A Piece Of You Is Alive
What the career of James Howard Kunstler can tell us about the politics of the city authentic.
Before we begin today I want to plug two upcoming book talks this month. I’ll be at Fitz Books and Waffles in Buffalo on June 17th at 4PM followed by an afterparty at the Eugene V. Debs hall at 6. I’ll also be at the Schenectady County Historical Society on June 22nd tickets are $8 and support the society.
In the 1988 John Carpenter movie They Live Roddy Piper's character George Nada finds a pair of sunglasses that reveals a world of subliminal messages run by a race of mind-controlling aliens. One of the first times he tries on the glasses he looks at a billboard that shows a computer in an endless vista of glowing green phosphorous and terminal blue. In white text it reads "We are creating the transparent computing environment." When he puts on the glasses the board is replaced with a white field and black bold text that reads "OBEY." Another billboard of a bikini-clad woman reclining on a beach with the words "Come to the Caribbean" splayed across the sky. The glasses reveal the true subliminal command: "MARRY AND REPRODUCE."
If we wore such a pair of glasses in the city authentic, what would be revealed? What is a throw pillow emblazoned with "SMALLBANY" or a button that says, "You Take Brooklyn, I'll Take Troy" commanding you to do or think? PRETEND YOU ARE A CELEBRITY or YOUR HOME IS A BRAND seem like good candidates. Instead of They Live I would name this spinoff A Piece of You is Alive. That piece is yearning to blossom, grow, and take over the rest of your identity. It is the story that you told yourself, about yourself, early in life. What's holding you back is often said to be internal -- self-doubt, lack of ambition, regrettable decisions, eating too much gluten-- but in reality, the problem is structural. It is a set of relations that are antithetical to human flourishing. That and the deliciousness of carbs.
What is truly at work here is a redirection of attention away from the source of alienation --capitalist exploitation and immiseration-- and towards each other in the form of endless rat races to achieve an authentic-seeming life. The deep sense of longing we feel for human connection and an attachment to place comes from the needs of capital. In Chapter 6 of Das Kapital Karl Marx wrote that the ideal worker is doubly free to, "dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale."
To make this happen capitalism does some very good things and some very bad things for human freedom. On the one hand it means everyone should be treated equally. Your "labor power" must be accessible to anyone who is willing to pay for it, meaning that older forms of domination --like serfdom that ties peasants to a particular piece of land or patriarchy that ties women to families run by men-- must be eliminated. This liberalizing force inherent to capitalism does a lot of good for conferring individual freedoms of people subject to ancient injustices but often enough individuals are delivered from one kind of subjugation to another. From the controlling father to the dominating boss.
In the process of switching forms of domination we also change how we relate to people. The deep, intimate relationships between people that are held together through kinship ties, gossip, and hanging out are replaced by more modern, utilitarian forms of relation: grocery store clerk, Instagram follower, co-worker.
We can afford to be fairly ambivalent about this transformation. We lose meaningful and dominating relationships and gain shallow relationships that also confer a larger degree of personal freedom. Also, this transformation is never total- both patriarchy and peasant-like slavery still exist all across the capitalist world. But in every instance the goal is to free individuals up to move and change behavior as quickly as capital demands.
Which brings us to the second kind of freedom Marx is referring to. We have to be stripped of our own abilities to sustain life outside of the work-for-money-then-spend-money-on-necessities system. That means even if you are a subsisting off the food you grow on your own land, you have to pay taxes in the form of currency and you may be required to pay a utility provider instead of generating your own electricity and digging your own well. It also means groups of people are discouraged in myriad ways from engaging in mutual aid that may create a parallel system of resource allocation and production. With "no other commodity for sale" other than the labor which you sell to an employer or the tax man, you are stuck.
The left and right jockey for a satisfying explanation for these forces. The right suggests a RETVRN is in order: white, heterosexual families looked over by a military state with an economy that’s somewhere between agrarian feudalism and space-faring petrostate. Whichever aesthetic gets the most retweets.
The left, at its best, outlines a new horizon for humanity. One where everyone has enough to live a self-actualized life with who they want, where they want. But leftists aren’t synonymous with futurists and so there’s all sorts of good reasons to plumb the past for good ideas to live by. It also makes sense, as capitalism finds new wages to ravage us and the planet, to say, “Hey yesterday seemed better than today.” And from there it is a quick hop, skip, and a jump to authenticity talk. Authentic things feel grounded, existentially connected across space, time, and culture. Whether it’s a bar of handmade soap or a farm-to-table burger the thing's resistance to scale and mass commoditization feels pleasurable, even politically so. Here lies political horseshoes.
Consider the career of James Howard Kunstler. He wrote two really good books —The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency— that lay out the existential dangers of suburban sprawl and fossil fuel dependency respectively, that are as relevant today as when they were published years ago. But after The Long Emergency Kunstler couldn’t seem to get out of the apocalyptic corner he’d written himself into. We’d ruined the planet with strip malls connected by gas guzzlers and there just isn’t a source of energy in existence that can reverse this trend or make it any less harmful to the planet. And so he started turning inward, writing four speculative fiction books where China lies about going to the moon, Islamic terrorists blow up DC and LA, and the grid goes down. Life becomes difficult, but also rewarding. John Galvin’s review of the first book, World Made by Hand, has a good example:
Farmers have begun growing poppies, not for the drug trade, but to keep the local doctors stocked with powerful painkillers. The local dentist stays in business using a salvaged pulley drill, and patients bring in their old gold jewelry to use as cavity fillers in place of the high-tech composites used by dentists in ol’ 2007. The electricity doesn’t work anymore, but people in town still get water thanks to the gravity-fed reservoir. There’s no more Amstel Light but plenty of hard cider, home-brew, whiskey, and wine. No more Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine, but at the wake for a victim of one of Wayne Karp’s outlaws, there was “spinach cooked with bacon and green onions, radishes, rocket . . . and new beets.” There were coffee cakes made from ground butternut meal and honey. Sounds pretty great, actually!
But after three more books (or maybe the transformation happened earlier, who knows) Kunstler’s work became much darker and meaner. His ire, which used to be directed at powerful people making stupid decisions about energy, housing, and transportation policy, to his imagined enemies on some post-oil battlefield. He now makes ample use of words like “parasite” and “Western Civ” in the latest installment of his monthly newsletter at The Daily Reckoning. Not every person who takes an interest in peak oil or homebrew is going to turn out like this, but I can’t shake the feeling that the combination trends in this direction.
Too often our frustrations and fears around alienation, instead of being direct at the capitalist enterprises that operate above our heads and behind our backs, are misdirected at each other and at artifacts that are over-burdened with meaning. We invest so much of our anger and hope at the landscape and the technologies that transformed it, that we lose sight of the social, political, and economic forces that are at work. We are also encouraged, through the manifold tactics of the city authentic, to see our choices of where to live and what to buy as pregnant with deeper meaning. This opens up even more frontiers of capital accumulation as businesses and cities sell even more experience and trinkets that salve our harried minds.
A piece of you does live, but it will never be nourished by the city authentic and its attendant gestures to the past. The only thing that can enable mass human flourishing is to grasp beyond our conceptions of modernity and tradition, contrivances and authenticity, and secure a new life where everyday life is rich with meaning. We can clutch our throw pillows and burn our scented candles, all with the genuine hope that any of it matters but in the final analysis it is our relationship to each other that will get us where we want to go.