How to Change the World for Real

1. “Warm Best”

Let me be clear that I love everyone I am about to put through the ringer. Among them pride of place surely goes to all those American collaborators and associates of mine who at this point seem unable to write a simple e-mail without some prefatory comments, often much longer than the brass-tacks business part that follows, to the effect that “in these dark times of rising fascism and authoritarianism, as existence in the United States has becomes increasingly unbearable, as ICE round-ups intensify and the Trump administration is unleashing military force on our own citizens, as we witness an ever-intensifying slide toward police militarization, and new legislation funneling resources upward while stripping them from those who need them most, leaving millions without medical care, I’m hoping you can get me a signature on our funding application by the Tuesday deadline. Warm best, P.” To which I habitually reply in something like the following manner: “Here’s my signature. J.”

How do we explain this disparity in our respective e-epistolary manners? Is there hard evidence here that P in fact cares about the fate of the world more than J? Or could there be other factors in need of consideration?

One complicating factor is that the ever-accumulating burdens of form-filling and e-mailing are, from a certain point of view, among the many features of our current technopolitical landscape that pose a real threat to our well-being. To add an additional pressure to engage in quid-pro-quo e-commiseration is at the same time to draw your correspondent into such shit of the world as they may, with great difficulty, have only just managed to succeed in screening out for the sake of their own well-being and productivity. When it’s the 80th e-mail your correspondent is answering that day, and when the ultimate pretext of the e-mail is in fact just a signature on some bullshit form, the pressure to answer in kind can easily be experienced as yet another symptom of the same technopolitical crisis that also manifests, through other of the serpents wriggling from its Hydra’s head, in the form of a municipal police officer dressed up like RoboCop. It is, I mean, somewhere between merely impolite and literally oppressive.

Now you might say this all sounds rather facetious, and if so that is likely because you take “fascism” as a better descriptor of our emerging political order than “feudalism” (or “technofeudalism” in its most fashionable current variant). Of course we do wish to avoid a log-jam of -isms, but as far as I can see which of these two you choose to focus on really is just a matter of priority and positionality. So let’s not call it a log-jam. Let’s call it an intersectional analysis.

But you still might say that in soliciting an in-kind commiserating reply the e-mailer is at least manifesting their own unmistakable humanity, the real presence of a soul, whose unmistakable soul-signal can be transmitted even through a wifi connection, bounced off satellites, directed straight to your own private screen for the sake of your own human eyes. I mean, they’re sending you their warm best! What could be more human than the warm best of a human?

The feelings communicated surely are human; I’m just not sure the words are. Typically, if they come to me late in the day, I will already have read more or less the same words a few dozen times. Several of the variants will have been generated by an automated system. Often I am uncertain whether the author is human or not, but either way the human-written summaries of everything that’s wrong in the world at the present moment are virtually interchangeable with the machine-written ones. Bad news is simply, and pervasively, ambient. This is not to say that one should never allow oneself to become a transmitting node of ambient bad news, but one should at least not remain under the illusion that in doing so one is, well, sharing news.

A large part of the problem of the present moment, one that has more to do with our enserfment under technofeudalism than with our oppression under fascism, is the near-universal presumption that the only way to resist, politically, is to issue straightforward declarative sentences whose first-order meaning conveys a clear understanding of what your political commitments are.

There is of course also shitposting, as well as other species of internet-mediated ironic self-distancing, but for complicated reasons the ironic mode works, in the present moment, almost by definition in the service of those in power. The US president himself is a shitposter, and pretty much has the market cornered. This circumstance has pushed self-identified progressives and other dissenters into a defensive posture of hyper-literalism — consisting for example in simple repetition of the same news we have already heard dozens of times in a single day.

When progressives do abandon the role of volunteer newscasters, they usually do so not to hone other more subtle rhetorical powers, but only to shift from the hyper-literal to the obviously exaggerated, this latter being the rhetorical vein most productive of the sort of shared slogans and morsels of distilled wisdom as find wide acceptance at political demonstrations, on placards, on t-shirts, on walls, and today, most of all, in online bios and in reshared memes. “All cops are bastards,” you say? Alright then. What now?

