pointless yet circuitous
Hey gang,
Not a lot of point here (in general, existentially, it feels like some days, god damn, but I mean this post in particular - even more so than usual). I've been buried with work and some life stresses (I'll spare you most of the details, which are tedious, but I hope it suffices to say I've spent twenty five hundred bucks on car repair and cat care - one of my feline friends BROKE his PELVIS what the FUCK - which is a large chunk of our annual income and the time and energy cost has been commensurate or greater than the sticker price, so to speak), so I've been distracted and pressed for time. Plus I start back to teaching in a couple days so I had a lot of tasky things to do to get the semester ready. [Deep sigh at the tasky things of the world.] Along the way I wrote up some fragmentary notes over a couple three days which I'm now dropping in here. Bon appetite, I guess?
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I've done a little experimenting lately with technology. For one thing, I got out the old AlphaSmart3000. (I typed some of this post on it the other day at a small round wooden table outside a coffee shop about a five minute brisk walk from my house. The weather was perfect, low 70s in the shade, was a nice day.) The AlphaSmart as far as I know originated as a limited function computer designed for teaching typing to kids in schools. I got it used on Ebay a while back, used it briefly then stopped because my updated work laptop didn’t have the right ports to get stuff off the Alpha. I’ve recently figured out what kind of cable works to connect to the laptop so the Alpha’s usable again. It appeals as well for the focus. Well, it’s not that I’m focused when using it, it’s that it takes less work to focus. My laptop forces choices - will I read the news? will I read my email? will I listen to music? etc etc - and some of the doorways it includes are frightening (I probably should see a therapist about this but I have a real reaction to checking my work email at this point. This is getting better but only slowly.)
I also ordered myself a cheap walkman tape player on the thought that I could do a similar no-choices-required no-willpower-tax approach to the music I listen to while working, and be generally less on a computer. That's been fun too. I have a very limited number of tapes at this point - which is weird given that I used to have tons of them, but whatever - and the limitation shapes what I listen to while also meaning I don't think as much about it.
I don’t think those devices create focus so much as they reduce barriers to and costs on focus. I’m hoping the result will be more total time spent concentrating/in a flow state, and greater frequency of concentration sessions as well - concentration/flow state being one of the primary joys afforded by my job and one that’s been in increasingly scarce supply for multiple reasons.
Random thought - another of the joys: flow states and working in an open mode affords the bubbling up of random thoughts and partial thoughts to pursue - there’s a bit in Tony Smith’s book I always mention, Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism, where he says something like the following. People’s preferences are significantly determined by the contexts they're in. People often satisfice, so to speak, in that they live with what they can have - Dillinger Four again: “This isn’t what we want, this isn’t what we need, this is what we can afford.” Furthermore, while D4 rightly lament that reality, angrily, making do long enough can lead to shifts in people’s metrics: the preferences that define what counts as satisfactory vs mere sufficient can change so that what was satisficing becomes more taken as satisfactory. This means we can’t solely evaluate the acceptability of social contexts via the preferences of people in those contexts, since the contexts themselves significantly create the preferences.
This isn’t the same as but it’s related to how people change, become different people, and sometimes people they never would have chosen to become - one settles, takes what one can get in the contexts one is in, and so comes to evaluate those contexts differently. This is part of where ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ comes from, I think, among other things. There’s some real friction involved in trying to stay critical and deliberate and so be somewhat less fully molded by the contradictory pressures in context. To put it another way, a critical outlook and connection to communities of such can constitute another pressure to partially offset some of those shaping forces. Me pinning some small hopes on getting off the computer a little more is me trying to clear a little more space against some of those pressures and hoping to use that space and time to do more of the things I find more rewarding in the longer term even if less immediately gratifying. That’s maybe a better way to put it - the computer-connected life has these moments like a nice-but-empty sugar high, and related moments like a nauseous sugar high or like getting a little drunk and then having a disagreement: its harder to self-regulate and some of that feels good, it can be gratifying or at least captivating to be caught up even in a somewhat negative experience (thinking again of stuff at my job!). This is all even more on my mind as the fall semester is looming, which means work emails and meetings are ramping up and soon will do so even more so.
