How Things Are
The hyper-independent (socially, financially, emotionally, perhaps even physically) individual ... is the ultimate neoliberal fantasy of automation
I have been reading, but not as much as I’d like. I have been watching films, but not as many as I’d like. I have been leaving the house. The House, as it happens, is not a location, or a building, or a feeling, but an identifiable boundary of intention. I (re)watched Star Wars: A New Hope this weekend and I rated it 3.5 out of 5 stars on Letterboxd after much consideration, because, you know, if I were to rate it for everything it has done, it would be an undisputed 5, but if I had to rate it for everything it is, then I would have to take some points off, particularly for the fact that Jabba the Hutt looks like that, for some reason, and says all the same words we have already heard before, and maybe even for the fact that every time the color pink is on screen it made me so uncomfortable in a way that was so scathingly accusatory of the world we live in right now, so much so that I had no choice but to take it out on the film itself. You understand.
There is very little purpose in doing this. Writing all this down. I am trying to think worthy thoughts, form ideas that are important, think in a direction that is useful. I am failing. This is okay, possibly, for now. When people say ‘rest is radical’ it makes me wonder why. Of course, if your entire being is being subsumed by capital, and your entire being is reduced to labor, it is, of course, radical to put a spanner in this extraction by refusing to labor in the first place. This is not true for many of us. What is radical, ultimately, is to labor in the other direction — move, breathe, create, produce, think against capital. I am trying.
David Graeber, in his essay “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit” in The Utopia of Rules, argues that our society is afflicted with a sense of shame, of embarrassment, because the techno-futuristic world we (or some of us, anyway) grew up imagining and fetishising never actually came to pass: in out-sourcing labor to the Global South, the western hegemonist nations (and their people) came to inhabit a kind of artificial luxury, where the overworked proletariat was not only invisibilized but also invisible, which ultimately rested upon “an uneasy awareness that this whole new post-work civilisation was, basically, a fraud.” Of course, Star Wars has something to do with this. It is difficult to look at it without being afraid we will never live up to it.
When Sally Rooney said she no longer believes “in the idea of independent people”, that “we all rely on each other’s labor all the time”, that “someone has to make [the clothes we wear]”, “farm the food [we eat]”, this served as an exercise in un-invisibilizing the labor we all rest on “so that we can have the lives that we have”. The hyper-independent (socially, financially, emotionally, perhaps even physically) individual described by Rooney is the ultimate neoliberal fantasy of automation, of flying cars and jetpacks and every other technologically forged future world that many of us grew up expecting. Instead of making labor un-needed, we have shifted this need onto a kind of labor we are comfortable erasing, comfortable omitting from our brains, pretending it is simultaneously non-existent and unworthy of noticing.
David Lloyd accurately situates this divide of human-ness and worthiness along the lines of race, or racialisation, “the line that demarcates superior from inferior, identity from difference, white from black.”, wherein the white man stands “closer to the identity of the human”, the “pure, universal identity that is the Subject without properties”, which the white (deemed universal) individual does not inhabit, but approximates. This fantasy of approximation, is, again, a tool of self-distancing as much as it is a product of what creates the necessarily obfuscated conditions of exploitative labor: the distance is not only from the abstract laboring (racialised) classes, but also from the fantastical and abstracted (this time with more immediate deliberateness) universal Subject that exploits.
When Rooney includes herself in the exploiting class, she takes the very necessary step of collapsing this distance between the oppressor and those who resemble the oppressor. In Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry, he declares that poetry “arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine”, creating, again, a sort of chasm-ic discordance between the thing and what it is trying to become, manufacturing safety and plausible deniability in its inability to ever become that thing. So what is independence? What is techno-futurism? Who dreamt these things up in the first place? If it wasn’t us, if it was simply people we have grown up next to, people we resemble, people we have learnt from, then we are safe, un-implicated, simultaneously the “pure, universal identity” and the thing that it exploits.
Failing to recognize our own complicity and our own active, knowing violences is a strategy that enables us to live without a “decomposition” of the subject (Lloyd), that is, ourselves, while allowing us to be perfect victims in uncomplicated ways. This, of course, is in and of itself more complicated. Ultimately, though, a particular harm we fail to account for in doing so is the harm we do to ourselves: in shielding our own minds from the world that we are helping create for our own benefits (wherever, whoever we are), we are discounting the ways in which we ourselves produce our own victimhood, not solely through narrative moralisation but also through our own material realities.
Perhaps we are too ashamed of the world we have created to pay attention to the fact that we are the ones who created it, and are creating it every day, deliberately, on purpose, and without acknowledgment. Perhaps the way out is to think not just of the things the world is doing to us, but what we do to it, and to those we share it with.