reflections on Benjamin's "aura": the link between mechanical reproduction and commodification

mercado de la navidad, mexico city

*** this essay is in response to and references Walter Benjamin's essay The work of art in the era of mechanical reproduction (1935). Here is a PDF with my highlights and marginal notes.

I’m somewhere in the Mojave desert in California, and for the past couple of months, as I’ve slowly reread Benjamin’s essay (I attached my PDF with highlights & margin notes if that’s helpful), I have been thinking about “aura” as it pertains to art, healing, and spirituality. These three things have all cropped up in my life in commodified forms, and I’m increasingly convinced that some specific damage is done, some line has been crossed, when endeavors that fall under these three categories are commodified. I mean commodified in a Marxian sense, which is not just taking an extant object and rendering it purchasable, but rather producing the object (using previously acquired capital) with the intent of making a profit off of it (in expanding the production of that product).

    In these three cases, the commodified object can be something more intangible and ambiguous — even an experience. Experiences have been the objects of commodification in the west since we began seriously outsourcing industrial production to the “developing world” after WWII, leaving the “developed” Western nations largely a global upper class. I’m thinking of things like the movie and TV industries, education (charter schools), artistic practice (MFA programs), spectator sports, custom tourism packages and resorts, coffee shops, cooking classes, retreats, workshops, professional development, and the like. This experience commodification was accompanied by a shift in local working class job opportunities toward the service, care, and experience industries for Western working classes, bolstered by the portion of downwardly-mobile millennials who do not want to work in the corporate rat-race.

As regards art, I take after Lewis Hyde in “The Gift” where he asserts that artistic production should always be offered as a gift. Maybe this is a hot take, but whenever I hear the phrase “support your local artist,” I cringe, thinking that this is the wrong direction. Art should be free, above the corrupting world of monetary valuation, as I don’t agree that money can be totally equated with “value” in this nebulous, quasi-spiritual realm. (That said, I always tip the band, because that’s the world we live in.) At the root of this reaction is an utmost belief in the emancipatory and revolutionary potential in art — indeed, it is one of the few realms that possess this capacity. And reducing art to just another way to make ends meet seems another way of commodifying (potential) rebellion, bringing it into the fold of the system.
    By the same token, I am wary of the professionalization making art into being a “working artist.” This effectively reifies the creative process into a taxonomic category of human, rendering it a profession interchangeable with “accountant” or “hotel facilities,” each just part of the social division of labor and being calculated into our national GDP. (This is not to discredit accounting or hotel facilities as important endeavors, so much as to maybe make the case that all of living is art, with art being the last to be commodified.)

    I am also not trying to claim that any “struggling artist” who sells their works to make an income is becoming a capitalist — this situation seems more akin to a small-scale producer who owns their own means of production, which predates and can exist outside of and (to some extent) alongside capitalism. And anyway, we all have to get by. I’m thinking more about the art industry. I’m especially wary of an “artist” who creates works with the express intention of sale (as a capitalist approaches the production of whatever commodity they like — it doesn’t matter to them, because it is the money from the sale that matters). You could argue that this is the entire film/digital media industry, and Benjamin writes about how film is scary because of how capital-intensive it is, basically necessitating, as a condition of it being possible to make it in the first place, that it be commodified and sold at a profit.

    At bottom, my question is, do we really want to understand making art as “productive work" (i.e. making a profit for someone)? I am an advocate for recognizing the value of the labor that goes into making art, but not making art as “work” (i.e. a job for which you are paid wages).
    The peculiarity of the art-commodity (as opposed to, say, socks) is that it contains two elements: on the one hand, a person ostensibly buys a work because of the intention of the artist to convey something meaningful and beautiful (or otherwise aesthetically compelling) in that work; on the other hand, in tension with this aesthetic/sentimental attachment is the work's existence as a smart investment in an “asset” that will appreciate in value, if it is socially deemed so by the opaque and capricious machinations of the “art world.” The arbitrary and subjective nature of aesthetic appreciation means that, somewhere, there are tastemakers, and those tastemakers have a financial incentive to make certain tastes. The art-object is a strange commodity because its use-value is both in 1) its asset-capacity of storing value productively (as the work increases in value over time), as well as 2) in the totally intangible emotion evoked in the owner-viewer. It still maintains this social/sacred dimension, this “aura” of not just uniqueness but sentimental attachment and social significance, and even influence; this sentimental/social significance to the individual owner is what becomes of the cult/collective origins of art.

    It can sometimes be hard to see this commodity form of art in day-to-day life. Streaming services like Spotify hide this commodity-relation in that you pay an automatic monthly fee, and you magically have all of this music at your fingertips. But what appears to be a magical land full of the creative output of your fellow humans is under the surface driven by an industry that determines what these songs sound like (producers and labels as gatekeepers with profit motive) and which ones make it to public and get promoted through music streaming platforms, all the while slicing cuts off of your subscription fee off from what eventually makes it to the artist.
    My hunch is that this fully capitalized art world dynamic trickles into all but the “lowly” art that was never intended to be viewed as valuable in this scheme (I’m thinking of such intentionally low-brow forms as zines), though anything is corruptible. We see this clearly established in a hegemonic path toward “success,” like Chance the Rapper who got “discovered” on SoundCloud, went viral, got super famous, and super rich. I don’t think the reason all non-famous artists sell their work is primarily to get famous, but when that exec approaches you with that record deal, will you take it? And if you don’t because you’re music is punk as hell and fuck the system, you still get the social validation, like it or not. I have another hunch that this is what killed Kurt Cobain.

    All of this to say, the commodification of art and the professionalization of art-making makes me sad because it threatens to negate what it alone can offer, which is a respite from, and even a revolutionary challenge to, a totally commodified world.

As regards healing, I was recently invited by a friend to register for the Landmark Forum, a sort of New Agey secular self-help long weekend intensive retreat course. They are so confident in their method that they *guarantee* you will have a breakthrough, get unstuck, and level up your life, or your money back (only 6% of people ask for their money back). (I should mention, I haven’t attended the Forum, just the intro session, so this whole section is based off of my incomplete knowledge of the program.) It’s usually done in person in a theater with 50 other people, with multiple sessions offered every month around the world, but they now offer many Zoom sessions as well. I have gone back and forth now an absurd amount as to whether or not I want to enroll the the class, which costs around $700 dollars.
    Apart from this being a steep price, what gives me pause about this sort of deep healing work, which aims at full self-actualization into your most “you” you, is that this vision of liberation seems to stop at the individual customer. It buys into the atomized understanding of the world, and if the vision of liberation extends to a wider social liberation of some sort, it is only a result of individual customers undergoing individual breakthroughs, in a logic of: “if we all pursue our passions, the problems of the world will regulate themselves to resolution!” It’s some sort of free market libertarian ideology with a mask of humanism. There does not appear to be any guiding ethic beyond “follow your passion, to the max!” In a strange way, Landmark seems to use the language of "negative liberty," or merely removing obstacles to free activity (in this instance, within the self), to move toward "positive liberty," or the presence of control, to be able to choose to live out one's purpose. But this is still understanding liberty in the restricted scope of the individual. The program is agnostic when it comes to what your passion is; their only duty is to liberate you and set you off into the world. This is pretty on-brand for the hippie movement, and exemplifies the way that its revolutionary energy was successfully rerouted from the political to the individual through a focus on self-expression and building an internal mind-palace or communion with nature or humanity in some apolitical sense. 

