more useful than legible

This is a phrase I wrote down from Erin Kissane's post a few weeks ago, where she discussed the concept of vernacular institutions.

Vernacular institutions as I am thinking of them have three essential qualities:

They emerge from highly specific local conditions.

They prioritize needs on the ground over those of centralized powers or abstractions.

They are more useful than they are legible. (Some of that usefulness is maintained under the protection of illegibility.)

This relates to many of the grassroots organizations we work with at Transgender Strategy Center – a blog post for the TSC blog, perhaps – but I also think about this in terms of how I access power and when and whether I believe it's important to be intelligible to others.

Today, I'm finishing up moving my writing over to this new website and doing some work to taxonomize it, but trying to stay in tune with what taxonomies resonate with me and give me pleasure, rather than thinking always of what would be most legible or iintelligible to an imagined reader. To an abstracted reader, to my abstraction of what a reader might want. We are not abstractions.