I do the dishes at my house, often after everyone else has gone to bed, and to pass the time I often watch TV on my laptop. My tastes skew to British stuff. Open Mode completionists (ykinmkbykiok, friends!) will know that a while back I spent a while watching old kitchen sink dramas, a term that I am told, at first by wikipedia and people on twitter but I’ve since seen it in books (books, if any young people are reading, are like a slower analog form of wikipedia and twitter, if you’re not already into them then don’t bother, they’ll just bring physical and psychic pain), refers to social realist film and TV from the mid 20th century UK. It plays to my tastes and I liked the bad pun in watching kitchen sink TV and shows while literally washing dishes in my own kitchen sink.

I recently watched a recent film billed as in the kitchen sink style, called Looted. Outside of very niche subjects and different ones than this (for instance: the other night I found a video on youtube of US Maple covering Naked Raygun’s “Peacemaker,” which is a fucking classic of midwest despair rock and has the added beauty of recalling the Alkaline Trio line “remember last April when we saw US Maple? somehow the singer told The Fireside exactly how I feel” - the Fireside being the much beloved Fireside Bowl, dearly precious to me, recently visually referenced in a tour poster by Rise Against - who I saw at the Fireside in 1999! - and Alkaline Trio, a graphic design nod that genuinely made my heart sing, but I digress and you don’t give a shit, and reasonably so) I am a massive culture and aesthetic ignoramus so I certainly don’t mean to suggest that my views on the film are anything but my irrelevant personal opinions. (This is a good story, eh? “Yes, I know I’ve used that line before. I don’t care, it means more, it means more right here.” That’s a D4 line. I think I saw them at the Fireside too but am not 100% sure.)

I liked the film but I’m primed to like it - british accents, set in the UK, working class focus, etc. And yet... it’s so bleak! The brutality of the lives the characters are allotted...! The way they are dealt terrible hands and, having to play for money, in effect forced to cheat but the cheating feels like - and is treated by the law as - a choice and thus punished, how the self-loathing that wells up eats at self-esteem and poisons relationships, leading to more bad choices leading to more self-loathing.... (I suspect there’s also something going on, and I’m sure some scholar has written on this and I just don’t know it - ignoramus, as I said, with a deep and multifaceted ignorance - about the home and family as anchor points in this kind of drama - the ‘kitchen sink’ phrase suggests this. Raymond Williams refers somewhere to television as being taken up in a cultural context of ‘mobile privatization’ - people moving around over the life course and in different ways during daily life, while anchored to a private space and set of relationships carved off, and often depicted, especially for men, as a refuge - with television organized in a way suited to and reproductive of that condition of life.) Anyhow the brutality is all a bit much, hard to take, especially when children are being murdered in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran. I’m not saying I want something lighter and escapist but that’s only because I find that desire embarrassing.

Taking the discomfort as a prompt for thinking (such as it is…), I started to wonder if maybe there’s something here about the limits of social realism. At least one version of the idea of social realism as I hold it in my head, and I can’t be the only one, is that the telling of hard truths about ugly realities turns gears in the world. It can’t be denied this sometimes happens. It can also very much be denied that this always happens. And it seems clear to me the determinants of when it happens are contextual: truth turns gears when institutions are such that, and organized constituencies are such that, people can be moved to move other people via their responses to the truth and there mechanisms in place for this moving of others to happen.

