In my previous post I considered the language that is often used when analyzing climate crisis as well as when proposing solutions to it, and how that language both contributes to an inability to perform a real critique of the issue (and therefore to approach the sort of real action that it requires) while at the same time mysteriously drawing close to the sort of analysis that could actually enable us to do that. In short, the fact that what we are dealing with is the natural global carbon economy makes it easy to slide into a capitalist approach to solving the climate crisis, even while it provides us with at least the opportunity to use that very language to perform real examinations of the historical and material development of global capitalism that has lead us to this crisis in the first place. 

In this post I’m going to take a look at some language deployed by protestors during the #ClimateStrike. It might feel as though my considerations wander far afield, but I hope you can see how my identification of the shared use of economic language by both scientific nomenclature and liberal commentary gave me some traction in understanding the situation, and how I am attempting something similar here.

 On the day of the #ClimateStrike I was home with my youngest child, who was home sick from school. Between jotting down notes and scouring articles, I was checking in on Twitter for updates on the action. At one point I had to walk to the grocery store to get supplies, and on my walk home I saw a sign that a child had made in one of my neighbor’s yards. The text on it was one I’d seen at least once in one of the many photos from the different protests, but for some reason seeing it in real life really struck me. The sign is supposed to be funny, and I think on some level it is, but it also struck me as problematic. It read: 

 

And please let me say: by problematic I mean, specifically, that the construction of this truth statement in this manner and in its myriad contexts revealed to me, in that moment, a fissure, a rupture that, as such, called for an examination of the ethical problems it symptomized, especially in its attempt to address its own ethical problem. 

First, the contexts:

1. My neighborhood, Shafter, sits on the boundary between two neighborhoods of varying levels of gentrification. To the north sits Rockridge, famous for being “not real” Oakland, and for (at this end of it, anyway) its beautiful Bay Area-style (formerly) working-class cottage-style homes, now occupied by white San Francisco white collar workers. To my south is Temescal, which is technically a “business district,” but which is seeing not only the sort of hipster-boutique cultural gentrification, primarily along Telegraph avenue, but in the past two years has also seen the completion of something like five or six massive condominiums built along a ten-block stretch of that street, built for the massive outflux of white tech laborers who have effectively managed to gentrify even themselves out of San Francisco. My little street sits at the border of the two, and is comprised mostly of aging Free Speech Movement-era white liberals, who purchased these houses in an earlier wave of gentrification, near as I can tell, in the 70’s and 80’s. The houses are weird and large and these folks are having a hard time keeping them as pretty as the cottages that line the commuter corridor that our street terminates at, but the presence of comfortable, established housing security is still pretty palpable. One of the things that is interesting about my block is that there are at least two commune-style co-op living situations, one which is (or used to be) a writing residency, and another which includes a child care service. I would not describe these communities as radical: they are liberal and monied and solidly white. They all have bikes that cost more than my last vehicle, and their vehicles are impressive, too. It was one of these communities, crucially, that had the sign.
2. I have personally observed that humor is one way that liberals have dealt with the increasingly dire national and global situation. All day long my landlord/ housemate leaves his computer on to whatever channel or website it is that plays Trevor Noah on a constant 24-hour loop. From time to time I will hear him in there, giggling at this or that jibe Mr. Noah has made at Trump. Perhaps it is the constancy of this background noise, but the feeling I get, as I walk by the computer out the door to go about my daily life, is of an actually increasingly dire set of violent conditions, especially for Black and brown folks, poor folks, women and Trans People, immigrants, and on and on, while Trevor Noah and company overcompensate for their own failures or incompetency by investing in a non-stop torrent of smug, obvious, face-palming excoriations of Donald Trump—who, by the way, has got to be the single lowest-hanging fruit in the history of fruit. My point is that while Black and brown folks especially are actually dying, democrats and white liberals are laughing because it is just so obvious how awful and stupid Donald Trump is. The humor is completely lost on me. 
3. Relatedly, humor has become an increasingly important element in the way our more mainstream protest events are held. And of course not only is humor a fertile location for reading contradictions, but it is an excellent indicator of the political valence of any organized action. One need not think hard to remember the Transmisogynist “pussy hats” of the women’s march, or of the overwhelming middle-class whiteness of signs like the “We Should Be At Brunch Right Now” sign held by the newly radicalized-by-Trump Becky Bloc. There is more to be said on contemporary protest signage, of both the funny and unfunny variety, which maybe is for another post. For now let me reiterate that my point isn’t that folks aren’t radical enough (this is true, it’s just not my point), or that I feel it is my chief labor (or joy) to call out “problematic” behavior, but that this behavior reveals the host of misrecognitions and misapprehensions of the larger problem that is evinced precisely in the language that we use to articulate it.  

