A four cornered impasse? (Politics of 4 kinds; efficacy conditions; etc)
As usual at the edge of my peripheral vision I can see a silhouette of what might be an idea and I want to try to get a good look at it here but first I need to do some throat clearing. The other day I remembered this old thing I wrote: https://libcom.org/article/making-our-languages-politics and I reread it and I’m not saying it’s smart but I am saying I still believe everything I said in it. I have half a mind to someday try to collect stuff I wrote back then (‘then’ meaning roughly ‘from a little while before to a little while after Occupy’) and put it all in one place, though maybe that’s just vanity like self-googling. Anyhow. In that old thing I say, as I think I’ve also said on here but I don’t remember (I don’t write this thing because I like to read it, ugh, who could like reading this thing?!) I think we lack a common vocabulary and set of reference points on the far left today and maybe more generally as well. I suspect this is both a perennial condition - probly what it is to be on the left per se - and also a real thing about the present, like the perennial condition is especially bad in the present.
Consider that paragraph my first big ahem. Now for the second.
I’ve read about 15 pages of Christopher Hamlin’s book on public health in mid-19th century Britain, if I recall the title is ‘Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick.’ I don’t have it in front of me and if I google for the title I’ll likely end up distracted - the internet is pernicious because full of shiny things. That’s part of why I say stuff like ‘if I recall correctly’ and ‘as I may have said...’ and whatnot on here - if I check I’ll lose my train of thought: this little blog o’mine is about writing and looking stuff up isn’t writing. So far the book is great. I have a long document of notes and quotes and thoughts in response which I’ll eventually toss up here, probly what I’ll do is drop that into a post later and plan to keep reading and note-taking/writing-to-think in response and when I’m done I’ll put all of that into that post so it’s all in one place. (Man this is gripping stuff, eh? Next I’ll be reading you my grocery list. Sigh.)
Right, so, in the Chadwick book Hamlin writes that historians of public health have overemphasized the explanatory role of social conditions. ‘Why did that institution come to exist? Because conditions’ isn’t the answer it often feels like it is. At most conditions pose political problems, or pose conditions that it takes work to turn into political problems in any practical sense, and political problems admit of multiple solutions. This relates to something Alex Heffron said in a conversation, I forget now if it was on social media or in something Alex wrote or something else, and I don’t remember the exact phrasing anymore (part of telling a story well is concrete detail, don’t you find?) but it was something like ‘people seem to want to outsource the politics of the response to this catastrophe to the catastrophe itself.’ This is very much my impulse a lot of the time!
Throat cleared, here’s the idea I want to flesh out: for lack of better terms I’m going to just say there are 4 politics, which I will helpfully name by number. (For real I’d welcome actual names for these if anyone has suggestions - I like having words for specific experiences and phenomena, its part of what’s genuinely really cool about The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. If you don’t know what that is, google it, its worth it imho.) So, politics 1 through 4, which hang together in an ensemble of shitfulness.
Politics 1 right now is the impulse to let conditions do the walking, so to speak - to outsource the politics of response to the catastrophe that is the pandemic to the catastrophe itself. A little more concretely, this is an impulse like ‘let’s speak truth to power’ or ‘if people only knew the truth.’
Politics 2 is our need to not completely fucking drown psychically because the weight of the compounded nightmare of the world (right now and also always) is so massive in both pushing and pulling us down and the water is so choppy, and the mechanisms/habits/practices/whatever we use - I think rarely fully consciously? - to stay afloat and shout/cry/howl/whatever our intense and reasonable distress.
Politics 3 is the total situation that we’re in, the conditions themselves, which are the nightmare that politics 2 responds to: capitalist social relations, the pandemic, the shitful social-murder-intensifying policies of the government, the various ideological pressures on us, etc.
Politics 4 is a consciously held-in-common account of the pandemic and of political actions in response - not necessarily an agreed upon common program of action but at least a set of reference points debated openly and thought through together - and it seems to me this barely exists in any real way in the world.
I think politics 1 is in part just what it is to be a relatively socially included member of a liberal democracy - I’m a white, abled, gender conforming straight man with an okay job, so I don’t experience the formal or informal kinds of social disqualification or barriers to social and institutional participation that a lot of people do in this society. Being an approved subject of a liberal democracy, I think, fosters certain kinds of ‘we can work this out through reasoned discussion’ kinds of impulses. It’s also an occupational hazard for certain kinds of writers and people employed as academics, I think - it’s hard not to think that the content of words on the page matter in some way. And they do, but it’s easy to get the way they matter wrong.
