For Warren: I Wouldn’t be Me Without Him
Delacey Tedesco (Okanagan College)
This is a hard loss. I first took a class with Warren in 1998 called, if I remember correctly, Hegel and His Discontents. I was a third-year undergraduate student, returning to the University of Victoria after an exchange year at the University of Exeter, a year teaching English in Japan, and a year off recovering from the year teaching English in Japan. I hadn’t been in an upper-level class before, and I hadn’t been in any university setting for a couple years. I was terrified. I don’t think I ever became less terrified of the class, or of Warren, that term. And I remain terrified of Hegel.
But I realized, as I thought, that actually I would have met Warren and Sharon, and I think Rachel too, in December of 1993 or 1994, as they generously hosted the graduated students in the Politics program for a holiday gathering; I was there as the date of someone doing his MA in the program and working with Warren to read William Morris as a utopian socialist. So, that means that I knew Warren for 30 years, and worked with him closely for 25 years, as he became the supervisor and co-supervisor of my Honours, MA, and PhD projects.
It was a challenge, in the early years, to overcome the fear I had developed, as he seemed this towering figure, with the all the world’s knowledge at his fingertips… as though when he closed his fingertips together as he spoke, which he did often, he was closing a circuit and allowing the knowledge to flow unimpeded. He pushed hard, and he was demanding, in ways that left me sure that he saw me as very stupid and very lazy and very unsatisfactory. He would seem exasperated and disappointed, and I would become defensive and shut down, which made him exasperated and disappointed.
Over the early years, we had to work through these stories we had created about each other and find our way to a more honest and more vulnerable place of connection. When I think back on some of those exchanges, I can notice that he was perhaps the only person I was being honest with at the time, which says a lot about how much I was willing to risk to find a way not just to work with him, but to connect with him – to trust him.
Over the past month, I’ve tried to find ways to reconnect. I have searched for videos that might capture his amazing capacity for telling stories in the classroom, weaving spells on his audience. But nothing can bring back the feeling of being in his presence as he spoke, whether in a full lecture hall or in his living room. I’ve gone back through years and years of emails, seeing everything he gave me laid out chronologically: countless letters of recommendation for countless job applications, many of them totally implausible, yet he never complained; pictures of Rachel with Daniel, sent with such love and pride, as I was getting used to mothering my own twin boys and sending just as many photos with just as much love and pride; and always, that mix of careful reading, insightful analysis, theoretical singularity, generous engagement, and what I came to trust was his absolutely characteristic warmth, under the often dry delivery.
So I want to celebrate the contributions he has made, not just to me, but to everyone who has engaged with him and his work. And I want to do so in his own words, as he was a consummate storyteller who spoke and wrote with such voice.
Anyone familiar with Warren likely witnessed his amazing ability to come into a lecture with a few notes on yellow legal notepaper and tell an elaborate story that traced a line of thought or argument through the centuries, as though it were the sole, essential perspective on all those years. The one story that we couldn’t live without. And then the following class, with another brief set of notes, he would do it all over again, only developing a different line of argument or a different concept, a different lineage of texts and authors. Everything came as an inherent story, and in duration of the telling – articulated by his gestures, wrapped in his voice – it was the only story.
In my one brief experience working with him in a more editorial capacity, on a forum Jen Bagelmen and I co-edited for International Political Sociology (Bagelman and Tedesco 2015; Magnusson 2015), I witnessed first-hand how this approach to thinking through fully-formed stories emerged in his writing. We received a first draft, Jen and I, and offered a range of editorial comments, suggestions, and queries. What we received back was simple:
IPS Forum (August 2014):
Jen and Delacey
I wrote an entirely different version of my contribution, which I have attached here. It may be better or worse. See what you think.
In other words, the thinking emerges from and through the story. If you tinker with a sentence here or a reference there, you haven’t just changed the story, you’ve changed the thinking itself. I remember him talking about writing for a day, or a week, and feeling that something was not quite saying what he wanted, or telling the story that needed to be told. It wasn’t enough to try and work with what was there and mold it into shape; it was necessary to start again, and again, until the story being told was exactly the right story.
This relationship between Warren as a scholar, a theorist, a storyteller, a writer, and a phenomenal teacher is indeed something remarkable to celebrate. It’s not surprising that so many people have commented on it. Warren is widely known as the most dedicated of teachers: inspiring, incisive, committed, magnetic.
Yet in my many, many years of working with him, what I experienced were his efforts to attune to me not just as a student, but as a person; his insight was not just analytical or theoretical, but deeply interpersonal. There were numerous times, over the years, when his comments got to the heart not just of my work, but of me. Observing battles I had with myself and inviting me into the possibility of opening up and letting go. As here, after my PhD defense left me feeling defensive and defeated, addressing the deeply self-critical assessments I had made of myself in an email to him with a generous offering of insight into himself, as if to reciprocate the sharp gaze he was placing on me and mitigate the sharp gaze I was placing on myself:
Post-dissertation (January 2016):
“It's a matter of letting go. I find that when I am trying to work out theoretical ideas I tend to get obsessive -- or at least I used to do this -- and keep re-formulating something again and again until it seems right. That can go on endlessly, so that the paper never gets finished. Teaching has helped me, because in a classroom context you are forced to let go -- be satisfied with an explanation that is good enough in the circumstances. When I allowed myself to write more like the way I teach it became easier for me because I could accept "good enough" explanations of things that were necessary to the over-all argument I was advancing -- an over-all argument that was itself simply ‘good enough’ for the purposes. Leave it to Kant or someone like that to be absolutely precise. The rest of us have to be content with approximations. The ideas we work with are all a bit fuzzy, and if you accept that and recognize that you can enter into conversations with people that are productive, not defensive.”
