Countless movements across the vast expanse of history have been driven by key texts. At the heart of each social reform, each popular revolt, and each cultural movement, we have had a sole artist or group of artists who created the art necessary to spark the imagination of the people who soon followed. Here, we will briefly explore this concept in moderate detail, just enough to allow for an illustration of this thesis. Taking three key events in recent history, we can explore this concept via three different texts. Texts do not necessarily have to be defined as forms of literature. However, in this case, we will be looking at what keystone pieces of literature lead to the decline in inequality in the United States, the left-wing theoreticians of socialism, and the modern environmental movement.
To begin, we must understand how texts can be interpreted. When texts are placed in front of the person who will subsequently read it, look at it, hear it, or otherwise experience the text’s stimuli, they will construct a potential meaning of the text. Meaning is constructed from the content of the said text, and thus meaning will become personal to whoever reads the text (in this case ‘read’ and ‘reading’ refers to an interpretation of a text). It can be said that there are three types of ‘readings’, dominant, oppositional, and negotiated.
A dominant reading would be seen as a direct reflection or near perfect decoding of an author’s text. It would most likely draw the same conclusions that the author drew before encoding that message into the text itself, yet there may, of course, be room for slight personal interpretation, as little is objective in art and literature. An oppositional reading is when the audience of the text rejects the dominant reading and creates a totally different meaning from the content of the text. The encoded message does not reach the audience, and effective decoding does not occur. In such a case, we may be able to discern several factors as to why an oppositional reading was constructed. Some of these include differing cultures, personal backgrounds, as well as the text may be difficult to follow and highly complex. Finally, a negotiated reading would be a combination of these previous concepts. Partial recognition of the author’s original meaning would lead to part of the text being decoded with a dominant reading, and other parts of it would be read with an oppositional reading, from these two types of readings of various sections, the overall understanding of the text would be negotiated between several points of view, thus giving rise to why it is called the ‘negotiated reading’.
Throughout history, socialists painted parts of the world red, but Rachel Carson managed to turn the world green (however red-green colourblind folk would think they were the same, almost similar to how certain conservatives paint environmentalists and socialists with the same brush). Carson’s Silent Spring illustrated how the usage of Persistent Organic Pollutants, such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, known to many of us as the pesticide ‘DDT’, damages and degrades the natural environment. This was absolutely pivotal to the way Americans and then much of the western world, saw the impact of the recent ‘Green Revolution’ on the environment. In the rush to enter a third agrarian revolution to boost crop yield and test new cultivation technologies, it could be argued that humanity was overzealous in their pursuits of greater food production. It was Silent Spring that managed to get Americans energised to act, as her uncovering of its harmful effects and environmental repercussions opened up the new environmental debate and the subsequent modern environmental movement.
A quick look at history shows that Carson was not the first to write about DDT, that may have been —one of my favourite people of all time— Murray Bookchin under the pseudonym Lewis Herber, 4 years before her in 1958. However, she may have had greater success at making the conclusions more palatable and readable than Bookchin, as he had a more theoretical philosophy background, as opposed to Carson’s hard science background.
Carson’s ideas were largely understood by the general public, as well as the certified scientific community. Once they all began clamouring to get to the bottom of the issue, by gathering further data and developing solutions, the thought of ‘going green’ and environmentalism had permeated the societal and cultural zeitgeists. Take the greatest example of what was the ‘Hippie’ era, Joni Mitchell’s hit Big Yellow Taxi. The song mentions DDT, as well as other drastic and extreme phenomena and situations that reflect the standing of society at the time. The most common point being in the refrain, where she sings that “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot”, showing us how Carson’s concern for environmental degradation and appropriation of natural capital for industry, as opposed to its conservation, is still the main focus of American society at the time. Carson’s warnings may or may not have saved us from further environmental decay. Imagine a world where we had not read her book or listened to what she had to say, imagine one where we had let the planet go to waste at the whim of our own anthropocentric needs, as opposed to seeing things from a more holistic perspective. It is with this thought that I can surely say Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was a formative text in our current views on the environment (at least, those of us that accept climate change and aren’t bought out by big corporations).
On that not of corporations, let us glance into economic systems of resource production and organisation. Following the formation of nation-states, nationalism soon transcended many societies in Europe as the main source of political and cultural influence. Coupled with the previous sprawling kingdom take on politics, was the feudal system of agrarian serfs and their lords. With the new rise of national identity, the ruling classes needed to conflate their new ideals with illusions of ‘progress’, and thus the capitalist economic system was born. This, as keen eyes would point out, is almost a dialectical approach to explaining how European societies and cultures evolved in the 18th and 19th centuries. That, of course, means we are discussing one of the most influential philosophers of the 19th century and a founder of the world we live in today, Karl Marx. Marx has written and co-written numerous books, pamphlets, manuscripts, articles, and other texts, which may make it difficult to pinpoint the exact text that caused the most uproar with the status quo. But for this purpose, we have the chosen text, or in this case, texts. Das Kapital has three volumes, and all three of these will be treated as one unitary text as they each have the same goal— to critique capitalism.
