"the personal is the political":
but change is eternal

our politics (or lack thereof)

Q & A with thomas bey william bailey

I hear you want to limit the amount of  “political” content on your label. Why?

The political landscape now is, I think, hopelessly oriented towards a binary (“us” vs. “them”), purist, overly simplistic understanding of reality. Politics are becoming increasingly insipid and lethal the more that they regress towards this totalizing thought. With only two acceptable “sides” on which to stand, admitting a single contradiction within your own systems of beliefs can have severe personal repercussions, because the crisis at hand has been defined as a zero-sum game (i.e. “I can’t win unless you lose”), and too many of the politically engaged feel that its stakes are existential ones.

This is in stark opposition to the experimental principles that art can, and should, work from: it may “escape” the intentions of the artist and unlock completely unexpected insights. Working seriously with art can also lead to the expansion of what it means to be human; it may lead to the asking of completely new questions that allow us to innovate where we were stagnating and suffering before. With things as they now are, I just feel that explicitly “political art” is diminishing this experimental power; it’s merging the politician and artist into a single figure that tells people exactly what they want to hear, and removes the possibility of introspection or self-analysis.. 

Susan Sontag famously said that art meant to be interpreted politically “turns the world into this world.” When art acts as a defender of partisan conceptions of truth, we can never expect much more from it than a facsimile of existing struggles. This is truer now than ever.

So how would this explain past music / sonic material of yours, that seems political in nature? 

Probably the last piece I did, that might be construed as such, was called “A Desperate Expediency.” It was a kind of warning against the increasing normalization of torture within advanced Western democracies. However, if we strip away the specific geopolitical realities that this was addressing, there was a more broadly applicable message that I hope my listeners take to heart: not every social phenomenon can be reduced to a true / false dichotomy, in which one truth is opposed by one falsehood, like positive and negative electrical charges. A single truthful narrative can be, and often is, obscured in a fog of multiple false narratives, and, naturally, “two things can be true at once.” In this case, it was true that despotic right-wing governments use torture to achieve strategic objectives, but also true that left-wing governments (e.g. the PSOE in Spain during their campaign against the Basque ETA militants) were complicit in this same.

Even with work like that, I think the point was not a political one (“left-wing” or “right- wing” governments are inherently evil), but part of an ethical project to view issues of truth and falsity in a polychotomous, not dichotomous, way. This is incredibly important, to me, for the survival of a sane public discourse.

OK. What’s the difference then between an ethical work and a political one?

For a work that is morally or ethically instructive, there’s a certain understanding that this art is meant to make you think differently about the implications of your own behaviors, and to adjust them of your own volition. The political process is more concerned with getting external authorities to change others’ behavior, in a way that is essentially backed by a threat of violent force to guarantee compliance. Marrying your art to the political process also makes it more likely that your art will communicate whatever issues currently matter most to the thought leaders of ‘x’ or ‘y’ political affiliation, rather than issues that arise organically from the artist’s own experiences. 

What would you say is your guiding ethos as an artist?

“Change is the only constant.” It’s a healthy enough motto to live by, and it echoes thinkers from antiquity such as Heraclitus and Marcus Aurelius, if you’re more inclined to lend your ear to philosophers than to musicians. Embedded within this axiom is a sense of humility regarding your own malleability as a human vehicle for specific beliefs. 

Somewhat along those lines - maybe you have avoided this in your music, but you’ve certainly made your share of “political” statements as a writer. Why should we trust your opinion on anything if your attitudes continually change?

Consistency of thought and action isn’t a virtue on its own - just ask anyone who has  lived with a mean drunk for years. And we can go back as far as Socrates’ “I know that I know nothing” for the argument that revisions in thought do not undermine credibility, but in fact *strengthen* one’s claims to it. Karl Popper and many other respected thinkers have made similar claims; that changing your mind when presented with new information - particularly when this may come at a personal cost - evinces a stronger commitment to truth than to the rewards of social status.

Tell me more about what you mean by this “personal cost.”

I don’t think it’s any secret that art of an “experimental” nature is not very popular, not even the sonic arts. Every single new convert  or album sale is to be treasured (sales in the 100s of discs are actually considered “good”), and a single well-placed negative review or a single influential person disavowing you on their social media can bring years of positive development to a grinding halt. In environments where there is so much competition for recognition, there’s very little incentive for being a “complex thinker” who goes against prevailing socio-political orthodoxies. Right now, that orthodoxy is almost completely of the New Left / democratic socialist / progressive political orientation. You simply don’t criticize the moral authority of that establishment (or, to be honest, any reigning establishment) if you don’t want your well of opportunity to dry up. 

