The essay I just published, “The Body Politic,” argued that the city of Los Angeles has been conditioning bodies for a century to expect aloneness and to call it freedom. The freeway, I wrote, is in the nervous system of every Angeleno who has ever merged onto it. The fortress home is a posture the body assumes when it walks past the gate. The cultural work of the left, I argued, is to build an alternative dense enough that ordinary bodies can find belonging inside it.
I have been working on another essay that I am calling, for now, “The Colonized Horizon.” It started as a separate project, something I had been carrying for months before the body essay arrived, but the more I write into it the more I see that the two pieces are not separate. The body essay was about how capitalist culture conditions bodies. The horizon essay is about how capitalist culture conditions imaginations. The mechanism is the same, and I am only beginning to see how much of one essay was already inside the other.
The horizon piece is taking longer than the body piece did. Part of that is its scale, since it pulls on Fanon, Gramsci, Lukács, Berlant, and Fisher, and each of those thinkers wants more room than I am giving them. Part of it is harder. The body essay diagnosed a city. The horizon essay is trying to diagnose how we are taught what to want, which is a more slippery target. I keep writing paragraphs and then realizing they are restating the body argument at a higher altitude rather than doing new work. The unmanufacturing of capitalism’s hold on the imagination is not the same task as the building of socialist culture in Los Angeles, but they are close enough that I lose track of where one ends and the other begins.
Something has surfaced in the drafting that I did not expect, and I am working out where it goes. The body essay was written under the assumption that the conditioning urban theorist Mike Davis describes is total, that the freeway is in every nervous system, that the work is to build an alternative against the grain of a complete cultural achievement. I am no longer sure this is right. There are domains in California where Californians, including ones who would otherwise vote against every form of public provision, accept and even insist on common ownership without flinching. The beach, made permanently public by the 1972 Coastal Act. The major museums, free or nearly free, available to anyone who shows up. Griffith Park and the Observatory, gifted to the city in 1896 by a complicated patron and defended ever since by Angelenos who understand the land to be theirs. It is a consensus so powerful that it shapes even our battlegrounds; look at the contested LA River revitalization, where even the developers feel obligated to use the language of the commons.
The conditioning is real but not complete. There are spaces where the political imagination of the Californian has already ceded ground to collective life, and the body of the Californian has already learned what shared space feels like. I do not yet know whether this material belongs in a separate Marginalia, in the body essay as a correction I owe my readers, or in the horizon essay as the place where the analysis grows teeth. My current instinct is that it belongs in the horizon piece, because it gives the abstract argument about colonized imagination a concrete local foothold and because it sets up something the essay needs to do, which is to show where the dynamic breaks down. If you can name where capitalism’s grip fails, the argument that the grip is otherwise total becomes more credible, not less.
I am writing this note from the middle of the work, which is not where the previous Marginalia came from. I believed most would be written either before an essay began or after it landed. This one is being written while I am still inside the second essay, with the first one a week behind me. I am not certain what I will keep of what I have drafted. I am certain that the body and the horizon are the same problem at different scales, and that the political work suggested by both turns out to be more continuous than I had thought.
More when I know more.