Enforced meaninglessness plus more on the first New Left
I think I’ve mentioned before on here that I no longer want to say ‘manufacturing consent’ about the pandemic because ‘consent’ to me conjures up a content that’s positive in two senses - that there’s a thought there (an actual presence, as opposed to an absence), and that it’s an approving thought. The go to comparison for me is the US attacks on Iraq in the 90s and 00s. I remember talk about Hussein being basically Hitler and then later the idea was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Those were propaganda efforts to get people to actively approve of US military action, and that’s what I associate (whether rightly or wrongly) with ‘manufactured consent.’ With the pandemic I think instead we have a lot less positive content in either sense - little approval and little effort by anyone in official positions of power to call attention to the pandemic. Abby Cartus said in a conversation recently that we’re really in a condition of “enforced meaninglessness” which seems totally right to me. I think that meaninglessness does coexist with some propaganda efforts to manufacture consent in the sense I mentioned, but even moreso we have lack of information, a cultivated absense of thought - cultivated in part by reassurance that there’s no danger to you or anyone you should think about, and related to that a kind of incomprehension via interruption. What I mean on that last bit is that some days it’s hard to hear myself think or even to have thoughts at all, partly because work and other obligations are tiring, partly because life in a hellscape is generally distracting and energy depleting, and partly because there’s a lot of noise and little signal in a great deal of the talk about (or deliberate talking around of) the pandemic, and that noise also makes it harder to think.
I suspect this is all doing tremendous psychic damage to basically everyone, moreso to two groups, those most immediately harmed by covid (insofar as they’re left with fewer resources to make sense of the experience and also siloed off into a corner so to speak, because surrounded by a somewhat hostile and fairly uncomprehending social context) and those most apparently at peace with the pandemic and just sort of going about their lives as normal like pod people in the Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. The damage is pretty different to the second group. To my mind part of all this is that there’s not a consensus meaning for the pandemic, it’s largely an unprocessed event.
I’ve been thinking about this a little via this bit from EP Thompson. He referred to experience as “social being’s impingement upon social consciousness,” meaning, I take it, that the way we live shapes the way we think and feel, that shaping being complicated in various ways. Quoting at length, he wrote that
“Experience arises spontaneously within social being, but it does not arise without thought; it arises because men and women (and not only philosophers) are rational, and they think about what is happening to themselves and their world. (...) changes take place within social being, which give rise to changed experience: and this experience is determining, in the sense that it exerts pressures upon existent social consciousness, proposes new questions (...) Experience walks in without knocking at the door, and announces deaths, crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide. People starve: their survivors think in new ways about the market. People are imprisoned: in prison they meditate in new ways about the law. In the face of such general experiences old conceptual systems may crumble and new problematics insist upon their presence. (...) people do not only experience their own experience as ideas, within thought and its procedures, or (as some theoretical practitioners suppose) as proletarian instinct, etc. They also experience their own experience as feeling, and they handle their feelings within their culture, as norms, familial and kinship obligations and reciprocities, as values or (through more elaborated forms) within art or religious beliefs. This half of culture (and it is a full one-half) may be described as affective and moral consciousness.” Those are all from here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1978/pot/essay.htm
He went on a little later to distinguish tentatively between “experiences I - lived experience - and II - perceived experience. (…) events within ‘social being’ - such events being indeed often consequent upon material causes which go on behind the back of consciousness or intention - which inevitably do and must give rise to lived experience, experience I, which do not instantly break through as ‘reflections’ into experience II, but whose pressure upon the whole field of consciousness cannot be indefinitely diverted, postponed, falsified or suppressed by ideology. (…) Experience I is in eternal friction with imposed consciousness, and, as it breaks through, we, who fight in all the intricate vocabularies and disciplines of experience II, are given moments of openness and opportunity before the mould of ideology is imposed once more.”
