Good morning, beloved —
Jeremy! I hope you’ll forgive me if I briefly break my pledge to not discuss matters topical — I’m just too amped by yesterday's victory to let it pass by without comment. And I damn well should be amped. It’s the first time in my entire adult life that the elected leader of a major national political party holds positions that are within shouting distance of my own, considerably weirder ones, in more than a few basic areas of agreement. (For the record, I agree or mostly agree with 23 of these 24 stated positions.)
Whether you yourself happen to share each and every one of those beliefs, I hope you’ll grant that of the candidates for Labour leadership, only Jeremy Corbyn chose to engage the reality that the majority of working people in this country (and beyond) contend with. What moved me just about to tears about his candidacy was hearing someone with a significant public platform name the bare facts of our existence so plainly. I would listen, stunned to hear these words spoken in this order over the airwaves of the BBC, as he ticked off my own sentiments, one by one: the familiar, gnawing worry that furnishes virtually the entire emotional content of life in the contemporary precariat. The sorrowed disbelief that tremendous civilizational achievements like the NHS are being ransacked as we watch, and there doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can do to stop it happening. The similar pangs of rageful loss one feels in standing by helplessly as richly textured, characterful neighborhoods are transformed one after another into warehoused, abstract counters for global capital. And finally, the belief that all of this can still be repaired — that the overwhelming majority of the population wants it repaired, even knows what specific measures need to be taken, and has been as perplexed as I am by the surreal inability of anybody in public life to speak to the situation until this very moment.
That I can tell, most of those who pronounce themselves ambivalent about Corbyn over a pint — as opposed to the professional concern trolls in the media — mostly feel the same way. They don't actually disagree with him too badly in substance, on these questions or others. They're just petrified that he’s unelectably weird, and will therefore hand the Tories a permanent majority. It reminds me of Orwell’s ridiculous, shaming argument, in the terrible latter half of The Road to Wigan Pier, that Socialism would have no problem attracting “decent, ordinary people” to the cause, if only it could rid itself of its association with “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.” (I hadn’t remembered this from my first reading, over twenty years ago, nor his comments about “that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit juice drinkers.” These passages stand as unimpeachable proof that Orwell cowed his editor Gollancz into submission, and just don’t make me like him very much.)
What can you say in response to something like that? Such tone policing is, of course, invidious. But the underlying fear is real, and I both understand it and grant some of its premises. Another decade of Tory rule really would mean the end of the NHS and the BBC as we’ve known them, along with the other collective accomplishments that between them constitute the fabric of everyday British life, and which have by now endured for a half-century or more. The risk is nothing to trifle with. But fucksake, at some point you have to actually stand up for what you claim to believe in. If the price of getting Labour into No. 10 is putting up someone who conceivably could have run as a Conservative — say, an oleaginously plausible neoliberal cretin like Tony Blair — you have to wonder just what values the party actually exists to uphold.
Note well: I’m not arguing that there's no daylight between the parties, even between the Labour Party of Tony Blair and the Conservative Party of David Cameron. Clearly there is, and a whole lot of life chances hang in that difference. But you only plump for the lesser of two evils when you don't have a meaningful choice. In this season, at least and at long last, the British public does have a choice.
And that choice evidently appeals to the electorate far more broadly than any of the official commentators expected, throwing up all the markers I associate more with underground movements than with national-party politics: furtive stickers at the bus stop, actual no-lie graffiti. Consider, too, the huge number of previously-uninvolved young people that showed up at Corbyn rallies, that went a real step further in plunking down a few pounds to register Labour and vote for him. I’m not sure those things can so readily be dismissed as “weak signals.”
Whether or not Corbyn will ultimately prove able to leverage this upswell of enthusiasm and transform the conditions of British public life is something that we cannot yet know. (And I say this as someone who’ll answer to the charge of “anarchist.”) But I find it hugely inspiring that he's already disrupted the profoundly offensive consensus defining a “leader” as someone who looks pretty much as we expect them to, wears the right things, makes the correct sounds, and above all stands aside as the hard-won common wealth is pillaged. It’s past time for sharply-drawn contrast, for candidates for high office in our allegedly democratic societies to name, and name with pride, their belief in policies designed to preserve and extend that common wealth. What Jeremy Corbyn alone of his peers seems to understand is that any nominal progressive who agrees to play by the rules set by capital is likely to lose both the contest and their integrity.
— Whenever you take on questions of national politics and policy, you necessarily brush up against the world’s obscurity, even its outright opacity.
