Goldfish

I think I was four years old. For my birthday, two different people gave me the same action figure. My family decided to test me. You know those experiments they run to see how long it takes for the child to eat the candy on the table? They told me that they’d exchange one of the action figures for a different one if I didn’t open them both. Of course, I was a small child. The point of the experiment is how long it takes the child to take the candy—not whether or not they’ll take the candy. They scolded me and told me that they wouldn’t exchange the action figure. (Of course, they obviously could’ve still exchanged it.) I cried and said it was unfair. I got angry, and I threw the action figure onto the roof.

A few years later, one of my little sisters went with my father to some sort of carnival. They won a goldfish. The goldfish came in a plastic baggie. We moved it into a little empty glass fishbowl. We kids were all excited about the fish. We fed and fed and fed the goldfish, so it died. In the morning, we encountered a cloudy fishbowl with an upside-down goldfish floating at the top. We all cried. It was unfair. For some reason, we decided that the thing to do was to pulverize any trace of the fish in the garbage disposal. Maybe we all said a Hail Mary. We asked our parents to get us another goldfish. They’re cheap, right? We already had a fishbowl. They refused.

Around the same time, our black and white cocker spaniel had a litter of puppies. They’d been growing for a few weeks. One night, around dusk, the puppies were playing in the garage and in the driveway as it extended out toward the street. Our parents told us it was time to go inside from playing. I dribbled a basketball, while my father yelled from the end of the driveway to my sister who was in the garage: “Close the garage door!” She pressed the button. I could see the problem: one puppy was bounding toward the inside of the garage. At first, I was calmer. Finally, I was yelling at her to stop the garage door. She couldn’t make out what I was saying. I pointed at the puppy, and she realized the tragedy that was unfolding. She pressed the button again, just as the door was coming down on the tiny puppy’s neck. My father scooped up the convulsing puppy and told my sister to come with him. I was wailing, my face covered in streams of tears. They took the puppy to bury it in a wooded area at the end of the street, but they told me that they’d taken the puppy to a veterinarian and that the puppy would be fine. I didn’t find out until years later. The puppy had a name, but I’ve forgotten what it was.

Dilemmas

I met my friend from Turkey to attend this philosophical cinetalk with the director and some philosophers. Two short, kind of postmodernist films. On the way, my friend had been mad at me.

            I’d left the apartment, and she’d called my name. I saw her. She looked beautiful in the twilight—she wore a black, sleeveless top and an olive skirt down past her knee—but she was angry. “Do you have an explanation?” I could tell she was frustrated.

“Explanation of what? For what?” She was mad because, due to lack of time, bad coordination, and lack of communication, she’d had to wait. We’d sort of resolved it before the talk.

At the talk, the main interlocutor seemed confused about the films, but he was trying to be generous. I raised my hand. I tried to point out that the director’s films seemed to advocate for getting rid of language, but I don’t think that I made the point clear. The professor I’d been trying to impress seemed to maybe be trying to defend him? Hard to say, though.

            My friend and I walked around the lush, floral campus, but it was dark by that point. We couldn’t really see the sea anymore. Damn. She pointed out that the light grey, futuristic brutalist concrete spaceship-building didn’t belong between the old academic buildings with their Middle Eastern motifs. Also, because the building was top-heavy, it wouldn’t do well in an earthquake. “Pyramids are perfect for earthquakes.” The Egyptians win again.

            We went to eat shawarma. The toum was good. We had tea. When in Rome (anyway, she’s Turkish). As we walked down Hamra Street, with its little warm lights, the regular carhorns, the shops, the hijabs, I told her I was sorry about earlier. I explained that I’ve recently earned secure attachment, but even though I no longer take things personally as I once did, getting rid of old habits of thought and behavior doesn’t replace them with new ones. I joked that I think she likes me because she acts avoidantly attached (we’re not going to date, but we’ll be friends awhile), but anyway, I’m sorry because I interrupted her a couple times and, while I didn’t quite yell, I did raise my voice a bit once or twice. I’d like to not do those things in the future.

            Comparatively, I’d acted well enough, but it’s a low bar. I explained that I’m still learning how to deal with awkward situations to try to make things better. I’m going to be more patient. She got a bit defensive, but in the end, all of this finally cut the tension that’d been lingering all night.