Not to council cowardice, but it does seem to me important at least to be aware that the kind of speech that is currently triggering gross violations of the First Amendment rights of those who deploy it, is speech of this latter sort. Those who wish to suppress free expression hope to be able to do so by scanning for key-words or key-slogans, not by actually doing any serious reading. In this respect, just like those who seem to be satisfied with waging resistance through uses of language that might just as easily be outsourced to machines, those who want to crush that same resistance are very much on a parallel track of human/AI convergence. For this reason, if no other, it does seem to me that the rise of technofeudalism is an even deeper problem at present than the specter of fascism: it’s swallowing up fascists and antifascists alike.

2. Where Is the Friend’s House?

All of this has been on my mind ever since I read a peculiar item at Daily Nous, a professional blog for Anglophone academic-philosophy insiders (reading it is at this point the only real connection I have to Anglophone academic philosophy at all). Justin Weinberg (a very fine and honest fellow), that site’s owner as well as the post’s author, proposes five degrees of speech under incipient authoritarianism, from most to least risky for the speaker, as follows: (A) Fuck tha police; (B) Speak up; (C) Carry on; (D) Play it safe; and (E) Roll over. (A) and (B) seem, together, to describe the two varieties of speech I have already identified, under the labels of “exaggeration” and “hyper-literalism” respectively. But obviously this list does not exhaust all of our options, nor are all the other options “lower” in efficacy than B, even if they likely carry with them a different risk profile.

One might also follow the example of Ismail Kadare, who published his Palace of Dreams in 1981, a thinly veiled allegory of total surveillance and control, in which a government bureau collects and interprets not just the public speech, but the dreams of its citizens. The censors were too stupid or inattentive to block publication at first, and their mistake might well have been enough to open up a fissure that led to the downfall of Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship in Albania some years later.

Some gestures are much more subtle. You can hear dissent in the bleakness of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth and Tenth Symphonies — but it’s tricky indeed, for refined critics and censorious brutes alike, directly to interpret as subversive an art form that is famously non-propositional. Sergeï Eïsensteïn made Stalin into a musical-comedy star through ingenious subtextual identification of the generalissimo with his predecessor Ivan the Terrible, in the eponymous Part Two of his cinematic portrayal of that fearsome Tsar (1946). He almost got away with it.

Iranian filmmakers are often masters of subtle dissent, by which you affirm the existence of a human life-force beyond the regime, unsubsumable into the regime’s vision of how the world ought to be, simply by portraying everyday people doing everyday things. Abbas Kiarostami made an entire film, Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987), about a kid who goes all around his village trying to return his classmate’s math homework before the day ends. That’s it — that’s the whole movie! Does that sound boring? If it is, then so is a humble Flemish still-life depicting grapes and dead eels and so on, such as you may have seen in the early Renaissance, coming out of centuries of theocratically enforced pressure to ensure that pretty much all visual art concern itself with bloody scenes of crucifixion.

Kiarostami’s film didn’t exactly spark an Iranian Renaissance… not yet. But when that regime finally collapses, I suspect such purportedly “apolitical” affirmations of the basic humanity of Iranian citizens will turn out to have provided among the most forceful arguments against it.

Now of course not everyone is in a position to join the ranks of Kadare, Shostakovich, Eïsensteïn, Kiarostami. I am not bemoaning the fact that they are failing to do so. The problem rather is that today Americans do not even seem to be aware of the particular kind of resistance these great artists learned to practice. I conclude from this that Americans still aren’t really all that familiar with authoritarianism, with the result that when they encounter what they take to be an incipient homegrown instance of it, all they know how to do is to affirm, in the most literal way possible, or in the most exaggerated way possible, the very propositions that even the dumbest regime enforcers, both its official agents and its volunteer auxiliaries, know how to interpret, and love to squelch.

In fact, though, while you may not be in a position to follow Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony in your expression of dissent —say you’re like me and you can’t even read sheet music—, I suspect you do have it in you to be somewhat more like Abbas Kiarostami, and I suspect, further, that such a pathway for dissent is far more powerful than progressives are ordinarily able to credit. Just put humanity on display — your humanity, the humanity of others, the humanity of the people who would like to dehumanize you. Affirm the real existence of everything that is left over of the human, once politics is subtracted.

Authoritarianism, practically by definition, does not want to find anything left over. It does not know what to do with that remainder. By contrast, it knows exactly what to do with another video, filmed by some impotent progressive American parked in her car, working herself into a delirious performance of anger over the latest grim news item that will be forgotten within the week. What they will do with this display namely is they will relish it, they will make it go viral, they will use the occasion of it to own you, a “lib”. And things will keep getting worse.

