nature of academic conventions. I love the idea of figuring out and imagining something as you build it, and the willingness to embrace the messiness of real change. My own practicality as well as society's obsession with the guise of hyper rationality can make it hard to let what would otherwise seem like discrete steps--imagine, dream, plan, build, implement--happen concurrently and in an illogical order. So much of this applies to the act of writing itself, but also activist work that can be difficult to explain to other people. Mariame Kaba's has been on my to read list for awhile, I guess it's time to read her work!