---

            We went by my apartment so I could set down my stuff. I was a little tired; my back and feet were killing me. I started the laundry. I came back out, and we walked down to the sea and used some guy’s hotspot so that she could get her ride back to where she was staying. He seemed annoyed, but I think he would’ve been too embarrassed to not help. “You’re welcome!” He grinned at us.

            I explained that, in the US, we would be reluctant to borrow someone’s hotspot. “Why?” Well, because we’re all selfish, and no one wants to help anyone. It’s considered rude and embarrassing to ask for help.

We stood there waiting, and my friend pointed out that, across the street, there was a little boy laying on the ground in front of the building. He had his t-shirt pulled above his head, and he lay in the fetal position. “Where are his parents?” Not good. She thought that the way he was laying was unnatural, so maybe he’s sick, but to me, it looked like a pretty normal way for a kid to sleep. I don’t know what to make of that disagreement, but anyway, I didn’t mention it.

            Eventually, the guy she’s staying with came and picked her up. She left, so I crossed the street to walk back toward my apartment.

As I crossed the street and got closer to the building, I saw the kid, and I kind of wanted to cry. I looked around. No parents, no police, no unoccupied adult. A guy with a corncart walked toward me, so I asked if he spoke English. I pointed to the kid. He smiled and shrugged. “Where are his parents? Could we call someone? What about the police?” He smiled and kept walking. A young guy came, and the same thing ensued. He stood there, smiling, not knowing what to do. He said something in Arabic. Then, an old security guard came. He wore a tan polo with blue letters—the name of some security company. He had brown skin and the white hair that forms a rotunda atop one’s head—caesarian. He also said something in Arabic. I asked about the parents again. He told me in English to go home. The younger guy said that the security guard said that the kid’s parents were walking along the coast. He again said to go home. I wasn’t sure, but what could I do? I walked home, unsure what I should’ve done.

Escapism and Utopia

(This text represents my argument developed in conversation with my friend, Phikria.)

Authenticity is the concept of nothingness’s fullness. Why “nothingness?” Authenticity entails the supposition that, beneath the dirty surface of things, there lies a quiet, still, harmonious, ineffable being that contradicts all our ways of conceiving the material presence of reality as we experience it. One could never talk of authenticity as something; its nature must always remain fundamentally inutterable. If one is to seek their authenticity, they must find it in a kind of nothingness.

Thus, the Authentics manichaeistically divide the world in two—the sacred and the profane. Deep inside everything, the Authentics claim, there is a second register of reality. This second register is the real, or “authentic,” register where only pure, healthy, content, and “higher” phenomena take place. The first register—the domain of quotidian experience—conceals the second register. When one attends to the loud business of the first register, the dirty half-truths of daily life are revealed. When one attends to the quiet, still, full emptiness (again, empty of the hum of all the associations, symbols, and sense-making that occupies our daily life [In The Destruction of Reason, György Lukács refers to this authenticity as the “irrational”]) of the second register, higher, beautiful truths are revealed. This dualism is the necessary condition for both escapism and capitalism.

The full space of authenticity’s emptiness is also the space of utopia. The fundamental reality of the world—that by which reality’s unrepresentable truth is concealed by everyday life’s ugliness—is also the reality of something radically better than what we tend to experience. The achievement of utopia, then, requires a third term—a strategic medium. This medium has been thought to be any number of things: engagement with nature, transcendental meditation, asceticism/self-denial, psychedelic drugs, self-inquiry (despite that many meditators subscribe to the Buddhist concept of anatman [no-self], they ask: “Who/what am I?”), near-death experience, smashing one’s own face with a giant rubber ball, etc. The payoff is figured to be that, if enough people sufficiently participate in the mediating experience, all life in the universe will be freed from suffering. Sounds beautiful, huh? Also, kind of fun, kind of playful, kind of joyous.

Such a process represents the promise of a simultaneous progress for all the world’s phenomena. Indirect progress is also the wager of liberalism, and thus, of capitalism. One might say that capitalism was the innovation by which universal progress would be mediated by the limitless production of abundance and surplus. While, previously, people had often taken care of the poor before securing abundance, liberal individualism permitted the idea that a system of actors would create utopia through rational actions in markets. The payoff, then, was supposed to be that turning focus away from improving people’s lives, and instead, turning toward creating the conditions for creating the maximum possible abundance, would free everyone from suffering, need, and even desire. Oops.

