The Complaint Apparatus

Saying no within an institution let alone to one is no simple matter. To say no to those who control institutional resources is to risk losing access to those resources. Damn it: you might need those resources! Many who are warned that complaining will shut the door on their careers do not feel they can afford to find out whether warnings are idle.

And yet, some of us can only do the work we do, live the lives we live, because of how many before us complained. An open door can be an inheritance. It was a killjoy joy to write No is Not a Lonely Utterance, not least because I could gather past nos, bring them into the text, so they could keep each other company.

It has been an uncanny experience taking this book on tour at this time, speaking of the companionship of no. Because if anything, those who say no to institutions, pointing to their complicity in violence, seem more likely to be stopped by other people’s complaints than by their own. You only need name what is happening in Gaza as genocide to risk being the object of complaints, that you are antisemitic or creating a hostile environment for Jewish people, despite the fact that so many Jewish people are protesting genocide. Facts can be inconvenient.

That complaints can be weaponised against those who say no to institutions is central to the analysis I offer in the book. Admittedly there have been so many more examples of the weaponisation of complaints since I wrote it, that it is overwhelming. Hence I hope to return to this problem from another angle by thinking about common sense as hegemonic complaint.

One example mentioned in the book: On January 10 2025, law professor Katherine Franke announced in a public statement that her employment at Columbia University had been terminated. Franke had supported the rights of students to protest “the Israeli government’s genocidal assault on Palestinians after the October 2023 attacks.” She explained she “truly believed that student engagement with the rights and dignity of Palestinians continued a celebrated tradition of student protest at Columbia University” but that “instead, the university has allowed its own disciplinary process to be weaponized.” In her statement, Franke shows how internal disciplinary processes were used alongside techniques of surveillance: “Colleagues in the law school have videotaped me without my consent and then ...