Category: utopian visions

Anticolonial Aesthetics (2)

Here’s the question that J. Daniel Elam’s book (World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics [Fordham University Press, 2021]) poses in stark terms: How to live in an insufferable present? One answer is to work as a revolutionary or as a reformer to create a future that is better than this present. That, we might say, is the traditional answer—and, as Elam is at pains to show, that answer is tied to a package of assumptions that he calls “liberal.” I, of course, would quarrel with using the term “liberal” in that way. But that’s irrelevant at the moment. Let’s instead just identify the key features of the package: an investment in effective action, understood as the ability to envision something and then act in ways that bring that vision into existence. Such a model of effective action is going to emphasize the will (hence a certain model of the controlled self dedicated to a coherent “project”), along with rational planning, and the capacity to command resources (both of human labor and of required materials). In sum, a celebration and enactment of “mastery,” of shaping the world to fit one’s vision of what the world should be. For Elam, mastery leads, just about inevitably, to tyranny. The present is laid waste, is sacrificed, in the name of the future—a future that never arrives.

In response, Elam wants to articulate a politics that does not bank (and the word “bank” is particularly apposite here, with its image of delaying present gratification in favor of future returns on investment) on any future at all. This politics eschews utopian visions, even visions of reform, declaring them “sweet cheats” that devastate the present while never delivering the promised future. To that extent, Elam is seeking the same golden calf I have been pursuing: a non-sacrificial politics, ways of being in the world with others (human and non-human) that don’t require victims.

But there is a catch. The present is itself unliveable, insufferable. Completely and utterly. Back to the affirmation issue. What does it mean to live in a present that cannot be affirmed, that is a continual affront to every value and desire one holds dear—and to live in that present with no hope that the future will be any better. To be blocked on all sides. No exit. Just a succession of present moments all as bad as this one.

It seems inevitable under such circumstances that the search will begin for “lines of flight.” It is unimaginable (unless one sinks into the utter torpor of despair) that nothing will be done in an attempt to meliorate the situation. Even if only in fantasy. Shamed by the cruelty of American society and the puerility of American politics, I dream of moving to Canada. I don’t do it, but the idea that an escape is possible offers some small consolation, some inkling that the present doesn’t have to continue utterly unchanged.

The activists Elam discusses in his book are just that: activists. They keep moving, keep acting, even though all ways forward are blocked. What do they do, how do they live? What choices do they make in a world that has denied them any meaningful freedom—if we take freedom to name the ability to make a choice and to act on that choice. Elam downplays the political acts that these Indian activists performed. That’s probably a weakness in his book. But this downplaying has two functions: one, to starkly dramatize his central question of what to do when the future is foreclosed, and two, to allow him to highlight an alternative politics, a politics that is not oriented to actions designed to create a future. A politics of living in the insufferable present, a politics “in the meantime” (3).

It is a politics precisely because it seeks an alternative to the regimes of mastery. This politics turns its back on (even at times explicitly renounces and refutes) the marshalling of resources that yields the tyrannies of most political projects, including colonialism. Against the command and utilize structure of efforts to produce a future, this politics aims for egalitarian moments of collective togetherness that produce nothing, that offer a fleeting experience of sociality for its own sake. The model feels aestheticist because of this focus on the non-utilitarian, on that which is done for its own sake. George Simmel thought of “sociability” in these terms. Simmel was thinking about the person who loves to throw a good party (Mrs. Dalloway). There is no thought of what is to be gained by throwing the party; it has no aim other than of bringing people together. Mrs. Dalloway tells us that she throws her parties “for life,” as a tribute to life. She has a “gift”—and fights back against those who consider calling her “a perfect hostess” is a sneer. The present is all—although death does come to her party when she learns of Septimus’s suicide. The party is not a denial of death, but a way of attending to the preciousness of each moment in the face of that inevitable future death. Death—and other imagined futures that are less inevitable—do not justify sacrificing the present.

What practices embody this politics of the present? Elam’s quartet—Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Baghat Singh—didn’t throw a lot of parties. What they did do, a lot, was read and write. Hence my unjust crack in my last post that when the going gets tough, the tough pick up a book. Reading is certainly a line of flight, a way to escape the insufferable present into another place. There is an imperative need to envision an elsewhere—be it Canada, a utopian future, or the world offered by a book—when present circumstances are soul- and life-destroying. And Elam’s book brings home just how bookish radicals on the left are. Even Stalin had pretensions to being a scholar. Most revolutionaries read voraciously—and their revolutionary convictions stemmed almost as much from their reading as from their direct experiences of oppression and injustice.