I balk more than a little here as this seems to be verging on implying the value of art is instrumental, as if social realism matters because it gets a law passed or instigates a strike or something. Not at all my intention. Art matters because people matter and as people we need bread but roses too and art is roses. And yet I’d developed some reservations about social realism’s thorns. (These reservations apply as well to some writing I care a great deal about, like Nelson Algren’s work and Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. They apply as well to a fair bit of music I like, especially Dave Hause’s renditions of Patrick Costello and Patty Griffin songs on the Paddy/Patty double EP. Costello is the bassist and occasional vocalist of the punk band Dillinger Four, and D4’s own renditions are more brash and angry than Hause’s stripped back acoustic versions. Hause brings out the sadness and vulnerability and that’s beautiful. On the other hand the fury and the weird humor in some of the samples between songs on the D4 records inflects things differently, as the humor brings a sense of keeping spirits up despite the odds and the anger is a vehicle for a version of hope since they’re clearly deeply outraged songs, and as I was just saying recently to someone, to be outraged is to say that something must be changed, which implies the conviction that it can be changed.) These reservations also apply directly to my book as well, to be frank, which, as I remember it anyway, is pretty fucking bleak, to say nothing of the work I’ve done since on social murder! It felt right at the time and I stand by the decisions I made, to the limited degree they felt like decisions, felt much more like I was serving an unfolding process than like I consciously did it, but that’s not relevant here really. I feel self-absorbed talking about my book this way, I mostly just mean to say that this has some stakes for me, stakes tied to what I feel are limits of some of the work I’ve done so far and tied to aspirations for what I might do in the future if I write another book. (I used to say when; what can I say, the world’s got me down.)

I guess part of what’s on my mind is that I do appreciate the ways this sort of work presents a cruel social world and working class life within and despite, and often defeated by, that social world. I find it validating of some of the harder parts of my own experiences, direct and personal like how fucked up it was being so broke for so long in my twenties, and vicarious but still personal of people I know who have been brutalized in various ways by the world. And at the same time, thinking of people I know, the brutalizing, and their own choices for better and for worse, all co-exists with their smiles, their senses of humor, their interactions with their pets...

What I mean is that it’s easy for this work, which I do like and appreciate and care about, to give one the impression that the truth of a working class life is the ways the world destroys that life, which is a kind of reductionism. Maybe there isn’t any truth of a life, in the sense of something that sums up in a pluses and minuses tallied in a spreadsheet kind of way, and there are instead a collection of truths that contradict each other and are more than the sum of their parts. I’m diving into abstraction here because in part because I don’t know how else to talk about it and in part because I don’t want to talk about it, being, after all, emotionally stunted as a midwestern middle aged man from a working class background. (Grief is a feeling and what we do with feelings is bottle them up, after all, then bury the bottle, ideally under a bunch of food...! The reality, I suspect, is in part that grief is a way of being and a skill at living that way of being with some degree of grace, and I probly can only keep deferring learning all of this in a practical sense for so long, but like I said, I don’t want to talk about it.)

As usual these days I think about most everything in relation to Raymond Williams because I’ve been reading a lot of his work. (Though at the moment I’m finding Writing In Society a bit of a slog because I just don’t know any of the literary works he’s discussing. I might punt on it as I’ve done with The English Novel and come back to it after I’ve read more of the works and history he discusses there. Other than that...) I continue to find the Williams exciting and thought provoking in general and on this in particular.

In an essay on realism, I won’t look it up, too lazy, Williams talks about The Big Flame, a TV play written by Jim Allen and Ken Loach. If you’ve not seen it, do yourself a favor and figure out how to watch it. The gist: workplace dispute at a port leads to a strike then an occupation and for a few days it seems like the workers might really win and the struggle spread. In his essay, Williams talks about how the film is realist in style in its depiction of work life and use of local residents playing basically versions of themselves in dockwork and the surrounding community yet in it what he calls the hypothesis of the film it moves into something not (yet!) real. I think we might call that a speculative leap? It’s not realism in a straightforward way there or at least it’s not social realism of the document-ordinary-misery type. (I think similar could be said of Steinbeck’s incredible novel In Dubious Battle about communists trying to instigate a strike and then shape it after it breaks out. I remember recommending that to a close comrade back when I was more politically active. He read it and said ‘yeah Steinbeck’s really got our number.’)

I think I’ve seen most of Loach’s films and a lot of them, like I Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You, while superb, are of the documentation of misery side of the kitchen sink. A smaller but still large number of his films, like The Big Flame, Land and Freedom, Bread and Roses, and Jimmy’s Hall, put a lot more emphasis on collective action. Arguably, The Old Oak is the best of these at least in terms of being apt to the present as it’s not larger than life and instead is at the small scale that’s more practicable and believable at present (for reasons that his bleaker films explain, in a sense, as we’ve been beaten back from revolution to survival pending revolution to collective sociality for the sake of just surviving - beaten back temporarily I should add, and I really do mean, though in historical perspective temporary can last years of people’s lives, and many very long formative years of children’s lives, which is hard to sit with.)

