Of the many shameful justifications for the violent suppression of student peace encampments, perhaps the most absurd was NYPD Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry’s presentation of a mocked-up version of Charles Townshend’s Terrorism: A Short Introduction. Discovered during a raid on the occupied Hamilton Hall, Townshend’s academic primer was cited as evidence of outside agitators, malignant figures committed to fomenting discord between Columbia’s student body and their country. It is unclear whether the Deputy Commissioner held the book up as a manual for practicing terror or whether he considered it more broadly as a vector of radicalization, affecting its readers and making them susceptible to causes hostile to the United States. The soft power of humanities scholarship hardens into its opposite here, with the interpretation of the world becoming a conduit for violent encounters with the state.
Ridiculed for the conflation of scholarly research with personal belief, the Deputy Commissioner seemingly posits a causal relation between the consumption of radical literature and participation in subversive activities. You act out what you read. The problem of how to connect ideas with action is also one of the concerns explored in The Way Out (2020), Ricardo Piglia’s off-kilter take on environmental terrorism – a novel loosely based on the Unabomber (see here for an extended discussion). Narrator Emilio Renzi investigates a potential link between Thomas Munk, a Harvard educated mathematics prodigy turned war machine, and Ida Brown, a brilliant Marxist literary theorist who has died in unusual circumstances. Reading Ida’s idiosyncratically annotated copy of The Secret Agent, Renzi is struck by a resonance between Conrad’s anarchists and Munk’s operations, which appear to have put the novel’s ‘creed into practice’. Munk, Renzi speculates, ‘was a kind of Quixote who first reads novels furiously and hypnotically and then sallies forth to experience them’. The terrorist, in this instance, is someone who believes in fiction and takes it ‘seriously’, a committed reader who manifests literary plots through direct action.
Thanks to a previous encounter with a private detective, Renzi secures an interview with the incarcerated Munk and tests out his Conradian thesis. Munk explains that as readers of fiction ‘we’re immersed in a world that is like the real world, immersed as if we are in the real world’. One of the advantages of ‘fictional universes’ is that they are constitutively ‘incomplete’: their endings are less a culmination than a radical cut. For Munk, the task for those discontent with consumer society and its technologically induced stupefaction is to ‘politically complete certain unresolved plots and to act accordingly’. Fiction is not separate from the world but a point of non-identity within it, a device of sorts that models behaviors, responses, and attitudes that can be adopted and used to modify relations and situations. In an era without ‘illusions or hope’, without ‘powerful social fictions or alternatives to the status quo’, literature, Renzi wonders, is perhaps one of the few resources left from which new forms of action might emerge.
The relationship between the imagination and material conditions plays an important role in Jason Reads; immensely generative The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work (2024). Unlike the ‘storification’ that has spooked Peter Brooks or the woeful cannibalization of narrative that draws Byung-Chul Han’s ire, Read considers how the imagination is both shaped by the world but also how it shapes the way subjects act in and on the world too. Like desire, the imagination is ‘shaped by its relations, its encounters, and its affects; past associations form the basis for new connections and associations’. The memory of previous histories, impressions, and narratives feeds into and influences the production of future interpretations, of novel or habituated ways of thinking and acting.
For Read, the imagination is a kind of conduct on conducts or ‘meta-conduct of conducts’. That is to say, the imagination does not strictly determine actions but rather structures ‘how one thinks of the very possibility of action’. If hard power acts directly and coercively on the body – violently breaking up student encampments, for example – soft power works surreptitiously, through consent, ‘acting upon desires and beliefs that shape and determine actions rather than upon actions themselves’. The seemingly immaterial stuff of dreams, ideas, and feelings actually become the very ‘condition and ground of the material actions of bodies’.
What develops, then, is another double shift of sorts, one of popular culture into philosophy and philosophy into popular culture. The narratives and stories that we read and watch affect our comportment, language, and mannerisms: how we relate to and interact with the world. Yves Citton, whose work is crucial to The Double Shift, mass culture inculcates ‘socializing gestures’, it trains readers how to react and respond to social relations and situations. As Read clarifies, it is less that that readers and audiences directly recreate the content of scenes – although they certainly imitate poses, glances, turns of phrase – and more that they learn and adapt certain interpretative gestures and practices. Habits and traditions are constructed around ‘meta-scenes’, scenes which ‘draw from a general matrix of possible and desirable actions’. There is thus a ‘metalepsis’ between the imagination and action, whereby situations encountered in novels and movies affect how we think, feel, and act in quotidian life, and daily life constrains the limits of what is imaginable. The imagination works on and volatilizes pre-emergent feelings into acts, but it also assembles narratives that orientate striving in the world of bodies and matter, furnishing desire with goals and objectives.