Elam, however, is not interested in the convictions that underwrite one’s disgust with the present. Rather—and this is his book’s greatest strength—he develops a particular ethos of reading. It is not the only possible way to understand the practice of reading, but it is a way that he argues (persuasively) is shared by philology and anticolonial politics in the period between the two World Wars of the twentieth century. Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis stands for Elam (as it did for Edward Said) as the exemplary text of a philological practice of reading that announces its own incompleteness, inadequacy, and non-totalizing, fragmentary forays into interpreting a world and its texts. That world, those books, will always exceed any effort to comprehend it, so that the individual philologist is always already engaged in a collective project, contributing his or her mite, to a project that aims not so much at achieving comprehension (in every sense of that word) as at creating fellowship (“fraternity” in the work of B. R. Ambedkar) through the ongoing conversation. We are all readers together, struggling to parse a difficult text, occupants of a kind of Borgesian library where the effort to understand does not generate despair and competition, but fellow feeling, cooperation, and (perhaps) delight in the world’s endless intricacies (good and bad).

One concrete form this practice of reading takes is the commonplace book (103-105). As distinct even from the anthology (which is aggressively curated and annotated by its editors), the commonplace book simply presents snippets one by one in an egalitarian jumble. We can identify the one who has compiled the commonplace book, but he or she is certainly not an author and only a very minimalist editor. The compiler is assembling a fellowship—and joining its ranks. Elam sees such work as “the assertion of one’s own radical inconsequentiality, commonness, and accessibility” (105).

And then proceeds to explain why this self-abnegation of the reader is political.

“An ethics rooted in inconsequence refuses future possible outcomes in favor of an investment in the secular (that is, non-transcendent) present. For Leela Gandhi [from whom Elam derives his attention to “inconsequence’], this is a political gesture: “we democratize our consciousness by sacrificing our telos,” she notes. If inconsequentialism names “ a force of interruption in the worldly drama of repetition, reproduction, and duplication, so that newness might reenter the world,” inconsequentialist reading is the practice of a revolutionary anti-authorial recalcitrance that both inaugurates and is made possible by a certain worldly commitment to the common, the impossible, and the ephemeral present” (105).

A radical politics of renunciation. The list of what is renounced is long: hope for a better future, faith in one’s self as an effective actor, surrender to the myriad voices of a multitudinous world, and acceptance (even affirmation?) of the massive territory of the impossible. But where, Elam and Leela Gandhi ask, has our allegiance to schemes for betterment gotten us: just the deadly repetitions yielded by our efforts at mastery.

Mine is not a renouncing temperament. And it is all too easy to sneer at the Western academics espousing renunciation even as they carefully build their CVs. But Elam’s book brought home to me, in the starkest terms, the issue of how one lives (day to day in the most mundane ways) in a present one despises yet cannot escape. The answer, at least for me if I am honest (and I suspect my case is not so different from many others), is that I read and write “against the day” since few other outlets for protest or action are open to me. I do contribute to political causes (what Adrienne Rich called “checkbook activism”) and attend the odd protest or two. I agonize over the daily news, but somehow feel it a duty to keep up even while it does my spirits or the larger society no good. And I take lots of “moral holidays.” The term is from William James—and he did not mean it negatively. He simply wanted to note that all of us give ourselves breathers; we take a respite from worrying about or even suffering from the state of the world. We go on a picnic and even manage not to feel in the least bit guilty about it.

For me, reading is very often one of those moral holidays. It is not political in the ways that Elam describes. But it is true that reading can offer the deep consolation of learning that there are others who feel as I do about the current state of things, and who have ways of articulating or explaining our mess that resonate with me. Edmund White has written movingly about how his reading of Proust and Genet during his Ohio boyhood allowed him to understand there was not only nothing wrong with him as a homosexual, but that there was a world, a fellowship, out there that he could join. Reading Hardy, Joyce, and Woolf as a teenager had the same effect on me; there was a world beyond the suburban desert of my hometown—and I was going to leave and join that world.

The point is that reading is often very solitary—and an escape from one’s surroundings. But that reading can also intimate that an “elsewhere” exists—and is already occupied by those one would like to have as fellows. The politics therein focuses on the imagined “republic of letters,” or the “world literature” referenced in Elam’s title. No matter that countless tales of disillusionment reveal that world to be petty, cutting, and back-biting once achieved. In the space of reading, the fleeting utopian fellowship of equals that Elam invokes offers its escape. I still think turning that image into a politics requires a way to get from here to there. But it is, of course, just that kind of calculation that Elam rejects. So: is reading just a “moral holiday” if we don’t try to make its egalitarian allurements, its invitation to join a world we want to belong to, “real”? Are we to leave those awakened desires in the world of fiction, accepting they are impossible to realize in the non-fictional world?

A short digression: worth thinking about the ways in which the internet allows every sub-community discover that it has it adherents. White, the isolated gay Ohioan, finds his similars through books. Now deeply devoted fans of the Dick van Dyke Show discover they are not alone—and form chat rooms followed up by conventions. No avocation is too obscure or too outré to not have its quorum.

