Help, I watched some movies and felt some feelings!
Our dishwasher was always a bit shit and it’s been busted for ages. A combination of laziness, cheapness, and not wanting to fuck with having a new one delivered and installed and asking the people to wear masks means we’ve just lived with it for ages. I do the dishes by hand after everyone goes to bed. (I did when we had a dishwasher too.) I don’t especially mind beyond an abstract sense that one ought to have a dishwasher. I kind of feel like we should yank the dishwasher and put in more cabinet space in our shoebox of a kitchen but I don’t want to fuck with that either. I could be wrong but I feel like this is an example of markets don’t just respond to preferences but shape preferences - I’m remaking my preferences in accord with what’s on offer that I can afford: I’d much prefer to be rich and all.
Anyhow, when I wash the dishes at night I watch stuff on my laptop. At one point I was listening to music more in that window, I dunno why the change. What’s the Marshall McCluhan (not sure I spelled that right) thing about hot and cool media? I can’t remember the distinction anymore (this is a great story, eh?) but as I vaguely recall it there’s media that sort of take the audience on a ride and there’s media that pull the audience into them in a way that gets the audience to have something of a workout, demand a little more of the audience in the process. I feel like I have less gas in the can for the latter these days (hard to get up from the floor, so to speak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AHoQR1Fi1E).
That’s all a long preface - but hey, at least it’s also boring and nonedifying!, credit where it’s due, dude - to saying my Ken Loach film binge continues. I think I’ve recentlyish watched Sorry We Missed You, The Price of Coal, I Daniel Blake, The Gamekeeper, Kes, Looks and Smiles, The Navigators, and Up the Junction. I remember being really into his Justice for Janitors movie - with what’s his butt, Adrian Brody maybe? and the Spanish Civil War one, but these recent ones are even more up my street. Basically they’re studies in how working class people play the hand their dealt, with hand dealt unfairly of course so that people are set up to fail, in various particular times and places and looking at different facets of those people’s lives in the process - especially various relationships: work friends, neighbors, partners, kids, parents... (I listed those in case you don’t know what a relationship is. You’re welcome, dear reader, I’m here to uplift and edify, at my own expense. I’m not saying I’m a hero who deserves an award, but I wouldn’t turn down a cash prize, especially a big one like if the McArthur Genius people starting giving out a corresponding Doofus Award, but I digress.) I can imagine a hostile viewer going ‘we know how all of these movies will end though’ and the defensibility of that response depends on the class background of the person saying it. Working class people who are like ‘I’m living enough misery, thanks, don’t feel like watching more of it!’ are one thing, other people who just aren’t interested in working class people’s lives and/or don’t understand the role of class in conditioning working class people’s lives, well, believe it or not, not everything is for you. Go watch whatever it is you people watch! Long preface continues, I suppose.
Anyhow - and this time I mean it! - I’m watching Loach films about people getting wrecked by the ordinary course of events in life, including the ordinary operations of state and economy, and I keep thinking ‘this too is social murder.’ I don’t want to make the category overly broad but on the other hand, capitalism is massively blood soaked and the bloodletting never stops, both metaphorically and literally. (Marx puts it something to the effect that capitalism generates wealth at one pole and misery at the other, both accumulate. Werner Bonefeld’s newest book, on economic coercion, is significantly about this.) To an important degree, capitalism harms everyone in the system and is beneath the dignity of everyone, but not at all equally. Watching the Loach movies underlines how many people are walking around mid-destruction, so to speak, fighting to stay afloat in and against the currents that will pull them under. I see a lot of my extended family in these movies, and I have to say that one of the particular miseries of my having ended up an academic is that I’ve had a mild degree of class mobility, knowing a lot more middle class people than I would have otherwise, and setting aside the genuine loveliness of many of them individually, the disparities in their and their families’ lives versus mine and my family’s has been a bitter pill dry swallowed. Among other things they simply have less immediate presence of social murder in their lives and so less of the resulting unprocessed grief.
Grief’s not something I understand, not an activity I know how to undertake, a skill I’m not sure I learned. I’m unsure, I could be wrong (as ever... https://writingtothink.wixsite.com/mysite-2/post/talmbout-condescension). I noticed this a few years back when we set up an ofrenda for Day of the Dead. My kids had done an activity at the library for this, a nice sort of multicultural ‘learn about how different people do things’ kind of thing, so I went along with it thinking it was geography and culture education for my kids - and art, we made and colored in some lovely little skulls, calaveras I think is the name. And then at one point I was in absolute floods, ugly crying, I went upstairs and took a shower to get it back together, sparked by photos of dead uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents, and ones I don’t have photos of. I don’t know if it really makes sense to think of feelings as a substance inside (as in the metaphor of ‘bottling up my anger’) but it felt accurate at the time - I didn’t know I had all that in there, and it was like a champaign cork, small opening relative to the volume and pressure of what’s in the bottle, and that stuff came out in a rush. And everyone’s carrying some of that, I think, though definitely not equally. Sarah Jaffe’s writing a book on grief at the moment, if I remember right she said she’s trying to give a marxist account of grief. I look forward to reading it, feels, I don’t know, psychically urgent, an important contribution to living in this world.
So yeah, Ken Loach, big downer. Mostly emoting here while typing and listening to “South London Boroughs” - I’m earning my McArthur Doofus Grant by finding the spiritual kinship between Loach and Burial.
