Before beginning this blog, I would write long comments under pieces of art on my Instagram. I wrote this when I was first in Angers on 29 October 2019. I’ve rewritten it slightly, but the core remains the same. The emotions I felt then and now are not the same, but they rhyme.
In 2004 David Foster Wallace asked us to consider the lobster. These creatures, who act as though they are being boiled alive, are seemingly ignorant of the culinary scientists who assure us that they do not feel anything throughout the 40-50 arduous seconds in which they clang and bash and cry for life, but to Wallace and me they seem as though they are suffering. Ten years after Wallace’s suicide lobsters are again culturally relevant, however, this time they are not figures of suffering but tools of an ersatz intellectual, Jordan Peterson, in his quest to justify boiling women’s rights alive. Given our dueling images is it not time to reconsider the lobster?
That was the start to pages of wandering and, honestly, poor writing that I came up with after seeing a still-life of a lobster. But re-reading it made me think about what would Wallace say if he were alive today? What would he think? Every grotesque American failure on steroids, if 2008 was enough for him to kill himself, what would he say today? I think many of us are walking down that path, going further and further into a depressive madness until we finally snap. Maybe that is what it is like to be boiled alive in a sealed pot. Dumped into this overheating world without ever being asked, having the horrible heat consume you, slowly breaking down your defenses while you bang, cry, and pray for it all to end until you finally, mercifully, die. Your suffering is over, and you are replaced with a delicious carcass for a cowardly New Englander who could not be in same the room as you in your most agonizing final moments. I guess in this metaphor God is a Patriots fan.
This is not a particularly materialist analysis; I’m missing my usual Marxism. Maybe the boiling is our ‘rebellious youth’ finally being broken by the need to “get a real job” and having the carcass of who we once were presented to corporate America to be gobbled up alongside everyone else. Either way, I’m scared. In “Consider the Lobster” Wallace had a unique tone, he is obviously denouncing the Maine Lobster Festival and the process of boiling a living creature alive, but I think there was more. I think that, in those lines, he saw two victims, the boiled and boiler. He was talking about something more than lobsters.
The original essay was not very good, but it had an important theme, co-optation. The far-right has taken our language and our symbols and wielded them as weapons against us. They have always done this – look no further than National Socialism – but it feels different now, our anti-fascist allies – liberals – have convinced themselves that they must destroy it all, Marxist analysis, the language of class oppression, etc., all because it can be co-opted by the right. If someone wants a topic for an article, I invite you to take it, how anticapitalist language and symbols are being co-opted in the 21st century is important and the case of the lobster, going from a figure of sympathy to an object used to disregard sympathy for another human being is simply fascinating. It’s free, I will even help you submit it to The Activist. All I ask is that today, everyone reconsiders the lobster.
Signed,
Andrew (Pfannkuche)
Normal Thoughts 