by
The Baffler
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The premise is that in order to tell the best, richest, fullest stories, or (what amounts to the same thing) in order to offer the best possible interpretations, you have to lay the object you are interpreting next to human history as a whole, or as much of it as you can manage, and stretch it to see what new shapes it assumes. The best story is the most inclusive of other stories, other histories. This principle has a certain persuasiveness even if you are not totally sure that the most inclusive story deserves to be thought of, by analogy with Freud, as society’s political unconscious.
For Jameson, it is the ability to see big stories hidden away in small ones that is Marxism’s secret selling point. Narrative on the usual small or private scale is temporally provincial, comfortable only in or near its own narrow present. And to many readers those are the only stories that feel real. But reality is larger than that. If humankind is going to understand what it is capable of becoming, it needs a better sense of what it has been. Only Marxism, Jameson writes in The Political Unconscious,
can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past, which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it. This mystery can be reenacted only if the human adventure is one; only thus . . . can we glimpse the vital claims upon us of such long-dead issues as the seasonal alternation of the economy of a primitive tribe, the passionate disputes about the nature of the Trinity, the conflicting models of the polis or the universal Empire, or, apparently closer to us in time, the dusty parliamentary and journalistic polemics of the nineteenth century nation states. These matters can recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective story; only if, in however disguised and symbolic a form, they are seen as sharing a single fundamental theme—for Marxism, the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity.
[...] something Rilke says about poetry in his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). Poems are not, he explains, “feelings—those one has early enough—they are experiences.” And from experience, he slips into memories, and launches into a page-long litany of them, and then he says (translator: Burton Pike):
But it is still not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them. . . . For it is not the memories themselves. Only when they become blood in us, glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves, only then can it happen that in a very rare hour the first word of a line arises in their midst and strides out of them.
This is good; this is easy. He wants to talk. He has the untroubled grin and bright blurred gaze of someone who likes working in tech, who genuinely believes in the mission and, of course, the money. She used to live a diminished version of that life, performing remote data entry for a company that would eat photos of your apartment and spit out your scientifically optimized aesthetics, your exquisite objets, your precious self. Her task had been to re-tag products sent in from their secret corporate partners, since the A.I. tagger was only right 68 percent of the time. Nope, this one is actually a wingback; this is a papasan; this is a chaise lounge. It was good, it was easy. She would wake early. She would dress and eat an orange. She would pad through the beating grey light to her computer and click for ten hours. A finger on the cursor, a set of eyes, a brain. Disembodied parts strung together by flesh and electricity, her mind leaping blindly from one corrected metadata tag to the next while her body sank into the chair and rotted.
It’s the worst thing that ever happened to him. It’s the worst thing that could ever happen to him, besides possibly being hit by a bus, which is unlikely but not impossible, and therefore not magical. His wife left him for an ex, an old flame. As though it had suddenly flamed up in her—I am not with the right man, I am not where I am supposed to be, I am not in my right life no matter how comfortable— and her flame sparked the flame of her old flame, and they burned together. In the old days they would have been considered the worst sort of sinners.
She tells him about the old furniture-tagging startup, and her current work, which is whatever she can find. More mechanical Turking but less well-paid: dog-walking apps, homework assistance, personal shopping, middleman food delivery. Last week she was robbed in Queens for a burger. She was just standing outside a duplex at midnight, waiting for the person who’d ordered the burger, but she’d been there ten minutes already and was about to leave when a rat-tailed man whipped around the side of the building and hissed at her to stand still. He had a gun. He held her up at gunpoint for a burger, which wasn’t even her burger. The burger place she was delivering from was just okay. It wasn’t even that good of a burger.
He laughs, but uncomfortably. She’d hoped he would feel strong in the story—oh if I had been there I would have, etc. etc., grabbed the gun, badassedly. I would have protected you. And he seems to feel that a bit, but he’s also bothered; it’s too close to reality, to a real thing that happens to people. People not like himself. The wrong approach, she realizes belatedly. Most men she’s dated seem to want a woman around for contrast, and self-definition. So they can be the shaggy golden man-half, the eloquent speaker, the mighty hunter. Or else they just want to assuage their nostalgic adolescent loneliness. But this man, with a child, doesn’t need to be a child anymore and he doesn’t need something else fragile to protect. He’s eager to settle down with someone, of course, but he needs a wife. His profile should have been a job listing. Must be able to fold laundry, give great head, and pick up the kid after school. Room and board included. Must love me and my stock options enough to never leave.
Outside TAROT he suddenly grabs her shoulders and shoves his mouth at hers. It’s meant to be fierce, romantic. It’s not. Wet and bumpy and unpleasant: a toad’s kiss. She’s turned by it into something small and mean.
“We’ll do this again,” he says, decisively.
“I don’t know if I can,” she says.
He lets go of her shoulders. He’s absolutely stunned. It’s impossible, which means it must be magic. Only some kind of curse could make a lonely, lovely, desperate girl reject him. Only a curse could explain why women keep walking away from him—him! With his stock options! He stalks away, furious.
