What is Political Fiction?

It was inevitable that I would write something on the topic of politics and fiction. I hate the way it is talked about, because people are often so shallow in how they approach the topic. We are regularly treated to gems like, "Art shouldn't be political," and equally shiny gems like "All art is political." Invariably, I find the discussions to be particularly annoying and, at the heart of all of them, there is a rather obvious problem. They do not define what it means to be political. How else do you think people could be making such ridiculously contrasting statements? They have different understandings of what it means to be political.

In this post, I want to unpack multiple senses of what it means for art to be political, and draw out the implications.

What is Politics?

I subscribe to a particular form of power politics, so my understanding of politics places power at the center. Politics is the set of activities individuals, groups, and institutions engage in order to further their interests and ideals via the acquisition of power. Rights, freedoms, or other principles are all established downstream of, and are subordinate to, the power that a given unit will claim for itself.

In order to understand how art can be drawn into this discussion, the notion of power needs to be unpacked a bit further. Power is the ability to influence the behavior of other people, to get them to do what you want them to. Power is constituted by positive and negative incentives, and soft power. Positive incentives involve giving people what they want (a carrot), so they will do something. A wage, for example, will motivate someone to work. Negative incentives involve giving people what they don't want (a stick), so they don't do something. Imprisonment for theft, for example, will disincentivize that behavior. Soft power is more subtle, as it is distinguished from the prior two that are both forms of hard power. Soft power is about attraction and persuasion. It is about rhetorical appeal. And, as you can imagine, this is where art comes into the picture.

Most people are willing to accept that art can have rhetorical appeal. People can read it and learn new perspectives, entertain new ideas, and even come away with life-changing revelations. This is soft power, in essence. The ability to influence people is the definition of power. But this is not the hard power of incentives, but the soft power of rhetorical appeal. People are persuaded because they are attracted to the work in question.

In this formulation, I think we can quite strongly conclude that art, at the very least, has the potential to be political. I think this is the first major distinction that should be made: There is a difference between saying art is political and saying that art has the potential to be political.

This is nowhere near sufficient, however. If you have ever engaged with revolutionary literary interpretation, then you know that basically everything really does seem political, because they essentially want to change everything. And because even the most basic fiction takes for granted the things they want to change, it all of the sudden becomes political, in their eyes. To understand this, I've come up with a three-way distinction, articulating different senses in which art can be political.

Political Art

I think you can model these three senses of political art as three separate spectra. I will outline them quickly. I will then share some brief thoughts on each, and then go on to expand on the nature of each in relation to the others. They are as follows:

Active and Passive

Relevant and Irrelevant

Overt and Subtle

Active political art is consciously seeking to create a message, while passive political art is unconscious. The implication here is that you are influencing people regardless of whether you intend to. Traditionally, the former is considered political, while the latter is considered apolitical.

Relevant political art is thematically linked to key topics discussed in the political scene. The implication here is that politics is specific to a time and a place, at least to some degree. Traditionally, art that talks about what is politically relevant is political, while art that talks about what is politically irrelevant, or what is now commonly accepted, is considered apolitical.

Overt political art is identified for its aesthetics, rather than its content. It's not about what it is saying, but how it is saying it. Overt political art is heavy-handed and basically synonymous with incompetent writing. Traditionally, overt political writing is considered political, while subtle political messaging is considered apolitical.

Active and Passive

Technically, there are eight different permutations that I can go through—from active, relevant, and overt—to active, irrelevant, and subtle. I won't need to go into that exhaustive amount of detail, however. These three models are merely meant to provide a stepping stone to help you think about how these conversations are had and why people come to the conclusions that they do. From here, we can continue:

I mentioned that you are influencing people regardless of whether you intend to or not. This is most obvious when you read or watch leftist critiques of art. (It's also obvious in some right wing critiques, as well, I should mention). They often criticize movies, even banal Christmas movies like Elf, because they take for granted consumerism, which perpetuates the capitalist system that we live in. I am not a Marxist or an anarchist of any kind, but they are not wrong when they point out that even the most basic fiction that takes for granted consumerism has soft power. They make consumerism and capitalism seem like the norm, when, in their view, they do not have to be. As such, Elf is now a political form of media. More specifically, it would be passively political and politically irrelevant (to most people)—and the third condition would not hold for reasons I will explain further later on. This explains why the common person would consider it apolitical, and why a Marxist would see it as political.

Because the active and passive model identifies a spectrum based on whether people are intentionally delivering a political message or not, books that are passive politically are almost always "conservative" in the broad sense that they reinforce the status quo. This is not to be confused with the Republican Party or Trump, however. The general idea is that passive art simply takes the status quo for granted, and presents it as the norm. This could include typically socially liberal ideas, like having sex outside of marriage, being taken for granted in art. This is roundly criticized by social conservatives, yet the passively political fiction simply reinforces the norm by taking it for granted, even when it's not the core theme of the story. It is passively political.