That’s from here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1978/pot/postscript.htm
In those terms, we all have lived experiences of pandemic life, with lots of differences in those experiences along axes of class and so on, and we have not so much as an “imposed consciousness” of the pandemic as an imposed peripherality - the pandemic made to some degree, in shared cultural reference points, into a word on the tip of the tongue, something just at the edge of perceptibility and which seems to recede when we try to focus directly on it. (That’s overstated because many of us do have a grasp of what’s going on, my point is that we don’t have a shared sense of what’s going on that we hold in common generally.) Even so, as much as or more than imposed consciousness, the enforced meaninglessness of the pandemic makes it harder to have perceived experiences (again, to have them in common with one another generally - lacking a shared frame of reference and with our perception or comprehension of the pandemic actively interrupted, we have a sort of fracturing: at the level of lived experience we’re living through the pandemic differently based on class position and so on, and that difference gets magnified in the differences in which we have perceived experiences of the pandemic, or have lived experiences that never become perceived experiences as a result of enforced meaninglessness). Again I think the psychic costs are high, and this condition is significantly politically demobilizing - rather than manufactured consent we have dissent prevented.
This is part of the bad guys winning, the indifferent inhumane processes continuing to condition the world we live in. The official politics of the pandemic continues to win out, to remain successfully dominant, and what I said above is both a description of the effects of that ongoing dominance and also those effects also operate as causes in the sense of feedback loops, reinforcing the dominance. (This point about capitalism and feedback loops is well made by Søren Mau in his book Mute Compulsion, on which I encourage you to check out Cartus’s review: https://buttondown.email/abbycartus/archive/social-murder-and-social-meaning/)
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The pandemic is a new event to which old analyses and politics are inadequate. These terms can be overstated and can be quibbled with of course - there’s a lot of old in the new, the new can sound like a revival of the old, etc. Fair enough. It remains the case that we lack an adequate empirical account of pandemic life and policy, lack an adequate theorization as well, and lack an adequate political practice. This is in important respects an example of how capitalism over time is stabilized by destabilizing our lives: the effects of capitalism’s various crises throw a great deal in to disorder, often fatally so for many people, and that disorder means two things - one, the effects of crisis in people’s lives are themselves serious obstacles to a political response to crisis, because of the ways our lives and many other things are thrown into disarray, and two, prior relatively solid resources for a left response (analyses, organizations, practices) are likewise thrown into disarray and also likely to be challenged by the pressures of people disagreeing (understandably) heatedly over what to do in the new circumstance.
(Anton Pannekoek writes “ Society does not develop in a continuous way, free from setbacks, but through conflicts and antagonisms. While the working class battle is widening in scope, the enemy's strength is increasing. Uncertainty about the way to be followed constantly and repeatedly troubles the minds of the combatants; and doubt is a factor in division, of internal quarrels and conflicts within the workers' movement.
It is useless to deplore these conflicts as creating a pernicious situation that should not exist and which is making the workers powerless. (…) And the reason why the proletariat ought to seek new ways is that the enemy has strength of such a kind that the old methods are ineffectual. The working class will not secure these ways by magic, but through a great effort, deep reflection, through the clash of divergent opinions and the conflict of impassioned ideas. It is incumbent upon it to find its own way, and precisely therein is the raison d'être of the internal differences and conflicts. It is forced to renounce outmoded ideas and old chimeras, and it is indeed the difficulty of this task that engenders such big divisions.
Nor should the illusion be nursed that such impassioned party conflicts and opinion clashes belong only to a transitional period such as the present one, and that they will in due course disappear, leaving a unity stronger than ever. Certainly, in the evolution of the class struggle, it sometimes happens that all the various elements of strength are merged in order to snatch some great victory, and that revolution is the fruit of this unity. But in this case, as after every victory, divergences appear immediately when it comes to deciding on new objectives. The proletariat then finds itself faced with the most arduous tasks: to crush the enemy, and more, to organize production, to create a new order. It is out of the question that all the workers, all categories and all groups, whose interests are still far from being homogeneous, should think and feel in the same way, and should reach spontaneous and immediate agreement about what should be done next. It is precisely because they are committed to finding for themselves their own way ahead that the liveliest differences occur, that there are clashes among them, and that finally, through such conflict, they succeed in clarifying their ideas.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1936/party-working-class.htm)
I also think that there are new analyses and politics being created, we need more of that, and alongside that some of the time people can’t tell the difference between on the one hand identifying the new problem and the need for a new perspective - that identification happening in versions of the old terms - and on the other hand the actual new politics needed. This too fosters conflicts and disconnects, and I think there’s no way around it, it just has to be pushed through.