So yeah, the depiction of the social world and life despite it and often destroyed by it, that’s all a power of the kitchen sink sort of work, and a limitation insofar as we need a political imagination that involves destroying all of that and fostering a more robust humanity and better society. Some of the latter shows up in some works to some extent like the Loach films I mentioned. I think it’s arguably present in all of his films (and, without any suggestion of comparable quality, in my book) in an implied and/or negative sense, by which I mean that Loach clearly (and I definitely) believes all that shit can and should be ended and to comrades and fellow travelers with that same conviction the work lands one way. To people without that conviction, though, I suspect it lands another way, which strikes me as a limit of the work.

I wrote the above, and a fair bit of what’s below to be honest, then paused to do some other chores - finish the dishes planning to go to bed after, then remembered it was trash and recycling night so I had to take all that out. I had music on while I did that. During that a few thoughts clicked into place. One thought is that one way to put the difference marked by Big Flame is that this work is best when more leavened with explicit revolutionary aspiration, and specifically with an attempt to depict that aspiration as something collectively practiced in the world rather than just a notional commitment.

Another thought is that one way to put some of my complaint in the above is that sometimes social realist work depicts the working class as, as I recall it anyway, what Marx calls a class in itself, meaning with the working class a structural social position, a class in the sense of being the set of people forced to live primarily from the sale of labor power and subject to the power of capitalists who buy that labor power. On the other hand, in The Big Flame in particular, there are glimpses of the class for itself - meaning the working class coming to be an active, combative collective subject fighting against its subordination and for emancipation. That’s a stark conceptual distinction but the reality is that the working class in labor processes does a great deal of cooperation, as Marx talks about in volume 1 of Capital in waged workplaces. Survival strategies are basically unpaid labor processes and also involve a lot of cooperation, and then there’s conviviality, socializing together, which is also a matter of lived collectivity. This suggests a degree to which class in and for itself are as much ends of a continuum as sides of a stark distinction.

Another thought I had was of depiction of music and parties. I’m thinking especially, because I’ve been on a dub and reggae kick, of some of the house party scenes in the Lovers Rock episode of Small Axe, but there are a lot of depictions of people dancing at raves, going to gigs, etc. I don’t have a handle on how to talk about that, which bugs me a little because live music has been such a huge part of my life. I’m biased because I love that so much but I wonder if maybe the depiction of musical life, and likewise I’m thinking of the relationship between the boy and his bird in the Loach film Kes, is an area where social realism can be nonreductive, not depicting working class life as just its miseries.

Final thought that bubbled up while taking out the trash is that I remembered that in 2019 I wrote up notes for a future book, before getting derailed in various ways by the covid pandemic and other forms of intensification of the hellscape and my own resulting preoccupations. The working title was Civic Subjects, Economic Objects and I imagined it as a history of the laws governing employment in the US, from the laws on union organization through individual rights at work issues like minimum wage and antidiscrimination laws.

The working hypothesis, yet to be confirmed by actual empirical research beyond my book on workers’ compensation laws and some of what I’ve written about labor law over at Organizing Work, is that we find in the law of the employment relationship a set of ways of representing and managing the working class. One is disqualified subjects such as prisoners, slaves, and undocumented immigrants, and so subjected or under threat of subjection to the repressive arm of the state and, closely related, especially predatory employment relationships. Another is objects of civic concern and state management, such as child laborers and often women workers, often thought of as resources for biological reproduction which the state should protect regardless of what they want themselves. Another is civil subjects lobbying and otherwise acting within existing state institutional channels - being in effect clients of the department of labor, social security office, etc. The final one is as actors negotiating economically via unions, a process heavily mediated and organized by law, generally in ways that serve capital accumulation more than workers’ well-being. Some but only some of these forms of representation show up in kitchen sink dramas, I think, and this relates as well to the great essay I talk about below about the show Adolescence - more on this in a moment or three.