Elam is striving to articulate an anticolonial politics. On the one hand, that politics is trying to escape the massive damage that has been done by fantasies/practices of mastery and the infinite demands of productivity, accumulation, and the quest for profit. On the other hand, he is trying to imagine a politics that deals with the ethical question of how to live in a world that refutes our most basic desires for justice, an end to suffering, and love between one human and another.

That second, ethical, question—how to live—can be put in stark existential terms that make it seem less political and more just a matter of responding to the human condition. Elam hits that existential bedrock in the following passage:

“What does it mean to read in the face of death? What does it mean to read without seeking mastery or expertise? What does it mean, therefore, to read without consequence?” (104).

Most academics read in order to have fodder for their own writing. They rarely read without thinking about how what they are reading is going to drive their own production of a new text. Writers are harvesters from the books they read. But there is a limit, there is an impossible future: namely the future of one continuing to live and write without end. No one gets to cheat death—everything we might do to cheat death is inconsequential, cannot have the consequences those actions aim toward.

So maybe one fundamental political question to ask is: how do we live together on this earth in face of the fact that the future for every single one of us is foreclosed? If we accept our radical lack of mastery in the face of death, does that have consequences for how we should arrange our relations to one another and to the world we inhabit? What would follow (and this is the burden of much of Judith Butler’s recent work) is we accepted our radical equality in this matter of dying (instead of seeing some people as less consequential, as more dispensable, as more acceptable victims of mortality)? I am trying to register here why Elam’s book moved me so deeply. It goes against almost all of my instincts, but opening myself to his eloquent meditations, leads me to seeing how the pretension to mastery is just that: a pretension. Elam adds that it is a pretension that only generates misery—in the short and the long runs. So: can we abandon that pretension? What does it look like to abandon it? And what practices and politics follow if we succeed in this act or renunciation? There are paradoxes here, to be sure, since to talk of “acts” and what “follows” them as I do in my last sentence returns us to the ground of the consequences of doing things, but Elam’s book has convinced me that the difficulties of thinking through impossibility and non-mastery should not short circuit the effort to do so

Anticolonial Aesthetics and a Politics of the Impossible

I want to register some reactions to J. Daniel Elam’s compelling World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (Fordham University Press, 2021).

Elam begins form a position almost exactly identical to that of Christina Sharpe—the position of those whose lives are not only not protected by the state, but marked by the state for wretchedness unto death.

“Politics can only be ‘the art of the possible’ for those whose lives are secured by the state, or, in other words, only for those who can confidently know that they will live to see the ‘possible’ attained. Those whose lives are not guaranteed by the state, or those whose lives the state actively expects to end, cannot afford the luxury of such politics. The ‘wretched of the earth’ require, instead, a politics of the impossible. This politics requires imagining and foregrounding, in the face of imminent or certain death, a politics not accountable to regimes of ‘success,’ ‘sustainability,’ or ‘attainability,’ but rather to ‘the meantime’: the time being, the passing moment, and the present” (2-3).

“This is an unsustainable and inconsequential politics. It is a radical politics of the present. . . . Despair and nihilism are insufficient for an anticolonial politics, but they guard against the equally unsatisfactory politics of optimism and hope. Anticolonialism is, in this final instance, a project of locating fleeting moments of egalitarian politics in the relative opacity of an unguaranteed future” (3).

In a memorable phrase, Elam writes of recuperating “an anti-nihilist non-futurity”(5)—connected to the attempt “to create a language sufficient to imagine political collectivities motivated by the fact of their current impossibility. They [anticolonial writers] invented aesthetic forms necessary to imagine a worldwide egalitarianism rooted in the unlikelihood of any future at all” (4).

My first response is to note how closely this tracks Walter Pater’s aestheticism. Many of the key themes of the conclusion to The Renaissance are reprised here: the focus on fleeting moments, the insistence on the present since the future only brings death, the rejection of the utilitarian calculi that measure the worth of the present in terms of its “fruits,” in the things that effort in the present will make possible, will bring into existence. Pater’s radical atomism moves toward severing any connection between one moment and another—a dissolution that also unravels the self (which is revealed as an essentially temporal construct, built upon a constructed continuity between past and present, thus creating an entity, an identity, that can be carried into the future.) Elam follows a similar path when he considers Gandhi’s attempts “to abandon both mastery and self”(73), and recommends “the disavowal of the self-knowing self,” in favor of “the tentative assertion ‘that the something that [one is] should be openly expressed as provisional, revocable, insignificant, inessential, in a word, irrelevant’”(125; italics and brackets in original; the quote is, I think, from Roland Barthes, although Elam’s footnote doesn’t make that absolutely clear.)