On new politics and thought, I’m reminded of a Stewart Lee bit that I think of often. He says that a right wing comedian will soon launch a touring show called “An evening of certainty” advertised with the line “leave just as you arrived, only more so.” I think this gets at the complacency - the comfort with the death and disablement of so many - that typifies the Bidens of the world and that the enforced meaninglessness of the pandemic is a condition that fosters a similar affect. No need for anything new, nothing is wrong, keep smiling and keep working.
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As I’ve mentioned before, I continue to be interested in the first New Left in the UK, from about 1957-1962 and in its afterlives. Now, I’m just interested in this period, full stop, and for lots of reasons. As such it’s something I think about relatively often, to the degree I’m thinking at all, and it often becomes a vehicle through which I think about other things. So of course it’s on my mind here as well.
The first New Left arose in a time of social and political novelty and in many ways of a bad kind. There were old cycles ending plus new harms and injustices, so that received politics in the far left and in the official institutions of society struck a lot of people on the left as inadequate, in a context of widespread and somewhat diffused social discontent. I think the New Left didn’t succeed at constructing a new politics and analysis in the manner in which it aspired to, it more announced the need for that new politics and analysis and laid a lot of groundwork for future political and intellectual work. The analogy is probably obvious in that I think present politics is likewise inadequate, likewise a need for a new politics and analysis.
I also think of the first New Left because it was largely a collection of relative social nobodies - lowercase I intellectuals, doing alright economically in their time but nowhere near independently wealthy or with access to the halls of official power - and their political activity including their intellectual work was largely unrewarded and hard to sustain. Some of them later became famous and more well to do, but by 1962 or so the participants in the initial cycle seemed to be really struggling, feeling the wear and tear of their efforts combined with the need to make a living. This is in some respects not an uplifting parallel but in other respects I think it’s inspiring and something of a provocation insofar as it was regular people without any real resources making their way collectively, tracing the new situation, surveying their political inheritance and retaining their core commitments, and trying to push things forward. To me it’s a bit like punk - ordinary people starting bands becomes a provocation to other ordinary people: we have aspirations and dissatisfactions too, let’s express them, and see if we can make something worthwhile, because the issues matter and must be addressed, because regardless of our efficacy or not some of us just feel compelled to speak and write on these matters and to try to make more sense of them, just as a pursuit that’s intrinsically valuable. One implication in this parallel is to expect that the rewards of the work will arise from the doing of the work and the community that the work mediates, expect frustration and sadness to be high and to feel like the work is both inadequate to its object (we need new politics as I’ve said and efforts toward that will fall short a long time) and is undervalued - especially relative to the felt sense of moral urgency it has - other than within small networks. That’s just what it’s like at present and there’s no point in either denying or dwelling on that, it’s just something to recognize honestly, to work through emotionally, and to manage insofar as it’s something of a strain and source of energy loss.
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On this point about new politics and old forms and conflicts over what to do, I think often of a line by the philosopher Otto Neurath, taken up later by others. I’m told it’s a riff on the myth of the Ship of Theseus, and from wikipedia, that sounds plausible to me. It’s in reference to how our beliefs and vocabularies change over time gradually and piecemeal, rather than being subject to being remade fully from top to bottom all of a sudden. Here’s a version of it: “We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.” Making new politics orients to older politics like that - keep some, pull up and repurpose some, throw out some - and we fight among ourselves in part because sometimes we’re trying to pull planks out from under each other, and sometimes we really have to do so, and some people might get knocked overboard in the process sometimes. No way out but through.
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Two other thoughts, neither completed, both related to the first New Left insofar as it’s me drawing from people who passed through. One, I’m reading the book Politics and Letters right now, which is a collection of interviews with Raymond Williams conducted by editors from New Left Review (people not really associated with the first New Left, I think the details would be boring to anyone but me so I won’t get into it here), and I hope to make it through more work by Williams. (Not ‘make it through’ because it’s a slog, so far what I’m reading by him is great, I’m just a slow reader easily distracted with too much else to do.) In an essay of his - if I recall correctly, it’s “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory” - he lays out a set of terms for understanding culture dynamically and as a matter of contention. In any time period there’s a dominant culture, with non-dominant elements being either residual - old ways that persist - or emergent - new ways being made. Those non-dominant elements can be either alternative to the dominant, oppositional to it, and/or undergoing processes of incorporation into it. Williams stresses that dominant cultures aren’t homegeneous but rather part of their dominance can consist in their being internally contentious, but that contention can crowd out possibilities. (As a simple examle, if you’re spending all your time fighting about whether Biden or someone else should be the nominee for the Democratic candidate for President, you’ve got no time left for any other political issues or activity.)