    An alternative view of liberation, the Marxist view, is that my liberation is tied up in your liberation, and that one person’s idea of liberation (let’s say, to get rich enough to buy seven yachts), may come at the expense of another person’s liberation, or even their exploitation. A revolution of thought facilitated through psychedelics is one thing, and not insignificant, but the Black Panthers and environmentalists were the true revolutionaries of the 1960s and 70s, in the sense that they wanted to liberate people and the planet from harmful systems. What bothers me about Landmark is what I read as an act of cashing in on what may well be a powerful therapeutic method with real liberatory potential, and truncating that liberation to the self.
    You can tell a lot about the vibe of a program by how the chairs are set up. For Landmark, everyone faces the facilitator, the keeper of the special sauce, whose access you’ve purchased for limited time only. You can also tell a lot about a program by what they portray on their website. Landmark’s is pretty bland, like it was made with a PowerPoint template from 2004, and markets itself for corporate retreats, no doubt a significant source of income. But this may be the biggest red flag of them all: a method so open and agnostic that it can be applied to workers in a setting where the real aim is boosting productivity. This also speaks to the cravenness of corporations that would deign to penetrate so egregiously into the interior lives of their workers, under the guise of care (which may be real), with the motive of boosting efficiency and productivity (workers work better when they are unencumbered of their personal baggage).
    This reminds me of how I feel about talk therapy, which has become professionalized and incorporated into the medical-expert-diagnosis-to-healthcare-provider pipeline. I do think something is warped when the person to whom you are baring your soul is being paid by the hour, and has to wrap the conversation up as neatly as possible when time is up for the week. I think education falls into this category as well, which is why I feel drawn to France’s socialized education system. Why I feel different about paying for certain things or classes (piano lessons, for example), I haven’t totally figured out yet, but it has something to do with individuals in the system that is traumatizing people (the alienation of capitalism) cashing in on treating the symptoms of people who are suffering, and not only failing to identify what I would wager is a major component of the suffering (alienation due to capitalism), but rather sewing further confusion and sapping the suffering of its revolutionary potential.
    In addition, Landmark's 'marketing' model of relational 'invitations' to an intro session, during which you are 'invited' to enroll (and pay a down payment) for a Forum, feels wrong to me as well. I believe the friend who 'invited' me when he says he did so out of genuine love and an interest in sharing with me something that really helped him in his life, but at the same time, this organization relies on social bonds and the human feeling of empathy to bring in new customers, and revenue. And while many people who attend the Forum are already doing well in life and are just looking to “level up,” the rhetoric does also prey upon those who are down and out, offering a sure-fire end to their suffering. In this way, it feels manipulative, and I would argue is manipulative regardless of whether the people who paid the money are glad they did so and recommend the Forum. Landmark is not unique in this: manipulation has been woven into our social fabric, a capacity or tendency that is naturalized and normalized into everyday interactions, as we go about seeking to fulfill our desires.
    I have been in a long exchange with a good high school friend about whether or not charging for healing work in this way is ethical. This friend lives in Los Angeles and makes a living working for the people who founded Human Design, and giving Human Design readings to people. Again, I do not want to come across as delegitimizing the work itself, which is immensely valuable, and deserves compensation of some sort. She is of the mind that money represents an intention or an energy exchange that can act as this compensation, but I have a gut feeling that money is a lot more sinister than that, and rather than effectively compensating, does some harm to the practitioner and the practice. To quote Augier, “Money comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek” — and, Marx continues, “capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” There is a lot to unpack in this conflation of money with energy.
    All of this to say, what seismic liberation might the Landmark method catalyze if it were not organized as a quasi-pyramid scheme? The jury’s still out on if I’ll sign up, but if I do, it will be for research, I swear!!

As regards spirituality, I learned a lot at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center about how such a spiritual institution may be perturbed under the influence of the market and government, essentially being a religious commune that must also "make ends meet" in meeting the demands of the secular capitalist world (upkeep, taxes, insurance, etc). The Bodhi is officially a Wwoofing host, but you don’t have to go through the site. They rely on work-trade volunteers to staff the center for the private retreats that rent out the space in summer and fall, which is how the center makes a big chunk of its money, allowing them to keep the place running on what seems like a pretty tight budget (they also sell stuff at the farmers market). Winter and spring are the monastic study periods. Typically, people who come for the spiritual side will leave a donation, which is similar to the yogic practice of dana, which dates back hundreds of years, where you don’t pay the teacher directly, but leave a donation in a box after the class.

    So there, I am at once a student, a work-trade volunteer, and a sort of indentured servant performing unpaid labor. An advantage (for me) of this work-trade life is it avoids the mediation of wages. At the Bodhi, I get my subsistence (a place to sleep and food) directly as part of the community, which communally cooks, eats, and cleans (with some division of labor), whereas at any other job, you work for a wage and buy your subsistence on your own. The advantage of receiving a wage is that the compensation for your labor is societally liquid, meaning you can invest the money you make in other things outside of the commune. In the commune/buddhist subculture, all you walk away with as a volunteer is the experience, and the social capital at that Zen Center, allowing you to move up in the hierarchy, and which legitimizes you in the network of similar institutions. This is how people like the retreat chef get gigs — by being skilled and having good New Age networks. But the difficulty here is that, unless you climb the hierarchy in an institution, you will be a wageless work-trader forever, and either stuck in that world with no pay, or spit back out into the market with no money.
    A bit of a tangent, on van life: There is an entire culture of people who do not care about accumulating wealth, and instead pursue the accumulation of experience — and not to the end of some “cashing in,” but the intrinsic value of a happy life, and perhaps a progression along a spiritual or healing path. More and more in our generation are opting for this life as we become increasingly disenchanted with mainstream life, moving into vans to avoid as many bills as possible, approximating a sort of tribal lifestyle in the interstices of late capitalism. Now, after having lived in my car for almost six months (voluntarily, thankfully), I kind of see what it’s about. For those already oppressed by the system, it is the only option. For people like me, who can choose this life of individualism and freedom, it is an opt-out of social obligations. We may see a crisis in public infrastructure if everyone would rather live in a van in the woods not paying bills than pay for grad school to work 55 hours a week as a classroom teacher. And we’re in the golden age (or already past) where gas is cheap enough and there are still parking spots in paradise.