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I recently finished my third Doris Lessing novel and have a big stack of them to read next-ish. I'm reading Lessing's stuff from the 50s and early 60s in part because of my interest in the UK and its left in that period. Lessing was on the editorial board of one or both of The Reasoner and New Reasoner, publications edited by John Saville and EP Thompson and very important in the UK’s first new left in the late 50s and early 60s. As I've mentioned on here before, this is a recent-ish and so far steadily deepening research interest of mine.
One way to think about the two new lefts in the UK is as waves - one rose, crested, subsided, the water calmed then later a second wave rose. That metaphor is illuminating in important ways and also limiting, because while the first new left dispersed and many participants got less active, many stayed around with some degree of activity for a long while. They had their own re-wave at least once in the late 60s in an effort tied to a pamphlet called The May Day Manifesto, initially written and/or published in 1967 by Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and EP Thompson, then issued in an expanded and substantially reworked edition in 1968 (I believe mostly written by Williams but with input from a lot of other figures), and cosigned by a long list of left luminaries. The Manifesto was bound up with - I think directly led to, via the efforts of the editors/writers/signatories - an event called the National Convention of the Left. This is basically everything I know about the Manifesto effort, it’s more a topic of current research than something I know a lot about already, but I just recently learned that the Manifesto group had members of some kind (defined how, I don’t know yet), with some locals that met and sometimes wrote things - as far as I know there were locals in Leeds, Hull, and Brighton, I assume elsewhere too but I don’t know that - and there was a bulletin published in the network as a means for the members to talk to each other/the network to talk to itself as part of the ongoing political work, in addition to, I think, some additional more public facing pamphlets in addition to the Manifesto. That’s all very interesting to me and I hope to write more on it all as I learn more. I spent a day or two recently contacting archives about duplicating some of the materials they have related to all this.
Anyhow, getting back to Lessing, she was in the mix in the first New Left early on in ways that are unclear to me (not least because my grasp of what ‘the mix’ and its activities were is still pretty preliminary). I’m interested in the role of literary/creative writers in the new left and cultural politicking more generally. I’m also interested in what I think was a kind of diffuse discontent and rethinking in that era - people trying to live differently, in a mix of satisficing and demanding more than just satisficing. There were important shifts and new developments in youth culture in the era, for instance, and in drama and TV/film. (I’ve written a little on here before about kitchen sink realism as product of this era for instance.) All of that makes Lessing of interest to me. Furthermore, as far as I can tell, the first new left had limitations on gender/feminist politics and on race/anti-racist politics, which makes me particularly want to know more about Lessing. She grew up in either South Africa or Rhodesia or Southern Rhodesia, I think it was Southern Rhodesia. The work of hers I’ve read so far is very focused on youth, gender and to some degree sexuality, and to some extent race insofar as the work touches on apartheid, the treatment of Black servants, tensions and violence and also a kind of existential emptiness among the white population, especially downwardly mobile farmers and members of the professional/middle class. It’s clearly the work of a writer with a critical analysis of and felt distaste for the racist, sexist society she grew up in. That she was in the mix and her work on these topics circulated in the new left is interesting to me and I’d like to know more.
I may write up some notes on the content of these Lessing novels eventually but not now. I’m running out of steam and have also accidentally already said some of what I had in mind to say about the novel - the transition from the preliminary throat clearing to the main event was so subtle that even I missed it, reader, how’s that for artful? A skillful accident so gracefully enacted as to be anticlimactic.
All I’ll add for now, I think, is that so far the three novels I've read of Lessing's from the 50s resonate with Raymond Williams’s Border Country and interest in community, though Lessing with a different and more critical orientation to the community depicted. The work also reflects a broad, diffuse dissatisfaction - there’s a strong sense of something just not working in that society, in a way felt intuitively by a lot of people - without a clear, conscious articulation of the problems, let alone an organized response. (Is that relatable or what? Fuuuck.) To use Williams’s terms, there isn’t an oppositional or alternative culture depicted in the novels (with the partial exceptions of a cameo by the Left Book Club, a genuinely socialist oppositional effort that at least in Lessings novels hadn’t cohered or maybe had atrophied, and the other partial exception of some raucus youth culture that was more of a loyal opposition within - and alternative route to the same destinations as - the dominant culture) so much as there’s the simmering unhappiness of groups of people on their way to generating a - on the way toward what Williams would call an emergent - oppositional or alternative culture.
