educating desires/constructing majorities
Two phrases echoing in my head lately (my head is a largely empty cave in which the distress and exhaustion feedback, punctuated by these occasional echoes): “politics does not reflect majorities, it constructs them” and “utopia’s proper space is the education of desire.” The first is a Stuart Hall line as best I can recall it, the second is a lightly paraphrased line by EP Thompson (“education of desire” is word for word; I saw the quote in an essay on 20th century socialist fiction in the UK and wasn’t expecting Thompson to appear in it. I think it’s a quote from his biography of the radical and artist William Morris, which I’ve not read. Anyhow, if anyone wants the exact quotes and can’t find them on a quick google, let me know and I can look them up. The gist is good enough for my purposes here but I get that exact quotes with citations are worthwhile.) My sense is that ‘utopia’ here really means utopian vision in art, but I’m not entirely sure. My sense is the Hall line refers to the doing of politics in an every day sense, politics as an activity in the straightforward usage of the word and understood that way the quote makes a useful point, but I think it’s not too far afield from what (admittedly very little) I know of Hall to say that the quote can be usefully flipped the other way round - the construction of majorities is a political process - in a way that I think makes the resonance with Thompson clearer. In any case, the sense in both quotes is similar insofar as they both refer to a process of transforming people collectively and individually: making a new society is a process of making new people, not in a linear ‘do this one first then the other follows’ way so much as that the two processes are actually a single process.
As usual lately my mind goes two places here - mid-twentieth century UK radical politics, and covid today. In reverse order: as I’ve said before, I find being more covid cautious than typical in the circles I’m in to be isolating and exhausting, deeply lonely and also corrosive on my interest in interacting. I simply have less interest in associating with a lot of people than I used to, and yet that interest isn’t zero - people I have less desire to hang out with are still people I have some desire to hang out with - but/and the hanging out is less fun and more tiring to consider now, let alone do. That’s straightforwardly a matter of not being on the same page with people about covid behavior-wise (I’m still masking, not eating at restaurants, etc), but it’s also a matter of disconnect in that I have past and present killing, disabling, harming of the pandemic fairly close to my immediate top of mind and I also think that stuff was and is a deep violation and atrocity. You know that ‘this is fine’ meme of the dog sitting down in a room on fire? It’s a bit like I’m another dog in that same room howling ‘what the fuuuuuck’ or something. The disconnect with the ‘fine’ dog is uncomfortable in multiple ways, to put it lightly.
That said, I recently talked to three people at work who all had had covid not long ago and all of them were to some degree kicking themselves of getting sick because they felt they hadn’t been cautious enough. I will admit to some degree of impulse to compare cautiousness, an impulse that feels very close to tisking in an ‘I told you so’ tone, but mostly I just feel really sad for them. Not only are they sick but also to some degree they blame themselves for getting sick. That seems to me like insult added to injury, and the fact that in one sense they are doing the insulting themselves makes it worse. I say ‘in one sense’ because their blaming themselves is externally cultivated, an effect of context. I don’t know if it’s exactly the result of a process of ‘educating desire’ but it’s not far off anyway. Similarly the fact that some of the sensibilities and behaviors involved in both their getting sick and their blaming themselves are both widespread and cultivated by policymakers is an example of politics constructing majorities.
One of those coworkers said that I had earlier described us as being stuck in a particular way (I don’t remember saying this or this phrase, but who knows), namely that we’re trying to individual choice our way out of a structural problem, which just doesn’t really work, and it’s not like we chose to have only individual choices, that reflects our being dropped in the shit by the government. It feels funny to quote myself (Stewart Lee voice: “I believe it was I who said...”) but since I don’t remember it and my coworker said it to me it feels less so (well, it feels less funny-icky and more funny-haha). I think ‘trying to individual choice our way out of a structural problem’ is a good way to put it. Widespread negative individual behaviors related to covid are effects of collective processes and state action. Covid politics doesn’t reflect a majority being any particular way, rather covid politics has constructed a majority that is a certain way currently. As usual I’m optimistic and pessimistic about the construction of a new and better majority - optimistic in the long term: we marxist covid zero zealots reflect a future consensus; pessimistic in the short term: that future consensus will get here with grinding slowness and a lot more people will get really hurt in the meantime.