3. Love is what love looks like in public

It won’t be easy. In order to shift to this other register of speech and of action, you must first renounce any hint of operating in the mode recommended by the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, whose thinking, like the human/AI convergence, is yet another feature of our current technopolitical landscape that characterizes both left and right. You must, that is, reject Schmitt’s astoundingly fashionable and enduring idea that all politics can only unfold through a fundamental friend-enemy distinction; or you must be prepared to say that if that is true, then farewell to politics. You must, I mean, be prepared to declare, and to mean it when you declare, that you have no enemies.

Whether that sounds radical or capitulationist to you is perhaps the ultimate political gestalt test.

In order to speak in favor of the radical side of the gestalt, we will have to say at least a few words about the place, in political rhetoric of the last 60 years or so, of love.

Wait, you’re saying, is this guy seriously proposing to talk about the place of love in politics? Isn’t this the same guy, you might further ask, who just wrote a book about doing mushrooms? At which point you might assure yourself that there’s no reason to read any further. You thought I was pushing some over-the-counter centrist Substackian bullshit about how a bird needs both its right and left wings in order to fly or whatever, but it turns out I’m still operating in psychedelic-guru mode, as some self-styled prophet of the new Age of Aquarius? You’re ready to go back to gawking at Nate Silver’s pie-charts?

Wait a second. You might yet be glad to have stuck around. I’m a serious thinker… sometimes. I mean, at least my interest in the place of love in politics is a serious one, and has absolutely nothing to do with the book I just wrote (unless you pay close attention to what I say in the final chapter of it).

One thing I can’t help but note is that for a brief period in the previous century, with a sharp terminus ante quo of 1969, love was elevated to a mainstream political ideal, however hypocritical some of those who learned to invoke it may have been. It was invoked constantly by Martin Luther King, and it was invoked by Robert Kennedy in his eulogy to MLK. Hannah Arendt characterized amor mundi as an absolute precondition for any hope of improvement of our shared realm. James Baldwin insisted that “the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others” (italics added).

We are a world away here from the etiolated notion of “allyship” that dominates more recent progressive articulations of the highest possible form of social bond across boundaries of class, race, and gender. For my part, if I am ever going to call myself a progressive in the future, this will only be when it becomes possible, again, to affirm: I don’t want to be your “ally”; I want to be your brother and your lover (metaphorically, but also truthfully, speaking).

Superficially, a more recent formulation from Cornel West might seem to be in continuity with the previous paragraph’s cluster of sentiments: “Justice is what love looks like in public.” But in fact this is already worlds away from Baldwin et al., adapted to the same post-1960s reality that turns lovers into allies, restyles husbands and wives into partners, and substitutes RFK Sr.’s mutant son into a comparably prominent role in American civic life. Only love is what love looks like in public; it does not need to be translated into some other virtue as it moves out from the private realm of the family or from the interior realm of the heart. To suppose that one must establish such a translational equivalence is already to suppose that love has no proper place, in its own right, as itself, in political life.

Again, this may look foolish — love, you may take it as obvious, simply is not a political virtue at all, unlike justice or solidarity or, the feeblest cousin of all of these, “allyship” (are they not aware that there already is an English noun describing the abstract condition that unites allies — to wit, alliance?). But the fact remains that at a few very critical moments in history —e.g., 33 AD, 1967 AD—, love did enter the fray. On at least the first of these two occasions, the rhetorical move that permitted it to do so ended up changing the world. On the second occasion it was stifled almost as soon as it began —in part because it was not the real thing, but only an ecstasy-induced simulacrum—, to the extent that even to bring up the historical fact of these earlier chapters in human history incurs the risk of looking like some sort of unhinged Schwärmer.

I’ll take that risk. I think unhinged Schwärmer are kind of cool — and sometimes they’re even right. And anyhow it is already certain that our own historical moment is, like the others I’ve identified, nothing if not a critical one. This means among other things that however the near-future turns out, it’s going to look nothing like the recent past. And this means that, really and truly, everything is up in the air. In spite of all the doomsaying, there really is something exhilarating, something hopeful, about that. You may as well just go ahead and make your wildest bid now, throw it into the mix, see if it gains any traction. You may as well put your warm best out there for real.