Here goes a bunch of freewheeling, ordinary thoughts.
Sense of belonging, at least in common parlance, is a misnomer. Surely sense of belonging is not something – a sense – that resides in individuals. Belonging is a force, a mark of relationships within an environment. To conceptualize or measure sense of belonging at the individual level renders it into a problem of the individual, resolvable through the individual. That’s not wrong, just partial. If I feel a low sense of belonging, what does that say about the system that has (not) come into relation with me? On a macro scale, I think we know that sense of belonging is a mark of environments. This is why it has become code for inclusion of minoritized students (and faculty, and staff, and administrators) among administrators and faculty who cannot or will not discuss marginalization and power, especially as attached to race, within their local political environments. It functions at a threshold that gives it wide association and this interest convergence provides it cover. Yes, it can be a marker of racist, ableist, etc. systems. But majoritized students can also feel like they don’t belong for any number of valid reasons. And the term itself doesn’t cry out at systems, it marks individuals.
But what about those systems? Systems aren’t faceless. To feel like you do not belong somewhere can be the accumulation of many, many interactions with individuals who incite the feeling. If I feel like I don’t belong, those individuals are also in this feeling. Systems also carry a discourse that is implicated in the relationships it produces. If the discourse of a system produces situations that create my un-belonging, my un-belonging is of this system also. The flip is that the system isn’t a simple concatenation of individuals. The system is always more than one. It is greater than the sum of its parts. It is abundance.
I turn to systems quickly, that is true. I try to interrogate this as much as possible. I do not turn to systems if they are gelatinous, feature-less blobs or absolutely determinative of our lives. Systems are networks of complex relations that we all define and that define us, and they are singular in their compositions. The point of inquiry is to live through these systems hard enough, experimentally enough, so that our questions of them change them and us in just ways. This isn’t something to figure out once and for all. And I fight a cynic inside of me who, as I get older, is starting to get a little more doubtful that some of these systems will meaningfully change in my lifetime. I have to believe they will change, otherwise why try? The nihilism of nothing matters is central to the persistence of most (American) social issues today.
All this about systems and social feelings, and still the individualized feeling of not belonging is powerful. I feel like I don’t belong. I feel like those above me in social hierarchies barely know or consider my existence. I feel like a replaceable cog in a machine. (Abby Lee Miller: “everyone’s replaceable.”) In this case, it may not be the feeling that is a lie but that the social hierarchy is, or at least our investment in it. Capitalism forces a certain amount of investment. The more precarious we feel, the more overwhelming this investment feels. I have to belong in order to stay afloat. We are compelled to go along within systems that do not care, and we replicate the problems we feel on others consciously or not. The person who makes you feel like you don’t belong is a singular combination of forces in the system themselves.
Without precarity, the stakes dissolve. If it doesn’t matter much that you don’t belong in one space because you do in another and either space will fill your needs, it’s hard to see what matters. If I don’t feel like I belong in the Damonte Ranch Starbucks because the music is too loud, and I don’t believe I belong at the Meadow Creek Hub because their wireless isn’t working, but I do feel like I belong in the South Meadows Dutch Brothers because James gets love and pup cups from the baristas… okay. Beyond the random chance of any event happening in these places that would radically change my trajectory, I can just get Dutch (medium iced annihilator with almond milk with a pup cup please and thank you at the moment) and do my work at home. Next week I’ll try Hub again, and Starbucks is ubiquitous. Sure, butterflies flapping wings, etc. I don’t dismiss this at all. Precarity seems different though. Precarity would be a feeling that to not feel like I belong at Hub keeps me from internal goals of mine and from my community, whatever that means at the moment. Precarity comes with a sense that the you who you are and want to be will not be possible without access to the thing you are denied.
Captialism defines communities we must belong in, but not just capitalism. Universities existed long before capitalism, and long before this variant of capitalism. Being in a university community (students, president, professors, and tutors) but not feeling a sense of belonging to that university community was bad, differently. First, a problem like this is almost exclusively available to white men in American higher education prior to the productivity variant of capitalism. To not belong is a different problem from being excluded entirely. I think this is why belonging comes up in higher education discussions of the last few decades about it’s not just access. Belonging is the play cousin of exclusion at best, a euphemism that obfuscates exclusion otherwise. Second, the if-then is different on the inside. The if-then today – if I don’t belong, then _____ – is daunting. Some of this comes with the durability of identity. We identify with spaces that repel us, and to not belong to them starts to break apart the person we see ourselves to be. Some of this comes from the state of the world. Our current stage of capitalism is marked by a radical interdependence, a paradox as it’s also discursively linked to radical independence, bootstraps, and so on. We are radically interdependent on the world around us, and, it is up to us to manifest the conditions of our survival.
Third, if-then logic itself makes the precarity of material conditions more durable. If-then logic is a linear logic that turns the world into precedents and antecedents. Everywhere there is an effect of a cause; everywhere there are causes for effects. We turn into machines looking to remediate and remove causes of the things that make us precarious… and to where I began, causes of the things that make us feel like we don’t belong. If belonging et al. are products of swarms, the logic of a swarm is fundamentally different, and it calls for different modes of intervention and repair in the world that are inconceivable within logics of cause and effect. Someone may make you feel like you don’t belong. That’s a true and valid feeling, especially within the common sense of our late capitalist society. It’s also the case that material-discursive swarms produce your (my, etc.) feeling that you (I, etc.) do not belong. What do we do with that? How can we experiment within these systems, within our current common sense, to act at the level of collective affect to produce more just environments? I’m not sure belonging or belongingness are the concepts we need for this work. Systems are not abstract, and they do not exist for thee but not for me. They are the collection of anecdotes on anecdotes of experience. Our opportunities to intervene are everywhere, if only we can alter the force fields of our relationality.
Laura Smithers 