This indirectness deserves reflection; the indirectness itself performs a few functions. It keeps alive the idea of improving things for everyone. Whew! Guilt-free. It allows one to prioritize one’s own comfort above others’ needs without completely sacrificing love for everyone. In fact, by capitalist logic, one can argue that consuming more, and indulging in one’s own pleasure, is a morally good thing to do. By demanding the production of more abundance/surplus, one helps to ensure that more abundance falls into the mouths of the poor. One need not see any conflict between, on one hand, one’s own comfort and convenience, and on the other hand, the needs of others. Enjoy on Earth, and be rewarded in Heaven. There’s no reason, then, to focus on others’ misery. To focus on others’ suffering is uncomfortable and unhelpful. In fact, others’ misery creates an emotional obstacle to one’s enjoyment, which violates the logic of creating abundance in order to perfect life on Earth (or, “in the Universe”—however one prefers). By this reasoning, one could say that focusing on others’ suffering is, then, actually immoral. To focus on others’ suffering might distract someone from the moral good of demanding more. Worry about yourself. Guiltlessly enjoy. This is one of capitalism’s moral commandments.

Of course, one could also guiltily enjoy. Guiltless enjoyment requires a certain kind of discipline. So long as one has enough resources, then it can be relatively easy to go through life without apparently causing harm. One can retreat into ethical purification in order to avoid the frustration and the corruption of politically dealing with others. The good capitalist subject need not engage in politics in order to be ethical. One can escape the world’s stupid and ugly forms of conformity, oppression, and even violence. One can live the ethical life of their choosing. One could, for instance, become a good meditator in the Andes and learn to administer ayahuasca to tech executives, holding out the promise of improving the world in some way. At least, in so doing, one does their small part. So much of contemporary culture hinges on the promise of the supposedly limitless (but also contingent, perhaps even magical) power of tiny acts of kindness. Always be kind. Don’t be critical. Don’t be political. Be a good capitalist subject.

One good reason to escape the direct activity of improving conditions for the most vulnerable people, then, is that it allows one to avoid reckoning with their own complicity in the situation out of which certain people are made vulnerable. Our responsibility makes us sad. It’s far more comfortable to purify one’s own actions with relation to the values of one’s own heart than it is to deal seriously with the overwhelming number of suffering people in the world. One could try and fail. That would be sad. We want to avoid dealing with the ways that the world’s shittiness harms others more than it harms us, so we try to make our world—and, thus, our responsibility—small. In our small world, we can be good and do good. Some people even claim that it’s more important to purify oneself than to improve things for vulnerable people. Before you help others, you should help yourself. Before you support suffering people in some other place, you should pressure your own leaders to stop doing bad things. Purify yourself before you help others. Don’t be so arrogant as to impose your goodness—by doing things like feeding, sheltering, and mending others—before you’re really good.

To be clear, all of this is already entailed in capitalism’s logic. Massimiliano Tomba writes, “Today we can say that ideology has become such a pervasive dimension that it includes both the defense of what exists and its critique, as well as many alternatives to the present.” (“What is Ideology?” forthcoming) Resistance to prevailing ideology is a matter of consumer choice. One can obey the spicy law of disobedience. Thus, ironically, resistance, too, is its own side of the prevailing ideology. Capitalism (and liberalism) welcomes resistance with open arms and tightly-closed prison cells. Violate the law in order to create more options to be commodified. Capitalism loves this. Tomba continues, “[I]ndividual freedom is nothing, because individuals are functions of an existing structure and they are no freer than a stone rolling down a hill; individual freedom is everything, because individuals are free to choose and build their own life; individual freedom is ideology, because the very notion of individual freedom belongs to a historically specific representation of the present.” (ibid.) In the first place, we can say that people think of themselves as “individuals” because they’ve been conditioned to do so. Capitalism necessarily entails the multiplicity of mechanisms for teaching people that they’re free and autonomous—free to choose to act as expected or to deviate. Free to live as they choose and free to die as they choose. Free to engage in violence and free to be imprisoned. Everyone is responsible for themselves, and they’ll be rewarded according to the market value ascribed to their choices at the moment of those choices’ enactment. People’s choices are part of a system that already accounts for, and profits from, differences. Everyone, then, can choose when to conform and when to deviate in order to determine the conditions of their lives from within that system. Such “individual” choices are good because each of them helps to reproduce and strengthen the capitalist system.