That pre-emergent simmering makes sense to me: historical developments disorient, getting (re)oriented takes time and effort, both individual and collective. The first new left was simultaneously a response to disorientation, an effort to further disorient in the sense of retracting from or boring holes within the common sense/ideology of the dominant culture, and an effort to orient/re-orient within the new conditions, all conducted in real time. Lessing's novels I've read so far pre-dates that in the UK slightly as they published before 1956, often taken as the year of emergence of the new left - arguably 1956 was the precipitating event and 1957 was the emerging, via organizing in continued response to the events of 1956 and the momentum that organizing took on (for a while). So the novels I've read so far reflect some of the conditions feeding into the new left’s emergence, so to speak.
Final thought in this direction: I believe I’ve mentioned it before but I don’t remember for sure. Zachary Levenson recently-ish published two co-written essays on the concept of racial capitalism. (I feel bad but I forget his co-author’s name just now and am typing this without internet access so I can’t look it up.) One focuses on concepts of racial capitalism in the South African left and the other focuses on Stuart Hall’s understanding of racial capitalism. I don’t know the scholarly literature on any of that but I thought both articles were great and I hope to read further in the literature guided by the articles. I’d like to try to write something connecting the themes and concepts to elements of the labor history of the United States. There’s also a resonance here with Lessing in at least two ways. One, at least in the 50s anyway Lessing was a communist writer writing critically about the racial capitalism of southern africa and the white cultures within that context. Two, as I said, she was in the mix of the new left as was Stuart Hall - he was a key figure in the first new left and to the best of my knowledge that experience was a foundational one for him in many respects, so the connection or resonance with Lessing there is interesting to me. From what little I currently know about Hall after the early 60s and have read from the period from 1956-1963, I suspect that with Lessing it’s more a matter of unfortunately missed connections - thinkers in parallel, so to speak - than active connection and engagement. I’d like to be wrong about that but either way eventually finding out more and fleshing out these preliminary points sounds rewarding.
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I recently got Hannah Proctor’s book Burnout from the library. I'm only 30 or 40 pages in so far, but I like those pages a lot. I may write up notes on the book later, most likely I will. For now I wanted to talk a bit about the library - I’m reading the library copy, which was purchased because I requested that my local branch buy a copy. I felt genuinely a little emotional when I got the notice that my request had been approved (I also asked for The Exhausted of the Earth, which I’m also excited to read.) I just love the library. I’m from a working class background, ended up for better and for worse a college professor at a teaching school, so I feel like I’ve caught glimpses of different possible lives I might have had, and I’m now more aware of what a beneficial force in my life some specific social institutions were, I’m thinking particularly of the library of course and also public television. (I learned to read young enough that I don’t remember what it was like before I could read or what it was like to learn to read. I have an impression that public TV shows like Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and Reading Rainbow were very important to my learning to read and certainly they affirmed me as a reader - reading is cool! - when there weren’t always those messages in schools from some peers or in other aspects of the dominant culture.)
When I was younger and more, I don’t know, desperately and demonstratively countercultural (remember Adbusters magazine?) I was happy to be contemptuous a lot (remember people who had a thing of not owning a TV? I was one of them, likewise listening to the radio - I listened to DIY and underground punk records, fuck you normals. We didn’t have the word normie yet and if we wanted to condescend against the mainstream we had to walk up hill in the snow to sneer at them, kids these days have it easy.) I’m too old and socially disconnected to be counterculture now, I mostly parent and work. I’m indifferent to a lot of popular media but without any energy to it - I didn’t feel superior when I had never heard Taylor Swift, and I don’t feel anything at all now that I’ve heard tons of Taylor Swift, with the exception that I relish my kids’ love of her music.
What I’m trying to say is that relative familiarity with certain artistic and media content is a way to mediate forms of social participation and interpersonal interaction. I used to enjoy my ignorance of some of those forms and the resulting not knowing in some contexts - people I don’t respect talking about a work I’ve not heard of in a medium I dismiss with an eyeroll reflex, the sense of not being proximate in those settings felt great, I’d rub that brain chemical on my gums if I could. Or I would have. I no longer feel that way.