mercado de la navidad, mexico city

***

I’m convinced of this corrosive effect of commodification, but what exactly does commodification corrode? Maybe you have the same art work either way, or you give the same Human Design reading. What’s the difference in charging for it? This is where Walter Benjamin’s notion of the aura, which he outlines in his essay The work of art in the era of mechanical reproduction, comes in handy. In rough summary, he is telling the story of what happened to art and society once the technological advancements of lithography, photography, and eventually cinema made it possible for a far wider public to encounter the reproduction of an original work, and even the creation of work that is from its inception infinitely reproducible for the masses.
    For Benjamin, mechanical reproduction upends the traditional characteristics of a work of art: serving a ritual function in the realm of the “cult” or religious, having a singular presence in time and space, and being located within a specific cultural tradition. These three elements contribute to the “authenticity” of a work, as Benjamin defines it: “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced” (4). This definition locates authenticity in the very materiality of the work, before questions of nominal or expressive authenticity come to consideration.
    When the mechanical reproduction of works of art becomes widespread, cultural shifts in the way we interact with art ripple throughout the modern world. The religious function, which ascribes to the art-object a cult value, is replaced by a political function, which ascribes to the art-object an exhibition value. The singular work located in a tradition is now disseminated throughout the world, existing in innumerable identical forms, and encountered by innumerable people in innumerable different personal contexts with no historical continuity. Our tradition becomes reproducibility, our religion becomes exhibition.
    Art itself is a casualty of this historical process, and “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art” (4). Aura is uniqueness, presence and proximity in a singular location, bearing a specific historical witness. The loss of the aura is loss of a certain aspect of uniqueness, and it is the loss of authenticity.
    Aura does not pertain only to works of art, but to all existence that could be subject to mechanical reproduction. Every thing, and every one, is unique. I am still unique if I post a picture of myself on Facebook, but a certain aspect of my uniqueness has been diminished, as a likeness has brought my being beyond its natural bounds. For Benjamin, not only does the aura of the being suffer from this, but this loss of authenticity becomes systemic throughout society as mechanical reproduction not only becomes commonplace, but conditions the way we relate to existence regardless of whether or not it is mechanically mediated in a given moment; we internalize the effects of this mechanization, and they begin mediating autonomously through our unconscious subjectivity.
    The stakes of this assault on aura are high. Benjamin is writing in the prelude to the Nazi takeover of Germany, where the third Reich employed cinema in a massively effective propaganda campaign to condition the masses to not only go along with, but to joyously join the fascist cause. What this means of mediation allows is for a general remove from life itself, and in this void grows fascism. Benjamin ends the essay with a chilling exhortation: “Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art” (20).

 After rereading this essay, I can identify that what links these three initial categories that stick out to me — art, healing, and spirituality — is their ritualistic nature, which has fallen under the duress of a society that seeks to commodify everything possible. I want to now break down the connection between mechanical reproduction and commodification.
    Benjamin’s account of the decline of aura pins the blame on mechanical reproduction, which enacts this violence on the level of the individual art work, the way new artworks are created, in the way the society relates to art, and reality as whole. Mechanical reproduction saps the the work’s ritual value, replacing it with exhibition value, and erodes its authenticity and aura. Healing and spirituality, especially in their non-Westernified iterations, can be thought of as “arts,” and have a heritage in ritual. It is only relatively recently, since the Enlightenment, that Western healing has become thoroughly deracinated from its ritualistic roots and brought fully into the realm of rational and scientific practice. For these reasons, we can treat healing and spirituality as essentially ritualistic, and subject to the same corrosive effects of mechanical reproduction and commodification as art.
    Benjamin begins to outline how mechanical reproduction plays a central role in the commodification of art. The act of mechanically reproducing a work enacts “the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage” (4). I take liquidation to mean rendering liquid in the form of money. The cult (religious, or specific) value is transposed into an exhibition (political, or exchangeable) value. This transforms the work of art into a commodity, fungible with any other commodity on the market. Thus, mechanical reproduction is not synonymous with commodification, but it is a critical step allowing for the latter to become possible and commonplace.
    There is a difference between something that exists and is then commodified, and a thing that exists only as and to be a commodity. Art begins to be produced with reproducibility in mind, which means it is no longer ritualistic but exhibitionist in nature, lacking authenticity from the outset.

To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics. (6)

The result, it seems, is that the more rooted in mechanical reproduction, the more susceptible to commodification the work becomes. In this new form of exhibited art, “the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental” (7), raising the question that, while it may look pretty, is it still art? It seems as though the function of the work becomes central to the question of whether or not the work is “art” by Benjamin’s traditional standards.
    Concomitant with this revaluation of the work and new question of function comes a change in the way the public relates to the art. Benjamin writes about the audience becoming “experts.” By this, I think he means that the traditionally strict division between artist and viewer starts to erode, that the democratization of viewing art leads to a democratization of producing it: “At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship… Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property” (12). Both audience and producers begin relating to art as “testers,” segmenting a work or performance to be judged on quality against an established standard, rather than in its own unity and in its tradition.
    What we see here are the traces of the dialectical development of history: a new technology is introduced that changes the way people interact with art, and this not only leads to a new way of creating art, but of interacting with the world. Mechanical reproduction serves as the catalyst in our society toward generalized commodification. Art is being produced with profit motive, the audience is relating to it as an expert consumer. In the new mass culture,

Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of great social significance. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. With regard to the screen, the critical and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide. The decisive reason for this is that individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to produce, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in the film. The moment these responses become manifest they control each other. (14)