To note the similarities to Pater is not to belittle Elam’s project. My intent, rather, is to clarify the stakes. The echo here, I think, is the Adorno and Horkheimer of The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The target is the madness of productivity. Everything must be turned to account. Everything we do is in order to achieve something else. Nothing is done for its own sake. Elam’s experiment is to ponder—with the help of a series of anticolonial writers—what it would mean to embrace the “inconsequential,” to step aside from the pressure, the demand, to produce a future out of the miseries of the present. The claim—and here the similarities are to the contemporary work of Fred Moten, David Graeber, and Jack Halberstam among others—is that the effort to produce that better future only guarantees making the present miserable. It is the very logics of mastery and productivity that render life in the here and now unbearable. In his most expansive moments, it is that logic of exploiting the present for the future profits it can secure that is the hallmark of colonialism. To be anticolonial is not simply to oust the European colonial power; the fully anticolonial must overthrow the extractive processes that strip-mine life right now. It is regimes of accumulation, laying up stores for the future, that must be overcome.

Except that it can’t be overcome—or, at least, won’t be overcome in your lifetime or mine. Faced with that impossibility, what kind of politics makes sense? Elam proposes an inconsequential politics, one that aims (only) for “fleeting moments” of egalitarian commonality. Even putting it that way makes it too utilitarian. Elam speaks of a non-teleological politics, which starts to look something like Foucault’s “care of the self,” except with a more collective resonance. Certainly in Graeber and Moten, the call is for something like “being the change you want to see in the world” (the famous charge that Gandhi lays on us). Elam ponders the possibility (which he derives from Fanon) of “stopping and leaving” (pp. 117-125), of refusing to play the utilitarian game. Why accept the madness and despair the colonial regime inflicts? Refuse participation in its mad push for ever more productivity—a push that destroys life in all its forms, human and non-human.

I want, today, to register all my worries about an inconsequential politics. But I will in my next post concentrate on the strengths of Elam’s case—and on the specifics of the practices he thinks embody the politics of the impossible, of the meantime, that he advocates.

Elam is way too smart to believe that many people have the option of stopping and leaving. There is “no escape” (124-125) for the vast majority. That’s why his is a politics of the impossible. Which is a nice intellectual legerdemain, but of no consolation (dare I say of “no use”) to those suffering in the present. To be (most likely) over romantic about it, I am surprised that Elam doesn’t turn to what Hannah Arendt called “the lost treasure of revolution.” Arendt was referring to the ways in which participation in collective struggle is, itself, a heady and deeply satisfying experience. And it is so satisfying in large part because it gives individuals the kind of immersion in a collective project that is seldom afforded to us. In short, revolutionary struggle does not have to succeed to prove meaningful. But it does have to be oriented to a continual protest against and articulation of the injustices of the existing socio-political structures. For Elam’s purposes, it provides that experience of egalitarian collectivity that he treasures

Elam’s book notably never uses the terms “justice” or “power.” Maybe that’s because “justice” and “power” are consequentialist in their focus on outcomes. But I suspect—and here is where I really ground my reservations about a politics of the impossible—it is because politics is always disappointing. No political effort ever achieves it goals in a perfect, non-compromised fashion. When full-scaled utopia (the overthrow of all productivity, all sacrifice of the present in order to achieve something in the future) is your stated desire, then it follows inevitably that you will see the goal is impossible and opt for a politics of the impossible instead of the messy politics of the possible. Your refusal to settle for half a loaf (social democracy instead of a complete dismantling of capitalism, to take one example) means you dream of an (impossible) escape from politics altogether. Because justice can never be won once and for all, because it can only be secured imperfectly and temporarily by the endless fight against the forces that would withhold it, you want to walk away. The continual mixture of defeat with (compromised and partial) victories is just too exhausting. Better to go off (and here I am being really unfair to Elam as tomorrow’s post will show) and read a book instead.

All of this connects to the (only implied in Elam’s book) alignment of power with oppression. But power can also refer to the capacity to get something done—and point us toward the things that individual could never accomplish on their own, but can accomplish when part of a collective. We are back to the “lost treasure.” Feeling powerless in the face of established institutions, routines, and socio-economic demands is the common lot in today’s world (and, undoubtedly, in every society throughout human time). That’s why experiences of power, of being able to participate in doing something that moves (however imperfectly) toward its goal, are so exhilarating. The imagined and virtual collectivities that Elam celebrates, even as he acknowledges they are “ephemeral and fleeting” (14), look like a simulacrum of what the heart really desires.

In short, this is a politics of despair, a politics that pursues a “diminished thing” (the Robert Frost poem I keep coming back to) because it cannot see a path to what it truly desires. Of course, Elam explicitly acknowledges that he is describing a politics of despair. The question on the table is how to live under terrible conditions, ones that make it impossible to live an affirmable life. That’s the strength of his book—and of Moten’s work (to take one other example). And that’s the question—how to live—that I will take up tomorrow.

