Mo Drammeh

The title of that poem gets repeated with such profound frequency to the point that it has become something of a cliche. Not even in the sense that a phrase like “no ethical consumption under capitalism” is where it has become a debate truism whenever the topic of American complicity in imperialism comes around; no, ‘the revolution will not be televised’ has become its own context at this point. People say it the same way you’d say “power to the people;” it is an assertion of one’s beliefs, a principle one orients themselves around. My fear is that, though, because of the incredible evocative power of the refrain in Scott-Heron’s poem, people who have been affected by it have begun to repeat it without ever truly coming to an understanding of its meaning. I want to begin by attempting to address that.

The basic layer of what (I think) Gil Scott-Heron meant in “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is that revolution, or any period of great social change, is experienced actively and not passively. It is not a thing you will watch, it is a thing you will do. “The revolution will put you in the driver's seat,” as Scott-Heron says towards the end. But to leave it here occludes an important part of the poem’s larger message I seldom see discussed. Throughout the piece, he focuses on the ‘television’ to refer more generally to what was in the zeitgeist: he writes that “Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and women will not care if Dick finally gets down with Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day.” He takes aim at the 24-7 news cycle (“There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock news…”) and stories focusing on electoral campaigns (“NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32 or report from 29 districts,”) without taking a breath.

He dismisses, here, everything he believes does not actually contribute in a direct, material manner to the revolution. The question is not of where ideological sympathies may lie but of where systems of power (i.e. capital) can be not only challenged but ultimately dismantled; things The Beverly Hillbillies is constitutionally incapable of doing. The ‘television,’ so to speak, is simply a way of referring to all of the cultural ephemera which cannot contribute to substantive change. The revolution will not be televised, nor will it be pantomimed in an internet viral figure skating routine, nor will it be referenced in a catchy song on the radio or an Instagram Reel. You won’t read about it in the poetry of a famous Black writer and musician or in the blog posts of a markedly less famous Black author.

It won’t be in a novel coming out this year, either. Or the next, or the one after that.

There is a famous Kurt Vonnegut quote I always think about:

“During the Vietnam War... every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”

I always feel bad for Vonnegut reading this quote, and yet there is simultaneously a cynical part of my brain which asks, “what did he expect?” The undertaking of the Vietnam War was in accordance with the material interests of the American ruling class, who naturally wanted more than anything else to combat any development of communist society. So long as that ruling class remains in charge, the war would continue: release as many biting satirical critiques as you’d like.

And yet, I am a hypocrite. As much as I feel I understand the mechanisms behind why it happened the way it did, there is no amount of understanding one can possess that will make watching a diverse coalition of artists from different mediums, genres, countries, and walks of life take a stand against the genocide of Palestinians and apartheid in the West Bank to no avail. Tens, more likely hundreds of thousands continue to die to bombs paid for with taxpayer dollars in service of maintaining global American hegemony. At home, deputized fascist thugs kidnap, kill, and deport working class immigrants on ethnic grounds. We, in our capacity as artists, have only a custard pie and a stepladder.

I would also be remiss to mention the cultural instability of the novel which seems to inform this discussion. The financial viability of being a full-time writer has perhaps never been lesser in American society. The novel has been replaced as the dominant American pastime by film, which itself was replaced by television, which itself was replaced by streaming, which itself may actually be in the process of being replaced by TikTok and Instagram Reels. As the perceived relevance of the novel fades, there appears to be a need to find something which makes the novel uniquely important to our current political situation, and thus uniquely indispensable. Thus, we have the maxim that books can “change the world.”

But, as Vonnegut said before he made his famous quote about the Vietnam War in an interview with David Hoppe, when asked if satire can work to ‘change things’:

“I guess it works some. Just telling people, ‘You are not alone. There are a lot of others who feel as you do.’ We're a terribly lonesome society. For all I know, all societies are. You can make a few new friends, that's all. You can't change history.”

What I wish to do with this post is save you having to come to this conclusion the hard way, as Vonnegut, and I, ultimately did: the revolution will not be in the bookstore. The reason we find ourselves recurrently despairing this is that we keep trying to draw water from a stone by trying to wish it into truth. You cannot change material conditions merely by observing or commenting on them. The only way things will change is if we change them, if we collaborate on building a better future. The assertion that fiction can, by itself, precipitate social and economic change seems to be built on the idealist notion that the progression of history is predicated not on material conditions and the struggle between classes, but the strength and persuasiveness of individual ideas. If that were true, though, Vonnegut and his contemporaries would have stopped the Vietnam War several years early, and To Kill a Mockingbird would have ended racism.

If we were forced, likely at gunpoint, to strip the novel down to its barest components, and avoid giving the hour long lecture which would be necessary to encapsulate the answer to the question of what the novel is, what we would have to call it is a collection of ideas — ideas about the world, about human beings, about nature, about the novel itself. And ideas can inform action — but having ideas does not constitute action itself.

