On the relationship between work and capital

In Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, Claire Dederer calls herself “that weird beast, a professional critic.” She tells a story about her middle school English teacher observing that she, “thinks about a situation or a person or a book and you don’t stop until you find something wrong with it.”

Your cultural criticism demonstrates that you’re also the type to keep turning things over and over in your mind, whether it’s The Dialectic of Sex or The Little Mermaid CGI remake. Do you know that you’ve arrived at the purpose of thinking about something so much when you’ve found something wrong with it?

I won’t really convince anyone if I say that I’m actually not determined to find something wrong, because I suppose I probably strike people as quite, shall we say, critical socially.

Every piece of art is criticizable if you think about it long enough.

Simply because art is part of history and context and cannot do everything and is probably in danger of doing one thing as part of the cost of doing something else. But yeah, my partner of 13 and a half years was always teasing me about how much I love to “do critique.” If I ever announced that I’d seen or read something, there’d always be a little joke like, “Did you have critiques?” It’ll be on my tombstone, “Here lies Sophie. They had critiques.”

I also really like to like things. In a pure sense, critique is often aspirationally about an engagement that isn’t about wrongness, so much as paying it the compliment of working with it and responding to it.

This phrase, “that weird beast, a professional critic” is very redolent. I remember [in Waiting for Godot] there’s the worst possible thing after a series of abusive epithets, critic with a sort of many Rs. Critic is the worst thing you could possibly call someone. There’s a sort of historic hatred of critics, a contempt, a sense that they’re the lowest life forms. I mean, it’s wrong, isn’t it? It’s kind of wrong.

It has to be wrong, because I too am often saying, “I have notes.” We have to rehabilitate the critic’s bad image. In addition to writing about what movie you watched when you were on acid [a notorious essay “My Octopus Teacher,” in your essay collection Femmephilia], you write a lot about political power, about domination and submission and authority. Are you conveying your inner subjective life as a project of self-expression, or are you situating yourself as the authority on a topic?

When I saw Andrea Long Chu’s essay collection title, Authority, I remember actually thinking something half formed along these lines. I may have some way to go before I am totally at home in my own relation to authority, and the clear desire I have to be listened to, to be convincing, to persuade people.

Persuasion! It’s a kind of seduction.

Seduction for sure. I think some strategies of authoritativeness are kind of sideways, like being a little charming, relentless, perhaps a playful way of conveying one’s authority.

But I really think it’s, first of all, not really possible to write without the self involved. It’s only possible to write badly through a sort of disavowal of the self or an unworked through attempt to adopt some kind of objective unselfed or sort of bird’s eye or disembodied kind of perspective.

I think it’s wonderful to put body-visceral feeling in one’s political analysis. One just has to do so thoughtfully and with some care to not fall into solipsism and arrogance.

The first piece of yours I read was “The Satanic Death Cult is Real,” (Commune Magazine, 2019) in which you are “that weird beast,” the critic for Ari Aster’s first two films, Hereditary and Midsommar. Your writing felt like magic, helping me to understand that I was responding to his connection between what is so horrific about a cult and what is so horrific about a family. Then when I found out that you were going to come out with a book called Abolish the Family [2022], I was like, “I’m in.” Ironically, I was like, “Sign me up for this cult of abolishing the family.”

I’m glad that piece resonated. Those first two films about the wrenching ambivalent, not necessarily pretty thirst that some of us have for forms of communized care.

The way that the protagonists of these two movies feel and behave under the influence of a death cult, because that way of behaving could plausibly be the way they feel and behave under the influence of a nuclear family. We see the need to abolish the family, which is to say to communize care, to find ways of deprivatizing the care that the family form steals and sucks up for itself, turning us away from each other and towards our “own.”

So seven years later I get this update on your Patreon saying that a sort of zine-ification of that piece was introduced as evidence of what is called “guilt by literature” in the case against Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who was arrested in a demonstration against ICE’s Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas. What does it mean to you, to have your work used in that way?

The fact that a guy in uniform from the armed wing of the US state picked this up—because some wonderful anarchists have made printed zines out of it—and it says in giant caps on the cover, “The Satanic Death Cult Is Real,” which you have to read through his eyes as like, “We don’t believe in God or America. We worship the devil, signed Antifa.” And he goes, “Uh-huh.”

What if my government job was sitting in a sunless X Files-type room getting stacks of zines that had been seized as evidence and putting a big rubber “ironic” or “not ironic” stamp on them?

I don’t know how to talk about it responsibly because it’s a horrifying situation, and one’s laughing because otherwise one would cry. Full solidarity with the Prairieland defendants.

Of course.

Lex McMenamin has a piece coming out that’s going to be big about how this has gone down exactly. An absolutely devastating escalation in fascism in America, really. The seizure of literature and the use of this literature to prosecute people as terrorists under terrorism statutes.

It’s almost something that would happen in the Ari Aster movie Eddington to expose how bananas anti-Antifa sentiments have gotten and Antifa does not have a private jet… but this is not a satire, this is real life.

In one of the raids they did, my essay was the only named thing that was not a phone, a hard drive, a gun, or a physical tool of some kind.

I suggested to the Mother Jones reporter who alerted me about this, perhaps there’s an element of truth in the preposterous linking of the mere implication of having read anti-fascist culture writing about the private nuclear family in the horror films of Ari Aster with the alleged crime of belonging to a cell of an organization that we all know doesn’t even exist, Antifa.