But the creation of this vacuum-sealed environment has, I think, given many of its guardians a false confidence in their viewpoints’ popularity outside of the walls. And I don’t think nearly enough attention has been paid to the negative effects of denying dissenters a peaceful means of expression, inquiry, and collaboration. The people denied such means don’t simply melt away, and many will be so embittered by this rejection that getting revenge on their inquisitors will turn into a consuming obsession.

Anyway, I’ve certainly lost friends and collaborators over what were (IMHO) very mild policy disagreements. And not just passing acquaintances either; we are talking here of people who were instrumental in my personal development, or who were at one point in contact with me every day. This didn’t turn me into a foaming-at-the-mouth, far-right demagogue, but the combined “ghostings,” disavowals, and false assumptions about my beliefs didn’t speak well to the character of these individuals either. 

Here’s the thing, though - what’s so bad about refusing to tolerate the intolerant? If you just allow your culture to exist with no moderation of bad actors, it will immediately become infested with them, and the noise will overwhelm the signal. 

Granted, there are plenty of people who contribute nothing, and exist solely to mock those who have the audacity to rise above cheap cynicism. And yes, there are people who exploit liberal goodwill to make very predictable comments about its naive openness to society’s sociopaths and troublemakers. In the art world, as in every other segment of society, there is always going to be a hard core of irredeemable, malignant creeps who need policing.

What’s concerning for me is that this aforementioned “purity spiral” political environment thrives on extremely reductive, uninformed theories of how the “enemy” thinks. So the intolerance is already inside the house. While I apologize for being repetitive, and I am trying my best to present an impartial critique here, I again have to call out specifically leftist media and art professionals for attributing all-or-nothing, irrational convictions to people who they only “know” from inaccurate character assassinations. You can’t be a paragon of tolerance while believing that there’s no qualitative difference between  - just to give a few random examples - the worldviews of Friedrich Hayek, Roger Scruton, Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet. 

Aren’t you worried that you will also be defined by “the company you keep” in a way? You have worked with and released a lot of artists who, I’d imagine, don’t agree with you politically.

Yes, that’s certainly correct. But here’s the thing: to judge others solely by their politics is a hallmark of totalitarian thinking. It’s the road to a kind of dehumanization that, once intensified to a degree, removes our natural resistance to treating each other as mere objects. And from there it is only a short step to more paroxysms of mass violence and cruelty.

These days, the politics of an artwork are often the first consideration for how good or “important” it is. And this has always been the primary criterion of value for a certain clique of music journalists, who evaluate music based on what it tells us about their own enlightened politics, rather than on its sonic merits. Instead of a critical culture that enhances our understanding of universal human conditions that we can work together to improve, we have one that praises work for how well it maintains existing partisan divisions.

Why is that necessarily a bad thing?

Simply put, we need more spaces in which we don’t approach each other as political creatures first; where we engage in free play and non-purposive collaboration so as to understand what we all have within us, as human beings, to accomplish. And if our collaborations do eventually get steered towards political differences of opinion, the animosity arising from these differences might be somewhat less intense, since we have mutually demonstrated an ability to positively, mutually reinforce each other’s lives. 

Prior to the age of curated social media timelines, it was far less common to come to knowledge of your friends through their most radical or controversial opinion - we would work our way up to revelation of such opinions only after we’d already found common ground in other activities. So, if I accomplish nothing else with my work, I hope it brings a little more of that into the world.

This sounds nice, but I just get the feeling that you’re looking for ways to keep doing what you enjoy, without coming right out and identifying as right-wing or conservative. And you have to admit, the “change” you speak of is fundamentally a progressive idea.

Wrong on both counts. I’m basically a pragmatic independent. I can’t think of a less ungainly way to describe my life approach, i.e. making judgments on a case-by-case basis, and making new evaluations when circumstances arise to challenge existing beliefs. Right-wing traditionalists would, generally speaking, not like my aesthetic standards (I love Brutalist architecture!), and I find plenty of current beliefs among the “anti-Left” movement untenable and ridiculous: I don’t understand, for example, Elon Musk’s obsession with letting A.I. make humans irrelevant in every industry, while also claiming that we need to increase the total human population. 