The particularly capitalist notion of individual freedom, then, entails the ideology by which necessity is never fully considered. If philosophers’ dealings with freedom always entailed consideration of freedom’s necessary relationship to necessity, capitalism( and liberalism)’s innovation is to conceive of the “individual’s” freedom as limitless and as absent any forms of conditioning. Generally, the philosophers of the past few thousand years would consider such a conception of freedom to be fantastical. However, again, such a conception of freedom is necessary for capitalism’s reproduction.

The ideology of individual freedom allows one to escape their sense of their social nature and the fundamental debt that they—by their ongoing survival—owe to the collectivity. Such a conception of freedom allows one to avoid the fact that anyone’s pain is tied up with others’ fates through the system that we share. As a “free individual,” one escapes their feeling of social mutuality—their feeling that the conditions of their lives are tied up with the conditions of others’ lives. A conception of freedom that wasn’t based on the fantasy of the so-called “individual” would, thus, have to deal with the necessity entailed in people’s mutual relations.

The dualism that is, on one hand, authenticity’s fullness of nothing, and on the other hand, the quietude of utopia, is the same escapist condition that’s necessary for capitalism’s ongoing immiseration and destruction. This is the dualism that supposedly allows some magical mechanism to make everything better for everyone. That magic is also the magic of the “individual,” the magic of a world of non-mutuality, the magic of the absence of necessity, the magic of a mechanism for which the cause by which it improves everything all at once is never—indeed, necessarily can never be—explained. It’s the same dualism that allows one to avoid the possible frustration and sadness of trying and failing to improve things for people. It’s the dualism that allows one to escape their immediate, concrete sense of responsibility to the collective.

The Fire of Another

Maybe I’m a heartbreak hotel,
but don’t pretend I was cruel to you.
Don’t send Leonard Cohen songs,
don’t ask what happens to the heart.

Don’t we want a little tenderness this time?
We fought around a healing wound—
the silken bandage begged for mercy.
The required patience constituted a crime.

If I stole too many moments
and locked away accrued caresses,
when we were thinking houses, deeds,
then you poured acid on your blessings.

I’ll attend the black funeral, with its death-clouds hanging above;
I’ll carry the Sisyphean load;
but I can’t say I lit this fire under your salty glares,
as you carry me below.

We chose to sit with each other awhile.
We chose each other to hurt and to be hurt by,
but pain is always part of love,
and still, we love all the while.

In the Sky Between Atlanta and Durham, 18 Dec 2022

I used to love flying to Iceland. I remember the brilliant colors of the clouds, the ocean, the land, and the ice below. Sometimes, the plane wing shone at dusk like it was an extension of the sun. The glaciers, the mountains, and the evergreens took my breath away. I often think it’s corny to stare out of plane windows, but sometimes, one must look to see how wondrous is the world around us. I remember taking a train from Serbia to Germany by going through the Austrian Alps. It looked like a fairytale land. I once drove from Denver to San Diego. I’ll never forget the colored wooden cottages; the ravines and river valleys; and the brilliant, colored diagonal stripes on the mountainsides.

I flew to Reykjavik for love, but I also loved flying there. It was endlessly exciting because I landed at 5am or 6am or 9am or 4pm, and that meant that I always saw something new. I flew there for several seasons multiple times. Sometimes, it was snowy, but not always. Sometimes, I felt enveloped in an orange glowing light. Sometimes, it was aquamarine; sometimes, it was purple. Always, it was brilliantly soft and warm, even when it was crisp and cold.

Magical moments occur in one’s life. Those moments are absolutely of this earth and this life; they’re everyday occurrences. Every day, children are born—small, soft animals entering this world with wide eyes and soft cries, needing sustenance and swaddling. Every day, people climb mountaintops from where they look down on cloud blankets. Every day, nature’s chemicals light up water, land, and curious creatures. Every day, people assemble to do things that couldn’t have been imagined. We are of the earth. We’re as fragile and magical and powerful as this earth.