But, first, let me summarize my objections. There are two main planks, both of which might be seen as protests against the all-or-nothing position associated with the dream of revolutionary transformation. First, capitalism, utilitarianism, colonialism, racism are all configured as monolithic totalities, not only entirely evil, but also viewed as coherent overarching wholes that must be felled tout court or not at all. I am deeply influenced by Gibson-Graham’s The End of Capitalism as We Know It on this score. We need analyses that abandon totalized characterizations of large abstractions in favor of examination of varied practices on the ground. To paint all utilitarian thinking and effort as oppressive means, presumably, that the writing of books is as soul-destroying as working in a coal mine.

Admittedly, when it comes to racism and colonialism, I am not inclined to parse out certain practices that are acceptable or (even) less pernicious. But do we really have to align colonialism with utilitarian thinking—and then say we have only eradicated colonialism when we have rendered the world free of the tyranny of consequentialism? When it comes to racism, once we posit that racism is constitutive of American society—and that racism in the US will only be overcome when the whole social order is dissolved—we not only should expect a fight to the death (who is going to acquiesce in the complete collapse of society?), but also (and more much importantly in my view) ignore and fail to recognize as resources the vocabulary of rights and equality built into the American political order—a vocabulary that blacks (and others) have been able to mobilize to their benefit. In short, American racism exists alongside other components of “Americanism” in ways that belie seeing American society as monolithically racist–or as lacking any internal resources, traditions, or institutions that can be used to fight racism.

Working the seams is, I am arguing, a more realistic politics than constructing (theoretically) an undifferentiated, non-contradictory, monolith which can then only be dislodged (or even changed) by its complete dismantling. I have also already said that this alternative politics is frustrating, endless, replete with partial victories, stinging defeats, and soul-wrenching compromises. But it also offers joys of participation to those engaged in its multiple struggles. The politics of despair, I am suggesting, comes from a demand for all or nothing—combined with the response that “I’ll take nothing” because I know that getting all is impossible.

Second, the problem with all or nothing thinking in that it locates the problem in “the system.” The focus is on institutional fixes. If we just get the design right, then all that messy political stuff will disappear. Justice, equality, freedom will just flow automatically from the perfect machinery we have established. (Marx offers a prime example of this kind of thinking.) But what I am saying is that there is no escape from politics, from the endless need to negotiate among competing interests, competing visions of what is desirable, and also (crucially) between necessary trade-offs among goods. There are always going to be people trying to game the system (no matter what the system is), but there is also the intractable fact that securing one good must in many cases require sacrificing another good—and there have to be political processes to handle disputes over what sacrifices to make. The left is all too prone to an unrealistic faith in mechanisms, in design.

This last way of thinking, I should add, is not offered in any form in Elam’s work. Instead, his politics of the impossible is addressed to a different critique of revolutionary practice and theory. Namely, he is concerned that the means of revolution (violence justified by its ends, for one example) or its aims (to gain power in state form, to achieve sovereignty) will doom any successful revolution to merely replicate (even if in somewhat different forms) the oppressions of the prior regime. If colonialism is characterized by a logic of mastery, of consequential action, then colonialism is not overcome when the European occupier leaves. The post-colonial nation state, all too often (and inevitably it would seem in this despairing politics), offers new versions of the assaults on life that characterized the colonial period. Postcolonialism is a social and political condition that has not yet been achieved, no matter who sits in the halls of government.

A good place to end for today because it points to one of the many strengths in Elam’s book. He is addressing real dilemmas: how to live in an unjust present? How to move us from that present to a future that will not merely reproduce the oppressions of today? There is a good case to be made—and he makes it—that the traditional politics of struggle and revolution has been unable to deliver on its promises—and so a new kind of politics must be imagined and practiced. And there is surely a case to be made that sacrificing lives in the present in the name of a better future that is not going to be achieved (that is impossible to achieve?) is madness and unjustifiable. (We just need to think of Stalin and Mao to see just how mad—and how evil—such sacrifices are.) So how to live “in the meantime” is an urgent question. That part of me hates ceding power to the bad actors, hates what looks like the quietism of letting the other side win, doesn’t mean that Elam is wrong. I just can’t stop asking why the other side’s world (despite its self-destructive insanity, measured in the toll it takes on human and non-human life) is “possible” while our (the left’s) utopian visions are “impossible.”

Roberto Unger: Utopia, Participatory Democracy, and Exemplary Action

I have now read two recent pieces by Roberto Unger: the essay “The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View” and the transcript of a session at the OECD in Paris, entitled “Inclusive Vanguardism: The Alternative Futures of the Knowledge Economy.” (Both are available as PDFs on Unger’s website: http://www.robertounger.com/en/).

Here is a quick outline of his basic project: the knowledge economy names a significant shift in the mode of production. Specifically, it changes the Fordist model of the mass production of exactly identical products into the machine-driven production of customized products. Thus, the new automatons change the dynamics of scale—and have the potential to upset entirely the “law” of diminishing returns. (Each now copy of a digital product costs almost nothing to produce; so the millionth copy of Microsoft Word produces a larger profit than the first 10,000 copies.)