I also have a hunch that politics 1 continues to exist because it’s a vehicle for politics 2 (could it be said that politics 1 mediates politics 2 right now? Filing that away to think about later when I’m at my most eggheaded). That is to say, I suspect my own impulse to speak truth to power despite my explicitly consciously not believing that power cares about truth - and my related impulses to a) conflate speaking truth to my fellow social nobodies with speaking truth to power and b) conflate what amounts to shouting ‘oh my god what the FUCK’ into the void for speaking to my fellow social nobodies - has a grip on me because acting in line with that impulse and just being in felt grip of that impulse (ie, feeling the ‘people need to know the truth!’ sensibility as intensely as I do with some regularity) is part of living - well, “living” - despite how fucking awful the world is right now.
I spent a long while, like a really long while, trying to inform friends, family, coworkers, and students about the realities of covid infection and the pandemic more broadly and I do think I got somewhere doing so, but I also think I didn’t get very far and after while I felt like people were increasingly tuning me out so I bring it up less often in those settings. Even as I bring it up less, the impulse to bring it remains pretty high, which creates a kind of nothing but bad options situation - talk and feel tuned out, don’t talk when I think something important is going unsaid. Pick your poison.
Part of what I’m trying to get at here is that information is not self-enacting - again, conditions don’t do the politics, we can’t outsource the politics of the catastrophe response to the catastrophe itself. Rather, information’s power is contextual: there are efficacy conditions for information, and those conditions are largely absent right now. Hence the sense of telling the truth but irrelevantly so. That ups the psychic distress as it means really important shit is socially rendered as merely trivially true - a bit like shouting ‘fire!’ in front of a burning building while people just keep walking by. I had an emotional experience that rhymed with this while writing my book. The book is on employee injury and the law thereof. Researching and writing it meant in effect wading waist-deep into the worst days in lots and lots of people’s lives: people getting their hands, scalps, faces, limbs, torn or burnt off; people witnessing that happening to someone right next to them; people learning that such a thing had happened to their loved ones. Obviously I’m not the real victim in any of that, I just witnessed it at a remove, but it was a weight to carry anyway. I repeatedly felt like the whole world should stop even just when I read about those events, and even more so should have stopped when that stuff happened in the first place. But the world, which is organized in capitalism as a death machine, never once stopped. That disjunction felt (feels!) real bad in a way that disorganizes my thinking - it’s like my ears are ringing or I’m in the dark and someone shined a bright in my eyes and they need to re-adjust now.
What I’m fumbling for is that there are a linked pair of experiences here, the shitfulness of the immediate events plus the shitfulness of the sense of disconnection and isolation amid my response to the immediate events for which we don’t have a shared, adequate explanatory framework let alone a shared practical approach - ie, we lack politics 4. That pair is so atrocious, feels really hard to live with and we don’t really have any option but to live with it so we find ways to do so. Those ways are what I’m calling politics 2. And for me and I suspect for a lot of other people as well, we act out politics 1 despite the lack of efficacy conditions for it because really that acting out of politics 1 is how we’re doing politics 2. That is, to stay afloat we pursue practices - I was just this morning arguing with a relative on social media about this, very strongly in the grip of a sense that it really mattered to do that while simultaneously also strongly (but less so, hence still doing the arguing) that doing so was probly pointless really because, as I’ve put it in this post, the efficacy conditions just aren’t there right now. That combination fucking sucks so fucking bad, holy shit, and I think to an important degree I often swallow down and forget (partly willfully and partly unconsciously, as part of the automatic or unconscious section of my mind is trying to protect me from the pain of the sense of disconnection and also the pain of feeling like we’re just stuck and fucked forever. Which we’re not. But absent a clear and worked out pathway to exit it’s really, really easy to start to think we are, and that’s a drowning-thought, a weight to pull one under.)
I think the brutal reality is that this impasse will continue a long while, another thing I want to - and, again, at some level both willfully and unconsciously, a thing I actively do - hide from as it’s so hard to really take on board. As I’ve said before I remain fully optimistic in the long term and at the same time the repeated realization of how long the long term actually is relative to the shortness of our lives and the longness of our suffering, well, it’s just a lot.