What Benjamin describes here is not only a symbiotic relationship between production and consumption, but a fusion of the two into one process. Our society has developed into one big “free” market in which artists, healers, spiritual guides operate as independent contractors competing for attention and funds of a general public that chooses what they want. Where once there were few writers and many readers, there is now a glut of writers and written material, especially in the context of the internet, which removes institutional gatekeepers and allows individual readers to both read and write in their own niches and echo chambers. The same applies to healing work and spiritual work; the content fills into the shape of the form.
    Jumping forward to today, this Jacobin article breaks down the ways in which the art world, fashion brands, and finance capital have become intertwined. It’s a great illustration of Benjamin’s point that art has lost its ritual value in exchange for pure exhibition value, which is easily commodifiable. It also illustrates a similar process of dialectical inter-influence of the masses and the industry. The author identifies the 1980s as the tipping point when “high art” became more accessible to the masses: prices for art works balloon, as they become another form of financial asset for finance bros to speculate over; this boosts wider popular appeal, driving revenues for museums and art dealers, interested in reaching wider (wealthier) audiences; in turn, popular tastes influence artists aimed at creating spectacles for “middle culture” that will draw large crowds, as well as galleries and investors in their speculations of what will take off, as they gatekeep what works gain acclaim and a place in the fair or museum. This leads to ever more extravagant art fairs and a merging of art and capital to the point where they become indistinguishable. Who knows, maybe art is becoming a more lucrative speculative market than property.
    NFTs (non-fungible tokens) attached to digital art pieces pose an entirely new set of questions that Benjamin’s essay is ill-equipped to handle, given the paradigm shift that has occurred as a result of the internet. NFTs allow for the complete liquidation of digital art works. A digital work represents the extreme end of total mechanical reproducibility, and NFTs allow for the artificial limiting of the work to belonging to just one “original” owner, approximating uniqueness. NFTs also allow for the work to exist as pure value: “NFTs, while retaining the positive associations of class and style associated with art, are really nothing more than assets with an associated JPEG, transformed into the frictionless commodity that capitalists have always wanted.” I imagine there are people do much more in-depth research on this thread, and I want to dig into it.
    With the near-total commodification of rebellion, it becomes difficult to create any art that effectively challenges the forces of domination that willingly engulf and monetize it. At its worst, art becomes “a tool of capital accumulation and social domination.” I think this is what Brecht was warning of in footnote 9 in the Benjamin essay:

If the concept of ‘work of art’ can no longer be applied to the thing that emerges once the work is transformed into a commodity, we have to eliminate this concept with cautious care but without fear, lest we liquidate the function of the very thing as well. For it has to go through this phase without mental reservation, and not as noncommittal deviation from the straight path; rather, what happens here with the work of art will change it fundamentally and erase its past to such an extent that should the old concept be taken up again—and it will, why not?—it will no longer stir any memory of the thing it once designated. (22-3)

Here, Brecht is advocating for a strict division between art-as-commodity, which must relinquish its claim on its history and ritual function, and the concept of the "art work," which must be protected against being lumped in with commodified art.
    There is an eerie resonance between the prestige of a brand or an art fair and the aura of a work of art. It makes me think of how something like Landmark probably has a marketing person to manage the brand image. The portion of the essay where Benjamin discusses the plight of the film actor can perhaps help us make sense of this similarity. The film actor experiences a self-segmentation and inability to connect with the audience quite viscerally, for purposes of proposing a question regarding how to relate mechanical mediation and commodification:

The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera, as Pirandello describes it, is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror. But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where is it transported? Before the public. Never for a moment does the screen actor cease to be conscious of this fact. While facing the camera he knows that ultimately he will face the public, the consumers who constitute the market. This market, where he offers not only his labor but also his whole self, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach. During the shooting he has as little contact with it as any article made in a factory. This may contribute to that oppression, that new anxiety which, according to Pirandello, grips the actor before the camera. The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity.

In this instance, we are dealing with the screen actor, whose relation to the public is mediated by the technical apparatus of the film camera, and the raw material of their performance undergoes a process of selection and revision (a revision of reality) before it is presented to the audience-market. As a result of this mediation, the actor becomes alienated from their aura, and their personality itself becomes a commodity. It is unclear here whether the public is already a market of consumers, or if this transformation has already taken place. I find this the most compelling way to understand contemporary stardom and fame, which is now permutating through the medium of social media into somewhat of a different beast from classic Hollywood or Beatlemania, where we all become producers/consumers (pro-sumers) of our personal brands, and we are all simultaneously the commodities whose data is being harvested by social media platforms to sell to advertisers. My question is, if we swap out the actor for a yoga teacher, removing the mechanical mediation, but keep the public-as-market context, what becomes of the aura of the yoga teacher, or of the yoga practice itself? The social relation becomes one of a market transaction, and I’m wondering if this commodification of an existing tradition enacts a similar destruction of aura. If so, the very fabric of life has become subject to the same corrosive effect of mechanical reproduction.

***

To reiterate, my intent here is not to propose that artists and healers should offer their labor and services for free or be deemed morally compromised. My lack of a solution for this problem I've raised reflects the reality that there is no ethical consumption, or production, under capitalism, how many of us are forced to compromise our values for survival. The artist who sells their paintings or the yoga teacher who charges for classes just to get by don't have great options: monetize, get a "real job," or poverty. This is not a moral failing of the individual; it is a moral failing of the system.

    Some questions for the future: Do we live in an era where aura is always already dead before we’ve even undertaken to create something or interact with someone, or is there still some aura to salvage? Maybe it’s not so dire if aura in its traditional form dies away, or morphs into something new. Surely, some of the art made today enriches our lives; personally, I find this to be the case more often when it's a doodle from a friend, as opposed to a multi-million dollar piece in a museum, though viewing the latter offers an opportunity for a different, perhaps more cynical and cerebral, encounter with an art-object that is not devoid of value (the ritual of contemplating the end of capitalism?).

    As for art’s collusion with contemporary fascism, as well as the potential it has to pose a challenge to a regime of global-finance-induced stratification and domination, I haven’t lost all hope yet for art, as well as healing and spiritual practice, as liberatory forces. Even in their commodified forms, I think we're better off pursuing these passions than not; for if we cease, what is left? There are people all over the world keeping their traditional cultures alive, and creating spaces for communal expression and experience. We just need to continue thinking of art and practice in different terms, outside of the museum or MFA, outside of the published novel or MCU blockbuster, outside the corporate yoga studio. I’m looking more toward the art and practice that slips through or intentionally dwells in the cracks, flies under the radar in the abandoned warehouse or the mountain commune, that allows for people to experience a glimmer of humanity, and opens some space for an expansive-liberatory being and revolutionary imagination.

mercado de la navidad, mexico city

reading digest #1: this labor day, better understanding capitalism

This summer, I've been reading through Marx's Capital Vol. 1 with some friends. It basically tells the story of how capitalism operates, and how it came to be. (It's in his other essays where we goes in on his theory for what his alternative, communism, would be.) Here are some of the things I've been reading in support of that endeavor.

trucks filling up on gas somewhere in Oklahoma

 

The Economic Policy Institute's Productivity-Pay Gap

A graph that illustrates the outcome of the explicit policy decisions of "trickle down economics" (anti-labor deregulation that allowed for monopolies to return, decreases in taxes on the wealthy, fewer increases in the minimum wage). This allowed for an increase in productivity to result in increased CEO and management profits and not in worker wages.

