Who’s afraid of a little theory? First attempt at a self-criticism

One of the main questions I’m interested in with these discussions of literature is: What is the relationship between literature and politics? and in particular: What prospects are there for political subversion or resistance in literature? and even more particularly: Is there or has there been something politically subversive about experimentation in literature?

There is a way in which the answer to this last question is: Obviously no. There is nothing in history like the publication of an experimental literary work that brought about anything like political—genuinely political—change. Of course there is always literary or more generally cultural intrigue. Works can make an audience gasp—and not much else. And of course on the other side of the coin the answer could be: Maybe, but then it would be entirely as an expression of an already ongoing change; or: Maybe, but it would be entirely unmeasurable. But subversion and resistance don’t have to be full-scale social upheaval. If instead we compare literature to protest or revolt, a work can count as subversive without changing any minds, without transforming anything.

Content and supply

One of the probably false—or at least only, in a best-case scenario, minimally true—suppositions I’ve made here is that artistic content can be subversive. Literary works form part of a complex political and economic fabric; they are inevitably woven into that fabric, so that the question of the political dimension of this or that work is inseparable from the politics of the institutional framework bringing those works into existence, fostering them, distributing them, and so on.

Let me make this point cheaply: Suppose you buy 1984 for twenty bucks. Nine bucks goes to your favorite retailer: Amazon, Bookshop, your local indie bookstore, whatever. A dollar goes to the distributor. Then nine bucks goes to the publisher, say, Penguin Random House (PRH), and the last dollar gets split between the printer, the agent, and the writer and/or estate. The bulk of the purchase is enriching the industrial infrastructure of publishing. PRH is profit-driven, and they’re going to take your nine dollars and do with it whatever will get them more dollars, including derecognizing its unions (which it did in the UK in 2016) or publishing crazy conservative media under its Sentinel imprint, which is currently pushing, for example, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. Making the corporation that does that an even bigger corporation that is more capable of producing Toxic Empathy is what nine of your twenty dollars are doing—no matter what the book is, and no matter where you buy your book.

(Here comes the objection: Yes, but if everyone reads Orwell, then . . . . And the response to this is: Yes, of course, if nothing fundamentally changes about the workings of capitalism, and everyone reads Orwell, then nothing fundamentally changes about the workings of capitalism, only everyone will be reading Orwell.)

The political ambivalence of literature

This point is tuned to another main frequency of problems associated with late capitalism, which is that, as we now know, it actually doesn’t matter if you tell citizens of modern democracies that

• this is wrong and/or you are suffering from this, and
• this minimal thing is all you need to do to eliminate it—

because if the cloak of ideology (and/or the network of industrial forces of capitalism) is pulled around the issues in the right way, the wrong will remain invisible anyway and/or motivations will not rise to the level of doing anything about it.

Moreover, the political effects of a work are not only difficult to measure but difficult to marry to the work as their cause. Consider a textbook case of a book that brought about political change: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Sinclair intended The Jungle as an argument for socialism, for workers’ ownership of the means of production, for revolution. The public read The Jungle, got grossed out, and wanted meat inspectors. They got them, and federal inspections then created a barrier to entry for smaller meatpackers, and those inspections consolidated and legitimized the big meatpackers—Sinclair’s very targets. Instead of an argument for socialist revolution, The Jungle became a bestseller—lining Doubleday’s pockets in the meanwhile—and a showpiece for capitalism’s inexhaustible ability to absorb and grow on its criticism. In reality, The Jungle made Big Meat even bigger, made capitalism that much more an entrenched political and economic reality.

This ambivalence cuts in all sorts of ways. Suppose, for example, a politician wanted to engineer a certain political effect making use of some work of art. They promote this work or that one, say: “Enjoy this; learn the lesson.” Is it guaranteed to have the desired effect? Obviously not. I mean, one of these days the audience at a Republican rally is going to listen to the lyrics of “Born in the USA,” right? No, probably not, and yet, there it is, just blaring its way out of every speaker in the place.

Inversely, consider book banning. Every time a book is banned it lends it prestige. There’s a stack of “YA” books no one heard of that shot to the top of bestseller lists after the recent (and ongoing) round of book bans in the US. This inverse effect isn’t restricted to kids’ books either. In 1933, when the US Customs Office seized copies of an obscure book out of Europe, it made modernism culturally significant beyond the literary circle of Paris and catapulted Ulysses into broad public awareness. Viking still packages Ulysses with the court decision overturning its ban. Bans sell books.

