For as long as I can remember, I have shuddered at the word relevant. It elicits a visceral reaction in me; my gut contracts, my chest sensitises, I feel the strength drain from my forearms when I hear it. It is a seemingly innocuous word that wields enormous power. It is one of the words that polices the realm of the (patriarchal, white) proper.
I am deeply suspicious of relevant and its claims to authority, as it confidently declares what belongs and what does not; what is and what is not worth paying attention to. Relevant, and its siblings common sense, the real world, and rational are tireless soldiers in the army of WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is) that currently rules human society.
Whenever I hear relevant being uttered, my mind is immediately filled with images of black holes and murmurations and gravity and mycelium and art, and I want to shout HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY KNOW!?! Inevitably, relevance involves a judgement, and that judgement is based on a limited perspective of space-time that is bound by what we have the ability to imagine.
If I express my discomfort with relevant, I am usually met with perplexity, or suspicion, or even condescension. It is such a ubiquitous, accepted, and *obviously* desirable quality to strive for. But I have found that ubiquity often provides a camouflage for the very things we need to attend to more closely. The things we do not question, that we take for granted, are often the things we most need to be curious about. What is ubiquitous is something that is hiding in plain sight.
When we say something is relevant, what we are really saying is that the connection is obvious to us. We can draw a direct line between it and whatever is being discussed; it sits comfortably within our boundary of concern, from which we must not stray.
That boundary of concern is, of course, normative; culturally defined by those with the power to do the defining. To stray outside the boundary would be to become distracted, to go off-track, to become ill-disciplined. And who knows where that might lead.
Lol, we know where that leads! Irrelevance! The place where everything outside the territorial boundary is exiled and derided. This is the place of the invisible, the unthought, the distracted, the weird, the improper, the non-linear, the random, the blurry; the tumbleweeds of “WTF do we do with that?” expressed in furtive horrified glances and awkward pauses around a meeting table.
But relevance keeps us tied to the already-known, to the normative, to the status quo. It is an imagination-killjoy that stymies evolution. It presupposes that the connections we already see are the ones that will lead us in the most helpful direction for our inquiry. Relevance cuts us off at the pass, before we get a chance to see the looping, indirect possibilities that a bit of wandering/wondering, and exploration might yield.
Premature declarations of relevance are what stop us from thinking systemically, because they keep us myopically focused on first order causes and effects. This spatio-temporal short-sightedness is how we end up with misdiagnosed causes and unintended consequences. It contributes to why we expend large amounts of energy playing whack-a-mole trying to fix proliferating problems to no apparent avail.
Relevance keeps us stuck in the narcissistic labyrinth of our curtailed imaginations, never able to see beyond the next T-junction. We become imprisoned in a rational choice architecture, with predetermined outcomes and repeated patterns. And we no longer remember to look up at the stars.
Relevance is weaponised against those who do not stay within the comfortable bounds of the obvious, where hearts do not palpitate with the anticipation of the unknown and where it might lead. It is wielded to dismiss divergence, to domesticate, to keep things in line. It is an overused crusher of possibility, that taps into our primordial fear of being ostracised, and keeps us in an abusive relationship with patriarchal, white, wealthy normative power.
I think relevance actually marks a place of great vulnerability in the controlling systems of power; it is a desperate flashing signpost that says “DO NOT LOOK AWAY!” What if we treated it instead as a hidden reminder of the fear that sits underneath that controlling narrative—the terror of places over which it has no knowledge or authority. Power is most fearful of those dark places it does not understand, and it pathologises them as a way of articulating its territory, warning us off them with tales of monsters.
It is time for divergence of all kinds to bring life-giving medicine to calcified structures of dominance. It is time for the so-called irrelevant to say “FUCK YOU! I’m not following this stupid path you have continued to wear away with your highly polished relevance boots that keeps us in your mean, rigid, dead domain, cutting parts of ourselves off for the promise of power.” Instead, let’s loosen the internalised grip of that desire to be at the top table—let’s see the table for the prison it is—and dare to wander off track into the colourful landscape of what is branded irrelevant by power, sampling its delights and the dangerous agency it gives us. Let’s festoon the world with delicious messy impropriety until it becomes so irresistable that it overshadows the grim, anaemic, dissociated fiction that we’ve been indoctrinated into believing is the real world.
The power to define collective reality is the greatest power there is. But it requires our assent. And this is where our power lies—in our refusal to comply. Hannah Arendt shows us the insidious ways we are kept in check by our desire to belong, and how that desire is co-opted in service of dominance. What power names as relevant is what it is familiar with. It is its territory of strength. What it believes to be irrelevant is its weakness, because it is where it has no control.
In a time when we are witnessing a resurgence of dominance, authoritarianism, and patriarchal forms of power, we do not have to play by those rules. Let’s not be co-opted into that game by internalising its dynamics to keep others in line. That is not the way to find safety, but instead to make our world less safe. What if we started to see how much agency we each have in the system to rewire it away from the forms of power that we do not want to be subject to. Dare to become less relevant to that world. Choose not to conform to its expectations. Dance new pathways and connections beyond what is currently understood. In doing so you create more safety, more coherence, more love, more joy, more space for the ways of being that actually nourish us. That is where courage lies.
Feel more. Wonder. Colour outside the lines. Unclench. And live…
Love this Rebecca! I hope to be companioned by your words in this new journey beyond Matariki!!!