The first job I was assigned to was hell on earth. I don’t think I’ll ever be “ready” to talk about it. Partly because I can’t communicate in words how haunting the smell was. Partly because I just kind of shut down and the memory of the experience is… crackly, like a bad VHS. In self-defense, my olfactory nerve committed suicide to deaden the blow of the stench. The rest of my body and brain followed suit, leaving just enough juice to keep the engine running. Every day, just enough. The other guys on the line and I got through each shift, went home, and forgot about it. That was it. We couldn’t bear to ask if our work “meant” anything to us. We didn’t want it to. We were just there, just doing a job that needed doing, laboring quietly in the rancid gut of modernity.
Here’s all I’ll say about it: our job was to stand amidst the steam and froth in full Hazmat gear, like humdrum astronauts, sorting and cleaning the soiled laundry of L.A. and Orange County hospitals. The conveyor belt in front of us never stopped, not once. It rumbled monotonously, shepherding endless piles of sheets and towels and smocks and blankets, all stained, dripping with the insides of our fellow human beings. Blood, shit… tears, dying words… piss, bile… the effluence of broken bodies, the residual pudding new life leaves behind—it all ended up here. I once found a syringe in one of the piles.
Besides the smell, there’s only one thing that stands out. One image, I can still make out through the thick steam that’s taken over that part of my memory. A Black man, fifty-something. He’d worked there for years. I never actually saw his face, just his eyes—we all wore masks. The smell, he said, didn’t bother him none. There was a superhuman tenderness and care in the labor he did to sift through an entire civilization’s worth of human-stained laundry, without being bothered by any of it. To make it all clean again. He was Atlas, holding the world up.
<3
I thought for a split second about martyring myself, telling her to take me instead, something like that. But it wouldn’t have done any good. She would have fired one of the new temps anyway. She just wanted to “teach” me something while she was at it. Worst of all, I was painfully aware of how much I needed the job… and so was she. Like the VP from Boston, she knew I wouldn’t be here if I had better options.
I can’t remember the temp’s name—she was one of the youngest. She was short and had a red shirt on. Some desperate thought convinced me she might suffer the least. The other temps looked like they might have had kids.But honestly, she could have had them too. I try not to think about it now.
“The one in red,” I said after a long pause.
The manager didn’t say another word. She walked over to the group and called everyone, over forty workers, together in a circle. My guts immediately started to rot. I assumed she would just pull the woman aside. But she didn’t. The group looked on. Alternating between Spanish and English, the manager told them all that we were behind because people had been making too many mistakes. That this was a business and we had deadlines. That we had to meet them. That we couldn’t afford mistakes. Then, abruptly, she pointed to the woman in red, calling her to the middle of the circle: “¡Ven!” She told her, in front of everyone, to go home.
I watched the woman’s head sink with shame. It sank in a way that, even now, to this day, is painful to think about. I’m a snotty kid, hurting, a coward, hoping some adult will come and save me and tell me this wasn’t my fault. The woman trudged out of the warehouse. She didn’t deserve this. What did her parents say when she came home? Did she have a kid to look at when she came through the door? I think about her often. Did she turn out okay? Does anyone?
I’ve never told anyone about this until now.
“So,” the other lady chimed in, “your manager tells us you’re leaving.”
“Oh?”
“Well, we were telling him how great of a waiter you are…” She waited for me to acknowledge the compliment. “And he agreed, of course. But he also said he was sad to see you go.”
“Ah, yup. I am moving on, sadly.” Why sadly? I shouldn’t be sad. This job was hellish.
“Where are you moving on to?”
“To Michigan, actually. I’m going to grad school.”
“Oooh,” they clucked in unison. “Congratulations!”
“Thank you.”
“How exciting,” the grey one said.
“It is.”
“And you’re going for what?”
“To get my Ph.D.”
“Oooh—a Ph.D. in what?”
“Comparative literature.”
“Ah!” she giggled. “So, we can expect to see you working here again when you’re all finished?”
aahhhh
Even consuming itself has become work. At the self-checkout, you can buy the best item for your needs—as identified by Consumer Reports or The Wirecutter or The Strategist. When you’re drowning in the condiment aisle, Serious Eats will tell you which mustard to buy. When we buy items sight unseen, drop-shipped from distant warehouses, buying guides and five-star reviews come to stand in for the reputation of brand names and union bugs. Review webpages are a cottage industry. Yet such overwhelming choice often deprives us of real agency when it comes to what fills our lives. Products are designed not for our needs but by the unfathomable logistics of a supply chain an ocean away, are sold via algorithmic data mining that clutters our digital lives, and arrive preposterously packaged to suit the needs of shipping and branding. Managing all of this is, increasingly, work, right alongside managing our identities.
This is work in the fullest sense, vital to keep us working and consuming, to keep systems of production flowing. Sociologists Kathryn Wheeler and Miriam Glucksmann have explored this at length in a study of household recycling, as we consumers warehouse and sort all the stuff that comes into and clutters our homes. Glucksmann identifies this as consumption work, a massive category of labor: “all work necessary for the purchase, use, re-use and disposal of consumption goods and services.”
Add in the work of our jobs, our commutes, care for our families, etc., and it’s little wonder that our houses are a mess—especially as capital makes them into waste transfer stations. It’s worth remembering that maintaining a household was once a (deeply gendered) full-time job for many, even as it was unpaid—this is still often the case. The promise of automation often fails to trickle down the economic ladder, leaving the richer more able to outsource this work to both maids and machines. A personal assistant can research and buy the best robot vacuum for your needs.