Getting back to Williams: in two essays of his he draws a distinction between what he calls social conscience, on the one hand, and social consciousness on the other. I believe this appears in the realism essay as well as in an essay called The Bloomsbury Fraction, about a group of upper middle class English liberal intellectuals. (By the way, a lot could be made of that essay by someone who knows, as I do not, a lot about some of the figures involved, like Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes, and the relevant English history, in relation to Tony Smith’s superb book Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism. Smith focuses on left liberal theorists and their theories, while Williams is mostly looking at left liberals who were what we might today called ‘creatives’ and policy wonks and their habits, dispositions, and implicit assumptions, which occupy the place where theorists keep their theories. Both, in both Smith’s book and Williams’s essay, lack an account of capitalist social relations and that lack is a constitutive part of their liberalism.)

As I recall the Williams, social consciousness is something like a combination of class consciousness, specifically working class class-consciousness, and critical social theory. In my book I called it social imagination. When I talk about it with students I often refer to it as the map of society that people have, including where people place themselves, their loved ones and their social superiors and inferiors on the map (if placed anywhere - blanking out in the sense of not being on the map is a pretty important phenomenon as well). What Williams would, I think, call a relative lack of social consciousness is what I would call a social imagination where the map has a lot of blank space on it (there being no blank space in the world such that blank spaces on a map always indicate parts of the world depicted as of no consequence for the purposes the map serves or is intended to facilitate).

Social conscience, on the other hand, is something like what I called moral imagination in my book, meaning here sympathy or empathy for others in the social world, tied to a sense of their moral worth. The two - social conscience and relative lack of social consciousness, or in my book’s terms, moral imagination and limited social imagination, work in tandem in varying and important ways. As I suggested a moment ago, I think social realist work lands differently to comrades than noncomrades because comrades share a social imagination more critical insofar as it maps in a more far-reaching way, and opposes in a more fundamental way, the capitalist society that social realism depicts, and that makes the relationship of the work to social conscience different (or maybe the conscience has a different relationship to the world and the political action needed to transform it).

This brings me to an essay I read recently by Oliver Dixon. It’s about the show Adolescence which I’ve not seen, which I don’t think would appeal to me - frankly I think I’d find it upsetting in a way that would ring in my ears a long while and my resilience is at a low ebb at the moment, but/and I think the essay is superb, very exciting and thought provoking. It’s here and I recommend it very highly: https://mediacommons.org/imr/content/adolescence-2025-and-social-realist-registration-fascism I copied a few hundred words of quotes from it as I read it. I’ll dig into some of them now. I’m not going to address Adolescence as I’ve not seen it and because I really think you should read the whole essay anyway. It’s very good. Click the link and go read it now and come back and finish this afterward. Or at least open it in a new tab and read it immediately after you finish this. (Do as your told!)

I’m in over my head here so I could be wrong but I read Dixon’s essay as at least in part writing against social realism as a mode of the dominant culture. I’m inclined at a gut level to say that there were forms of social realism which when relatively new - emergent, in Williams’s terms - were to some extent relatively alternative to or oppositional to the dominant culture. The Big Flame is an example. It got its creators in some hot water at the time. Those better or better-in-context versions might still have important limitations. I suspect so but am also largely agnostic on that for now since mostly I’m interested in this kind of work in the present context (again, and selfishly so, because of the ramifications of this line of thinking for the work I’ve written so far).