Now, given what I already said about the constancy of change, the idea of a progressive, wipe-the-slate-clean artistic program hasn't been anyone's exclusive plaything. Remember that the avant-garde of the early 20th century was once swimming in ideas that fed into nascent fascism, and that not insignificant figures like F.T. Marinetti, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and even Mina Loy made proclamations that would now earn them time in "Facebook jail." (Loy, now remembered as a pioneering feminist, once harbored an intense militarism, and wrote that her impression of pacifist men “almost amounts to the physical repulsion some people have for the sexually perverse”! Yikes.) 

This is not to engage in some genetic fallacy that things must irrevocably be linked to the beliefs of their originators - but to show how malleable certain forms truly are, in regards to their application to political movements.  “Poets don’t own words,” as Brion Gysin once said, and by that reckoning nobody really has an exclusive claim on, say, “noise as music” (to cite just one form that is the subject of continual political debate).

All this aside, don’t you feel though that “the personal is the political?”

In spite of the prevailing academic opinion, not every action nor event is conceived with a political end in mind. The great majority of human activity, I’d argue, happens with an indifference to how that activity will cause a re-organization of society to the advantage of one’s favored group. And random factors need to be better accounted for, as well: for example, my label’s roster now skews heavily towards men, but that is more an effect of non-reply from women I approached to collaborate, rather than any conscious effort on my part to advance some misogynist, exclusionary agenda. Likewise, I wouldn’t blame some “identity politics” motivation for their declining to participate – people get overloaded with work, people forget things, people get sidelined by injuries and illnesses, people die. All those things are personal, and while they certainly can be the origins and consequences of political reality, they just as often aren’t. 

At this point I have to wonder when dramatic changes are meaningful. Clearly you wouldn’t be supportive of just any case in which public personae renounce or move beyond earlier stated beliefs.

No, and here’s a salient example. I think 7-8 years back, there were a number of pundits and influencers who claimed the earth would soon be damaged beyond repair from the effects of climate change - and yet these people continue to fly in their private jets to conferences around the world. Being faced with the prospect of TOTAL PLANETARY DEATH, these figures didn’t devote ALL their time to forestall this worst of all possible outcomes, and opted instead to go on various little side quests. 

It just smacks of insincerity, when people behave in such a way, and make no attempt to explain why they have changed priorities or admit to errors in judgement. Instead the strategy seems to be “let’s just not mention this ever again” and pretend past crises are no longer an issue. It’s amazing and depressing how effective that is, even in an era when virtually everything is recorded for posterity. All other concerns aside, it is incredibly damaging to causes like environmentalism: so-called “normies” witness the ease with which this sense of urgency is just discarded without comment, and draw the conclusion that all environmental activism is based on a lie. And that can apply to any other issue which you might care about.

And what about yourself? What have you changed?

My positions have changed on so many things since my earliest published work (see circa 2006-2010), that I feel at least somewhat qualified to warn about all that I mention here. When I was younger, I was into all the trendy “bury yourself in the horror to escape it” sort of stuff, and I viewed intensity / extremity of expression as being more “truthful” than that which wasn’t as intense. At the nadir of my edge-lord phase, I was as insufferable as anyone else who felt that expressions of abjection and horror were more “real” than effusions of joy or contentment.

I now know to be more skeptical, and less immediately accepting, of the authenticity of such expression (in fact my next book will be a pretty in-depth treatise on the problems with “authenticity” as an ideal). I know full well that disillusionment with the false, bourgeois status quo isn’t a pathway to higher truths on its own - worldviews arrived at by way of disillusionment and resentment don’t hold up as well as those informed by genuine love and enthusiasm. So if the proudest moment of your cultural movement is that it “makes [your enemy] cry”or just some presents some kind of sustained insult, you probably don’t need my help. 

In spite of this encouragement to take a more “positive” approach, I feel like you really don’t have any answers for any of the very serious problems we face as a species. 

Admittedly, I don’t have the answers, nor would I be able to persuade everyone if I did have them. That is exactly why I’m involved with the form of expression that this little boutique label promotes and releases. I conceive of all this stuff not as the final word on anything, but as the first steps towards a space where open discussions and negotiations can once again flourish, free from the unproductive, absolutist, and infantilizing effects of the “culture wars.” Human selves are not static “things”, but unfoldings that exist within a much greater unfolding, and with that realization as a starting point - not a conclusion - we can make meaningful art that transcends the limitations of political doctrines. 

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