Interestingly, Unger (unlike so many others writing on this theme) does not think the human race is about to reach a condition of post-scarcity. Perhaps this is because he comes from the global South. Because he still believes scarcity is a problem, he is in favor of “perpetual innovation” and increasing the productive powers of our machines. Utopia, in his view, is having humans only do the work that cannot be done by machines (which might be characterized as “care” work—teachers, health care providers, child and elderly care, environmental protection etc.)

To unleash both the full productive and full utopian possibilities of the knowledge economy requires, in his view, the full-scale involvement of all in the work of innovation—hence his focus on “inclusive vanguardism.” We need to structure our societies to encourage constant experimentation as we search for the technical solutions to our many needs and problems.

In focusing on the mode of production and in what can only be called his technological optimism, Unger looks very much a disciple of Marx. I think many readers would share my sense that the biggest lacuna in his work is any attention to environmental concerns. He talks (in the OECD session) a lot about Brazil, yet never once mentions the subjection of Brazil’s land to extractive processes that are an environmental disaster. The knowledge economy (this statement is me, not Unger), no less than Fordist production, is a vampire with a seemingly endless appetite for “natural resources.”

“Perpetual innovation” in and of itself is no answer. Innovation has to be in the service of ends that are not destructive and/or unjust. Yes, we must experiment with and try to develop innovations that alleviate the severity and costs of climate change. But to believe (and invest and pursue) only technological fixes to environmental degradation is to trust the very mind-set that got us into this mess. We need also to re-think the whole obsession with “productivity” and “growth.” Unger appears utterly committed to the promotion of growth as the correct goal of our economics.

Having lodged that (fundamental) objection to his project, I want to dwell on what I found inspiring in these two pieces. Unger is advocating for radical social changes, but he argues forcefully that change is always piecemeal. You must begin where you are, experimenting with what is possible in this set of circumstances, even as you have an eye on the long-term, larger transformations your local action is aiming toward. On the other hand, this focus on the local (which includes an endorsement of “radical devolution” in federalist arrangements that permit substantial regional divergences) does not neglect the considerable power of the state. For starters, the state must permit those local experiments—and enable them through institutional/legal orders and with financial resources. But there also has to be a national (at least) vision that enlists the state in the project of inclusion, of breaking down the hierarchies that establish the division between the “knowledge workers” and the drudges.

When faced with an acknowledgement of all that is wrong with current arrangements, Unger insightfully tells us that any suggested remedial actions usually are felt to be “too trivial” (not substantial enough to effect the “real” change we want to see) or “utopian” (not remotely feasible under present conditions; just fantasies that we have no way of getting to from here). This strikes me as completely accurate—and it has a chilling effect, is a formula for hopelessness, exhaustion, and apathy.

My own sense (derived from Arendt) of how to combat this dilemma is to say that any kind of political or social activism must combine immediate rewards with “eyes on the prize.” Change is slow, uneven, prone to set-backs, never matches the full utopian vision, and a source of painful conflicts and compromises. Plus it is very hard to see the effectiveness of any single action in bringing change about. For all those reasons, the participation in any social movement must involve the excitement of working creatively with a set of people toward a common end. It is that experience of immersion in a collective project that sustains long-term political movements.

Unger is an advocate of what used to get called (I guess still is, although this theme has retreated from much recent work in democratic theory) “participatory democracy.” He calls for “a high-energy democracy that makes change less dependent on crisis because it increases the level of organized popular engagement in political life . . . and combines the possibility for decisive action on the part of central government with opportunities for radical devolution to states and towns—the creations, in different parts of a country, of countermodels of the national future” (68-69 in the Knowledge essay).

Unger has some sharp critiques of social democracy along these lines—basically arguing that it turns citizens into passive recipients of benefits handed out by the central government instead of active shapers of their civic life. He doesn’t want to see citizens as “consumers” that the government must serve. Unlike the conservative critique of the “nanny state” (even as Unger’s worries about passivity chime with some conservative views), the idea here is to have citizens actively engaged in the provision of those services. Unger favors mandatory national service; along with paying taxes to see that children and the elderly are cared for (to take one example), citizens would be expected to provide that care for some portion of their working life (either as a two year service period or as a periodic—one month a year—seconding.) This service would increase trust and empathy, both of which are in short supply in today’s world, even as it would also increase a sense that we are collectively responsible for the welfare of all our fellow citizens and actively engaged in both thinking about and participating in the best ways to insure that welfare.

Multiple ways to promote citizen interaction, as well as citizen involvement in the shaping of policy, would also be needed. Most crucially, perhaps, is the need from workplace democracy. The whole notion of an “inclusive vanguard” is built upon breaking down the hierarchies in the workplace that reserve expertise to a small minority. Everyone should be invited to participate in developing innovative ideas and experimental projects—and everyone should be provided with the education that makes such a democratization of expertise possible.

