Warhammers and Sickles, Part 1: Critics, Comrades and Cancelling the Culture
- N. A. Dawn
- Sep 7, 2020
- 5 min read
Updated: Sep 11, 2020
"Another US-backed coup in Latin America, huh? Must be for, like, democracy, or something. That's why they deposed the democratically elected president and installed someone who agreed to implement policies more favourable to their continued domination of global markets."
Alright, hold my boltgun.
It’s time to bring miniature warfare under the anarchic auspex of literature and do a little cultural criticism 101. If it starts to feel preachy, direct your complaints to my Emperor.
In a few seconds, I’m going to tell you that, believe it or not, we don’t have to hate each other’s guts. I’m going to tell you that analysing the things we love can help us evolve into wiser, kinder people. I’m going to tell you that communicating seriously about seemingly silly things can help us build a more harmonious, less toxic way of life. And to that extent, cultural criticism (inspecting and theorising about our behaviours, beliefs, values and norms, identities and creations) is an exercise in active consciousness-nurturing, a sort of super-attention we can all share, inspiring wonder, connection and creativity. It’s a kind of pleasure. But also, weirdly, a kind of combat. And that’s okay: we needn’t be enemies. It’s like play-fighting. Like miniature warfare.
Good cultural criticism requires of us a special form of humility which allows us to consider the fun parts of life more deeply than we might ordinarily find comfortable. Partly because fun is so lovely that it’s worth taking seriously, but also because it can sometimes smuggle in naughty nasties that make us more monstrous than we may be prepared to admit.
Before I can tell you all that though, I first have to lay out a conceptual picnic blanket, so we can chat this over on common ground. I think we need to revive a compassionate flavour of cultural criticism, one that returns us to the long-last art of movement-building and all-encompassing emancipatory endeavour: intellectual, psychological, spiritual, aesthetic and political-economic liberation. And I can’t do that on my own, can I?
With an esoteric tabletop hobby as our launch pad, we’ll explore some of the malpractices of contemporary commentary, and see what lies on the other side of the culture war. Ready for lift off?
"Capitalism means freedom; communism means unfreedom. This is my very sophisticated argument, based on political economic history, and totally not just a slogan I've been told by people with a vested interest in exploiting my labour. In fact, capitalism makes me so free, that I'm going to be freed from the entire realm of the living in an ensuing wave of anthropogenic mass extinction currently devastating the biosphere! How's that for breaking with the norm? Wahoo, innovation!" (Also, this is way too long to be a caption anymore, but nothing actually matters because we're all gonna die anyway while the billionaires get even richer! Thanks, Elon!)
Lo, the Communist Picnic Blanket!
Here, have a sandwich.
It’s vegan and non-allergenic, and yes, it’s fucken delicious. So don’t feel bad if you don’t want it. I’ll just eat it later.
But I should warn you: it’s not just a sandwich. It’s 13.8 billion years of stars dying and being reborn, again and again, so that atoms could amalgamate into the precise combination to make an Earth, and life on an Earth could evolve, and make an us, so we can use other bits of Earth (like plants) to make things like bread and avo and cucumber and jalapeños and artichokes and whatever other delicious thingies you put on your sandwiches. It’s hundreds of thousands of years of language developing as a result of peculiar neurophysiology and primate social tendencies and many other highly specific climatological factors that allow homo sapiens to survive rather remarkably in a variety of biomes, long enough to begin something we really don’t think about nearly enough but that saves our asses every day of our lives: farming. (Hence, FarmVille is still more ecologically conscious than most other things on social media.)
Agriculture precipitates twelve thousand years of storing and trading surplus crops, using the first real numbers to calculate market exchanges, using the first real writing to track traded goods, recording owed goods on little nuggets called currency, storing and managing the first real currency in the first real banks, deciding on how currency should be spent in the first real states, and invading other states for resources and labour in the first real wars with the first real militaries. (Hey, lemme finish! You can eat the sandwich afterward, I promise.)
Binding these turgid, increasingly massive groups of people (the first real societies) together are the elaborate myths that consolidate all social relations. Family obligations, identities, gender roles, class positions, racial distinctions, communal norms and beyond, all congeal under the aegis of the first real organised religions. Civilisation officially charts the course from tribal hunter gatherers to settled agrarian societies, then through a series of disastrous economic orders: two thousand years of slavery, one thousand years of feudalism, and about two hundred years of capitalism. And then you’re born, and I’m born, and then I give you a metaphorical sandwich.
And now you can eat it. I hope it doesn’t taste too much like a headache. Hopefully it tastes more like what all things taste like to a cultural critic: a set of ever-changing social relations with a long and complex history, featuring some properties we enjoy – mmm, avo yummy in my tummy! - and others we don’t: labour exploitation, resource theft, and mayonnaise. (Fucking mayonnaise.)
From this we can glean the following: Firstly, criticism is a practice of attempting to fully consider the elements and impacts of a particular idea, object, behaviour or system, and communicating it to solicit the perspectives of others. It’s trying to enlarge our perspective on something small, ordinary and seemingly insignificant, because we suspect it’s actually a part of something bigger, something quite extraordinary, and perhaps vitally important.
And secondly, criticism is an appraisal. The problem with takedowns is, however cathartic, they have a habit of reducing the subject matter, instead of expanding it. Everything becomes a nail, and all we want to do is whack away with our wordy warhammers. (More on warhammers soon enough.) Good criticism should attempt to make its case based on a holistic examination of the topic, hoping to explore alternative views and aspire towards something brighter than the darkness of the critic’s target.
Life is so full of suffering, and that suffering stems largely from systems of domination, but also from our ignorance. And there can be no enlightenment without humility, certainly not without the basic integrity of confessing that we’re not infinitely capable, boundlessly knowledgeable and perfectly sane. We’re confused, we’re vulnerable, and all we have is ourselves. But we also have each other. So we might as well talk about all this on our way out of this unprecedented world we’ve inherited from the strangers who made everything we call home. It might lessen life’s suffering just a smidge to chat things over, and even if it doesn’t, at least we won’t feel quite so alone.
Warhammers and Sickles
Part Three: Throwing the Toys Out of the Cot (Monday, 14 September 2020)
Part Four: A Call to Arts for Anti-fascist Imaginologues (Friday, 19 September 2020)
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