Dixon writes of social realism in specific forms as addressed within “the paternal perspective of middle-class state apparatchiks” which indicate the real viewer - in Dixon’s terms, the “ideal spectator” - addressed by the work: “The sympathetic police, educators, psychologists and petit-bourgeois home-owning parents.” These viewers are, “the narrative conviction” goes, “the adults-in-the-room.” (I hear this and think of a few things: the line in the Charles Kerr translation of the Internationale, “we want no condescending saviors to rule us from from their judgment hall;” Williams writing, I forget where, of the spread of ways of thinking and related real practices and social relationships reminiscent of what he encountered in the army under the heading “man management,” the widespread normalized contemporary grotesque phrase ‘human resources’ springs to mind as well; and I think of a dear old friend and comrade (the one who read In Dubious Battle) who used to refer to some people on the left as “clipboard guys” and “generals in search of an army,” people who fantasize about being very important in the process of social revolution and the post-revolutionary society. At the time we were in a left political milieu consisting mostly of working class people so these types always felt comical. I’ve since encountered, directly, at some distance, and vicariously through further reading, leftists and academics from very well heeled backgrounds, some of them born and raised onto trajectories pointing toward real access to the institutions of rule, so they don’t strike me as funny anymore. I think as well of Williams’s essay The Bloomsbury Fraction, the ‘fraction’ in the title indicating that the scholars and artists in that milieu were a distinct piece of an emerging and newly important class of technocratic social engineers and social managers, with that fraction distilling a good deal of the concerns, habits, and aims of that class.)

Dixon expresses more clearly the gut level intuition I had and to an important degree still have about social realism; wanting to flesh out some doubts about these intuitions at least in their relation to the present context is why I decided to write this. He writes, “the possibilities of realist intervention are typically predicated on rhetorical deployment of its epistemological claim: ‘to know these alien conditions will be to experience indignation and pity, and to be stirred thereby to political action’.” Alien and pity are pretty important terms here - to be clear I think Dixon’s right to use them, he’s correctly identifying something in the world.

Whatever else there is to say, perceiving others as alien and pitiable is not a democratic perception, or at the very least it is not to include those others democratically in a ‘we’ capable of deciding for itself over time through deliberation how to understand the world act accordingly. The alien and pitiable is an object. The indignation is on behalf of that object, and it easily flips over into repressive when the object is ungrateful or acts on its own. Social conscience, moral imagination, is not only insufficient without social consciousness or social imagination. It can become a resource for people to act against other people, which means it can be an active force - an actively oppressive force, a fact not changed by the additional fact that sometimes there are also even uglier forces in play - within the social world that our social consciousness should actively grasp.

The morally indignant pitying “middle class state apparatchiks” are the audience for the version of social realism - Dixon doesn’t say version, to be clear, he says social realism as such - that “has historically been content with announcing the quarterly social problem,” as the latest matter calling for some modulation by those apparatchiks or their representatives: call in the social engineers and class-collaboration-mongers! Dixon stresses the moral life of these forms of representation, the indignation and pity involving a degree of smugness (my words, not his, to be fair). This form of address “tells us to be assured in the morality of its gaze that arrives to announce the problem as if to solve it (worry not, we the adults-in-the-room can now handle this).” He quotes a scholar named Andrew Higson, writing that, “visually fascinated, we can at the same time rest assured that our gaze is morally sanctioned.”

The resting assured strikes me as significant as well. Social realism is troubling viewing and yet it can end up helping promote a kind of meta-level calm with the troubling, which is itself gross if examined closely. Bluntly: imagine looking at the depictions of the genocide in Gaza and the torture of dissidents and not being at a loss for words. Who could do so? What actually happens, often, I think, is we express distress from witnessing (the least real distress of such atrocities, it seems to me, compared to the immediate victims and their loved ones) physically - walking or tapping our hands or feet in agitation, a sick feeling in the stomach, and so on - and in inarticulate utterances that aren’t speech - sighs, sobs - or are emotional rather than intellectual speech - ‘my god!’ and swearing, for instance. Then we push through and find words, of various kinds, tied to our politics and analyses. We do similarly with other systematically generated harms arising from the death machine that is capitalism. I wonder if social realism for apparatchiks might be understood as - in part, among other things - a training in reducing the pre- or non-verbal distress, speeding up the time to finding words, and shaping which words (because shaping the political perspective). In Dixon’s words, this ideal spectator is “responsibly devoted to being troubled,” hence their choice to watch this sort of work.

