Tomorrow's future... today! ("The way-hey-ting is the hardest part." Or, "this crying, this screaming, [our] voice is being born")
I was talking with an old friend today who I hadn’t seen in ages, might be seriously eleven years. They happened to passing through town for work so we got together and hung out. It was lovely. We are cut from the same cloth in terms of covid stuff and much else, and it was fun to chat and hang out of course and to see the ways in which we’ve ended up arriving in similar places over the years. I wanted to type out some stuff that came up in our conversation. I think I’ve said some of this on here before but I don’t remember for sure.
I happen to believe that we represent a future consensus, on covid and on much else. That may be arrogant, I don’t know. If so, fine. I stand by it. Our side will win out. I’m fully convinced of that and frankly it’s unquestionable article of faith, not a faith that takes any work but just something that seems incontrovertible to be and that is a starting point. This belief is in important respects deeply optimistic, and the flip side is that it is hard to be an early adopter of this future consensus in a world opposed to it - opposed to it both in terms of many people’s beliefs and in terms of social and institutional organization.
This has also made me realize the degree to which I’ve benefitted in the past from other people who were early adopters of future consensus. I’d now say it this way: I’ve been very lucky to repeatedly show up late to networks of early adopters, in DIY music scenes and in activist politics. The people who show up early to early adopting have to beat their heads against a wall, feel the confusion and frustration and isolation and judgment of other people. Those of us who show up later in the process of early adopting get all the revelation and excitement and community.
Talking about this with my friend today, they suggested we’re currently in a period of backlash responding to the relatively solidaristic earlier days of the pandemic. I think that’s right, that there’s a significant state project of going on the offensive in various ways - police departments around the country building ‘cop city’ training facilities in response to the uprisings after the murder of George Floyd are one example - and one element of this offensive involves a sense by state personnel that widespread opposition to social murder is worse for them than a widespread intensification of social murder as a result of policy (the push back to work and the pressure against telecommuting being two related examples). My friend also suggested the backlash periods likely are historically normal - hence having the word backlash, I suppose - and they eventually end. That’s mildly comforting though only mildly, since it’s not at all a given that any of this will end anywhere near fast enough, but still, it’s good to have a bit more clarity on what it is we’re living through.
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Unrelated: the humanities are being shat on across higher ed and that’s a bummer. I got an earful about events to this effect at another university today from a friend rightly distressed by it. A thought I had in response is that I’ve occasionally heard people say that they think the humanities are politically important and that’s why they’re under attack. The sense of political importance used there is something like ‘powerful tools people can use to contest subordination.’ I think that’s simply false regarding the academic humanities. Instead, I think the humanities involve significant elements of respect for dignity and freedom, the freedom to make one’s self in new ways. They’re politically important in the way that principles of respect are important, not because they have an instrumental value in helping us win political fights, but because they have a bearing on the kinds of good life we want that helps motivate political fights. By analogy: oppressed people are often denied decent food, shelter, and medical care. Providing those goods to people is terribly important and it often requires serious conflict to make those goods available. But it’s not that the provision of those goods contests power, it’s that the provision of those goods to oppressed people often has contesting power as a precondition. A little more generally, we get freedoms insofar as past struggles fought for those freedoms. That the freedoms are products and stakes of struggle doesn’t mean the freedoms are necessary conditions for struggle, and saying that isn’t to say those freedoms are unimportant, it’s just to specify why they’re important. To try it yet another way: the old strike slogan “bread, and roses too” is not a claim that people with access to beauty struggle better, but rather is a claim that people deserve beauty, in a context of recognition that many of us will not be provided access to beauty unless there is significant social conflict to demand that access. This is all in part to say that the reason the humanities matter is that people matter, and the reason the humanities don’t matter to institutions like universities and governments is that people don’t matter to them either. Those institutions are all part of the death machine, ultimately.
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A third unrelated thing: I just watched This Town on the BBC. Hopefully it gets a second season. If you’ve not seen it, it’s set in the early 1980s in Birmingham and Coventry. I could do with a bit more big picture scene-setting - Thatcher’s weirdly absent, for instance - but I still like it a great deal. It centers on people, most of them young, largely marked as discardable at a time when discarding people was intensifying as a matter of state policy (part of why I wish more of the national picture was present but whatever). This shows up in the show in the form of poverty, layoffs, state repression, and addiction.
A major theme of the show is music, the main characters end up starting a band. There’s a lot of music played in the show as both soundtrack and characters listening to it themselves, both recorded and live, and the music’s all good. The music in the main characters’ band is pretty good too, better as the band gets its shit together. There’s a pretty strong emphasis on roots reggae, early ska, and two-tone, which is very up my alley, and, related, the clothes...! Oh...! Here too I’d like more of the big picture national political situation since that’s a big part of music culture at the time - the Specials “Ghost Town” springs to mind, and “Free Nelson Mandela” - but in important respect the omission of those elements makes it less period specific in ways that, despite the downsides, I think work pretty well, making the show less about Birmingham and Coventry specifically and more about the importance of art to embattled people. That speaks to me a great deal.