Another key issue with liberal idealism which has major implications for the novel’s ability to generate revolution is that it presumes ideas to be generated ex nihilo, i.e. separately from the material conditions in which they are construed. In reality, ideas, subjects, and thus the novel, are products of those material conditions, generated by the historical developments which preceded them. For an idea to take hold, it must, to the masses, be based in an evident and accurate accounting of those material conditions and historical developments. As such, the ‘strength and persuasiveness’ of any given idea is dependent on history. Even if a novel inspires someone into action, it is not simply because of the novel that the action takes place, for neither the reader nor the text exists in a vacuum, and thus the text cannot claim sole responsibility. To mangle a Marx quote: the novel may facilitate its own history, but it may not facilitate it as it pleases.

And yet, even here I would not necessarily contend that there is no place for fiction in the creation of that better future. As Zachary Gillan writes in “Reading Weird Fiction in An Age of Fascism:”

“Praxis—action—relies on recognition and theorization... Weird fiction might be intensely un-utopian in its affect, but it can inspire us to think critically about our received information and the world that our hegemons want us to see. Weird fiction inspires us to take something liberatory from our reading, to think of our received ideologies critically so that we can offer utopian responses to the weird realities of our collective histories, presents, and futures.”

What Gillan identifies here in weird fiction is what I believe to be the thing necessary in any work of fiction which hopes to address the current crises: ‘something liberatory,’ that in the text which raises the consciousness of the reader and better equips them to navigate a world of state-sponsored violence and imperialist aggression. Something in the content which troubles reactionary and traditional narratives about the world, or, better, something in the form which embeds a framework into the mind of the reader allowing them critically analyze the world around them.

Books cannot change the world, but they can help you understand it, and that understanding can inform radical action which results in real change. I ask you; is that not enough? Is it not enough to reveal the contradictions and mechanisms of capitalism? If the novel can only occupy the space of advocating for a revolution which material reality is already producing, is that not an honorable and great space to be in? Must the novel carry the weight of revolution on its back to matter at all?

Even if we are to concede that all of this is completely useless towards social change, we would, firstly, ultimately reaffirm much of what we have already stated and restated; that the novel itself cannot create different conditions, that to change material conditions one must change the system which produced those conditions, etc. We must concede these things to be true regardless on whether or not we find a place for the novel in the project of changing history.

But if we do not, if the novel is to be treated as cultural ephemera which is a distraction from the work of revolution at best: does that mean there is no value in the novel? Is it not valuable, intrinsically, to, as Vonnegut wrote, reach out and tell people, ‘you are not alone. There are a lot of others who feel as you do’? Is it not valuable to reaffirm the humanity of those suffering from the concussive forces of fascism, imperialism, and capital? If we have nothing else we can offer but an condemnation of our bitter present, should our focus not come down to trying to create the most biting condemnation possible?

Ultimately, though, I am drawn most towards the former conclusion: that the novel’s place in the abolition of the current state of things is as a means of raising political consciousness. A novel is only a collection of ideas — but so is any work of political theory. This is not to say that the novel should attempt to replace or regurgitate theory in a vulgar manner: quite the opposite. The unique capability of the novel is to reach out to the individual reader, to touch them, to move them both emotionally and intellectually. Thus, it is able to relate the large scale phenomena outlined in that theory into subjective experience. Theory gives us a literal understanding of this system and its mechanics where the novel, through metaphorical representation, can give us an emotional understanding, moves past the clinical diagnosis of a diseased system and into the sensation of sickness, a sickness we inevitably recognize in our own lives and have long grown tired of, and makes us long for treatment.

The revolution, if successful, will not be televised, because there will be very few left to watch it. Those who will be able to see the droves of people out on the streets will largely be the ones overthrown by the uprising. The televisions of those who are outside have been shut off and have been shut off for some time, not out of antipathy but out of incapacity: they have not had time to sit down and watch it for some time. The place the novel would take in this revolt would not be as the cause, it is true. But if we are successful as artists, what we will be able to do is create books which will one day have a great effect on their readers: we will write books which readers will arbitrarily take off their bookshelves and read, and as they do they will be beset upon by a certain grim realization. At one point or another they will realize that the things they have tacitly refused to see until this point have become visible: they will realize that they see the machinations of a machine which consumes human beings and produces human misery, that they smell the decaying bodies of the people murdered in the name of global American hegemony, that they hear the muffled screaming of the subaltern, and they will find it intolerable. And, as blithely as they took it off the shelf, they will suddenly snap the novel shut, as an awareness that the time for reading has come to an end dawns upon them. They will shut their television off, they will get dressed, they will go outside, and they will make history.

To quote Mario Savio:

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

Thanks for reading.