Speak of the Devil: Reflections on the Institutional Co-Optation of Language

This text originated from a conversation had around breakfast, in the Funambulist’s office in September of 2024. Akil and Seth Scafe-Smith were telling us why their architecture office, RESOLVE Collective, did not enter the Grenfell Tower Memorial competition in London, describing how British institutions had co-opted our language. We asked them to reflect further on this institutional co-optation and the spaces left for us to resist it, or even part from it and invent a new language.

“The power of literacy to make us fit for struggle should be exercised like a muscle, not waved around like a membership card.” The words of abolitionist and prison scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in The Funambulist’s “A Moment of True Decolonization” podcast series in 2020, are increasingly resonant today at a moment of genocide and overlapping permacrises—when many of us are questioning the value of gathering stones at a time of scattering them. Though a minor footnote in the texts of the existential struggle our kin are engaged in—from Palestine to Sudan to Kanaky—there is some relevance still in observing the role that languages and literacies of this struggle are playing not in the gym but in the guild. Today in Britain’s institutional landscapes, from museums to universities to architectural competitions, the terms that have for decades sought to articulate resistance to oppression by marginalized people are being progressively declawed; used not in commitment to the politics but the semantics and aesthetics of liberatory struggle.

Within these institutional contexts otherwise fettered to radio silence on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the roar of “equity,” “justice,” “decolonization,” “radical,” “participatory,” “repair,” and “care” has become a signifier not of intent but inertia, not devotion but rather, deceit.

These terms, populating exhibition texts and lecture notes across the country, have not been entirely appropriated by institutions. The academic milieu in which many of them arose cannot be understated, nor can we ignore the longstanding intersections between grass-roots activism and academia that has and can be cross-pollinating. Likewise, no institution is hermetically sealed; people and ideas outside of “ivory towers” are also in flux with them, secreted and absorbed in ways that complicate ideas of being “on the ground.” Often, when we are confronted in these institutions by the language of allyship or community, it is habitually uttered by peers for whom the institution is just the setting for one position in their multifaceted practices. How then, might we come to terms with both the reality and the detriment of co-optation? Of the extraction of language that we deem ours?

Importantly, this question is not an exercise in keeping up radical appearances. Our work as RESOLVE Collective, a Croydon-based, community-focused interdisciplinary design studio, often lands us squarely in the contexts of British cultural and academic institutions that circumstantially loiter above most of our thresholds for refusal. So, this is not an attempt to exempt ourselves from discourses of institutional co-optation, but rather, a recognition of the parts that we play in it.

We have entered exploitative architectural competitions with briefs that read like adrienne maree brown texts and participated in decolonial group panels at ever-colonial museums.

We have taught and lectured in universities abound with self-proclaimed Third Worldist Black and Brown academics who have categorically abandoned their students’ demands to end their institution’s complicity with the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. No amount of our ongoing work in support and mutuality with liberation movements can obscure this. Conflicting engagement with these sultry environments, particularly under the conviction of speaking truth to power as an employee, a cultural worker, a practitioner, or professional studio, will be a familiarly nauseating feeling in Britain. These spaces—the Tate’s, the University College London’s, the Institute of Contemporary Arts’, the Grenfell Memorial competitions, the Guardian newspaper—are unequivocal landscapes of extraction. But they are landscapes that, until our eventual, weary demurral, we regularly traverse under the banners of proselytizing, prosecuting, or reforming. Artist Jasleen Kaur, in her recent powerful Turner Prize acceptance speech and in conjunction with an open letter signed by over 1,000 artists calling on the Tate to divest from donors with links to the Israeli state, spoke explicitly of these realms as “institutions we are choosing to work with” but must hold to account in various ways. There is an anti-heroism to such admissions. It is exactly why challenging how language is used and for whom in these spaces is a question of interlocutors, not just utterance and its audience.

There is an obvious case for examining the cooptation of language in institutions, not in assessment of what language does—speaking about care, for example, is not practicing it—but instead by the action that it entails and that precludes it. In a fairly unexceptional example of this, some years ago we entered an architectural competition in Liverpool, alongside a consortium of other architecture studios and practitioners for the transformation of the city waterfront—a site deeply entrenched in Britain’s Transatlantic Slave Trade. The competition articulated a desire to engage “equitably” with the site and the city’s social and historical landscape in terms that felt familiar to conversations usually had between other socially-engaged practices. The brief spoke to how the city and the site had benefited from the trade of African people, there was a readily apparent desire to co-create with the city’s rich network of community practitioners and organizations from marginalized identities within the competition stages, and it was emphasized that submissions were endeavors between smaller, community-focused studios and larger architecture studios.