Marxist, anarchist, feminist, postmodern, conservative, and countless other ideologies have criticized the way in which unconscious messaging can subtly influence people in art.

Relevant and Irrelevant

Art that is relevant and irrelevant is the hardest to talk about, because there is an open question as to what ought to be considered relevant in the first place.

In some cases, it is rather obvious. A political art piece from the antebellum era, particularly about slavery, will be considered a lot less political today than it would have been back then. As I mentioned before, the political nature is tethered to the time and place. At the same time, who gets to decide what is relevant? Before, I said that Elf was politically irrelevant (for most people). This is a deliberate non-answer. We should eschew the idea of there being a definitive answer and conclude that, just as there are varied people in the world, there will be a varied answer.

Another useful model is to make a distinction between the mainstream and the outside. It is rather easy and intuitive, understanding what is politically relevant in the mainstream. In America, it is transgenderism, DEI, gender, race, health care, inflation, immigration, etc. The outside is just a catch-all term for any fridge ideologue who wants to critique the existing system for whatever reason, whether they be a marxist, a monarchist of Moldbug's fame, or something else.

After making this distinction, I think it is possible to acquire a more objective understanding of what it means to be politically relevant. In the mainstream, with some grey area, there is a clear standard for understanding what is and what isn't political. What is being debated about in the news? What are the hot button topics? The outside is completely open to whoever wants to critique the system, in whatever way they please. At this point, however, our only purpose is to remember that we merely seek to understand why they think the way they do. A marxist considers Elf politically relevant, despite the rest of society considering it not so, because their ideology leads them to stand outside the overton window. So it goes with a feminist critiquing a romance trope.

Overt and Subtle

I mentioned that overt political art has to do with the how, as opposed to the what. I don't want overt art to be confused with active. Active means conscious political messaging on the part of the artist, while overt means heavy-handed. By heavy-handed, this can manifest in two ways: the message relies on superficial signifiers instead of actual substantive critiques (like certain-mustache references), or they have out-of-place messages/references that stand out and therefore feel heavy-handed because of the contrast. I would consider 1984 active political art, in that it is consciously pronouncing a political message, but I would not call it heavy-handed, because it is unpacking actual ideas, and it avoids making real world references.

There is one book called The Devil Takes You Home that I had the displeasure of reading portions of. In it, there is a scene that was shoehorned in. A truck driver wearing a certain red hat started hurling racial slurs at the Mexican leads in the story for no reason, leading to a confrontation. Later, there was a rant about white silence and speaking up when you hear bigotry. The overt politicization ticks the box in both ways: it has superficial signifiers in the story (the hats), and then it has the out-of-place references that makes the scene stand out from the rest of the story all the more.

Overt political art usually has to be both active and relevant in order for it to be overt. The idea that something could be passive, irrelevant, and overt is generally nonsensical. It is possible for something to break these molds, however. For passive, irrelevant, and overt art, I would place Little Black Sambo. The book was actually seeking to communicate a political message that is opposite to what is taken now, and it is definitely overt. (I also called it irrelevant only because it is generally accepted to be wrong today). For active, irrelevant, and overt, the overt nature would just be relative to the time and place in which it was relevant. You could make a case that Orwell's Animal Farm is an example of this, as Snowball is Lenin, and Napoleon is Stalin, in his analogy, though Orwell arguably gets away with it, as it is a children's book.

There is also the flip side that is worth talking about. Subtle political art functions in a similar manner to passive political art. Passive political art is not necessarily subtle—Elf is not subtle about consumerism in the way it portrays gift-buying and decorations—but the fact that it is unconscious in both the minds of the artist and the consumer of the art means the result is that it is effectively subtle. Subtle art is often used by political activists who want to normalize their ideas in society. For example, LGBT themes were normalized, not simply through overt messaging, but simply by having gay characters in stories. Shows like Modern Family went a long way to normalizing the idea of gay people in society because they, at the very least, straddled the line. However, it is important to stress that this is active, not passive, art. Across the three dimensions, it would be active, relevant, and subtle art, politically speaking.

Conclusion

Politics is a matter of power, which is a matter of influencing other people's behaviors. Art can be used to do that, because it is in the realm of soft power. I propose that there are three models that can be used to think about how art can be political: Active and Passive in terms of whether they are consciously sending a given message; Relevant and Irrelevant in terms of whether the mainstream society finds them contentious or not; and Overt and Subtle in terms of whether the message is being communicated using superficial signifiers or is out of context.

Hopefully, this will be helpful in navigating these kinds of discussions. When someone says that "All art is political," ask yourself why, and use this framework I provided here to answer.

Video: https://youtu.be/3Qp05oD23Es