EXERCISE 3: THE ACT OF READING

What’s the Use has provided an explanation of how it is through small acts of use that possibilities become restricted; how histories becomes concrete, hard as walls. My task has thus been to keep thickening my account of use, more and more, heavier and harder; to show how histories can occupy buildings, can stop spaces from being usable even after they have declared vacant or open for business.

We know about closures from trying to open things.

When you become a diversity worker you learn how those who try to stop something from happening are themselves stopped.

This is why I describe diversity workers as institutional plumbers; you have to work out how things are blocked because they are blocked. We might from this description assume that diversity workers are appointed to unblock the system. But blockages can be how the system is working. The system is working by stopping those are trying to transform the system.

This means that: to transform a system we have to stop it from working.

When you stop the machine from working you have damaged the machine. 

Plumbers might need to become vandals, or we might have to pass as plumbers (fixing the leaks) to become vandals (making leaks bigger).