As I said, I’ve not seen Adolescence, and likely won’t, so I can’t speak to Dixon’s treatment of the specifics (I’m sure he’s right), but I think his points apply more generally. He argues that the show - and in this it’s clear he means it as a particular example of a more general type, a way of doing social realism - depicts its troubling ugly subject matter as in important respects inexplicable and unknowable. This inexplicability does moral work: we tried to explain, we’re good people who do our due diligence; we can not understand, we can only act on these circumstances. The sense of alienness facilitates social engineers and disciplinarians’ interventions. (It occurs to me the figure of the zombie is somewhat related, though more tied to the military wing of the repressive apparatus than the carceral wing, since the zombie too is a figure of threat who can’t be reasoned with, and spreads contagiously and so must be contained forcibly or eliminated.) As Dixon stresses, within the show the unknowability serves as a comfort once it’s identified: investigation reveals the heinous acts are inexplicable, creating a kind of relief, “thank God we know that we do not know,” Dixon writes. “We find the problem troubling, and this strength of feeling soothes us with the moral righteousness of being troubled. The effect of the pathos in repeated tearful breakdowns is that one feels assured in one’s own powerlessness.”

Dixon refers to this a matter of “moral realism” within this sort of work. That realism is a particular version of social conscience or moral imagination, of a piece with the politics of the work. The ostensible unknowability is tied as well to justifying the limited social imagination: this can’t be explained so the fact that we can’t explain - and, having realized it can’t be explained, quit trying - isn’t a problem with our analytical framework. We proceed as locally troubled but generally placid liberal egalitarians, living in a society understood as basically a chaotic natural phenomenon - unpleasant events are weather, it happens sometimes, we just respond and at best build capacity for that response. There’s no radicalism of the going to the root of things variety, no fundamental social remaking, just apparatchiks pitying and occasionally indignantly reworking the responses to the pitiable.

Part of the point here, I think, is that an insufficient (or simply absent) map of the actual processes in the world that produce the conditions investigated fosters work that in a sense centers on training the moral imagination without training the social imagination. Furthermore, this serves as training at the uncritical, uninvestigated holding of a highly limited social imagination that perceives only the results of uncomprehended social processes and and having a moral imagination to match - ‘I don’t get it, and really it can’t be understood, but I care and that caring helps me live with not understanding it’. Harms become givens treated as tragic rather than outrageous and thus subject at most to downstream modulation - managing effects rather than addressing causes, because the causes are unknowable, and sadly so, with that sadness not only a result but a resource: feeling sad marks the moral seriousness of the technocrat, then converted into political seriousness. And the incomprehension and pity in turn authorize interventions of various kinds of a reformist variety, at best, and, at times, carceral responses to those pitied.

I find the Dixon convincing and it articulates various gut level intuitions I’d had, which is always an enjoyable experience. I still would want to differentiate this from The Big Flame and some of Loach’s other work. I’d further want to argue that some works that lack The Big Flame’s explicit emphasis on collective action can, in specific contexts, still have a different political valence. (I’d point to the parts of the first and third volumes of Marx’s Capital and Engel’s 1845 book on the English working class as examples, as I talked about in my chapter on social murder in the marxist state theory anthology.)

At the same time, I’d say that it’s arguable that even work like The Big Flame can only go so far far in overcoming contextual limits - in that for at least some viewers, the parts that strike we commie weirdoes (less flippantly, those of us products of oppositional cultures) as exciting and hopeful will strike others, in line with the dominant culture, as silly fantasy, with the main takeaway ending up being closer to Dixon’s negative assessment of Adolescence. I suppose in important respects what I’ve ended up at is that the valence of the work depends significantly on the presence (or not) of a viable counterpublic or working class public sphere (I need to get back to that Negt and Kluge book eventually!). That’s too static, let me try it another way: those of us who care about and try to make and encourage the uptake of work like this should also be aware that we likely, especially in the present, need to help construct the relevant reception conditions, try to create instances of publicness that attempt to cut against the dominant culture at least momentarily, as part of a larger political project, at least aspirationally. And, to maybe put too fine a point on it, works don’t create their own reception conditions and, as Williams stresses, reception is as active and as much a process of production as is making the object.