I don’t get off on being different anymore, at least not to anything like that degree, though I do to make jokes playing up my own ignorance. I’m also not hungry for the social connection and participation that cultural fluency provides - I don’t need to watch Breaking Bad, say, or listen to pop music, but there’s no energy to it - I have no itches here, nothing is scratched either way.
A big exception is with my kids. Their enthusiasm makes me enthusiastic and knowing the stuff that they’re into does mediate my relationship with them. The She-Ra reboot, for example, lets me pretend with my kids in a way I couldn’t and it’s also just an ongoing preoccupation of theirs so if I want to understand what they’re saying and thinking a lot of time (my oldest daughter uses it as analogies in conversation with me a lot - some event, in the larger world or in the life of someone we know will get compared to some story arc). This has also meant I’ve encountered a lot of art through them that I’ve enjoyed a great deal - I think we’re in the golden age of books marketed as middle grade but which are really sort of like the accessible pop music of books: genuinely all-ages cultural objects of very high quality. Likewise we’re in a golden age of women, trans, and queer created comics, which is really fun and exciting as well. (Also in a golden age of aggro dude noise rock, which other than electronic music is the center of my tastes at this point - you can take the man out of the weirdo subculture but you cant take the weirdo subculture out of the man). I’m rambling afield from the point: I no longer enjoy a sense of cultural distance, though I’m not troubled by that sense either nor do I crave its opposite beyond the instances when I want to know something because someone I care about cares about that something.
Anyway my point is that my prior snobbery meant I didn’t consciously appreciate the provision of cultural resources to a broad public and, related, I didn’t have the life experience and hadn’t yet been in the contexts to appreciate the contributions of those resources to my own life and why they matter more generally. I now get it more.
I’m vague on the terms now but Mark Fisher wrote about what he called popular modernism, "popular" meaning provided to all and "modernism" meaning artistically worthwhile - basically high minded works used to be more widely provisioned publicly than they used to be, and, related, there were pathways for working class people to have significant time to devote to creative pursuits and, sometimes, to make a living doing so. The comedian Stewart Lee has spoken about this, not using Fisher’s terms but with an analysis that's very resonant, repeatedly in interviews. A variety of factors including policy choices, lower cost of living, availability of certain kinds of paid work (Lee talks about doing work for pay that allowed for flexibility, which would now be an unpaid internship), relative lack of debt, and somewhat more open pathways to write and perform were all factors allowing artists of his generation to try things out, learn their art form, and make a go of doing it for a living. Those factors have significantly dried up and alternate pathways like social media aren’t as robust. Something analogous seems to have happened in higher ed as universities have steadily retracted their support for any actual life of the mind for anyone on campus. (I feel like I'm one of the last people to get in the door before it slammed shut, and now I feel locked inside.)
This is all a long ramble about my love for the library as an ongoing popular modernist institution and a fairly genuinely democratic space in the sense of open to all (which is important but also still less than democracy in the sense of popular power and participation in decision making). So it felt nice to have those two book purchase suggestions I made be approved. Felt like being a small part of something I care about and now understand to have been a key shaping influence in my life - and in my kids’ lives; we’ve always lived at least a long walk from a library branch since my oldest was born and have spent loads of time at library events, not least because we were fucking broke as shit until at least my late 30s and only stably doing reasonably well by my early 40s (my wife describes us ‘clinging on to the ragged edge of middle class’ an edge we’re at most like 8 years into?)