But why not The Communist Manifesto? It was published earlier, actually completed (volumes II and III of Das Kapital were completed after Marx’s death), and surely more revolutionary in terms of politics than three thick tomes of economic gibberish. These are all correct facts, however, it was not The Communist Manifesto that laid out the groundwork of Marxian Economics, it was not The Communist Manifesto that enabled so many subsequent Marxists to understand the thought processes of Marx, and it was not The Communist Manifesto that let leaders plan economic policies that corresponded with the natural progress of Marx’s Historical Materialism. The critique of capital spurred thought all across Europe, amongst members of the left and of the right. It was not a ‘socialist’ text, it was a text about economics that pointed in the direction of socialism. In the context of the modern world, we think about or read Das Kapital thinking that it is a socialist text and doubting every single word, because we know the connotation of Marx, socialism, and the dissolution of the USSR and the liberalisation of China. Therefore some of us read him as a joke, as opposed to understanding how much of society and culture today was shaped by him, either directly or indirectly. The modern oppositional readings of Marx is what perpetuates the narrative that his ideas do not work, it also perpetuates the narrative that modern ‘scholars’ of economics and philosophy cannot fathom the concept set forth in Das Kapital I-III. It was early 20th century thinkers that managed to build off of him, great people like Rosa Luxemburg who refined and polished Marx her The Accumulation of Capital, and there were also Lenin, Bordiga, Gramsci, Trotsky, and many more who managed to build on to Marxist Theory. However, it was only with Das Kapital that they could have done this, as all subsequent critiques of capitalism are derived from that series of volumes, not The Communist Manifesto, or Critique of the Goethe Programme, or perhaps even Grundrisse. The efficacy of Marx’s theories is not the point of this exploration, however, his success in terms of inspiring revolution, and sowing the seeds of dissent is absolutely undeniable. For without him and Engels, modern socialism would have been relegated to simple social reforms, it was Marx (and Engels) who truly painted the world red by allowing the world this major insight into his head via the three volumes of Das Kapital.
The early 20th Century for the United States was a time of great change. Leftist philosophy was everywhere, from the unions to the first socialist member of Congress in 1910. However, 6 years prior, journalist and author Upton Sinclair, finished and published The Jungle. The Jungle detailed the negligence of the rights of workers and immigrants, and– to a lesser extent– the lack of food safety in New York City’s Meat Packing District. Though he originally meant to focus on the former two points of immigrant and labour rights, the action that was taken from his ‘muck-raking‘ novel (a term coined by President Theodore Roosevelt to describe journalists, authors, and other writers that aim to expose the wrongs of society and prompt change) was the tightening of food and health regulations. This is an example of a negotiated reading, when the individuals who interpreted the text constructed a meaning that comprised of parts of the author/encoder’s original meaning, yet it was combined with some of his original reformist intentions, thus making it negotiated.
Although Sinclair was not as successful as Karl Marx in creating the desired outcome, an outcome was still created due to his vivid description of situations that were very much still based upon the harsh realities of New York in the 1890s and 1900s. However, it is was also this book that created the right social and political climate for the labour movement, union rights, and other types of civil movements that aligned with an anti-capitalistic model of thought. It was here where one of the many American countercultures was formed. Long before the Hippies, and just before the Jazz age, the most influential American 20th-century counter-culture, was that of the socialists. American socialism penetrated society and culture, so much so that music was greatly influenced by the voices of labour activists like Joe Hill. This was the scaffolding that allowed folk artists like Woody Guthrie to have a niche for their music, and longer down the line, allowed anti-war music of the ’70s to recall back to those early progressive days of the United States. That was the power of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Overall, we can see that some of The Jungle’s revolutionary potential managed to imbue society with shock and then a subsequent desire for change and reform.
On a brief side note, the term ‘Concrete Jungle’ was first used in 1945, however, the term may have been influenced by some of Sinclair’s descriptions in The Jungle. Thus, the idea of the urban city being a sprawl of cement housing being compared to the thick underbrush of the jungle may be a vestige of the idea of how difficult it was for some folk to navigate the societal hierarchy in the early 20th century.
On a final point of intrigue, notice how the dialectical model seems to find itself here once again. The secondary point of this piece was to explore how different readings can be constructed based on the text itself. The three types of ‘readings’ seem to follow the dialectical method of Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis, as they mirror them almost perfectly as, Dominant reading, Oppositional Reading, Negotiated reading.
I do not say it lightly when I say that art is revolutionary. If not in the artistic tradition, i.e. a revolutionary piece of art that changes the style/form, but then due to its implications in reality. However, as we are all creators, we must be wary of the implications and consequences of the art and the texts we create. Either we must place them in capable hands, or we must ourselves ensure that the potential for our message to be heard from a simple ‘reading‘ of what we create. In short, our creations have the potential to be influential, and by extension, we have that same potential– it is therefore of the utmost importance that we do not abuse it.
Ed note from el-Aurens: Perhaps next time, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now or 60’s/70’s Vietnam movies vs 80’s Vietnam movies. Not certain yet.
About the Author:
Thomas May
Struggling and suffering have been common notions throughout my life, our lives, and humanity’s history. Being raised Buddhist in Thailand taught me a lot about the eastern world, and my Father’s British influence gave me a greater, more international perspective. And so I have become a writer, mainly poetry and politics amongst forms of expression. After completing my first 20,000-word political treatise, I only have the will to do more, inspiration begets inspiration. The will to inspire will always be coupled with the will to do better in our lives, communities, and our world.
The Big Duck 