That so little of this was eventually realized in the competition process was not, and is not, what is remarkable about how language was co-optated in this instance. We had of course already suspended our belief. In the competition brief were terms that many participating grassroots organizations—including community organizations from Liverpool and the wider Merseyside area who were in entrant consortiums—had fought for to become best practice for years, even decades. Some had fought to see them adopted in exactly these contexts; where the lives of local people are threatened with irrevocable change from the gossamer expertise of distant professionals. And yet, the inevitable circus of community inclusion and “starchitect” exhibitionism that followed was not a betrayal of what we had believed in but instead, what we were speaking to. For the poetics of equity and social justice in this competition were spoken with us, not merely told to us. The admission of the site’s inextricability from the Liverpool’s role in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the celebration of community, and the interrogation of equitable engagement were announced through our terms but crucially brought to life by our labor. We may not have believed the brief, but we believed ourselves when we responded to it with drafts for co-created organizational structures that address generational trauma, with costed five-year programmes to explicitly work with young, marginalized Liverpudlians to produce together visions of their city, and with the preliminary terms for paid-position community steering groups to help assure the project’s legacy. The bittersweet taste of the competition was engendered by our conviction in the weeks of physical construction, relationship-building, and project planning, not the sounds of our own rhetoric played unconvincingly back to us.

There are countless other examples where a co-opted language does not do as it “says”—some far more severe in their implication, others with consequences yet to be felt. But more pressing than illustrations of the limitations of what language does is the question of what we do for these words or without them?

While refusing the rhetorical acrobatics that are so often used to overcomplicate what is clear cut—from the genocidal complicity of institutions with Zionist ties to the UK Government denial of reparative justice for Caribbean communities—we can also accept that in cultural industries our words are an extractable resource that is mined by, procured for, and offered to power. Beyond instances where the misuse of words masks actions that must be comprehensively boycotted and defunded, it is not just institutions that co-opt language. It is practitioners, not institutions, that accept royal honors for services to anti-imperialism. Us, not them, who show the product of our creative labor at Bi- and Triennale’s about “care” in industries reliant on further unpaid “labors of love” within spaces constructed by the exploited labor of migrant workers. We who publish essays, articles, and PhDs on liberatory struggle for academic journals no-one has access to in universities everyone has problems with. To accuse or admit when we ourselves have co-opted language, importantly, does not have to acquiesce to a “politics of purity”: quixotic desires to remain or appear untainted by institutional affiliation in the attempt to disavow accountability. With the use of language, we must vehemently disagree, oppose, and dismantle the rhetoric within our own ranks that allows us to say one thing and do another, while acknowledging the spectrum of contradictory positions and urgencies our own practices register within, under the broad churches of diaspora, community, and sometimes even liberation in the cultural sphere.

This, it seems to us, is the double bind of language and is why it is critical for us to disengage in attritional dialogues that only, ultimately, nourish the vocabularies of those that wish to extract; it is the space between what we say and what we do that composes the gestalt image of institutional co-optation.

A lot of the action that bridges this gap and lies outside of the appropriable territory of language in Britain’s institutional landscapes is already familiar to us. Actions against what we oppose in the cultural sphere, such as collective refusal, boycotts, divestments, direct action, critique, and organizational restructuring, are, to quote journalist Diyora Shadijanova on divestment for Skin Deep magazine, “about reshaping the sector to align with the values it claims to represent, and not forcing artists to choose between their values and their livelihoods.” Though, building on this, there are arguably moments when this is a choice and no amount of rhetoric can disguise making the right one. In an economic landscape that is debilitating cultural workers and organizations, but also small and medium-sized institutions, these actions count now more than ever.

But there are also other types of affirmative action that do not face institutions. Instead they are peer-to-peer, where our literacies in equity, liberation, and decolonization are exercised at local and interpersonal scales by speaking with and acting for one another. There is no novelty in the call to refocus on collectivity and resource-sharing within ecologies of socially-engaged practice, particularly for practitioners from marginalized identities in Britain. Entrenched global histories of resistance, resource-sharing and redistribution, from the use of decentralised banking practices within migrant communities such as pardner for Caribbean diaspora, kameti for Pakistani diaspora, and ayuuto for Somali diaspora, to the establishment of co-operatives and DIY distribution infrastructure, are colored by nostalgia but still timelessly compelling. Moreover, unlike our extractable, contradictable, and so often ineffectual speech in institutional theaters, when we speak of resource redistribution to one another, it appears. To speak of the devil, today, deep legacies of peer-to-peer, redistributive work are already manifest in the work of organizations such as Brixton Community Cinema, OOMK, and KIN Structures in London, The Portland Inn Project in Stoke-on-Trent, Gut Level in Sheffield, Liverpool Tool Library in Liverpool, We Can Make in Bristol, as well as Civic Square and MAIA in Birmingham, and so many countless others. Together, we can think beyond the ownership of language and towards its reinvention as well as the action this would entail. ■