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I mentioned Mark Fisher. Fisher’s a mixed bag in a variety of ways including some politics I object to, but genuinely mixed in that there’s real insights in there, like his discussions of popular modernism. One of his other claims is that with the decline of popular modernism and the worsening of life chances for working class people as part of neoliberalism there’s been a deceleration of innovation in music (and, if recall correctly, film and literature, but I’m not enough of a movie watcher and fiction reader to really know that). I think this is questionable in various ways - first off, why is formal innovation to be prioritized? Given that the meaning of works is at least in part constituted in the reception of the work by people in a context, and given that contexts keep changing, even the same work repeated for years is different by virtue of its relationship to a changing context. Second, why is newness in an objective sense - ‘no artist has ever...’ - the measure of the new? Nirvana weren't groundbreaking relative to some of the bands they listened to (Cobain said in an interview I only vaguely recall now that a lot of what he wanted to do was be the Pixies and he sometimes thought he should have started a Pixies cover band, but in the context I was in "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on the radio sounded like it was from another dimension - one enough like this one to be comprehensible, I didn’t appreciate that at the time, but still - it was horizon expanding and the rooms it opened up to me, which I could only barely glance into from around a corner, so to speak, were urgently appealing, I needed to hear more. This wasn’t unique either in that I had that same rush of discovery and excitement many times - I started ticking off bands on my fingers and stopped at ten, five or ten more have bubbled up in my mind after trying to stop counting. So while those works weren't, for people in the know, anything new, I wasn’t in the know and they flipped my wig.) Third, artistic innovation does continue. John Doran from The Quietus has a great radio documentary called New Weird Britain documenting this.
So the modernism continues. But less popular - and this is the rational kernel of Fisher’s point - in two senses: less well known compared to when artistically innovative works were blowing up the charts (There’s a counterargument to be made here about innovations in big pop records, I’ve heard this said about Beyonce’s Lemonade and some similarly big records, I can’t assess those claims either way but I assume they’re right) and, I think more importantly, the relative decline of the infrastructure for working class entry into art making and potentially making a living at it. The New Weird Britain is great for fans at the level of sheer sound and the experience of the gigs (according to Doran, I’ve not been), but it’s also the new noncommercially viable Britain.
I wonder if Fisher’s work could be re-thought partly or refracted through Proctor’s, as diagnosing responses to political defeat in the sense she seems to focus on (basically, activists got beat, our hopes for our actions and opponents’ actions did not bear out), and also if Fisher’s work can be read as opening onto a different interpretation of some of Proctor’s categories: there are multiple kinds of defeats. Occupy lost, that’s a kind of defeat that’s squarely under Proctor’s remit. (I worry I’m being reductive, uncharitable, or otherwise unfair to the book in how I’m mentioning it here, especially since I haven’t said much at all about its actual content. To be clear, after 30 pages in I am very, very into the book and perhaps the book will talk more expansively later on, and if not that’t not a shortcoming, just a difference.)
Anyway, Occupy lost and afterward people had to live with that. Also, Occupy itself was a response to a sense of loss, it articulated itself significantly as a response to a downward slide a la ‘we held up our side of the deal but you fuckers backed out of your side and our lives will be worse now for this rip off.’ And more generally, the loss of popular modernism, the sense of Gen X as the first generation of Americans in a long while to not be reasonably able to expect to wind up better off than their parents, the dislocations brought in the wake of deindustrialization, etc, etc, these are all different kinds of defeats.
In an important sense, the ongoing existence of capitalism is defeat: the working class is a defeated class insofar as it’s subordinated (not permanently, of course, and that class relations are historically temporary matters a great deal thought it also matters a great deal that this is a 'temporary' arrangement lasting many, many lifespans), and furthermore capitalism’s violent dynamism means over and over again an expected future is held up as where one is/where we are going, then that future is set on fire and one ends up/we end up somewhere that wasn’t what we were promised. (And even in apparent golden ages and small scale lottery winnings - raffle winnings? - like my own case of landing a job as a tenured workaday college instructor or friends in union jobs in construction and healthcare, there is a kind of ‘be careful what you wish for, you might just get it’ kind of disappointment - our individual ‘wins’ let us down and that too is a kind of defeat).
I’m aware that the direction of my remarks here heads toward ‘defeat is everywhere’ which might sound flattening and like it minimizes the value of Proctor’s book. That’s not my intent. I do think in important respects defeat and its distress is everywhere - I feel defeated and distressed that my fall semester starts in a few days [kicks dirt] - but not at all in the same way nor with the same importance. The particularities are fairly important and sometimes deeply urgent to grasp, which to my mind makes the book even more important and suggests its categories open onto an even wider scope of analysis (or, multiple kinds of analyses, all valuable) of aspects of our lives in capitalism. I'm going to keep thinking about that as I read the rest of the book.
Well, there you have it. I did warn you there wasn't much point - one presses on hoping the rate of forward motion outpaces the sinking and trying to take the odd glance at the scenery. Anyhow, as ever, keep on trucking. Over and out.