I keep noticing miracles of human care and kindness. I notice when strangers help one another purely out of their mutual recognition of shared vulnerability. People smile at one another and spontaneously say reassuring words for no reason other than honesty and desire to improve a new acquaintance’s well-being. I saw a young woman in the airport offer to carry an old woman’s bag to her gate. The older woman declined the offer, but the younger woman insisted that it would be no bother. On the plane, strangers talk about shared concerns and hopes.

People sometimes think that some others are evil, but this really only results from misguided fear. People sometimes worry about losing what they have—privileges in material and symbolic forms. So, people really do sometimes produce racist, sexist, classist, etc. outcomes. We all sometimes participate in the production of these outcomes. There can be no doubt. But, perhaps everyone really loves strangers of every sort. We all love one another, but sometimes, we become afraid. There’s nothing inevitable about the maintenance and reproduction of fear.

To see through the window and onto vanishing golden hillsides, a young woman from a foreign country peers over the heap of cold-weather clothes, book, water bottle, etc. that lie in my lap. It makes me smile. Today, I’m optimistic about life and its possibilities.

Complacency and Hope

Someone said, “The opposite of hope is complacency.”
Complacency denies the affirmation of possible futures;
complacency precludes experimentation.
Complacency entails paranoia:
failure looms like total negation—perhaps annihilation!

Hope permits the possible possibility of success
—however limited—and risks failure
as the cost of improvement
or relief.

Paranoia and Love

“Paranoia knows some things well and other things poorly.” — Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

What is paranoia that it can know?
What’s paranoid knowing’s nature?
If paranoia were a knower, it might be a total knower—
a tiny, shimmering god.

The paranoiac brings into clear, bright light
that which lay in shadow.
The paranoiac always already knows
but anxiety compels them to show;
they suspected all along.

The paranoiac is a coward. They deny their own fear.
They project this fear—over all their world;
onto all their world’s objects;
and into their world’s deep, dark crevices—
the negativity they deny their heart.

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No one chooses their family,
no one chooses their community,
no one chooses who they are
or into what time or place they land in life.

To love conditionally is to love in fear.
Conditional love is to love the one
from fear of the other.
Conditional love is love-as-non-hate—
pseudo-love, ersatz-love—
it contains conditioning hate.
To love conditionally is to not love at all.
Conditional love is hate-as-love.

To really love requires the bravery to love all.
Love recognizes that each one is a someone
and we are all someones
and you are a someone.

The Television Will Be Revolutionized: Walter Benjamin and Stuart Hall on Media, Technology, and Politics

Jürgen Habermas and others have shown that, since the Reformation and the Enlightenment, new questions appeared in people’s daily lives. Questions of religious practice, commodity purchases, and political possibilities helped to produce private and public spheres (Habermas; Benjamin, 32). People’s opinions became important to the coordination of social life, motivating research in what’s sometimes called “public opinion.” (Habermas) In the 19th century, growing urbanization increased interest in public opinion. New communication technology permitted greater dissemination of messages and images, furthering interest in public opinion and media effects. Early-20th century fascist leaders’ novel uses of mass media to effect political outcomes elicited dramatic growth of research in public opinion and media effects.

To be clear, communication research was political from the outset. The effects of massification; democratization of politics, economy, and media; and new technologies were unpredictable. No one could guess what political paradigms could emerge from never-before-seen social conditions. The aesthetic processes by which media helped to shape people’s perceptions rendered great concerns over media effects and new technologies.

In this essay, I’ll compare and contrast Walter Benjamin and Stuart Hall’s views on aesthetics and politics. While they share a good deal, Benjamin’s concerns, expressed in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” more clearly reflect early-20th century thoughts on media effects and new technologies. Stuart Hall’s writings advance some of the kinds of arguments Benjamin made, complexifying the role of the masses in producing and receiving media and politics. I’ll begin by explaining Benjamin’s understanding of media effects and technology, before comparing it with Hall’s. Then, I’ll show how they expound on these in order to show the political role of aesthetic processes. I’ll end by synthesizing these thoughts and gesturing toward a kind of political media program suggested in the works of Benjamin and Hall.