In regards to the URANUS sign, it first struck me that the sentiment sprang from an idea of cleanliness. I was unable to remove this notion from its context, as a truth that was deployed by whiteness. I was unable to do this not only because I know the folks in my neighborhood, but because as a brown person raised in a white family in a white town in the middle of the midwest, I have first-hand experience with the ways in which white hatred of Black and blown folk are often framed as a matter of cleanliness. It’s a pretty tidy concept, ironically: white = clean, brown = dirty. 

Tied up in this is whiteness’ close relationship to cishetero normativity, which boils down to a fear of the anus, which is also often articulated as being due to un/cleanliness, but which is mostly just hatred for queer folk. Again: I was raised amongst cishetero white men—I have first hand experience with the almost manic fear of the anal. This sign wasn’t just extremely white, it was profoundly straight. There are multiple levels of fear emanating from it. 

What really struck me about the sign, however, was what these two things worked together to effect in the sign: it dawned on me, as I stopped to take a picture of it, that this sort of humor required, by its very essence, that something or somebody get thrown under the bus. The very mechanics of the joke did not work unless it performed at least a modicum of disparagement of some sort. And it reminded me of something I’d seen while visiting NYC just a few months prior.

That day, after spending a few hours touring the bizarro world of the “High Line” (truly an impressive cavalcade of half-assed attempts to obfuscate infrastructural relics that overwhelmingly signify a world built by exploited labor), my girlfriend and I were meandering back down 10th Avenue through the Chelsea District when we spied what I have just now learned (thanks Google) is Brazillian street artist Eduardo Kobra’s large mural (at 22nd Street) entitled “Mount Rushmore of Art.” The mural is clearly intended to honor and celebrate a handful of popular artists: Andy Warhol, Frida Kahlo, Keith Herring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. And it is also clearly supposed to be a celebration of queerness, women, Black people and people of color. However, this particular work’s immanent contradiction is much more glaring, in part because of its sheer size. The mural, in its very attempt to uplift and champion marginalized people, is yet in its very form, brutally fraught (to say the least) in its mobilization of an explicit signifier of colonial violence against indigenous people, Mt. fucking Rushmore. I mean come the fuck on: this is obvious sauce. My first thought was that I’d like to have been a fly on the wall of the meeting where folk brainstormed ideas, and to have witnessed first-hand the moment this artist and his cadre exclaimed in aesthetic ecstasy what a brilliant idea this was! Let’s put them on Mt. Rushmore! And call it “Mt. Rushmore… of Art! Transgressive maybe! Revolutionary even! Literally: who thought this was a good idea? What does “MOUNT RUSHMORE OF ART” even mean? And again: you can’t subtract a work’s actual, geographical context: located in the cutesy creeping boutique gentrification of the Chelsea “gallery district” as it reaches its cold white fingers toward Harlem, you can’t expect this symbology to be lost on everyone. 

Anyway, this is what I thought of when I saw the Anus Joke sign, and it all came together: not only do these two moments share the sense that at almost no time does liberal art with a message not throw somebody under the bus, but furthermore— apropos of my previous post—this phenomena shares in the logic of explicitly capitalist economic allegory and language. 

In this little machine someone always has to suffer, to lose, to be on the bottom. Not only does this have to happen for it to function, it is an epistemological necessity: the world is not knowable without a component that exists for the sole purpose of denigrating, dehumanizing, exploiting, even forgetting—and it’s a component that works to justify itself as just such a necessity. What’s more, and what is crucial to this whole analysis, is that even in those moments or attempts to turn around and puncture the problematic sheen of a world that can’t not shit on somebody—clever protest signs, art-affirming murals, etc.—this function still manifests itself, and often all the more obviously and in the most glaringly ironic of contradictions (the problematics that are the easiest to read). What’s wild about all this, I think, is that this is the work of ideology, which is what I’ll talk about directly in my next post.