Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and People

by Avery F. Gordon, Leon Golub

Avery Gordon's first book, Ghostly Matters, was widely acclaimed as a work of striking sociological imagination and social theory. Keeping Good Time, her much anticipated second book, brings together essays by Gordon that were "written to be read aloud." Her eloquent voice in this book further establishes her place among literary sociological writers of a new generation. Keeping Good Time will be of great interest to activists, feminists, sociologists, students and everyone concerned about how to beat the odds in influencing the shape of social and culture change. Readers will find their thinking changed by the author's perennial quest to "develop insights gained in confrontation with injustice."

264 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2004

About the author

Avery F. Gordon is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Visiting Professor in the Birkbeck Department of Law, University of London (2015-2018). She is the author of The Workhouse: The Breitenau Room (with Ines Schaber); Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and People; Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination among other books and articles. Her work focuses on radical thought and practice and over the last several years, she has been writing about imprisonment, war and other forms of dispossession and how to eliminate them. She serves on the Editorial Committee of Race & Class, is the co-host of No Alibis, a weekly public affairs radio program on KCSB FM Santa Barbara, and is the keeper of the Hawthorn Archives.

Reviews

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Avery F. Gordon writes:




I would say on one hand, it feels unreasonable – maddening – to want to be loved for asking people to think critically about things they’d rather not, for asking people to love you for questioning their notions of what’s beautiful. On the other hand, we would have a very different culture if the critical object was the beautiful, beloved object. You might make a different kind of art in such a context. The possibilities of this cultural change are unforeseeable at this point.




One of the things I’m most afraid of is falling in love with that which I’m struggling to eliminate. It’s dangerous to fall in love with what you hate, with what you want to fight. It’s very easy to become attached to the critical object you’re claiming to undermine, to develop a psychological and intellectual investment in it so that you can’t let go of it. To devote one’s time and energies to exposing and trying to change corrupt and harmful systems requires commitment, especially since these are not sanctioned activities, however repressively tolerated they are. But if you are too much in love with the authority you despise, the attachment can contaminate your creativity and your ability to see and get beyond what’s authorized. When you say, “I know how the art world works as a system, but I feel,” you’re describing a tension that’s part of the life of an outlaw. The tension is not shameful. What’s a shame is when heretics are unable to exist or imagine existing without the very thing they claim to oppose.




I would like to dance with the people and with the things I’m working towards.