Synopsis: Labor and The Image Economy
Walter Benjamin was a communist: someone who engaged with the political, economic, and social theories of Karl Marx, a radical thinker of the 19th century, as a philosopher and a writer. His essay on mechanical reproduction ends with the line “Communism replies by politicizing art”. Benjamin saw that the solution to the way that the Nazi party had “aestheticized” art, how they had managed to make fascism fashionable, was to make political art that could remedy and attack that fashion, and beat back the expansion of fascism that he believed ended in no less than the end of the world (an aestheticized, “fashionable” one, but still the end of the world).
Benjamin’s use of the word “communism” is a demand that we think about how our world looks as an expression of its economic structure, and how it works through images to uphold that structure. What does it mean to think like economically about the movies we watch, the social media we produce, the ads that harass us, and the teachers who make our syllabi?
In Boots Riley’s film Sorry to Bother You, we get a glimpse of both “politicized art” and economic thinking. The movie follows Cassius, a call-center worker in Oakland, California, as he tries to make enough money to pay rent on a bedroom in his uncle’s garage and to keep his beaten-up junker going long enough to get him to work. He is barraged by adverts offering him a way out of his life of poverty, including one with “life contracts” and “free accommodation” that seems suspiciously like a form of modern slavery. When selling yourself into slavery is beginning to seem like a less precarious, safer kind of work than the job market of the new economy, we’re forced to consider how sustainable the world Cassius lives in – one that looks suspiciously like ours – can be.
As the call center staff begin to organize a union and strike for better pay, Cassius is selected to become a “power caller”, and to leave his colleagues behind in exchange for fancy surroundings and an inordinately large paycheck. His whole life turns around: his apartment is fabulous and new, his car is slick, his TV gets bigger, and he leaves his uncle’s garage behind. But his newfound money causes a shift in Cassius that his girlfriend Detroit doesn’t like, and the lucrative work he’s doing as a “power caller” sounds suspiciously like selling weapons to fascist dictators harming their own people. Cassius is forced to choose between wealth, comfort, and safety, as a class traitor and arms dealer, and his old friends, family, and the girlfriend he loves.
It’s not an easy choice, and Cassius’s boss doesn’t make it any easier to decide, with bigger and bigger paychecks to match Cassius’s darker and darker insight into the world of the “power caller”. It’s not an easy choice because the economic structure Cassius lives in doesn’t give people many choices. It’s this job, or no job, or slavery. There is no ethical, well-paid alternative in his world. The dehumanizing effects of the work on the workers become increasingly literal, as the film produces an array of shocking images that work both as brilliant artistic creations as well as a powerful political critique of the economic world the characters live in, until Cassius finally snaps. These might be the kinds of images that Walter Benjamin means when he says we should be “politicizing art”.
“Riley speaks at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day rally in Emeryville, California, January 2016” by Pax Ahimsa Gethen is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Considering the role of images in upholding and protecting an economic system is a political act. How do films encourage us to accept inequality? How are visions and images of great wealth throughout our world used to make us aspire to be uber-wealthy? Are they also used to normalize extravagance so we’re less shocked by it and less likely to notice how unfair it is?
These question are provocations: they’re designed to engage a way of thinking about the world and about images that we don’t typically use or discuss. They’re the final stage of a survey of visual literacy that has ranged from how our brains read images (Compositional Analysis) to what role they have in creating and transmitting our history (Aura), to how they can be altered to improve our relationship to each other (Representation) and the flipside, how people are actively using them to control our behavior (Branding), then finally to how they spread in an online world (Networks) and how they reflect and produce our economic system, for better or worse (Labor). As with images, a powerful reaction to a leading question can tell you a lot about yourself and your values, ultimately allowing you to know yourself and your beliefs better. Visual literacy is that leading question: how do you think your world and life is shaped by images?