Unger understands that experimentation cannot take place where people have no economic security. Necessity, it turns out, is not the mother of invention. The absence of fear, the knowledge that one’s daily bread is secure, plus immersion in high-energy, collaborative (yet also somewhat competitive; Unger is fond of the phrase “cooperative competition”) environments is what stimulates the imagination and makes it possible to take risks. Make the cost of failure too high—and very few will take any risks. So, far from those conservative cowboys who adopt the macho line of letting the fittest survive in the jungle of the “free market,” Unger describes a political/economic regime that underwrites innovation and experimentation by providing the resources that make sure such experiments are not matters of life and death.

Why the focus on experiments? Three reasons, I think, all of which resonate with the project of “social choreography.” First, we don’t know in advance (through some kind of theoretical thought) what actually works. There are always unanticipated and unexpected consequences of any course of action—just as there are always unanticipated obstacles and (if we are lucky) serendipitous successes.

Second, experiments undertaken collectively are a site (and a very non-trivial one) of happiness. Participation can be—and often is—a joy. And it is the energy of that joy that carries the project forward even as it encounters difficulties and even as its contribution to a larger social transformation is not clear. Participation (and this is the Arendt piece) can be an experience (in miniature but in the real time of the present) of the kind of society we are aiming to produce. In short, participatory democracy in action, here and now.

Third, if we accept that change is piecemeal, then our experiments are “exemplary actions” (the phrase is Unger’s), demonstration projects that show what is possible. We don’t have to—and should not—wait upon total transformation to begin living the lives we desire to live. We can find the others who are willing to experiment with us—and begin to dance.

Ben Lerner (2)

Floating beneath the surface in Lerner’s 10:24 is a longing for connection, for art’s communicative possibilities to open up a pathway to community.

“[I] felt the small thrill I always felt to a lesser or greater degree when I look at Manhattan’s skyline and the innumerable illuminated windows and the liquid sapphire and ruby of traffic on the FDR Drive and the present absence of the towers. It was a thrill that only built space produced in me, never the natural world, and only when there was an incommensurablity of scale—the human dimension of the windows tiny from such distance combining but not dissolving into the larger architecture of the skyline that was the expression, the material signature, of a collective person who didn’t yet exist, a still-uninhabited second person plural to whom all the arts, even in their most intimate register, were nevertheless addressed. Only an urban experience of the sublime was available to me because only then was the greatness beyond calculation the intuition of community. . . . [W]henever I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to become one of the artists who momentarily made bad forms of collectivity figures of this possibility, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body. What I felt when I tried to take in the skyline—and instead was taken in by it—was a fullness indistinguishable from being emptied, my personality dissolving into a personhood so abstract that every atom belonging to me as good belonged to Noor, the fiction of the world rearranging itself around her. If there had been a way to say it without it sounding like presumptuous co-op nonsense, I would have wanted to tell her that discovering you are not identical with yourself even in the most disturbing and painful way still contains the glimmer, however refracted, of the world to come, where everything is the same but a little different because the past will be citable in all of its moments, including those that from our present present happened but never occurred. You might have seen me sitting there on the bench that midnight, my hair matted down by the bandanna, eating an irresponsible quantity of unsulfured mango, and having, as I projected myself into the future, a mild lacrimal event” (108-109).

The theme returns in a short lecture given by the narrator at a round-table featuring three writers. He has explained how the Challenger disaster and its aftermath (a poetic speech by Ronal Reagan, the rash of anonymously generated jokes about the event that circulate through the culture) set him on the road to becoming a writer.

“If I had to trace my origins as a poet to a specific moment, I’d locate it there, in those modes of recycling. I make no claims for ‘High Flight’ [a poem Reagan quotes in his speech] as a poem—in fact, I think it’s a terrible poem—and Ronald Reagan I consider a mass murderer. I don’t see anything formally interesting in the Challenger jokes, I can’t find anything to celebrate there; they weren’t even funny at the time. But I wonder if we can think of them as bad forms of collectivity that can serve as figures of its real possibility: prosody and grammars the stuff out of which we build a social world, a way of organizing meaning and time that belongs to nobody in particular but courses through us all” (115-116).

The wistfulness here reminds me of John Lennon’s Imagine—and seems tied to the author’s (and our?) inability to access Whitmanian mysticism with any conviction. The skyline is a monument to collectivity. It could never have been built except by many human hands working in concert. And even if the various activities encompassed by city life—“bundled debt, trace amounts of antidepressants in the municipal water, the vast arterial network of traffic, changing weather patterns of increasing severity” (108)—are “bad forms of collectivity” they are “figures” of the possibility of collectivity. Selves share the “meanings” by which “we build a social world.” The boundaries between selves are utterly porous; we dissolve into one another—and into the stories that we share, the images that guide us. If only we could tweak those facts, shift them slightly on their axes—then the world and each one of us would be “the same but a little bit different” (a formula for utopia that comes from Benjamin or Brecht or someone of that ilk; I can’t find the exact source).

