Conflict Is Not Abuse

Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

Author
Sarah Schulman
Publisher
Arsenal Pulp Press
Year
2016
Collection
Liberation
Buy this book
Bookshop

“How we understand Conflict, how we respond to Conflict, and how we behave as bystanders in the face of other people’s Conflict determines whether or not we have collective justice and peace.” In this measured and brilliant and “undisciplined” book, Sarah Schulman outlines a key antagonist to liberation in our culture: that of an impulse to equate conflict with abuse, and to shun, blame, and punish instead of holding each other to account. She observes this impulse in families, both queer and straight; in organizations; and most distressingly, in the state and its collusion with the family system to impose punishment instead of creating the conditions for repair. The book concludes with an extended look at the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza, which frankly reads even darker today—as the same genocide repeats, but to a greater degree. Which makes the book and its argument an even starker necessity, with the need to interrupt this cycle more pressing every minute.

Reading notes

People do things for reasons

In Conflict Is Not Abuse, Sarah Schulman’s measured and insightful take on conflict, she notes upfront that:

As a novelist, in order to create characters that have integrity, I apply the principle that people do things for reasons, even if they are not aware of those reasons or even if they can’t accept that their actions are motivated instead of neutral and objective.

Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse, page 15

I like this for two reasons: first, the evident truth of the principle, and its attendant call for awareness and accountability; and second, the acknowledgement that the principle is rooted in storytelling practices. We would do well to more regularly admit that the way we tell stories is a core part of how we know the world. It seems, in some ways, to be a truth that needs no reinforcement—like saying that we need air to breathe, or water to live—and yet it’s also regularly reduced to mere marketing (i.e., the notion that stories are good for branding but not for, say, wisdom) or else as something to be overcome—some weakness that has yet to be rooted out. But we can’t escape living in stories anymore than we can escape living in air. Better to know those stories—to know our own motivations and reasons—than to pretend they are not there.

Refusal

In Conflict Is Not Abuse, Sarah Schulman describes a common scenario in which conflict between two or more people has degenerated until the point where one or more of them refuses any further engagement. We’ve all witnessed this, or even been in that position ourselves, I’d wager. This is the move that often accompanies edicts like, “Don’t contact me again,” or, “I can no longer work on a team with that person.” If the situation has involved actual abuse—that is power over, in which one person has harmed the other (e.g., through an act of violence, whether physical, verbal, or economic)—then some temporary separation may be necessary, until or if repair can be made. But in many if not most cases, these situations are about power with—i.e., conflict—in which both parties have contributed to the circumstances and both are therefore responsible for negotiating their resolution. The refusal to engage in that negotiation amounts to an abdication of that responsibility. She writes:

The refusal…of looking at the order of events, or actually investigating what happened, is a kind of “dissociative” state, a level of anxiety about being challenged that is so high that they can’t even remember what the actual conflict is about, and don’t want to be reminded either. All they know is that they feel threatened. What really happened becomes unreachable. In other words, it is a state of being unaccountable.

Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse, page 173

This brings to mind Sidney Dekker’s work on accountability, in which he notes that just cultures require disclosure—i.e., they require the giving and receiving of each person’s account of what happened, not with the aim of finding the one true account (something that is neither achievable nor desirable), but with the goal of exposing the multiplicity of accounts, of the complexity of the circumstances. Refuse that disclosure—refuse to be accountable—and you prevent justice, or worse, create an injustice. Schulman notes elsewhere that:

shunning is wrong. It is unethical. Group shunning is the centerpiece of most social injustice. To bond, or to establish belonging by agreeing to be cruel to the same person, is dehumanizing and socially divisive. It causes terrible pain, and it is unjust.

Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse, page 279

So much of our common sense notions of accountability have become entangled with ideas of punishment that we often talk of holding someone to account as if it were synonymous with punishing them. But no account is revealed through punishment. In shunning, especially, the account itself is silenced, lost, muted. Blocked. That’s an impoverished, and—I think Schulman is very right here—unethical move. Real accountability requires both speaking and listening, both disclosing your own experience and agreeing to acknowledge other’s experiences too.