From 1979 to 2020, net productivity rose 61.8%, while the hourly pay of typical workers grew far slower—increasing only 17.5% over four decades (after adjusting for inflation).

Productivity also decreased in this timeframe, meaning "economic growth became both slower and more radically unequal."

The good news is, these are all policy decisions we can reverse — if we want to and have the political will! Massachusetts' Fair Share Amendment could send this message.

Jeff Bezos believes in the labor theory of value?

After returning from space, Jeff Bezos said in a press conference: “I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.” This indicates that he ascribes to Marx's labor theory of value as an explanation for how he got wealthy enough to fly into space. This is an important break from the story we typically hear from the super wealthy and uncritical, which is that value, in an economic "boost the GDP" sense, comes from the "ideas people." According to Marx, value is generated at the point of production of the commodity — let's say, by the workers who make iPhones at the FoxConn factory in China. The value of an iPhone comes from its utility, and the profit they generate comes from the discrepancy between what it costs to produce the iPhone (raw materials + wage-labor) and the price at which it is sold. When we talk about exploitation, we are referring to the fact that the wage-laborers are not compensated for all of the value they generate, as part of this value is siphoned off as profit for the people who own the factory and drew up the plans. The ideas are important, and they make possible the value creation in the form of the iPhone, but that is not where the value itself comes from — there is no profit without (exploited) workers.

Amazon is a bit more complicated of an example. Rather than providing a commodity in the form of a concrete product, they offer a platform (digital marketplace, and digital real estate in general) and service (delivery) for other peoples' cheap goods, taking a serious cut off the top. If Amazon's "fulfillment center" workers were paid more for the service they supply, Bezos would have less money, but still plenty, to blow it on space projects like this.

Howard Zinn's approach to writing history

I started reading the popular Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." It is eminently accessible, seemingly written with a teenage audience in mind, and is ever-so-subversively Marxist, without ever using the world, or explicitly mentioning capitalism.

Marx's approach to history is called "Dialectical Materialism," which posits that the unfolding of political and historical events results from the conflict of social forces over material needs, and is interpretable as a series of contradictions and their resolutions. In this approach, you'll see history described through class antagonisms — the poor and disempowered versus the wealthy and powerful — rather than through the more mainstream approach which focuses on individual events and individuals as inflection points. In Dialectical Materialism, these events and people are part of a larger historical process. This frame also asserts the primary and fundamental driving force of material circumstances (the base) over what's going on on the level of consciousness and culture (the superstructure, determined by the base — "matter over mind").

Zinn's take on writing history in American society:

The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or ration or national or sexual.

    Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker's technical interest is obvious ("This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation—for short-range, you'd better use a different projection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations.

What I appreciate here is his framing of writing history as definitely not an endeavor to document, to the best on one's ability, the objective reality of the historical process — life on earth, which becomes history, is far too expansive and complex to be fully documented, and any documentation effort will necessarily flatten and distort parts of history an an ideologically non-neutral way. According to this approach, we measure historical accounts on a scale of more or less objectively true, as opposed to supporting a particular ideological slant to history. But the question of objectivity and history is a big one, and I need to think about it more.

An interview with Peter Gowan, a Marxist political economy professor

Basically his life story, which I found to be a useful departure from what I/we in the United States have been exposed to.

Most illuminating in this account is his description of his approach to his work:

Q: Looking back, would you say that there is a constant set of themes that characterizes your work?

 

A:What is probably distinctive about my work is its jack-of-all-trades dimension: interdisciplinary, if you like. I’ve always been interested in thinking across politics and economics, and thinking in historical terms. Hayek said: someone who is only an economist is no economist, and I would say the same about politics. These categories—economics and politics—which are treated as utterly autonomous within conventional thought, are absolutely imbricated with each other, in very complicated ways. The second thing is that I don’t, on the whole, have the courage to write in the field of general theory; instead, I write in a kind of analytical mode. Analytical work has narrow parameters—it’s confined to particular times and particular spaces, and doesn’t claim truth across all ages; and much of my work is also contemporary. When I write, I do try to look downwards, if you like, towards the empirical, and upwards towards the theoretical. But I also find that when you get into this kind of work, you discover the specificities of relationships and dynamics which are much more peculiar and distinctive than one could ever have imagined. Last point: I consider myself to be at the opposite extreme from, say, Gerry Cohen in his Marx’s Theory of History, in that I do not think that economic and technological determinism can explain anything. This economic–technological determinism, what I would call ‘mechanical materialism’, is the approach of the classical political economists: Adam Smith and Ricardo. It’s quite extraordinary to me that such a huge number of Marxists have adopted it; Marx himself spent his life doing what he called a critique of political economy—i.e. of that mechanical approach. I think it is very helpful to make a distinction between the constitutive and the causal: the ontological significance of capitalism, of that social structure, is fundamental for understanding modern politics, and modern economics. But that doesn’t at all mean that you should start with what’s going on in the capitalist economy to find the causes of conflicts and changes.

 

Q: Could you explain that a little further?

 

A: Well, by ‘ontological’ I mean a very simple thing: your theory of what the world—the social world—is made up of. The standard approach in Western social science—the one used by Weber, but it’s an ideology that’s become as naturalized as the air people breathe—is an atomistic one: that the world is essentially made up of individuals. In addition, the individuals may be pushed by certain drives; Weber would say by rational drives in the economic field and by non-rational drives in the political field. But Marxists have taken the view that there are big objects out there which are not atomistic: social structures such as capitalism, for example, that are changing and shaping the everyday world. When we are looking at contemporary developments—say, in international politics—we need to ask ourselves what kind of ontological assumptions we are making, and what they imply for our analysis.

Degrowth: An environmental ideology with good intentions, bad politics — Collin Chambers

"Degrowth," a term coined by André Gorz in the 1970s, is the stance that, in the face of capitalism's drive toward limitless growth beyond natural bounds, which sets us on a path to environmental destruction and civilizational collapse, we must turn away from not just capitalism but any kind of productivism.

Here is a pull quote that describes the essence better than I could: 

Jason Hickel, a prominent proponent of degrowth, defines it like this: “The objective of degrowth is to scale down the material and energy throughput of the global economy, focusing on high-income nations with high levels of per-capita consumption” [3]. The degrowth perspective asks why society is so obsessed with “growth” (measured by Gross Domestic Product) and seeks to deconstruct the entire “ideology of growth.” The “ideology of growth” is used by the capitalist class to argue that more and more growth is needed to overcome poverty and to create jobs. This is bourgeois ideology in the sense that capitalism relies upon and produces the artificial scarcity to which we’re subjected.

