Producing Opinions

is now one of the biggest activities of the Culture Industry

Socialist Minimalism is Benjamin Fong’s latest in Damage magazine. It resonated with me a LOT because of my Mother’s Day advice to the angry young Leftists that the best strategy for dealing with this extremely fucked world we’re living in not to have an opinion on the questions of the day, as posed by Twitter Lords.

Fong describes this position much more eloquently as “socialist minimalism” and I’ve been liking it more and more.

The virulence of certain anti-woke commentators on the Internet has led me to believe that their agony about the directions that liberals have taken has obscured the wider, larger problem of conceiving of a mass politics with the welfare of ordinary, working class people at its core.

Maybe the anti-woke types are not socialists. I get that. But if their goal is to install reason in public life, their tireless attacks on the woke bogeyman seem to have lost sight of any political program at all.

Then there are the glib call out minions who stand at the ready to call my part of the Left class reductionists. They rehearse identity politics from the 1980s and 90s and I wonder if they actually believe anything they are writing. They’re more into in group identification.

Something happened in class this week that leaves me surprised and amused. Maybe the work of the postmodernists and their anti-grand narrative propaganda is done. They can go home now. No need to keep dragging that Jameson tome to argue about space/time discontinuity and the floating signifier.

I started out a lecture on the Western, specifically John Ford’s dark dark film The Searchers with a question, “Do we live in a just or unjust world?”

“Unjust” came the collective response.

“Are you just or unjust people? Do you fight for justice?”

“No!” the smartest of my students said almost in union. “I’m not a just person,” they explained. “Our world is effed up. I may not be a good person. How do I know that I am fighting on the side of the good?”

Then ensued a kind of hilarious debate on the virtues of anarchy (I was against and they were for) and whether or not we could have a Fight Club to determine grades this quarter.

Whether or not they held deep beliefs about anarchy, it seemed a default position to these young people whose basic attitude toward institutions was one of mistrust.

I ended up feeling like I was the biggest dupe of all, ready to argue with them about how being a social justice warrior could take us into the realm of the tormented John Wayne character in The Searchers.

I gave up on the direction I thought my lecture was going. We had many more interesting ideas to discuss — just vs unjust violence, national allegories, collective projects of nation building, epic framing of personal obsession, racism in the 1950s, racism now…

Social Media sets up every confrontation as if we were gunfighters in the OK Corral. I got sucked into this agonistic narrative in the very framing of my question about the Just/Unjust world. Sometimes, it’s better not to put on the holster and play our role in some stupid algorithmically smoothed over narrative.

I’ll have more to say about the difficulty of not having an opinion regarding the China/Taiwan issue next time!