Not quite so unrelated after all, I guess - the friend I talked with today who said the thing about backlash has an activist background and also DIY music background similar to mine. We talked about how sensibilities from those experiences are big parts of who we are today despite having significantly aged out of youth culture, and it occurred to me that those experiences were experiences of a significant access to wealth. I don’t mean wealth in a capitalist sense but in a sense, well, a sense of wealth that also embodies a future consensus. (I’m thinking of how Marx says in capitalist societies wealth appears as an accumulation of commodities and also says that in a liberated future one important version of wealth will be free time. This is not only freedom in the negative sense of not being told what to do, it’s also freedom in the positive sense of the presence of important social goods that facilitate individual and collective self-development. If that sounds vague, think about how learning another language makes us free to speak to more people and engage different cultures, or think about how economic security lets people pursue artistic pursuits more easily.)
Activist and DIY circles meant access to a wealth of ideas and art to make sense of myself and the world and - in limited but no less real ways - to remake myself and the world. At the heyday of my involvement in that stuff, there was so much of that sort of wealth that I didn’t always appreciate or even notice it all. I feel very lucky for having had those experiences. I notice them more now in their relative absence in my life due to a variety of factors, many of which are bound up with the pandemic. I was saying to my friend, I feel a bit like a reverse Wizard of Oz process, having lived in color a long time, gotten used to that, then slowly moving back to Kansas and a world more black and white. I remain optimistic that this is reversible, that’s entailed in the belief that we represent a future consensus, but, again, it’s hard to endure the awful wait.
This is all related at least slightly to Raymond Williams (my crawl through his books remains ongoing because glacial in pace), in that I’m talking in part about the emergence of alternative or oppositional cultures, and in that everything I’m talking about is a kind of production, though only some of it production in the capitalist sense. (Capitalist production is to a significant degree a limitation on some of these other forms of social production, since capitalism is antithetical to many important freedoms.)
I’m going to stop now but before I do I want to mention this great record by the noisy post-punk band Girls In Synthesis: https://girlsinsynthesis.bandcamp.com/album/now-heres-an-echo-from-your-future I mention it for the title, “Now Here’s An Echo From Your Future.” We represent a future consensus, and our enemies represent future atrocities as well as present atrocities extended and intensified between now and a fully liberated society. All of those different futures echo in complex and often painful ways. (I’d recommend to you Peter Frase’s lovely book Four Futures, and I’d add that all the futures he lays out as possible are already present in kernel form and have echoes in the present.)
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One last thought or three that also came up in conversation with a friend recently. Change in knowledge doesn’t always represent progress. The book Age of Fracture is full of good examples. It argues (put in an oversimplified way that does disservice to a fantastic book) that US-based academics across a range of fields got much, much worse at understanding power in the mid to late 20th century. Another good example is in Simon Clarke’s book Marx, Marginalism, and Modern Sociology. Clarke argues that economic thought got worse in the late 19th century, a worsening obfuscated by growing mathematization. He makes the point that fields can get worse in the sense of losing explanatory power and posing less important questions, and yet benefit from doing so (asking hard questions isn’t always looked well upon, depending on the sort of question) in part because a worsened field by one standard can also be an improved field from another (shitty ideological) standard.
Marx says that in Capital he doesn’t talk about individuals really, but rather treats those individuals as actors playing a part in a play. He specifically uses the phrase “character-mask,” meaning they’re in costume. Watching someone on screen or stage play a role, we think about the role the actor is bringing to life, not the actual actor as a real person with an actual life. Ditto when Marx talks about specific individuals in his book, he’s doing so not to draw out their actual individuality but because he wants to use talking about them as a device to get at systemic elements of capitalist society. This ‘character mask’ passage of Marx can also be read, slightly but only slightly against the grain, as being about how playing a role tends to make people into that role. Wear the costume long enough and it stops being a costume, becomes who you really are. Your face molds to the mask. (I think about this a lot in my industry: flat pay and worsening conditions make getting on the management track more attractive to some academics, and the current trends make it very likely all university management will increasingly be enlisted in attacking the things that make universities worthwhile.)
One part of the character-shaping effect of institutional roles is a loss of curiosity and loss of capacity to recognize other people’s humanity. I’ve lately been using street maps as a metaphor. Street maps blank out everything that’s not the street - everything that makes you actually want to go about in the world - in order to make the world usable. Capitalist society is absolutely lousy with processes of making the world usable and often for the worst sorts of purposes, and that means it’s also lousy with depictions of the world that blank out so much of what makes anything and anyone meaningful. People in positions of institutional power deal with even more blanked out maps of the world, at least in part because they and their institutions are all about using people and the rest of the world. I think the maps get in their heads, like face molding to the mask, so that those depictions of the world that help make the world usable become, to those people, the world itself. All of us nobodies aren’t on their maps - our lives and deaths don’t matter to them in a deep way: it’s not that they can manage despite their sadness over what’s done to us, it’s that they’re not sad. Of course that’s a little overgeneralized, but I think that’s the direction things go, tendency-wise.