For all that, it might be that literature and politics have not just an ambivalent relationship but none, and maybe no constitutive relationship. Fascism and literature in the twentieth century is an interesting case. Mussolini didn’t care about art until he felt he had to give his movement cultural legitimacy, but then threw his support behind literary figures of wildly different sorts: futurists and classicists, for example. What mattered wasn’t the literature but its popularity and, vacuously, the artists’ support of fascism. The Nazis aspired to elevate what they thought was “high” art, much of which was boring or unreadable; eventually Goethe and Beethoven gave way to kitsch. What passes a fascist censor’s desk today might be banned tomorrow, or vice versa.

The irrelevance of literature

In that brand of fascism, literature and art still seem to be a problem. Leaving aside book banning (which of course is not nothing), the mood in today’s culture seems to be, reasonably enough, that it doesn’t matter what’s in the book at all. Who reads books anyway? And, even if they did, what difference would it make? Suppose one were to write a book in which Donald Trump is sodomized three times on every page. That author under Mussolini or Hitler would have been burned upside down at the stake. But today? Who gives a shit? Or imagine a book that threw back the veil on global labor exploitation. As it happens, you don’t have to. There are literally tens of thousands of them; they have been printing them by the ton for the last half-century; there exists an entire industrial ecosystem for the printing of books on exploitation. The result? One result is that, instead of sweatshops (where injustices are conveniently on display, conveniently centralized so that righting them is fairly easy—remember when all we had to do was not buy Nike for a little while?), we now have decentralized global supply chains that kiss unprotected workers in five countries on their way to your local Amazon distribution center. Then a driver working for a third-party contractor drives an “eight-hour” shift that takes up to twelve hours, all the while monitored by dashcams and GPS, and with so little time for breaks that they piss into their water bottles and shit in plastic bags. Then we get to sit back and enjoy our hand-delivered copy of 1984, but, you know, subversively, in a highly revolutionary style, I guess.

Perhaps the problem of literature today is that it isn’t a problem, that it couldn’t be a problem. Of course that isn’t because we don’t live under an authoritarian regime; by all meaningful signs we do. It’s that authoritarianism is no longer the same animal it was in the first half of the twentieth century. It doesn’t need censors to do its ideological work; citizens themselves do the work for the regime. Or the ‘ideological work’ doesn’t even need doing because beliefs don’t matter; what matters is maintaining the global latticework of logistics and supply chains, which gets indifferently enriched by every word printed. But in any event literature can be both not a problem in the fundamental sense and not a supporter or complicit bystander. Protest is possible even without the possibility of revolution.

The disassembly line

All of this is a way of introducing a theoretical question and bringing to the fore an assumption about the way to an answer. The question is: What prospects are there for subversion and resistance in literature? and the assumption is that the possible (or anyway the possibly good) answers to this question aren’t just going to hit us in the forehead if we think really hard about it. In other words, since of course I’m not the only person ever to have wondered about this question, it would be irresponsible to approach the question without beginning, at least, from others’ discussions of these issues.

At the same time, I’m committed to The Book Hold’s ethos as non-professional. So the point of this ‘disassembly line’ of texts will not be to incorporate or build a theoretical framework that then gets worked into criticism. More modestly, the point is to treat theory as itself another ‘shelf’ of works; the appreciation of the shelf as comparable to any other form of literacy-expansion; and the works as (or often as) formal experiments themselves, open to the sort of appraisal and interest that novels receive here.

Many of the other shelves have clear throughlines—the dictator novel, novels under fascism in Italy, etc. The bibliographies for these shelves are fairly straightforward. For the ‘disassembly line’, however, the idea isn’t—couldn’t be—that we assemble a canon, digest it, and go forth freed of our miseries and confusions. Rather than build the shelf first, I propose to wade into the question one slippery riverstone at a time, as it were. There’s no curriculum; just a question and a dim light.

Texts

Here are four texts that immediately strike me as relevant to the questions described here, and especially to the question of content I mentioned at the outset:

• Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer”
• Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics
• Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique”
• Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen

I’ll start there.