The snow is coming down hard and I fucked up my lower back doing a first round of shoveling so I’m extra snowed in, sitting here with a hot water bottle behind my right hip. I don’t want to be on the computer today and am going to try to keep this short. Writing is a way to prepare the mind to rest, as I had intended to do all day yesterday, which is of course not what happened. I spent about twelve hours pacing around my apartment like a caged animal, hunched over my phone, worrying, increasingly convinced that “Breaking News” is just the name we give to participatory psychological warfare. A welcome phone call from Nate broke me out of the spiral and inspired some thinking, which inspired some jotting down, which inspired the paranoid scribblings that you are now reading.

Both Nate and I have been Doing This a long time, Nate slightly longer than I have by virtue of a bit of a seniority advantage (neither one of us is beating the “old” allegations, I fear). By “This,” I mean various actions in various protest and leftist movements of various degrees of organization. I also mean that we are both engaged in Marxist (or maybe better to say Marxian) intellectual work in the broadest sense, attempting to whittle important or interesting insights out of the solid block of current events using Marxian frameworks and conceptual tools. A fair amount of our conversation yesterday revolved around themes of mental and informational war and the constant attempt to thread the needle between being agitated enough to keep going but not so agitated that you exhaust and demobilize yourself. The fact that nobody can get used to this is a tactical point against the administration, but it’s a tactical point against us that huge technological structures exist to capture and defuse the emotional charge of constant agitation. The feeling that results is intentional and familiar for many of us: you’re addicted to the thing that depletes and paralyzes you, which is Becoming Informed by consuming emotionally pitched content on your phone. (This is a contemporary variant of left melancholy, I think.)

Nate and I talked and wondered, as we often do, about the role of intellectual work. We all tend to devalue the role of intellectual work in general just because the markets that structure our lives devalue intellectual work, but I think this is a mistake. At the end of the day, it’s only really ideas that are capable of moving people, ideas that are experienced and felt in addition to just thought. (This is the deep political significance of art, good art specifically, the kind that avoids sloganeering, lecturing, and simpleminded political allegory is the most truthful and moving.) Nobody ever picked up a brick for the labor theory of value, but people have done and continue to do it for higher wages and shorter working hours, or because they’re simply starving, like Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. People are doing incredible things in Minneapolis every day, every day proving Rosa Luxemburg kind of right after all, that people’s capacities for coordination and problem-solving are profound and don’t demand much by way of technical or ideological orchestration or management, and that the tactics of resistance constantly flow like water over and around the conditions of possibility and the compositions of power and population. Daycare patrol is as much a manifestation of the mass strike as the general strike on Friday, in other words. 

Whatever passes for leftist theorizing is so often just strained attempts to fantasize about a world that would be easy to change. (Liberals, I have noticed, are considerably less burdened by these fantasies in this moment.) Americans have a strange expectation that mass politics be somehow evidence-based (we conflate “policy” and “politics” as a matter of course, another ideological current that I think is intentionally demobilizing) and that theoretical correctness should be proportionally and monotonically related to political result. But I’m actually less interested in why liberals with theoretically incoherent and aesthetically cringe politics are so activated right now than in the simple and obvious fact that they are. I view one important role of leftist intellectual work right now to be neither “educating” nor “correcting” them but in asking, and trying to be clear-eyed about, what this means and what political possibilities (and impossibilities) it constellates. 

The other major role of leftist intellectual work is in protecting, nourishing, and reviving something like a political imagination. Please note that I am not using the exhausting critical theory jargon term “imaginary” on purpose; I do not mean an inert collection of mental objects, but an active and productive imagination. It is critical to believe that we can win, not as an abstract or ritual hope but as a mindset to be cultivated as carefully as an email list. Everything in our psychic environment right now is actively conspiring to kill the imagination, and radical-flavored content that purports to be educating you is no exception. The phone is a social technology for capturing and diffusing energy in a welter of contradictory demands on your attention and on your energy (scrolling through Instagram I get: buy a gun, don’t buy a gun, leave the US, don’t leave the US, donate here, donate there, use this historical analogy, no use that historical analogy, and so on and so on, all in the exact same feverish scolding tone). 

Consuming content is a way of changing your mind, but it changes your mind by deconditioning it. Content (infographics, short-form video, podcasts, slop writing, anything whose ultimate purpose is driving engagement) is an ontologically different thing than thought, critique, imagination, intellectual work (or play) generally. Engagement with content is not and cannot be political engagement, no matter how many content creators or how many load-bearing pillars of the status quo depend on your confusion on that point. So to the first and second, I’ll add a third role of intellectual work, which is attending to, and maintaining a critical distance around, the political conditions of our minds.