The author's problem with this theory is that it takes accumulation as the central problem, and its solution of self-limiting to sustainable bounds amounts to "ecological austerity for the working classes," who are already fighting for basic subsistence. Scale isn't the issue: it is scale applied toward the end of maximizing surplus-value (profit) for big corporate CEOs, rather than determining the necessary amount of accumulation to divide among the people and to reinvest in communal projects. The political prospects of the idea are limited: "The ideas from degrowth will not appeal to masses of exploited and oppressed people who actually need more, not less."

Marxism and ecology: the dialectic of growth — Ernest Mandel (1973)

Marx is very clear that value, under capitalism, comes from two sources: raw materials provided by the earth, and the labor of humans. In this way, his understanding of not only economics but of human life, and all life, can be read as ecocentric — there is no understanding of human society without understanding how we interact with and within our environments. Capitalism structurally fails to recognize this point: Marx writes in Capital Vol. I that "Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth-the soil and the labourer."

Mandel's essay is seminal in the thread of folks imagining what Marx might have to say about the climate crisis. In it, Mandel asserts Marx's belief in the importance of harnessing the large-scale productive forces toward the benefit of humanity. (That said, I would expand beyond just humans to all life, and also non-living matter — we do depend on our environment to survive, after all.)

The essential points run thusly: a surplus must be produced to allow for a division of labor and the possibility of leisure time spent doing something other than meeting subsistence needs; once a sufficient level of advancement is reached, we can liberate all from doing grueling physical labor and eliminate "the tyranny of the social division of labor."

This level of advancement can look different, as the way the surplus is divided and governed serves as the genesis of class differentiation (some get more control than others, justifying and enforcing this in various ways). Marx warned that, without a transformation of the social structure and the mentality of the people, we will wind up with an unequal, exploitative society, rather than his more balanced and egalitarian vision.

The issue we face is not accumulation as such (as discussed above), but rather that capitalist accumulation exceeds our collective capacity to consume and knows no bounds, expanding beyond the natural limits of our environment, and leading to its destruction.

Marx recognizes that all value comes from two sources: nature and human labor-power. He writes in Capital Vol. 1, "Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer." He also recognizes that, at a certain point, the forces of production become destructive of these very sources of value — and simply human livelihood. After that point, we are doomed.

Certain significant natural resources, such as clean air and running rivers, cannot be fully privatized, and therefore have no "cost," meaning they cannot be factored into any calculus within the capitalist logic of decision-making. Profits are privatized and judged on short time-scales, while the costs, both short- and long-term, are collectivized — we all pay for the ecological damage wrought by reckless production.

Mandel is clear that degrowth is not an option. I'll let him bring his argument home:

The choice for ‘zero growth’ is clearly an inhuman choice. Two-thirds of humanity still lives below the subsistence minimum. If growth is halted, it means that the underdeveloped countries are condemned to remain stuck in the swamp of poverty, constantly on the brink of famine. It sounds good to say ‘zero growth’ must go hand in hand with a radical and global redistribution of wealth. But who really believes that such an international redistribution can take place within the framework of a capitalist economy based on private ownership and under the constant pressure of the market economy, when even inside the industrialized capitalist countries such a redistribution has never succeeded? ... 

    Our only salvation is in the second option, controlled and planned growth. Disorderly, uncontrolled capitalist growth, which disregards people’s most fundamental interests and basic respect for nature, poses such a threat to humanity’s physical survival that radical change in economic and social structures has become an absolute necessity. The struggle for the socialist world revolution, for the classless society, is no longer only a struggle for a more rational, fairer, more humane and freer society. It has become a struggle for the physical survival of the human species...

    A triple priority can be established in consensus with the majority of the world’s inhabitants; (1) primary needs of all people must be met; (2) new and different forms of technology which save and replenish the reserves of scarce natural resources must be sought; and (3) the intellectual abilities of all must be developed (through education, research and meaningful recreation)...

    Planned growth means controlled growth, rationally controlled by human beings. This presupposes socialism: such growth cannot be achieved unless the ‘associated producers’ take control of production and use it for their own interests, instead of being slaves to ‘blind economic laws’ or ‘technological compulsion’.

Two essays on Marxist Feminism, written by my friend Dr. Smriti Rao

The first essay is an accessible overview of Marxist-feminist economics. I'm especially on board with the analysis of the "backstory" of capitalism, which is everything that surrounds and supports the "front story" of generating profit on the market. Social Reproduction Theory examines this "backstory" — the softer things, like cultural norms and gender roles, as well as the unpaid labor of biological reproduction, child-rearing, nannies, cooking — that supports capitalist accumulation in the market. Basically, imagine all of the things that the stay-at-home moms have to take care of not only for Big Boss Tommy to go to work on Wall Street, but also the working moms who also feed and clothe the next generation of worker bees, working in the service industry or customer service jobs at major corporations. While these are all natural functions of human life (eating, birthing, raising), they have been co-opted and conditioned to be supportive of the overall functioning of our society, whose aim is not merely the reproduction of human life, but the reproduction of human life toward the end of generating profit for the bosses.

Here is a quote that describes the social reproduction twist on classic Marxism, which fails to fully account for this extra-market labor:

There are two characteristically Marxist elements of this literature. First, it explores the mutually constitutive relationship between gender and class, where class is defined as the relationship of a person/group to the production, appropriation and distribution of surplus, as discussed in more detail below. Second, most contemporary Marxist-feminists view capitalism not just as an economic system but as an institutional order that shapes the culture, polity, as well as the economy, through its tendency to prioritize the accumulation of surplus, which is the “front story” of capitalism (Fraser 2014:102). Marxist-feminists have developed a critique of this drive to accumulate, arguing that it cannot be reconciled with a feminist vision that prioritizes life-making, in the broadest sense of that term (Bhattacharya 2017)...

    Capitalism has no mechanism for automatically ensuring the reproduction of workers (Katz 2001). Yet the “front story” of capitalism—capital accumulation—requires the existence of the realm of social reproduction as a “backstory” that is subordinated to the logic of accumulation (Fraser 2014).

 

The second essay further explores Social Reproduction Theory, focusing on what the crises caused by the present COVID-19 pandemic reveal about capitalist society. The first understanding to establish is the distinction between the "productive" and "non-productive" spheres — productivity in terms of generating profit for the bosses who employ workers. Marx is not super clear on this, perhaps because the distinction is murky. Nancy Fraser studies this fault line, and here Smriti summarizes her research:

capitalist society is not only the site of class struggles over the distribution of surplus between capital and labour in the “productive” sphere, but also the site of what Nancy Fraser (2016) calls “boundary struggles” over where the boundary between production and reproduction, the visible and the invisible lies, and who bears the costs of social reproduction. 