As I said I suspect that politics 1 as currently pursued does some important work in meeting psychic needs (politics 2) and also can only ever fall short of what we really need because what we really need is a real end to the pandemic. And I think politics 1 isn’t helping create the efficacy conditions under which the truth would matter in the way it feels like it ought to - it’s not really fostering politics 4. Having just typed that, I suspect that part of the grip of politics 1 (part of how politics 1 is practiced as actually politics 2 right now) is that it’s a vehicle for expressing our urgent need and desire for those efficacy conditions and also for doing the intense grieving we have to do over both the traumas of the pandemic and also over the lack of those efficacy conditions. This has all been a brutalizing process of being confronted with the fact that the world is even worse than most of us thought it was, even the already fairly radical and/or cynical of us.
I’m going to stop in a moment but I want to say two last things, one short and one long. Short: just to reiterate what I said above, I’d welcome suggestions of better terms than ‘politics, politics 2, politics 3, and politics 4.’ I think I’m right that these are 4 things that are in the world politically right now and relate to each other, but concisely descriptive names would be much better. I got nothing for that right now.
Long: to try to clarify one thing a little more, I get that how I’ve been using ‘efficacy conditions’ is vague. Trying to specify a little more: the truth doesn’t itself do anything in the world. Marx writes, if memory serves, that theory becomes a material force when it grips the masses. And really, ‘the masses’ are politically inert absent organization, mobilization, repertoires of action, and so on. (One facet of this is the kinds of stuff in the old piece of mine I linked to at the top of this.) Truths - accurate descriptions and explanations of what is in fact happening - are important resources for the collective practices of politics, but truths don’t create those collective practices. A particular social context has to be in place for truths to really be any kind of resource, and that context has to be built. I think a lot of people - absolutely me anyway - walked into the pandemic assuming we were in that context, and that state agencies and forms of professional knowledge like public health were useful/available/active/real pathways and actors composing part of that context. Turns out... not so much, an appalling realization that’s part of the avalanche of appalling shit that keeps rolling downhill onto us.
What it would take to create those efficacy conditions (how to construct politics 4) feels above my paygrade. I suspect that’s worth thinking about a lot more yet also not as worth thinking about as it may appear because the bringing about of those efficacy conditions isn’t likely to proceed such that one smart individual or a few smart individuals figure out the plan and then inform everyone else. Instead I suspect it’s going to be a matter of limited, faltering activities in a very widespread, diffused and dispersed way, that eventually accrete (I think that’s the word?), like drops of water depositing minerals that construct a stalactite over time, into a greater shared clarity analytically and programmatically. As I tried to say the other day in my response to Tony Smith, politics is in part a very large scale collective learning process. I think the reality is that the best any individuals and small organizations can do is try to foster better starting points to aid that collective learning process, and again that process will be genuinely insufferably long term relative to the moral and visceral urgency of all this suffering.
Feels like a grim place to stop this (written from - and read by people within - a grim place to live, god damn). Sorry gang, and I mean that. Keep on trucking anyhow.
cheers,
Nate
ps- Having written this out, I became worried that my remarks on the limits of what I’m here calling, ever helpfully and insightfully, “politics 1” ie the impulse to buy into a ‘speak truth to power’ politics, might sound like I don’t care about the truth, or might sound like I don’t value writing about the pandemic. Far from it. I value both. I just think that in learning and then sharing the truth about this nightmare we are not so much changing the hearts and minds of people who aren’t on the same page as us or otherwise opposing the death machine as we are trying to make sense of our own experience of that machine and finding others who are cut from similar cloth. That matters tremendously but it is at best a necessary precondition for getting started on what I here called, again with admirable wit and power of literary expression, “politics 4.” As I said above, truth is a resource for collectivities. Currently collectivities adequate to the tasks before us don’t exist yet, but that doesn’t mean there are no collectivities at all currently, it means we’re not anywhere near an acceptable a stopping point (or even an acceptable starting point). I think the kinds of uses for truth by - the ways in which truths are resources for - collectivities changes with the size and character of those collectivities. For instance, my need to share info and analysis with fellow covid-zero zealots is real and important, and I very much appreciate the friends and fellow travelers who do that sharing with me, and that sharing has at most a highly mediated relationship to politics 4. Final word goes to Lenin, of whom I’m not a huge fan actually but still. Paraphrasing just slightly: politics begin when millions of men and women are in motion; where there are not thousands, but millions, that is where serious politics begin.
We’ll get there, but not as soon as we desperately and rightly want.