It’s interesting to note, looking at it now, that this was later than the previous message, where a whole piece needed to be rewritten from scratch to address something that seemed not quite right. It suggests that he was in his own process of letting go and opening up, which was perhaps how he was able to recognize and be gentle with me as I struggled with mine.
The generosity embedded in this email, his lack of academic ego, and his engagement with his students as a generative site for his storytelling about the political and its continual disavowals in the world and the academy, is something that a generation of his students will carry forward, and the students they teach, and the people they reach. This generosity appears again in comments he sent to a number of us current and former grad students, after soliciting and receiving feedback on his book draft for Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City (Magnusson 2011):
Book Draft (December 2010):
Thanks to all of you again for your extensive comments on my manuscript. It's now in production at Routledge, and so I expect that it will be out some time in 2011. The other good news is that Rachel is expecting a baby in July; so, 2011 is shaping up to be a good year.
I've attached the revised version, in case you're interested. … The book remains more abstract than I would like it to be, but I've done as much as I can to use Victoria to illustrate my analytic points. The bunnies allow me to talk about violence in the way I want: that may or may not satisfy the guns and bombs crowd, but I find it amusing.
All the best of the season, and thanks again for your help. If I didn't respond to all of your comments and suggestions, the fault is mine. In a number of cases, I thought ‘Yes, that's true, but I don't think I have anything useful to say about that. I'll leave that matter to a younger and better mind.’
Warren
And of course, I could go on and on, because there is no way of saying enough about Warren to capture what an impact he has had on me. And on everyone else who has studied with him, worked with him, or read him, too, I suspect, because we are all findings ways to celebrate him – by gathering, by re-reading, by sharing stories, and by introducing his politics of present, engaged care to our communities.
So many years of emails, and I treasure each one. When I read the last email I got from him, in the summer of 2022, I experienced all the anticipation of grief that such news can bring, and despite telling myself over and over again that I needed to respond, I could never bring myself to do so. I chose to hide, during this timeline that was both uncertain and very certain. I have my regrets, but I also hold this choice with compassion, now that the anticipated grief has arrived.
Finding a sense of togetherness with all the people who loved and admired him is very soothing, very healing. There is no one in my immediate, day-to-day life who can possibly understand what the world has lost, in the loss of Warren. Those of us who knew him – wherever we are – we know it, and we feel it, and by creating opportunities to connect, we celebrate the way we are brought into community through him. Our shared memories, love, appreciation, and embodied resonances of Warren weave together, like a protective spell, to bring his presence back and hold the grief at bay for some moments. Insofar as it works, perhaps we can thank him for teaching us how to cast such spells with our shared words. And for teaching us that it matters: it matters which stories we tell, how we tell them, why we believe them, and when it’s time to maybe let them go and tell new ones.
I have been meditating on these memories and on the felt sense of Warren that still resides in me. And I have come to see better the connection between who he was, how he engaged the world, and his commitment to focusing on the local as the site of lived politics. Warren did not live, teach, or think in abstractions, despite being deeply theoretical. He did everything in relationship with people and the world, in real time, with real heart and soul, and with so much grace.
Certainly, his intellectual work on urbanism as a way of life – understanding the deeply theoretical work that people do when they gather to solve the problem of how to live together – has irrevocably shaped my own work, from my academic projects on urbanization and aesthetic cities to my professional efforts to advance equity, diversity and inclusion in municipal and post-secondary institutions. I think Warren would be the first to say that taking up his ideas in the world, and not just the academy, is precisely the political point. This is the politics underlying his reflections on pedagogy: letting go of the precision and perfection that can only come with abstracting from the world as it is; letting the approximation of good enough drive the world forward into better; letting these seemingly modest moments of connection be the foundation for trust and the capacity to attune to one another.
And I think his arguments on the importance of the local and the scale of interpersonal life for building political community in non-sovereign ways are borne out in the collective response to his passing. His claims are evidenced in how our lives change, and our communities form, shape, and extend over time and space, as we truly open to and engage with each other, rather than stay defensive due to the stories we have made up about each other. Or, for that matter, about ourselves.
So, wherever we are, whenever we engage with Warren’s legacy we gather as a community, recognizing that nothing can approximate the experience of being with Warren in person … despite how much I’ve tried this past month: not the remnant videos online, not the endless threads of emails, not the books that invite us into the world and his way of seeing it as a city. And that’s what makes it all so precious. So worth engaging, from the places where we are, every day, with a clear mind and an open and honest heart. And so worth fighting for.
Warren teaches us this, and I am proud to have been his student.
References
Bagelman, Jennifer Jean, and Delacey Tedesco. 2015. "Introduction." International Political Sociology 9 (1): 90–91. https://doi.org/10.1111/ips.12078.
Magnusson, Warren. 2015. "Bringing Politics Back In." International Political Sociology 9 (1): 91–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/ips.12079.
Delacey Tedesco is Associate Director, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at Okanagan College.