When something like COVID comes along, the "double burden" of mainly poor women becomes more challenging, torn between the wage-labor productive sphere and unpaid domestic social reproductive sphere. Both are necessary not only for their own livelihood, but for the maintenance of the entire national economy, with this weight falling primarily on the most vulnerable. In Smriti's research on India, she finds that "households most marginalised by caste and class were pushed into the most gendered solutions, with women’s responsibility for reproductive labour in Dalit, labouring households reinforced by the increased difficulty of finding work for pay or profit that did not require displacement (Rao and Vakulabharanam, 2019)."

The takeaway is that "the coronavirus is a further reminder of the fundamental contradiction between a capitalist system that prioritises profits, and a feminist ethic that prioritises life-making or social reproduction."

An open letter from Chicago DSA's Class Unity Caucus

A friend from college is involved in some political organizing in Chicago, and worked on this letter. The Democratic Socialists of America is a leftist movement largely aimed at rehabilitating the Democratic party. Since the intentional eroding of organized labor's political power, the DSA has emerged as a promising potential vehicle for working class interests, but its membership remains largely middle-class. As a result this caucus proposes four central aims:

• Prioritize universal campaigns that speak to working people’s actual concerns.
• Make CDSA welcoming to the working class.
• Politicize our rank-and-file membership, strengthen chapter democracy.
• Independence from politicians, no paid staffers in chapter leadership.

This endeavor is a head-scratcher for me. Given the duopoly's stranglehold on our democracy, it makes sense to attempt to salvage the Democratic party by building pro-labor grassroots power, aiming to replace party leadership and redirect party platform away from the current neoliberal pro-business track toward something more populist (ideally with some medicare for all in there). The question is, is the DSA the way to do it. I think so, if done right, and this group is trying. Given the slow increase in ranked-choice voting, perhaps third-party alternatives have a chance in local elections — and one can dream that they may have a chance at the national level someday as well.

An alternative perspective on the Uygher situation in western China

As the mainstream media criticizes President Biden for pulling out from Afghanistan, effectively ending our longest "forever war," which I thought would be celebrated, I am becoming increasingly skeptical of sources that seem to unquestioningly maintain that this ineffectual imperial conflict should have continued in any form. The Taliban will now attempt to pick up the pieces of their shattered country, after 20 years of continuous war, and another 25 before that, when the United States intelligence agencies first supported the founding of Islamic extremist Mujahedeen groups, such as al Qaeda and eventually ISIS, to destabilize the region through toward the end of (successfully) exhausting the Soviet Union.

In pulling the thread further, I started reading about the present buzz from those same media sources about  the Chinese government supposedly perpetrating severe human rights abuses against the Muslim minority Uygher people in Western China. The first red flag is the U.S.'s identification of China as our renewed Cold War enemy, strategically chosen as only they challenge our economic stranglehold on the world market. The Belt and Road initiative, proposed in 2013, that will link China to Russia through the Middle East outlines a new world order that excludes the former imperial powers of NATO. Another red flag is that only NATO countries have criticized China for these supposed abuses (which have been disproven), whereas the global Muslim community is in full support.

The more realistic story seems to be that the U.S. has perpetrated the same same destabilizing tactics that worked in the Middle East and in Nicaragua with the Contras in order to radicalize Islamic extremists, who have even been aided in traveling through Turkey to Syria to fight with the rebels there. The allegations of human rights abuses against Uyghers serves to cast China as our authoritarian, anti-freedom enemy that we must sanction and oppose at all opportunities. In reality, we seem to be the ones desperately lashing out at their own freedom of self-determination. It is yet another war on Communism to preserve the global capitalist world order, with the United States at the top.

Following this thread has been profoundly disillusioning. I know this may sound crazy, and I feel crazy writing it because it is so far out from the mainstream understanding in the U.S. media bubble. Feel free to read for yourselves and come to your own conclusions, and let me know.

walk diary #1: scattered reflections, rural alabama to memphis

Below follows a slew of photographs, impressions, and thoughts that have cropped up in my life on the road. I share them as an update on my life, and in the hope that they may by intriguing to you as well.

Shooting fig loot in the woods at Cane Creek, Alabama — This was our home base for a week of filming and editing in the woods. Not too many bugs, a warm river to bathe in, gorgeous sunsets, and only one run-in with the cops at gunpoint (someone called them on us thinking I was holding Ben and Chauncey hostage — partially understandable, as they were in chains all week leading up to Juneteenth). You can watch it here.

The Frank Lloyd Wright house in Florence, AL — One of around 60 "usonian" homes around the United States designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1930s-50s. "Usonian" serves as an alternative to the term "American" when referring specifically to the United States to avoid lumping in or excluding Canada and Mexico. It also refers to Wright's architectural movement, which sought to break from the European tradition and instead embody the unique "usonian" relationship to the city and nature. Each home design, always incorporating local materials, thoughtfully incorporated the natural environment, molding the built environment around the existing environment to promote the harmony of the two. These homes were also designed for the lower and middle classes, manifesting physically the belief that every person deserves to, and can, live in a beautiful space in balance with their environment, not just the wealthy. Unfortunately, neither the term "usonian" nor the bespoke high design for the masses caught on in the long term, and these homes, rather than being lived in as part of every-day society, serve as museums and pilgrimage sites to a movement that could have been far more wide-reaching. American society instead pivoted toward Levittown suburban leveling and cookie-cutter cheap and shoddy mass-production, which continues in the form of the McMansion today, a hollow luxury supercharged evolution of the post-war boom.

Testing the TVs at Goodwill in Florence, AL — I half expected the demon child from The Ring to crawl through. Do modern flatscreen TVs still capture this cosmic microwave background space junk, or just old tube screens?

Meeting a life-model in Corinth, MS — There is no question in my mind that representation plays a significant role in the way individuals conduct themselves in society. When I am not critically engaged in an inner process of envisioning a future I want to create for myself, I find my imagination limited to what I see others doing, both in my networks and in the extended human network of the media. What I see others doing sets the horizon of what is possible for myself, and it is a matter of selecting from among what is possible as instantiated by others. But whenever I meet or become aware of a person doing something unheard of to me, I am reminded that I myself am not limited to what others before me have done. This is how I felt upon meeting Professor Bushoven, a former professor and friend of Ben and Chauncey's from Saint Andrews University in North Carolina. He lives a life that resonates deeply with the desires I have for my own, but have not seen in the world in the same ways: a teaching job where he gets to engage deeply with students, inviting them over to his place on campus for long philosophical exchanges, yearly trips to India with students, lots of time to write... I don't want to replicate his life exactly, but I the elements of his life that excite me can serve as inspiration for creating those same elements in iterations that fit in their own way in mine.