Antifa is a strategy, a tactic. I almost want to say an ethos. It means anti-fascism, guys. Luckily organized anti-fascism does exist, unlike the specter of the Antifa super soldier.

And maybe there’s a serious misunderstanding-on-purpose way of rejoining to this monstrous absurdity, to say, “Yeah, it is precisely what we intend.” As the infamous proposal of the Communist Manifesto was framed, this was the way that Marx and Engels postured in the mid-19th century. They said that their accusers want to allege that Marx and Engels wanted to abolish private property. And to this, they wrote, “We say it is precisely what we intend.” And there’s something rather beautiful to me, without wanting to overstate the significance of anything to do with me in this trial, which ultimately is near nil. I’m not a defendant, I’m just in solidarity.

My writing, my utopianism, my desire, however, seems to have been shared by some of the people resisting the fascistic deportation of people of color from this settler colony. And many of them disproportionately are trans. And the fact that the bodily autonomy, the autonomy of movement of bodies is what the state currently is fascistically targeting is something we should be noticing more.

There are actually many more direct links between the struggle for the freedom to remake one’s sex and the struggle for the freedom to move and live, and forge a life wherever one wishes, than is commonly noticed.

You make such compelling anti-work cases in your writing. I’m so stressed out by what I see as writing being undervalued. Is writing an act of love and therefore labor that should be valued outside of capitalism?

I would say we’re defining work as the simultaneously valuating and degrading stuff that capitalism does with our labor. So our labor becomes work when capital steals it, which we also paradoxically need it to do. We need capitalism to steal and alienate our labor from us in order for us to survive. I have this wonderful poster on my wall that’s like a gothic horror movie type poster. It says, “From the co-author of the notorious call to arms, The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx: Capital, your labor dies and it becomes your worst enemy.”

This is a gothic horror story about the stuff that you love doing, becoming your enemy, what could be scarier than that?

So making money doing what you love is bad, but not making money for doing what you love is also bad.

Exactly. There’s only one thing worse than being exploited, which is not being exploited. The thing about writing under capitalism currently is that it actually is being valued as labor. It’s just being priced really cheaply.

I think AI is a symptom of this problem, but it’s worth noting that the cheapness of writing puts it in good company next to other objectively needful forms of labor, such as agricultural production, food distribution, childcare, eldercare, nursing, cleaning, sewer maintenance. Very important forms of labor are priced very, very cheaply. And we can’t explain this with reference to real human needs. We have to adopt the perspective of the enemy and capital, and ask, what can capital get away with? What could I get away with if I were capital? And then switch back to the standpoint of all living things, and try and figure out how we can become more expensive, for starters en route to destroying the value form, inshallah, and reorganizing the world on the basis of care instead of this value form accumulation.

As they used to say in 1968, be reasonable, demand the impossible. This is a way of organizing nature. Capitalism is a way of organizing nature that is just killing us.

We know it is. I’m nominally part of a Wildcat unionization effort, the Freelancers Solidarity Project, which does promote, at the very least, things like rate sharing, writers at least telling each other what different outlets and magazines are paying each other.

The going rate for literary words by essayists at US magazines has remained stagnant since the 1970s, which is an incredible pay cut. There’s no such thing as a freelance magazine writer essayist making ends meet in the 21st century without inherited wealth or a million side hustles, or day jobs. But I think there is maybe a possibility that things are rumbling and ready to change because really people do hate AI. They hate this ChatGPT slop. They know it’s for losers, and perhaps this will precipitate a reorganization, a desire for reorganization of the economy, one which advances the decoupling of survival from the wage.

When does writing become work? Is there a sort of quantum thing where before you have made writing available in the market, it both is and is not work?

This is maybe a “be careful what you wish for” horror movie plot. I wanted to be a writer before I could literally write, as in I would accost grownups to get them to write in the little booklets, what I would call my novels, that I had illustrated. I wanted to be a writer that bad and I have actualized it. But it involves a lot less soulful sitting in bay windows with quill pens than I think I might’ve imagined when I was a teen. It’s a lot more eye strain, terrible posture and nervous dysfunction.

So for instance, if I bust my ass writing something and then in the end a magazine “kills it.” This is an incredible industry term. That’s the verb when editors reject some of your work. The violence of it is dramatic, but sometimes you might not even get a kill fee. And then where can you even talk about the value? Did the value of your labor die?

Finally, do you drink coffee, and what I mean by that question is, do you feel like you have to get into a euphoric or tense state in order to write?

I actually was just thinking about how perverse it is that I haven’t really been drinking coffee these last few days because I cannot seem to unwind my nervous system following an absolutely unfathomably intense kind of writing hole binge that I’ve been in. I’ve been dealing with difficult life circumstances, probably shoving some grief to one side while diving into what I problematically call my work jail. I wake up and I can’t wait to get in my hole when I’m really in that state.

So I’m currently not drinking coffee because I’m trying so hard to sleep, and it’s weird that I don’t miss it. I don’t seem to be able to catch an addiction to some things. When I was a teen, I smoked cigarettes in France where I grew up, probably from the age of 12 and I thought it might be quite cool to be a smoker, but then I kept forgetting to smoke.

I don’t seem to have a lot of physical dependencies, but clearly I have a pretty bingey relationship to work, which is a bit tragic, since I’m an anti-work utopianist.

I’m stamping that with the irony stamp, Sophie.

Exactly. Stamp the stamp. That’s right.