The emphasis on structure and on people as significantly shaped by structure, context, historical process - ie, people as products of their larger environment - means I don’t take other people’s behaviors to heart as much, which is nice as I don’t need more things to be pissed off about. On the other hand, saying ‘well, you’re a product of your environment...’ hardly feels like fully respecting someone as a peer - so I don’t say it, not out loud anyway - and one term for one condition when you respect fewer as peers is ‘getting lonelier.’
The other direction: mid 20th century UK far left, the milieus Hall and Thompson came out of. As I must have mentioned, I’ve been reading some fiction (novels: I approve!) by people who were in the mix - Stalin-skeptical socialists and communists, basically. Partly this is just an excuse to read something I enjoy, as I’m not exactly oversupplied with real good times, but also these milieus tended to both try to support political art and also to try to think politically about existing art and culture. So reading novels from the era just sort of makes sense. I also happen to think that milieu emerges out of a process like I talked about in my post the other day, what Ralph Miliband called a state of de-subordination: basically plebs get uppity across society. Society is a pyramid made up of smaller pyramids nested together, i.e., society is hierarchical and composed of hierarchical organizations and institutions, and Miliband argued that in the 70s in the UK the people at the bottoms of many of those pyramids, little and big, were getting less easy for the people at the tops of the pyramids to manage. That’s not per se an exclusively progressive thing: reactionary disobedience is possible, for one thing, and also a diffuse refusal or troubling of subordination is as much or more an unsettling of the present as it is a kernel of a better future. Anyhow, I think something similar was also happening in the late 50s and early 60s for a while in the UK (and again later too of course), and the far left milieus I’m interest in partially reflected that/were products of that and also sought to respond to it by intensifying it, channeling it in emancipatory directions, and providing more concrete organization for it.
I mention this because it seems to me that novels from this period are a rough and ready window - but, like a pretty one too? stained glass window? idk idk, anyway - onto both the patterns of subordination that people were increasingly unhappy with and some of the ways they became more resistant to that subordination in that period. A little more specifically, I read a few Doris Lessing novels from the 50s then got onto Mervyn Jones, again from the 50s. I’ve read his No Time To Be Young, The New Town, and The Last Barricade, and have now started another, Helen Blake. (I’m just going in chronological order of when the books were published and will turn back to Lessing when the year of publication is right. We must have standards!) All of these novels have themes along the lines of what I said: discontent with the life on offer, criticisms of forms of contentment with the unacceptable, and various expressions of both that discontent and that criticism in different people’s lives - forms that are more and less pro-social/solidaristic, good or bad for the individuals involved, and conducted with greater and less degrees of a) confidence, b) collective organization, and c) individual discipline. I’m not at all suggesting there’s a clear, explicit, straightforward politics presented in or extractable from these works but I do feel like the authors’ politics makes sense and influences part of what I like in these books. It’s part of why they make sense and help me make sense of things, and when I’m reading them they just sort of feel like I’m within the loose shared political imagination that not especially close comrades and fellow travelers have in common. I appreciate that as a palliative against the current political loneliness and I also trust that this kind of feeling of mediated camaraderie indicates that the books will be good to think with, which I also appreciate. Okay but what really do those quotes have to do with those novels? Well, for one thing I think the novels can be understood as doing some of that education of desire and constructing majorities. For another, I think insofar as they’re realist novels that accurately reflect the times they depict (I’m not a British historian but I’ve read enough to feel confident saying that the works are relatively true to life), they help draw out how the processes of desubordination underway were processes of educating desire - a collective self-education carried out in a diffuse way by many, many people - and at least some of the time and at least in potential processes of constructing new political majorities. Time and tide flow wide, I guess. Final thought: I still insist that music, and particularly unsettled music, is good art for the fucked up present and can be part of educating desire and constructing new majorities, though that also implies an instrumental value as if jungle is good music because political useful, instead of just being fucking great intrinsically. That’s not what I mean. What I mean instead, I think, is that there are explicit and consciously organized processes of constructing majorities and educating desires, and there are implicit and not fully consciously organized processes of doing so (that’s a continuum rather than a stark dichotomy), with the latter being along the lines of Raymond Williams’s ‘new alternative and oppositional cultures emerge sometimes as part of the unfolding of history’ kinda thing. I think music just is a big part of the latter sorts of processes and emergences sometimes. I dunno if it’s a big part in the present in the sense of being socially widespread or if it’s just a big part in terms of my personal (and that of some friends of mine) way of understanding the world and coping with it.