I also had a thought about state actors. I dropped a Simon Clarke quote about state and capitalist actions, deliberately conducted in a way that theory-heads tend to overlook or minimize and I noted that at the same time for Clarke that action is rigorously and vigorously contextualized in a big picture social theory. I think there’s something to this about scales of analysis and degree of analytical abstraction: capitalism as such on the one hand and time- and place-specific instantiations of capitalist social relations - capitalist social relations in general are (Tony Smith klaxon sounds, flashing lights, music swells) indeterminate in the concrete forms they can take. This is why really grasping the actual capitalist world we - as people who live in specific times and places, real people - involves both theoretical investigation and other forms of investigation as well, neither supplanting nor doing the work of the other (and no hard and fast line between the two either), but needing to be in a dialog among marxists and the broader left.
Losing the thread a bit (or still finding it in the first place, hmm) - what’s on my mind just now are the scenes in the Loach films of individual actors with some power but themselves constrained (security guards, managers, social workers, subcontractors, etc) show up, always as some kind of bad guy or at best ineffectual neutral guy. They’re usually levers or immediate points of leverage in a longer lever - the tip of the crowbar so to speak - transferring and perhaps multiplying the force generated further up the food chain. Sometimes they’re active and apparently enthusiastic in that role, sometimes they’re conflicted in a way that never really matters. There’s a guy like this that I wrote about in the last chapter of my book. He was a good dad, as far as I can tell, in the genuinely hard circumstances of his kids’ mother dying, and also the designer and enactor of a system of medicalized discrimination, a role he seems to have felt ambivalent about at best. And like, so what? There’s the expression ‘crocodile tears’ suggesting insincere sadness by a bad actor - apparently there’s some old belief that crocodiles’ eyes weep while eating - but if it turned out that the bad actor genuinely felt sad (“gee, I hate to do this,” sobs the crocodile at the first bite, howling “someone stop me before I kill again!” after the last), again, so what? In my book I say something like the machinery of oppression doesn’t need monsters to operate, if anything that machinery makes its monstrous operators more than vice versa (though those operators do bring about feedback loops that reinforce and defend the machinery’s operations). There are also a few times when one of these low-on-the-food-chain-but-above-the-protagonist types take advantage of others - subcontractors, temp agencies, pimps, pawn brokers, etc. These people are taking advantage of imposed vulnerabilities and generate more harms - they’re the agents of or leverage through which there occur what I think I called in my last post vulnerability feedback loops, and they’re especially easy to hate, but they’re ultimately small fish.
What’s on my mind here and what I’d like a better grasp on conceptually is how there’s real agency and conflict of agents, occurring in bounded ways in structurally produced contexts. The problem isn’t really a bad boss or callous social worker, it’s privatization and austerity, which is a result of neoliberalism and the Tories (including the Tories in Labour like fucking Starmer! [shakes fist]), but the problem isn’t really either of those either, it’s capitalism. All of the above, both-and. Capitalism generates these situations where villainy on a massive scale is happening, which in turn generates smaller scale situations where interpersonal villainy on an immediate personal scale is happening. Two things Loach does well is to draw out the spark and light, however flickering and repeatedly snuffed out in the immediate place we see it, of solidarity in people’s survival practices and to a limited extent practices of opposition, as well as underlining how all this misery happens to real people who are flawed and possessed, like all people, of human dignity, so that the trampling on of that dignity is underlined as the injustice and outrage that it is.
Still losing that thread, trying again: state actors and employers and so on act in concrete contexts as sources of harm directly often by squeezing people between the system’s imperatives and some hard choice (do this dangerous work or get laid off) and also by abandoning people to the exposure, deprivation, and oppression that is the system’s normal (‘sorry lads,’ says a supervisor in The Navigators as he follows the order his boss’s boss handed down). In doing so, these actors express and reinforce and are generated by larger, more abstract systemic imperatives (the latter mostly existing only through the former - the system’s imperatives are patterns of action performed by people, system-compelled actions, which occur in situations that are to a limited degree indeterminate: indeterminate in that the specific harms aren’t predetermined, that indeterminacy limited insofar as all of the options are specific ways of inflicting and prolonging misery. Of course, collective action can disrupt those patterns and open onto better ways to live, though that’s rare.)
The final thing I’ll say for now, gotta get onto other stuff with my day, is that the endings of a lot of these movies tend to come in a sequence of holding one’s breath, nothing really resolved, with neither a ‘they all live happily ever after’ nor a ‘and now everyone’s dead and this is tied off however atrociously’ - there’s a clear sense that an episode has ended, a hard one, and the people left will be going on to further hard episodes (vulnerability feedback loops) next. Is that a Brecht thing? I wouldn’t know, but I remember someone who knew this stuff telling me once that stuff like this kind of thing was a Brecht thing, in his plays I mean.
I lied. The actual final thing is that I think, as I sort of said, there’s a tension and interplay that’s necessary to maintain between theoretical abstraction and concrete presentation: the system destroys people, and not people in general - there are no people in general - but rather specific, singular, actual and this concrete people, infinitely valuable, infinite losses, losses not equivalent or fungible.
Partly tempted to send old Loach my book. Someone should make him make a pandemic movie, eh?