no such thing as masses
hey everyone, I hope you’re all maintaining despite the bullshit. I’m feeling kinda ground down, personally, but am still keeping my head up. My semester at work had a protracted ending due to several factors out of my control, which was very annoying. I managed to get the formal writing finished that I agreed to write and was whining about a while back, so that’s okay. Then I read a book manuscript for a friend of mine. It was very good work, and very long and emotionally draining because the book is about some of the horrors of the hellscape, told in very arresting detail. I was glad to have read it as a book and of course happy to help a friend, but it was taxing. I finished that yesterday and now have some small loose ends to tie off and the will soon be in proper summer mode. I have to teach a summer class in July cuz we need the money, which is a bummer, but June should be pretty chill. I remain British New Left focused these days and am gonna write a bit about some of that in a sec, and I’m also percolating a little on what I’m gonna focus on. More covid and public health stuff, more marxism, new left stuff, maybe read some writing on music and read some fiction I guess, that’ll be most of the summer I suspect. [Deep sigh.]
Minor side note on the brit new left stuff: I went down a rabbit hole reading about some of the culturally conservative literary critics (‘remember the good old days, when there was good art?’ kinda shit) who formed some of the baseline coordinates that the new left writers emerged out of. That was fun both for getting to know these writers that interest me in a more nuanced, fleshed out way, and for identifying a finite set of material, going ‘I’m gonna learn about this some’, then doing so and then being like ‘okay cool, that’s enough of this.’ I’m not an expert on that material by any means, I just know enough about it to suit my purposes, and that’s very satisfying.
Prefatory and side notes concluded, now for the main event: I read some more Raymond Williams. Specifically, I finished Culture and Society and read his essay “Culture is Ordinary.” I’m currently planning to read loosely chronologically and not just Williams - the first new left in the UK is roughly from 1957-1962, though that can be challenged in lots of ways. Still, that period’s especially important for the stuff I’m currently interested in so I’m sticking in that period for the moment with that stuff. (I’m gonna read some more fiction from around that period too and I mentioned a while back I’d watched a bunch of late 50s and into the 60s films, kitchen sink dramas. I’m gonna keep watching around in the social realist TV programs that ran in that era or emerged out of that sensibility, a lot of that stuff’s up on youtube and it’s kinda fun despite the bleakness. Anyway.)
So what I wanted to say about Williams centers on a remark of his something to the effect that the masses don’t exist, there aren’t masses there are only ways of treating people as masses. Something like that. This is contextual in that Williams was responding to writers and critics in his time, but part of what he did was to link that ‘ugh, the masses’ sensibility he wrote against to some larger issues and patterns. This could much more vigorously theorized - capitalism cultivates seeing people as objects to make use of, and that gets organized in a variety of different ways over time in relation to specific ways to institutionalize capitalist social relations - but even without that fuller theorization it’s powerful in Williams’s hands because he’s a good writer with good politics, insisting that working class people are just as varied as anyone else and that real popular democracy is fully possible, the socialist political project being the creation of new forms of popular power, related closely to building a new culture and new humanity.
Part of what appeals to me in this is that I’m from a working class background and am employed as a college professor, which has meant I’ve run into a lot of condescending middle class people, not all of whom realize they’re condescending. (I wrote a bit about some of this here https://writingtothink.wixsite.com/mysite-2/post/talmbout-condescension.) That condescension includes treating people as masses, in Williams’s terms. This is also a significant part of what some of my scholarly writing has been about, the aggregating of individuals into populations to be managed. I’ve come at this through Michel Foucault’s discussions of what he calls biopolitics, meaning political efforts to manage populations’ population-level traits like birth rates and so on - basically governing in a way that treats people as aggregates and as part of that governs with a goal of making the aggregate look THIS way rather than THAT way. This governance is often pretty bloody for some and praised for having benefits for many others. I assume someone somewhere’s written smartly about Willliams and Foucault, maybe I’ll look someday.
I think there’s also an element of gathering people into masses within some contemporary covid politics. This is the case in the red state/blue state bullshit that was massively fouling the air prior to the pandemic breaking out. (I think I wrote about this a bit before, and Cartus has a great essay on some of this which I know I’ve linked to before - https://web.archive.org/web/20230304161021/https://www.pestemag.com/large-scale-medicine/partisan-pandemic-cottage-industry.) Closely related are some of the Biden administration’s scapegoating - the pandemic is the fault of the unvaccinated, the pandemic is the fault of Republicans, etc - which shades into victim blaming (remember ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated?’ and Walensky acting like how ‘only’ the vulnerable and disabled were dying was good news?) and in turn does work to minimize the importance of death and harm inflicted on people always depicted, if depicted at all, as Those People.
Another way that the ‘everyone’s else are the masses’ kind of thing shows up around covid is in some of what I’d call radicalizing liberal perspectives on what’s happening with behavior. I’ve talked a bit about this before with masking. A lot of people are understandably really upset about how fucked up everything is in terms of the pandemic and government responses, and I get the sense a lot of those people are being radicalized by this experience among other things. That’s related to explanations of what’s happening in terms of individual beliefs - like ‘people think the following and act accordingly.’ Specifically, there’s sometimes explanations like ‘abled people don’t valued disabled people and therefore they behave these ways.’ I do think that happens to some extent, but I think what’s really going on for the most part is something else and arguably something more insidious: a lot of people are going along with the general drift of life in our society as modulated by government action in bringing about a so-called return to normal, and that going along generates beliefs as much or more than it’s the result of beliefs. (I think those of us with beliefs that make us act out of step with this pattern are fairly atypical.) So to my mind the appeals to beliefs as explanations are a kind of massifying of people and in general that kind of massifying treats how people currently as fixed rather than historical and political results of processes, and underestimates the possibility for change: people really could act differently, and briefly a lot of people did early in the pandemic. If anything, as I’ve said before, the government saw that relatively solidaristic behavior and related concern over covid as a problem to solve, as that behavior and concern are potential obstacles to capital accumulation.
This is probably obvious but part of what I’m fumbling for here is a grasp of a few things. One, a broad or general account of how the pandemic is of capitalist society in general. Two, a grasp of the conditions in place both from above and from below, so to speak, when the pandemic broke out, as I think those conditions were on the one hand a set of dominoes that once tipped set off a whole Rube Goldberg machine of nightmare shit and were on the other hand a really bad starting point in terms of understanding these events, let alone responding politically. That is, I think we started off with some liabilities, including the ‘ugh, those red state fuckers!’ massifying kinds of political impulses that were prevalent prior to the pandemic and have remaining prevalent in transformed ways since the pandemic started. Three, some thoughts on where to begin negatively thinking out of those bad starting coordinates and liabilities - unlearning, so to speak, some of the baggage we started with - and alternative critical analysis of what’s going on. It’s just my disposition to think what I’m into is illuminating so who knows if I’m right (also, something can be illuminating in its own right but less illuminating than something else, so even if I’m onto something maybe there are still better things one could be onto. I dunno, here I stand I can do no other?), but I’m inclined to say this brit new left shit offers some resources for us amid this ongoing nightmare. I’ll keep tossing up notes and thinking out loud as I make my way through this stuff, and eventually we’ll find out if I’m right or nah.