Vintage RV in Corinth, MS — I was seriously tempted to upgrade from the Subaru to this thing, but it didn't have an engine. The headroom and extra storage must be nice, but it probably wouldn't get great gas mileage. These are the tradeoffs of vehicular living.

Self-checkout — Grocery stores are weird, right? They increasingly strike me as the bellwethers of evolutions in usonian late capitalism. All WalMarts now have self-checkout areas and even lanes, which appear to be taking over from traditional cashier-and-bagger model. Now, you can have one employee overseeing ten or more automated kiosks, only needing to intervene for technical difficulties or to verify your age for the sale of alcohol. Of course, fewer workers saves money for WalMart, and, to the extent that we want to consider scanning and bagging our products as service labor, shifts more of this service labor onto the shopper — without, presumably, shifting any of the savings of this model to the consumer in the form of lower prices, but rather redirecting it toward CEO and management pay, or maybe operations costs.

"Enhanced water" — Ummm.... I think I get what this is (probably tap water with some extra minerals or flavorings added), and view it as a step beyond commodifying a basic life essential ("bottled water") to creating new needs and tastes through marketing and supplying the fodder for the amorphous usonian craving for differentiation and individual choice.

Rowan Oak in Oxford, MS — I made a pilgrimage to the home of writer William Faulkner. He devoted his life to writing what he knew, which was the sociology and psychology of the post-Civil War South.

Finally arrive in Memphis — The studio where Elvis recorded his first big hits.

Bass Pro Shop in the Pyramid — Memphis, Tennessee is named for an ancient city in Egypt, and this gleaming glass pyramid, built in 1991 jointly by Shelby County and the city originally as a sports arena, presumably pays homage to this namesake. You can see it in the distance, on the shore of the Mississippi River (the US's Nile?).

The interior is one of the most surreal things I have seen. It is 32 stories tall and houses a hotel, archery range, restaurants, and a bowling alley. Rising from a synthetic swamp, replete with large bass swimming through the murky waters beneath the reflection of displays of children's toy guns, rises a blacklight-lit scaffolding structure, like the path of an alien tractor beam. Coming from Massachusetts, the availability of firearms is still shocking, but even more bewildering is the culture celebrating firearms for fun and defense. I can understand hunting for subsistence and even for sport, but not assault rifles. I have talked to several guns rights advocates who would sooner die than lose rightful access to serious firepower, which they depend on for a sense of "personal defense turned national defense" against a distrustful government. I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment, but I do find it a bit comical to imagine militias of the rural U.S. taking on our military — though the Taliban did just defeat us after an ineffectual 20 years, so who knows. Most disturbing to me is encountering children who have already internalized a love of guns and shooting. While I played a lot of Call of Duty growing up, it did not transition beyond simulated digital form.

National Civil Rights Museum — On April 4th, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a sniper while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis. He was in town to support the local sanitation workers who were on strike. The night before, he gave his final speech, about the mountaintop. In it he says to the striking workers and their allies,

we've got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point, in Memphis. We've got to see it through. And when we have our march, you need to be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together. Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.

This message of utter solidarity, and class consciousness, is not usually associated with MLK. For him, it was not just about securing equal rights for Black folks: it was about reuniting the oppressed working class to fight for greater equality throughout all of society. He ends his speech on a prescient note:

I've been to the mountaintop... Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.

It is little-known that, in 1999, a jury in a civil trial in Memphis found U.S. government agencies guilty of conspiring to murder MLK. As more information about the FBI's COINTELPRO come to light, and assassinations of such key Civil Rights figures as Fred Hampton, we are still uncovering the extent of this illegal surveillance and suppression of political groups deemed "subversive." 

Security is tight upon entering the museum portion of the site. Overall, the museum is impressively thorough in its historical account of the history of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

A dystopic detail comes at the beginning of the linear series of exhibits. After a few minutes in an annex chamber full of the history of the transatlantic slave trade and agriculture in the New World colonies, visitors are funneled into a movie theater for a short orientation video. The first thing that pops up on the screen is the image of an executive from the Ford Motor Company, affirming the company's stance against racial discrimination. Should MLK be alive to witness this corporate sponsorship, he might bring up the biting irony of this statement given the egregious injustices and exploitation this company has perpetrated on their low-wage employees of all races over the years and still today.

You could say that Henry Ford was not only an early innovator of manufacturing processes to maximize productivity, but that he invented the super-efficient moving assembly line production model. Taking after the Taylorist scientific management approach, Ford built the largest "integrated factory" in the world, which still serves as model for contemporary factories today. But he also theorized beyond the factory to an entire social approach to capitalist production, which rested on efficient mass production, and higher wages for more widespread mass consumption by the workers. Antonio Gramsci would term this social form, which would come to dominate post-war United States and the world, "fordism." The aim was profits above all else, and the company cracked down on anything that might threaten this. He created a company secret service to ensure his workers were living upstanding lives in accordance with his strict social code. His security force avidly suppressed the power of organized labor to demand better working conditions and fairer wages. All of this to say, given MLK's fight for workers' rights, the irony of this corporate sponsorship is especially biting.

Negatives from the 1963 "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom." 

Memphis Justice Building — While out on a food walk, Chauncey and I encountered this building, which sparked a conversation about our society’s orientation to “justice.” In the downtown core, which is full of abandoned buildings and is the main area where the city's houseless population hangs out, the justice building and the courts are immaculately manicured. The architecture of this building speaks volumes. The style is literally called "brutalism," popular in the 1960s and 70s, the period leading up to the Wars on Crime and Drugs. You could say our approach to justice is a brutal one, very much grounded in a punitive mode, rather than a restorative or transformative one. As we walked by, police rolled up to disperse a group of houseless people "loitering" by the entrance. Where houselessness is criminalized, justice looks like punishment, rather than help.

"Genocidal Roguish Co-Conspirators Who?" — Seen on the streets of Memphis, a cryptic message spray painted on what appears to be plywood covering up a busted window.

Couchsurfing in Memphis — Thank you to my beautiful CouchSurfing hosts Christy and Josh! I am so grateful to have found you. Keep up the impeccable ambassadorship of Memphis.

I'm getting pretty decent at stick and poke tattoos. A lightning bolt in progress for Christy...

... and a fly for Josh.

Finally, a funny sign — Evergreen, or Nevergreen...