Long time no talk. I heard newsletters are how writers get rich so I figured I should send one out. And what better to start down my path toward infinite wealth than sharing a quote from one of my favorite Marxist theorists?
I came across this passage in Raymond Williams’ The Country and The City recently which, though it was written in 1973, struck me as a powerful explanation for that overwhelming feeling of alienation and helplessness and exhaustion I get whenever I open up Twitter or The New York Times, as well as the unfortunate compulsion I have to keep doing it. It made me feel slightly less depressed, as it suggests an explanation for my situation more meaningful than “the world is mind-meltingly awful and I am a masochist”: capitalism.
Wordsworth saw that when we become uncertain in a world of apparent strangers who yet, decisively, have a common effect on us, and when forces that will alter our lives are moving all around us in apparently external and unrecognisable forms, we can retreat, for security, into a deep subjectivity, or we can look around us for social pictures, social signs, social messages, to which, characteristically, we try to relate as individuals but so as to discover, in some form, community. Much of the content of modern communications is this kind of substitute for directly discoverable and transitive relations to the world. It can be properly related to the scale and complexity of modern society, of which the city is always the most evident example. But it has become general, reaching to the most remote rural regions. It is a form of shared consciousness rather than merely a set of techniques. And as a form of consciousness it is not to be understood by rhetorical analogies like the ‘global village’. Nothing could be less like the experience of any kind of village or settled active community. For in its main uses it is a form of unevenly shared consciousness of persistently external events. It is what appears to happen, in these powerfully transmitted and mediated ways, in a world with which we have no other perceptible connections but which we feel is at once central and marginal to our lives. This paradoxical set of one-way relationships, in itself determining what we take to be relevant information and news, is then a specific form of consciousness which is inherent in the dominant mode of production, in which, in remarkably similar ways, our skills, our energies, our daily ordering of our lives, our perceptions of the shape of a lifetime, are to a critical extent defined and determined by external formulations of a necessary reality: that external, willed reality—external because its means are in minority hands*—from which, in so much of our lives, we seem to have no option but to learn.”
-Raymond Williams, The Country And The City
I hope this helps. Goodbye.
-Adrian
*Here Williams’ fantastically succinct definition of the capitalist mode of production from The Country and The City: “not the use of machines or techniques of improvement, but their minority ownership”
Lol I didn't have an author on this when I sent it out but it's me, Adrian!