We always already exist in collectivities; the struggle is to make them better, to make them serve our deepest longings rather than to stifle and frustrate them. We fight collectivity (cling to selfishness in all its senses) even as we long for it. Art is connected to that longing; think of how movies and plays move us to tears, even those of us who almost never cry in “real life.” We only indulge our longings in the safe space of art, while living our prudent, advantage-seeking, lives in the everyday world. We know—as Adorno says—what our better selves and a better world look like, and we live out the shame (no matter how deeply we manage to bury it) of the gap between that vision of the good and the sordid realities we inhabit and reproduce.

The web of shared meanings is what we might call “myth”—and what is frightening about the current moment in American history is that the prevailing “myth” is no longer shared. (Probably it never was; more likely is that those who held alternative visions were more ruthlessly silenced in the past.) There are two (at least) utterly incompatible set of meanings circulating through the culture—and they appear so incompatible that the proponents of each find it close to unimaginable to share the national space with the other side.

In a sense, the power of art has never been so dramatically on display. The left/liberal vision occupies the lion’s share of official culture, from the high art bastions of museums and universities to the culture industry’s popular music, film, and TV. But the unofficial, unsanctioned world of the internet has spawned the alternative vision of the populist right, which now has its spokesperson in the White House. Fed by a not inaccurate understanding of its exclusion from “respectable” opinion, populism has developed its alternative modes of communication alongside its refusal to credit anything the official world has to say.

Communication, “spin,” how and to whom facts and meanings are articulated, command the field. Only catastrophic natural events—the virus, hurricanes, wildfires—seem capable of breaking through the morass of words and images, and not in any definitive, unequivocal way. That supposed objective barometer of facts on the ground—the market—has proved as fictitious (if not more) than other “social indicators.” Printing money and piling up debt have become disconnected from any actual consequences. Inflation remains low, faith in government bonds remains unshaken, the stock market indices remain high. We do appear to have left a reality-based world far behind.

And yet. There is so much real and remediable suffering out there. How did we, the human race, manage to turn all our possibilities, all our astounding capacities, into shit? Collectively, we have built an amazing world. But it amazes far more often by its byzantine dysfunctions than its praise-worthy accomplishments. We can work wonders in medicine, but have developed a bureaucracy for delivering medical care that creates massive amounts of spiritually deadening labor and places obstacles in the way of getting treatment to those in need of it. We can feed seven billion people through our farming practices, but have built a system with perverse incentives that lead to the destruction of food while people go hungry and encourages the depletion of the natural sources of agricultural productivity. We spend billions of dollars on military hardware, but claim we can’t afford to help the 20% of children who live in poverty.

I have always disliked Lennon’s Imagine. It seems so removed from actual engagement, so enchanted with its own melancholy. I find Lerner’s wistfulness more substantial. He more fully articulates the sense of being both outside and inside of the collective failure. Outside of it because seemingly unable to effect its unfolding disasters in any way—and outside of it because viewing it from a perspective that makes one unable to take its madness for granted or as inevitable or as immune from harsh judgment. Inside because one is fully engorged by this whale; one can’t pretend not to be a participant, day in and day out, as one struggles to construct a life, a way of negotiating through this minefield. Coming to terms with the devil is what we do even if we dream of living otherwise. Driving one’s car, paying one’s insurance and tax bills to underwrite inhumane systems, consuming then throwing away plastic. The list of contributions we make toward perpetuating the world as currently constituted is endless.

Stop the world, I want to get off. Whitman’s optimism is no longer available, even if his dreams are. Lerner returns to Whitman later in the book and wonders about the “ecstasy” that runs through Whitman’s encounters with wounded Union soldiers in the hospitals in Washington DC. There is something inhuman, deeply disturbing, in how Whitman gets off on the sight of these suffering bodies. Optimism in such circumstances is reprehensible—and seems linked to an ideology of “glorious sacrifice” that was, I would hope, finally put to rest by World War I.

Where to find that optimism today? Clearly, some people find in the collectivities created by the demonstrations that have become a recurrent feature of American civil life in 2020. Insofar as the demonstrations attempt to construct—and make stick—a counter-narrative, a vision of American society antithetical to the racism and division Trump wants to amplify, the battle is on. It is a war of meanings, and a war between an inclusive vision of collectivity against a divisive one. Lerner articulates for us the forlorn, but still deeply felt, longing for that inclusive collectivity (the beloved community) even as he reminds us that art (if understood in the widest possible sense) is where articulation takes place, where the meanings we hope to share are first presented. We can never quite believe that Shelley was right about poets being the unacknowledged legislators, but it is less incredible to recognize how the arts are powerful creators of community—and of the shared meanings that hold communities together.