Benjamin’s “The Work of Art” shows how the development, and use, of communication technologies led to social effects. For instance, Benjamin says, film helped to lead to a kind of presentism (27). Film’s “tactile” “shock effects”—constituted by its perpetual movement—distracted film viewers, keeping them from contemplating on-screen events (32-3). Distractedness enabled viewers’ thorough absorption of filmic messages. This didn’t prevent potential for criticality, though. The film viewer’s position is distanced from the acts by which films are made, leading them to a critical posture (25-6). However, Benjamin observed that the film-film viewer relationship failed to fulfill its political promise (27). Rather than being directed at social conditions, criticism was primarily aimed at suddenly supposedly archaic traditions.

Parallel to Marx’s commodity fetishism, Benjamin said that art’s disconnection from traditions and material processes—what he calls art’s “ritual value”—coincided with the abstraction of art’s purpose into its “exhibition value” (21-3, 29-30). The destruction of art’s ritual value brought about the loss of art’s “aura”—its history, uniqueness, and unbreachable distance (21). Rather than represent everyday understandings of the world and social life, art became increasingly abstract, reproducible, and exchangeable, no longer tethered to referents (19-22). In this way, the loss of traditional connections to material practices inverted art’s purpose: instead of reflecting existing politics embodied in shared understanding and shared practices, art shaped understandings and politics (23, 28-9). For Benjamin (and as we’ll see, for Hall, too), this meant that public opinion came from the material conditions of people’s lives, but also from media effects. I will now show how Hall’s work relates to many of these themes.

Hall added the use of semiotic theory and took further some of Benjamin’s observations about the role that media play in shaping social outcomes. Hall said that all of reality entails discursive elements (“Encoding/Decoding,” 163-4). People receive (beginning in childhood and throughout life) symbolic systems—constituted by codes that associate symbols with referents—that they use to “decode” messages (“E/D,” 163-6). As people receive more messages, and are exposed to more kinds of associations between symbols and referents, their understandings of these associations and, more generally, of the nature of their particular symbolic system, shift. In this way, received messages help to perpetually refigure particular associations and remake symbolic systems. People decode messages in different ways, depending on their political dispositions and on their understanding of their symbolic system (“E/D,” 171-3). The power to make and remake symbolic associations is important for determining material outcomes. At least since the onset of modernity, ownership of media is a primary constituent of this power (“E/D,” 163, 169-72). This power might be more salient in recent times because the development of the private sphere (Habermas), the propagation of daily choices (Habermas), the proliferation of mediated images and messages (Benjamin), and the dissociation of symbols from referents (Benjamin, 19-20) have increased signifiers’ flexibility and ambiguity. As Benjamin and Hall show, this increased flexibility and ambiguity make more likely the incoherence typical of fascist and neoliberal media.

Benjamin said that fascists exploited the increased political role dictated by the conversion of art’s ritual value to its exhibition value (23). Images and messages in films have been crafted, cobbled together, and disseminated to masses from central locations (22, 25-6, 38n19). The ways by which film arrests attention, reshaping habitual feelings, thoughts, and actions make it an ideal tool for ideology and subject formation, or for propaganda (32-3). Instead of solutions, fascism offers the representation of grievances; Benjamin calls this the aestheticization of politics (33-4). In a way parallel to the way by which signs are divorced from referents and art’s role becomes more abstract (in the conversion to exhibition value), people increasingly succumb to the Malthusian impulse to convert populations into statistics and faceless caricatures (22). These increasingly abstract ways of perceiving the world helped to breed brutal impulses.

The aestheticization of politics must end in war—only war maintains property relations while mobilizing capital, the full labor capacity, and people’s feverish grievances (34). The war that fascism necessitates also produces its own aesthetics—metallized people, clouds of deadly chemicals, giant tanks, synchronized planes, and so on (34). Finally, the filmstar is a resource for fascist leadership style. Movie studios and ancillary institutions compensate for art’s loss of aura by building cult film personalities, not unlike the fetishist cult of the commodity or fascist cults of personality (27, 38n19). Through fascism’s cultishness, ritual value is refreshed but as pastiche: refracted, distorted, fragmented, disembedded symbols are haphazardly glued together (21, 34). Use of media effects to form incoherent ideologies isn’t unique to fascism.