One of the most pernicious meta-scenes, from the perspective of collective emancipation at least, is that of the lone rebel or isolated hero. As Read observes, this meta-scene of self-reliance is diffused across the manifold genres of popular culture and is foundational for much of the culture industry, whose narratives revolve around the struggles of exceptional individuals. An imagination cultivated around heroic independence bleeds into material conditions, most notably through attachments to work. Ideas of self-reliance and a determination gain recognition through ones talents and mastery inform a set of social and personal dispensations that perceive other modalities of association and cooperation as illegitimate, as signs of weakness or unconscionable infringements on freedom. It is a meta-scene that channels into what Jed Esty refers to as the weak-state mythology, a rhetorical and representational form which imagines that the social failures of the state can only be rectified by self-determining individuals. Presented as such, much of the existing cultural forms we consume and enjoy would seemingly inhibit the possibility of imagining and acting in way that actualized collective capacities.
The stranglehold of the weak-state mythology on the imagination is no clearer than in The Way Out itself. Whilst Renzi glosses that Munk’s individualized campaign is ironically a pure expression of the ideal of the ‘self-made man’ which orientates the ideology and imaginary of the United States, he also concedes that: ‘as Marx rightly put it, it’s difficult to escape from Robinsonism, and yet, after the catastrophe of socialism and the struggles against colonialism, the illusion of the lone man rebuilding an ideal society on a desert island seemed like the only way out’. Munk himself refuses the binary between the self-contained individual and the collective. Filtered through ‘anarchist subjectivity’, the individual, Munk argues, is always already constituted by a multitude of pre-individual forces and feelings, is always already a social collective. On the other hand, the collective can always be condensed and compressed into the actions of an exemplary individual. The virtuoso gesture simultaneously stands in for the invisible collective but is also an exemplary gesture intended as a source of imitation, instantiating a new mythology: ‘we’ve ended up confusing the capitalist system with the solar system. We, like Prometheus, are prepared to accept the challenge and attack the sun’.
For the radicals of The Way Out there are no alternatives to capital, which has imposed ‘a belief in its omnipotence and eternality’. Read is similarly concerned with how to imagine and enact radical change, given ‘the mutual reinforcement of imagination and practice, ideas and material conditions’. Like Munk, Read also identities the imagination as one possible solution to this ‘vicious circle’. The imagination, Read argues, ‘misunderstands its own conditions, presenting its associations and connections not as the effects of relations but as qualities of things’. In Spinoza’s terms, it originates from ignorance and belongs to the realm of inadequate ideas which misrecognizes effects for causes. But the imagination can also create new connections and associations, ones which disqualify the given and instantiate new linkages between ideas and bodies, relations and causes. The imagination can intervene and break up the mythologies of the right by advancing new interpretations, instituting new narratives which have the capacity to increase powers of solidarity.
On the one hand, the imaginary situations that we encounter in stories and narratives give voice to and amplify dominant, emergent, and residual structures of feeling around work, the state of the nation, sexuality. These are narratives that can either shore up regnant mythic compositions of labor, nationality, identity or dismantle those myths, expressing the ways lives are unmade and destroyed by such imaginary attachments. On the other, the imaginary can also generate new forms of solidarity, new forms of dreaming together and acting in concert on collective projects. For what it’s worth, much of this blog has focused on how the ‘imaginary labor’ of counterfeiters, hustlers, and con-artists might be said to short-circuit myths around hard work, reconnecting the relationship between desire, striving, and action. It has been drawn to encounters with characters and situation who dream of making money through words, to outlaw appropriation which refuses the mute compulsion of waged work and scripts new scenes for itself. One of its questions has been whether the ‘grind mindset’ that animates such individual searches for salvation can be communized, can be revised and re-imagined by mythologies of the left. And it is on this note that the blog will be going on an indefinite hiatus.
Thomas Travers 