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All this is a paradoxical situation for intellectuals who turn to fiction as the best possible prose vehicle for their interpretations, only to discover that those very interpretations—the urgency of which prompted the work—are to the reader the work’s most dispensable aspect. They discover that in order to write fiction that anybody might want to read, they must painstakingly conceal what is to them its very point. (Here is the germ of truth in that funny, sweet saying of the ignorant, that the function of criticism in general, and of freshman critical essays in particular, is to “find the hidden meaning.”) In order to make a world in which their ideas might be discovered, writers embody those ideas in materials solid and opaque, and thus conceal them. In the process of fleshing out a thought, they brick it in. The more subtle they are as artists (not as thinkers, but as artists), the more completely their structures will vanish into the work, and the more grouchy they will become the more readers tell them what lovely, solid bricks they make.
The story contains no trace of that bundle of bias, enthusiasm, motive, morality, personality, and mind which we might term “the author.” Where is Joyce? The work is seamless. I do not mean that Joyce does not intrude his opinions into his story—that is a pleasing but not uncommon virtue—but instead I mean something more profound and less easy to name. The sentences have in their rhythms an austerity that is complete. They exhibit, by their perfect concealment of it, an absolutely controlled tension, like that of a mastered grief or longing. I suggest that the austerity with which a writer wholly subsumes his thoughts to his fictional materials reminds us of—or is even identical to—the difficult dignity with which some people control strong and private feelings. We are people, and we call this “power”; it will always command our respect.
Perhaps, then, this high degree of tension and control in prose, this sense of great emotional passion at short rein, attracts our mind and leads us to inquire into the sources of the tension and the principles of control. And perhaps, too, the absence of any hint of explanation or motive on the author’s part will lead us to seek it, lead us to inquire, as we do of “Leaving the Yellow House” and, somewhat differently, of “The Dead,” what these things are doing here in the first place. I hope so.
As symbol, or as the structuring of symbols, art can render intelligible—or at least visible, at least discussible—those wilderness regions which philosophy has abandoned and those hazardous terrains which science’s tools do not fit. I mean the rim of knowledge where language falters; and I mean all those areas of human experience, feeling, and thought about which we care so much and know so little: the meaning of all that we see before us, of our love for each other, and the forms of freedom in time, and power, and destiny, and all whereof we imagine: grace, perfection, beauty, and the passage of all materials to thoughts and of all ideas to forms.
The task, then, of all the arts in each century is to rescue the clichés, not to turn from them, and to dedicate themselves each new decade to more comprehensive forms of beauty and understanding. It is to expand those arts’ purviews, to expand the arc of the comprehended world, and not to restrict any vision according to the demands for purity set by theory. Purity of practice guarantees that the artist will not err, and that superficial critics will find no flaw in the work, and that nothing has been ventured. Within the bare pantry of purity, stocked solely with what the mind knows to be essential, symbol, which is itself material and which requires a chaotic wealth of materials, can neither grow nor flourish. Symbols arise from material messes.
There are fish getting sick in lakes in Zhejiang, China. This is because Midwestern moms who lost their jobs during Covid have stepped up their side hustles selling freshwater pearls on Facebook Live. The pearl farmers in Zhejiang pour pig poop into the ponds to feed the algae that feed the mussels that grow the pearls. The phosphorus and nitrogen from the pig poop get into the groundwater.
There are landfills in Nigeria glittering with snow leopard necklaces because in Winter 2019 Facebook analytics told US dropshippers that in that Spring / Summer women 18-25 who liked something and something else would also like snow leopards, and AliExpress made it too easy for any dropshipper with a Shopify storefront and Oberlo integration to automate placing orders for the necklaces.