I think Covid Zero Zealot Marxism (please excuse my failing sense of humor, and please don't let my unseriousness make you think it isn't serious; I feel like I should admit both those lines are plagiarized. “By the way, I stole this riff”), that is, that ‘our’ responses to the pandemic are examples of emergent new culture and politics, and a lot of responses are a mix of dominant and residual. I want to think more about those terms and read more Williams. I feel like they’re of some use for mapping out the ideological condition we’re in. Also part of Williams’s whole deal is that society changes unpredictably as well, so that new conditions can come about that need adequate politics, thought, art, etc, so that it’s not an idea of a static dominant culture preventing newness so much as it’s a whole world in motion with differences over that motion and how to make sense of it, what to do about it. Williams’s concepts have room for situations like I think we’re in now, in that there can be an important social change without an adequate response. He says somewhere that in effect there are pre-emergent phenomena, meaning conditions experienced without an art and politics adequate to it at first, so that when new cultural and political articulations in response to those conditions come about there is a strong sense of recognition despite the work being new. I think this refer to that thing I love where I’ve had part of a thought and wanted words for it, then someone gives me those words. (“Somehow the singer told the [venue] exactly how I feel” goes a line in a song I like a great deal by the Alkaline Trio. The venue is the Fireside Bowl, which I miss and have many memories of. Anyhow.) I feel like a jerk saying this but I think my “broken sociality” essay struck some people that way, as a ‘this articulated my experience to me’ kind of a thing. https://web.archive.org/web/20230301200633/https://www.pestemag.com/lost-to-follow-up/broken-sociality (I got what felt to me, as a nobody, like a lot of responses to that piece in a way I felt honored and intimidated by.) I think one way to restate some of that piece would be to say that being in an emergent oppositional position can be a real strain for the people in that location, especially when the stakes of the opposition feel as high as they do right now.
To go back to the EP Thompson bits above, social being determines social consciousness and it does because new lived experiences provoke rethinking which leads to new perceived experiences and further reflection. This proceeds in fits and starts and is uneven across society. Blockages like enforced meaninglessness and lack of adequate frameworks impede the changes in social consciousness and there can be painful lags and disjuncts like I talked about in that essay.
The other thought and last one for this. There’s a great essay by Ralph Miliband called “A State of De-Subordination” https://www.jstor.org/stable/589656 where he speculates that in Britain in the 70s - he was writing toward the end of that decade - there was widespread discontent with social authority and relatively less willingness across society for subordinated people to play their prescribed roles without friction within relationships of authority and subordination. This was part of what underlay the hard right, he suggested, and I think the emergence of Thatcherism shortly after he wrote it supports his analysis. He said that he thought some people in the UK at the time wanted a counter-revolution against the desubordination to restore the troubled authority, re-compel obedience. I think this is an interesting set of concepts that’s portable to other periods and I think it’s at least one strand of what’s going on in some politics around schools these days, related to the pandemic and more.
I thought of this because I saw this news story about school absenteeism in Australia. https://www.theeducatoronline.com/k12/news/covid-lockdowns-still-affecting-student-attendance--expert/284155 I’ve seen other stories about the US as well. Now a lot of this is that kids are sick, this seems obvious to me and I won’t bother making the point at any more length or trying to support it here. That said, I’m also struck by a line in this article: “The pandemic normalised school refusal.” My first response was “good!” because I think that refusal is anti-authoritarian. My second response, a little more thoughtful, is that I suspect one nontrivial thread in pandemic policy is a strong concern by both public and private elites to maintain subordination and prevent desubordination. I suspect that the rebellions in response to the murder of George Floyd, the politics of the Chicago Teachers Union and other teachers unions willing to rock the boat, and the whole conversation about quiet quitting and labor shortages and so on, due in part to the temporary use of more redistributive policies, have all been pretty big factors in pandemic policy. (It’s tempting to stress here that labor shortages are tied to people being sick and so on rather than insubordinate, but illness or death of a subordinate is often insubordination from the perpective of the people on top of the heap.)