Agreeing with Benjamin (23, 28-9), Hall said that discourse is the domain of politics (“E/D,” 168-9, 171-3). Politics is “produced” ( “Gramsci,” 169): it’s by controlling the field on which politics is played—by producing hegemony—that broad, long-term political victories manifest (“Gramsci,” 163, 168). Hall said that the British right understood the need to create hegemony better than did the left; rather than waiting for conditions to degrade until public opinion magically responded with a proper analysis (as Hall accused the left of having done), the right embarked to shape public opinion (“Gramsci,” 169). Thatcher and her advocates constructed the interests of the working class through what might’ve appeared to have been incoherent aesthetic processes (“Gramsci,” 167-8). Thatcher evoked what Benjamin called the “aestheticization of politics”: waving the flag, she sold austerity under the auspices of long-term improvement—“Make Britain Great Again,” she seemed to say (“Gramsci,” 167). Thatcherism seemed to represent everyone, but crucially, it represented the interests of the elites at the same time that it recruited members of the working class (“Gramsci,” 165-6, 167). Employing a panoply of ahistorical, referentless images and hollow slogans, she evaded the promise of leftists’ mostly Keynesian, welfare state policies that the populace no longer believed in (“Gramsci,” 167, 172).

Hall agreed with Benjamin: it’s crucial to find means to achieve victories and to eventually install, invigorate, and even refigure leftist hegemonies (“Gramsci,” 170-1). As Thatcherites aimed to dismantle the Welfare State, they erected something else; this exchange provided an opportunity for the left (“Gramsci,” 165). Social change entails, on one hand, appealing to people’s already-existing attitudes and concerns and, on the other hand, building new kinds of coalitions (“Gramsci,” 170). These must coincide with pressure on attitudes and on coalitions toward more liberatory leftist agendas and greater participation in various kinds of political activities (“Gramsci,” 171). All of this is required to form a leftist hegemony by which political debates would be over choices between leftist agendas (“Gramsci,” 173).

For Benjamin, revolutionary film would’ve fulfilled Dadaism’s failed project to weaponize art (32); it would’ve entailed the marriage between criticism and entertainment (29) while having depicted new possibilities for social life (31-2). Instead of only having represented people’s grievances (as fascist film did), communist film would’ve helped to shape public opinion, having formed a hegemony by which grievances would’ve been relieved (33-4). If pointless, brutal, warmongering rush to death is the necessary aesthetic end of fascism, communists must respond by producing subversive art (34).

While Benjamin said, “Works of art are received and valued on different planes” (23), Hall emphasized this point more greatly. People sometimes subversively decode messages in order to better understand social phenomena and their effects (“E/D,” 171-3). Public opinion isn’t only shaped in an intentional, power-inflected, unilateral way. People’s subversive decodings of texts (including radio, television, film, architecture, etc.) can help them to change symbolic associations. Hall showed that connotation and denotation lie on a spectrum, so people can alter widely-accepted meanings by first influencing connotations (168-9). By this logic, people can begin to re-encode aspects of the social system both from below, through shared social practices, and from above, by making revolutionary art. Especially today, it’s important for the left to decode workings of power, especially as they relate to social conditions. Doing so can help them to exploit media effects and represent new possibilities. As contemporary social life entails the ever-increasing profusion of images and messages, the power to reshape symbolic associations is more important than ever. Using this power, people can redetermine public opinion and form a new leftist hegemony.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Media and Cultural Studies Keywords, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005, 18-40.

Habermas, Jürgen; Lennox, Sara; and Frank Lennox. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964).” New German Critique, 3, pp. 49-55.

Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” Media and Cultural Studies Keywords, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005, 18-40.

Hall, Stuart. “Gramsci and Us.” The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left, New York: Verso, 1988, 161-73.

