"Who cleans up?" vs "Who governs?" pt. 1 of n

yes, y'all, i'm finally writing that up as an article

I’ve had this on the back burner for about 2 years as I finished up The Sonic Episteme. Now that the book is finished, I have time to turn to this. Here’s the working intro for the article.

I was living in Chicago during the 2003 garbage collection strike. Trash began to pile up in the late summer heat, and it quickly replaced the weather as the go-to topic for smalltalk. Amid that smalltalk, I heard an urban legend about Chicagoians’ tolerance for civic mess: supposedly, Jane Byrne, the city’s first woman mayor, lost her re-election bid in the primaries because under her watch the city massively botched snow cleanup after a particularly bad storm. Chicagoans don’t mind dirty politics, but dirty streets are another matter.

Fast forward to summer 2019, when US media is already more interested in covering the 2020 presidential election that it is in covering the squalid and inhumane conditions at concentration camps at the Mexican border. Who should govern us? would appear to be the only question anyone really cares about.

It’s hard to blame anyone for thinking this way because they’re only doing what they’ve been taught. Who should govern? has been more or less the main question Western political philosophy has cared about since Plato. Because Western philosophy tends to be written by people belonging to the ruling class, it has tended to focus on who should rule and how they should do that. For example, it’s not just Plato’s Republic that spends a lot of time talking about the kind of person that is most fit to rule other people, but also Phaedo and Symposium, just to name a few; social contract theory is all about the legitimate foundation and use of state power; neoliberals argue the market is the only legitimate governor. Even C. L. R. James’s “Every Cook Can Govern” prioritizes governing above doing the dishes. [1]

This trend is reflected in contemporary Anglophone social and political philosophy syllabi, which continue to prioritize questions of governance over questions of cleaning, repair, and maintenance. In July 2019 I searched the “Social and Political” section of the American Philosophical Association’s bank of diverse and inclusive philosophy syllabi. This is not a scientific sampling of the field, but it is an official institutional record of philosophy syllabi, and it’s one that is explicitly intended to highlight the representation of traditionally underrepresented voices and issues. Looking only at generalist syllabi that weren’t explicitly about feminism, gender, or race, questions of care and/or reproductive labor--i.e., the “who cleans up?” question framed in broad brushstrokes--rarely appears. Some of the most common issues include justice, democracy, law, violence, citizenship, and (in)equality--in other words, issues relating to the use of authority and the relationship between governing and/or dominating institutions and those who they govern/dominate. For example, one syllabus on “The Philosophy of Liberation” lists the key course concepts as “agency, ontology, revolution, naturalist account, liberation (via humanist accounts), social conditions, epistemology, interest.” A few of the more narrowly topical syllabi did address issues related to care, cleanup, and the like. Diana Titjens Meyers’ 2011 syllabus on “Recent Feminist Social and Political Philosophy” does spend one week on “Transnational Care Work”; however, the rest of the syllabus prioritizes issues like rights, autonomy, and violence, and thus reinforces the idea that issues of care and reproductive labor are niche concerns within a subfield of political philosophy. Similarly, John Baker’s “Political Theory of Equality” syllabus has a section on “relational inequality” focused on “love and care” and its (un)equal distribution; however, the association of care with love (and all its warm fuzzy connotations) occludes the messy, gross, unpleasant dimensions of care the “who cleans up?” question foregrounds. The section on climate change in this syllabus on contemporary moral and social problems skirts around the “who cleans up?” questions, e.g., in assigning readings about the distribution of pollution and responsibility for fighting climate change.

So, it’s not as though political philosophers aren’t asking questions like “who cleans up after other people?”--it’s just considered to be a niche or tangential issue, an optional rather than obligatory question for thinking about politics and society. It appears this way only because the priorities we’ve been taught (and continue to teach) are all wrong.

Though it may feel like the most pressing question for the ruling classes, “Who should govern?” is not the most important question for politics and political philosophy. Taking this question as the central problem for political philosophy only legitimizes the ruling class as such because it centers them and their interests, biasing both how the question is asked and thus how it will be best answered. It contributes to the perception that governing is the most important and most high-status role one can serve in society. What if, as my above example suggests, it isn’t? 

My dad, an elementary school principal, told me that the most important person at his school was the custodian: even though my dad was everybody’s boss, his authority meant nothing if the facilities were out of order and the situation prevented people from doing the jobs he was supposed to supervise. His experience as a boss taught him that governing is actually less important than maintenance, repair, and plain old cleaning up after others.

He’s right, and not just about school administration: “who cleans up (presumably after other people)?” is a fundamental question for politics and political philosophy. This article offers one argument in support of that claim and then considers two examples of theoretical projects that use this approach. I use Angela Davis’s analysis of reproductive labor and Simone de Beauvoir’s political ontology to build my argument that taking questions like “who cleans up?” as the most central questions for political theorizing is both ontologically more accurate (given the material facts of life on Earth) and politically more just than the traditional emphasis on questions of governance. Then, I analyze Sara Ahmed’s account of feminism as “homework” and the emerging scholarly field of maintenance studies as examples of theoretical practices which do take cleaning up as a central question.

[1] C. L. R. James argues for the superiority of democratic practices where authority is genuinely handed to the public, i.e., non-experts or non-professional politicians. For example, he thinks the ancient Greeks’ “refusal to hand over these things to experts, but to trust to the intelligence and sense of justice of the population at large, which meant of course a majority of the common people” is an admirable example to be followed.