How does our world really work? How much of the dark fiber undergirding the phenomena we experience in everyday life can any one of us truly claim to understand? We have jobs, or gigs, whose terms of obligation and recompense are more or less well-defined. We live in containers we call apartments, that are valued and traded by the specialized rules of a market in land use and tenure. We nourish ourselves on foodstuffs that are grown (somewhere), packaged (somehow) and very often prepared for us (by someone).
We pay for insurance, we accumulate credentials, we obey or disobey laws. We even pilot by received categories as we pursue the intimate details of physical and emotional gratification; we are attracted to “types,” we enter and leave more or less conventionally-defined relationships. Many of us couple off in partnerships formalized under law. Some of us reproduce, bringing new people into being and giving them names, and they in turn immediately begin to collect social-security numbers and immunization records and documents of citizenship.
Collectively these arrangements constitute the totality of our environment. Like the proverbial fish that doesn’t know it swims in water, we don’t tend to perceive them on a moment-to-moment basis. They feel “always already” to us, even if in point of fact they are not anything of the sort.
How well do any of us understand this writhing hypermesh, or the agreements which compose it? There are the arcana of governance and law. There are the occult workings of the market — increasingly algorithmic, and well into third-order darkness anyway, those automata trading securitized derivatives of derivatives that pass all human ken, and have only the most abstract and tenuous relation to human labor even as their valuation concretely determines the conditions under which that labor may be sold. There are the informal or outright criminal arrangements that allow life and meaning to colonize the interstices between these macro-scale determinants. The world is a web that sustains us, and yet most all its strands remain unknown from the perspective of any particular observer.
I think of this opacity often, especially as the circumstances that I saw take on their present form come to constitute the unquestioned furniture of the world for younger people. Those of us born in the 1960s and ‘70s suddenly find ourselves, of all people, as the sovereign interpreters of the 20th century, conveying the meaning of events we barely remember or understand ourselves to people who know even less. How do you explain the WCTU, Dresden or Silent Spring to people who think in reaction GIFs? What emoji would you use to characterize William Buckley's lockjaw accent, or the future career trajectory of this worker at a Van Nuys armament factory? What use is it trying to explain that in some sense Panmunjom and the fall of Saigon lie underneath every Yelp review of a kimchi-taco truck or banh mi joint, or how it is that the Windrush arriving in Tilbury is ultimately why so much of Spotify or Apple Music or (ha!) Tidal sounds the way it does?
This is why I’m so often jealous of people who perceive the world through some kind of well-formed ideological grid. It’s a tremendous labor-saving device. What seems to me like intractable murk yields readily to someone who can see everything through the lens of class analysis, or libertarianism, or whatever. Those of us who lack any such master sieve, though, we’re forced to try to make sense of the world by following whatever individual strands we can get a grip on, even though we know it’s their unpredictable, nonlinear interactions that actually govern the shape of experience. And it sets us at a disadvantage — every capitulation to the reality of nuance or complexity does and cannot help but do so, when others can argue from the luxury of an all-encompassing explanatory framework.
Why am I even bothering to try hacking my way through questions like these? Last week my editor Leo dropped the happiest and most vexing sort of bomb on me, as we sat in the Soho drizzle and slurped the £1 Algerian Coffee Stores double espressos we’ve gotten into the habit of meeting over. He listened as I ran through some of the subjects I’ve taken up in the most recent progress — the mediation of urban experience by machine-learning algorithms, and so on — and brought me up short by asking “Are you really sure this is a book about cities anymore? Isn’t it possible that this is really a book about everyday life?”
And that just ups the ante, considerably. It’s a reframing that solicits comparison not to the relatively circumspect Anglo-American humanist-empiricist tradition I’ve always thought of myself as operating within, more or less, but to something far wilder, more Continental and arguably deeper. This is heady and scary and a whole lot to take on board, and I’s still not sure how it ultimately sits with me...but I'd better start trying to figure it out for myself. Lucky you, you have ringside seats.
— This Sunday’s grab bag:
• My latest for the Grauniad.
• Birth of an urbanist, parts I (note Kips Bay Towers) and II.
• They had me at “brutal utopias”; the “by Routemaster” bit is almost ludicrous overkill.
• Apropos of that, this image is SO TASTY.
And that’s it from me for this week! As ever, I hope you are both kind to yourself, and protect and nurture those around you.
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 46 of Sunday, 13 September 2015, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author.