The Exhausting Effort to Breathe Life into a Fire

I spoke with Bernadette today, a little over an hour. She’d gotten a haircut. Her curly, messy hair hung just above her shoulders, and I thought she looked a little like Marion Cotillard, but maybe I was just romanticizing a bit. I didn’t tell her, anyway. I think people often don’t like being compared to others. She ended up telling me about how the nuns who’d taught her as a child, in Nice, were really sadistic—especially the headmistress. We cried.

We cried because of Minneapolis and because of covid. I didn’t sleep much last night. I’d watched a bunch of YouTube videos of white people proudly calling the police, unable to reckon with their mistaken, biased association, and too entitled and proud to keep from invoking the threat of murder in order to win an argument. She said that the reason she was so depressed wasn’t because she was hopeless, but because she was hopeful. She told me that hope is what you need to have in order to be disappointed, and I didn’t know what she meant at first.

I said that, finally, people wouldn’t have the excuse that the cop was afraid, they wouldn’t have the excuse that the guy was dangerous, they wouldn’t have the excuse that the film was unclear, they wouldn’t have the excuse that it was an in-the-moment decision, they wouldn’t have the excuse that the protesters started the looting, they wouldn’t have the excuse that the protesters were being violent. After the stimulus package and the calls to get people back to work, there’s no confusion about where the government’s, the bankers’, the police’s, and the media’s loyalties lie. Minneapolis and covid show that the reaction to Minneapolis and to covid have been meant to protect the stock market at the expense of the lives of the most vulnerable people. There’s no confusion. In relation to race, for instance, George Bush doesn’t care about black people, but Trump has real animosity toward them.

So, there’s no possible neutrality here anymore. There’s no equivocating. No more excuses. You’re either on the side of caring about black people’s lives or you’re on the side of white comfort. Then, Bernadette repeated what she’d said before: “You can’t be disappointed if you don’t have hope.”

I started to realize what she meant. I have all these friends who insulate themselves in the warm blanket of cynicism. If there’s nothing to do, then there’s nothing to really do about it. There’s nothing to risk. Any attempt would be foolish. They can complain from the sideline, but trying to help would only make matters worse. Why give up their own chance at some limited happiness in order to fight a losing battle? But, that’s why it’s so frustrating, right? If it’s hopeless, it’s because we make it hopeless. If it’s hopeless, it’s because peace-loving white liberals aren’t willing to march, aren’t willing to give up the brass bars at the entrance to their subdivision, aren’t willing to say, “I was wrong. I had a racist moment, and I judged you unfairly. I shouldn’t have accused you, and I’m sorry”—especially without expecting some undeserved gracefulness and forgiveness.

We talked about how sad we are. I told her that I wanted pizza delivered, so I could watch YouTube videos in my bed in peace. We agreed that we were depressed right now. We joked about it. I told her I have therapy on Monday. She encouraged me to go down to the beach. She told me about how, in Nice, she would go to the coast in the winter and the waves would crash wildly into the rocks on the shore. She told me how it made her felt connected to the world, and that the world was maybe reflecting her frustration back at her. Maybe, in that moment, nature felt what she felt, and she didn’t feel as alone. She would sometimes then go into MAMAC and stare at some particular impressionist painting that she’d sat in front of a hundred times, getting absorbed into the incomprehensible array of painted dots of various colors, making up a whole that all the people and parts of the environment made up.

San Carlos

Two Yaqui gods got into a row—
one from the huya ania (wilderness world) and one from the vawe ania (ocean world).
The wilderness god threw a chunk of mountain
into the San Carlos bay—
the sedimentary register lodged in the ocean
at a 45-degree angle.

Then, rosebushes gathered along the ocean floor,
at the big rock’s feet. Cacti sprouted
from the top—hairs with tales to tell.
Gringos built big, gauche adobe houses
along the shore: “pueblos.”

Now, they sunbathe on wood decks,
avoiding the discomfort they would feel if
the bottoms of their feet touched rocky beach below.
The old white people watch tanned teens and local fishers until
reggueton and ranchera grate too much on distinguished ears.

I looked down, noticing blood
trickling from a cut across the top of my foot.
I always feel invincible when I swim.
Small chalk rings surrounded my ankle, Like a leopard,
where salt remained from sun-dried seawater.
I heard the opening crunch of a can of cerveza.
Reflexively, my head twisted:
two obreros chatting, meandering toward a half-finished building.