Mar’s community is just one of the hundreds of platform driver collectives spread across Jakarta. Each has its own membership rules, ranging from moral expectations (members must be honest) to socializing expectations (members must remain an “active” part of the WhatsApp groups, attend all social events of the community, come to the basecamp at least once a week, and so on). Communities hold internal elections and have mandatory monthly member meetings. Some even have membership fees, which go into a common pool of money used to support community expenses. Most communities have built basecamps where drivers meet between orders, some calling these spaces their “second home.” Many issue ID cards to identify members in case of road accidents, and as a way to solidify their sense of belonging. Collectively, they have set up their own joint emergency response services, and informal insurance-like systems that use community savings to guarantee members small amounts of money in the case of accidents or deaths. They have also provided their members with Covid relief, such as distributing personal protective equipment and free groceries.
sick
For many people in the Global South, work has long been isolating and uncertain by design. As “low-tech” workers such as platform drivers build community and collective power, they are able to draw on different local histories of resistance, and different methods for negotiating the social and political tensions in their cities.
Often, in the analysis of gig worker power by academics and observers in the Global North, an absence of unionization is thought to indicate an absence of worker power. Unions in the Global South, though, are not seen as the only or best way to collectivize in these labor regimes. This is not to argue that workers in the Global South do not unionize or that unions are unhelpful. Rather, they exist on a continuum of strategies to reshape work conditions, build collective worker identity and engage in mutual aid. (The political economists Arianna Tassinari, Matteo Rizzo, and Maurizio Atzeni, among other scholars, have examined in depth the role of unions in precarious work conditions.)
Capital cannot make people, but its need for more and different labor power is balanced by an impulse to disinvest from the costs of social reproduction and disrupt or abandon the spaces of solidarity and community that are grown therein. The political philosopher Nancy Fraser argues that this dynamic creates a “crisis of care” in each capitalist epoch. Our current crisis is marked by the state’s retreat from the responsibilities of care and the stagnation of wages for much of the working class, leading to a “dualized organization of social reproduction, commodified for those who can pay for it, privatized for those who cannot—all glossed by the even more modern ideal of the ‘two-earner family.’”
I would add, following the radical geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, that the state has not so much retreated from care but shifted those capacities into punishment—particularly for the working and workless poor—and that this is complemented by capital’s retreat from providing training within the firm. Capital has shifted the burden of skills training onto individuals so that they must now have all the skills necessary to succeed at jobs they do not yet have. To carry the burden of skills training, individuals take on debt, access to which is also racially differentiated, in order to pay for college or coding boot camps. If they are on the fringes of the labor market, they are forced to enter a constant cycle of job search, job applications, and skills training—the replacement of welfare with workfare. Police and prisons are tasked with handling those individuals who will not or cannot shoulder these burdens.
I went to the DWeb summit in 2016 and, I have to say, I was not impressed. It felt like an endless barrage of startup pitches by people who looked all the same, standing up on the stage and describing how they’re going to decentralize infrastructure, and how it’s going to save the world, upend this market, and change everything. To me, if decentralization has any political meaning, the people building it have to be very different from the types of people who built the World Wide Web. We can’t just replace the platforms and protocols we have today with other purely profit-driven companies that can only call their product “decentralized” because the technology functions in a more distributed manner. For decentralization to be a remotely revolutionary concept, we need to question the internal logic of the tech industry itself—how people are incentivized to build things, how people are treated in the process, and how the relationships and systems we operate with are controlled. How does decentralization redistribute power? That’s the fundamental question.
The days of my youth, as I look back on them seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car. In my sanitary relations with women I was practical, ironical and brisk. While a college student, in London and Paris, paid ladies sufficed me. My studies were meticulous and intense, although not particularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry as many manqué talents do; but I was even more manqué than that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in; and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates. I sat with uranists in the Deux Magots. I published tortuous essays in obscure journals. I composed pastiches:
The short white-sand strip of "our" beach-from which by now we had gone a little way to reach deep water-was empty on weekday mornings. There was nobody around except those two tiny very busy figures on the opposite side, and a dark-red private plane that droned overhead, and then disappeared in the blue. The setting was really perfect for a brisk bubbling murder, and here was the subtle point: the man of law and the man of water were just near enough to witness an accident and just far enough not to observe a crime. They were near enough to hear a distracted bather thrashing about and bellowing for somebody to come and help him save his drowning wife; and they were too far to distinguish (if they happened to look too soon) that the anything but distracted swimmer was finishing to tread his wife underfoot. I was not yet at that stage; I merely want to convey the ease of the act, the nicety of the setting! [...]
lmao