Street Knowledge: The Hidden Ways Social Change Happens

A philosophical framework for resistance that connects Socrates to the street

Does social change happen “top down” or “bottom up”—brought about by those who hold power or by those who struggle against the powerful? In Street Knowledge, Darien Pollock argues that the most powerful change comes from the bottom up. “Street culture” supplies the creative activity that inspires not only political change but any kind of positive social change. Pollock argues that part of what prevents progressive social change is that people in power only legitimize and respond to ideas and arguments that are legible to them; marginal actors—those with street knowledge—are forced to develop ways of making ideas that are illegible to the broader public meaningful and useful. At its best, street knowledge can be used to address civic injustice, cultural hegemony, and economic exploitation.

Reading Plato, Marx, DuBois, Derrida, and others, Pollock discovered that academic philosophy has had a street orientation all along. The core qualities he associated with the “street disposition”—the psychological and spiritual capacity to resist an unjust social arrangement—were already represented in Plato’s Republic. Drawing on the late Congressman John Lewis’s idea of “good trouble” as well as Socrates, Pollock argues that “the street” should be understood as a universal feature of the human condition—with the potential to emerge anywhere at any time. Street knowledge, Pollock contends, lays the foundation for a radically new way of doing philosophy and achieving social justice.