I’ll Be Back in the Mo(u)rning: Glimpsing a Politics of Possibility Through Rupture and Rend

In a 2015 interview about their book, Disposable Futures, Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux write that educated hope has two key premises at its core: first, that “agency is a product of education,” and second, that “at the heart of any viable notion of politics” there is an attempt “to change the way people think, act, feel and identify themselves and their relations to others” (Evans). This kind of hope is informed by a moment of “pedagogical awakening,” when the “rules are [or must be] broken,” when risk becomes necessary, when your bonds to others and tenuous tie to the world are made clear: then, “truth erupts” (Evans, my emphasis). Here, we are offered some of the qualities that render educated hope as separate and distinct from neoliberal rhetoric about sentimental optimism – but what are the prerequisite conditions for educated hope, both structurally and qualitatively? Who can access it, when, and what is required of them? When faced with the failed promise of manufactured happiness, where can and do we turn to find examples of educated hope on a personal level? And how are we to reckon with this rupture, this eruption, this gash of ugly truth that, paradoxically, threatens to undo us even as it renders us, that appears so central to the notion of educated hope?

In response, I turn to the role of the artist/intellectual in three different manifestations: the poet, the musician, and the journalist. In the latter half of the last decade, late musician Gustav Elijah Åhr (hereafter: ‘Lil Peep’ or ‘Peep’), independent journalist Andrew Callaghan, and poet Ocean Vuong rose to popularity within their respective fields, attracting national recognition and online fan bases for the way their work addressed grief, addiction, and poverty in contemporary America. Though each artist differs significantly in their choice of form, their art, and the way they create it, function in similar ways. Peep, Callaghan, and Vuong employ a popular pedagogy in their work that unconsciously resists neoliberal narratives by upending and countering its values of bounded individualism, manufactured happiness, and solipsistic self-interest. Furthermore, an application of Evan’s and Giroux’s concept of educated hope, Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism, and C. Wright Mill’s theory of the sociological imagination to Peep, Callaghan, and Vuong reveals the way in which their work functions as three different sites of rupture around which audience(s) can, and do, congeal. In the community that forms around their work, people can link or place individuated problems – despair, loneliness, and addiction – within a larger sociopolitical and historical context.

            My intent is to try and recognize a few of the quietly held, and often deeply personal, sites that we turn to in times of despair, when we want to safely engage with that which undoes us. I speculate that community can often be found congealing around these sites of rupture because they offer the exposition of our shared condition – one wherein we are mutually vulnerable to, and, consequently responsible for, one another and the environment in which we exist. In this recognition of the ways in which “a morgue is also a community centre,” (Vuong 49) and of the infinite variety of sites we turn to, personally and politically, to locate our own (r)end – with music, journalism, and poetry being but a few – I argue that we can see how the artist/intellectual plays a critical role in challenging dystopian realism, cultivating educated hope, and ushering in the conditions for a politics of possibility.

“Dystopian realism” is a term I borrow from Evans and Giroux, who understand it as a way of viewing the world that is immersive, nihilistic, and forces us to “accept that the only world conceivable is the one in which we are forced to endure: a world that is brutally reproduced and forces us all to become witnesses to its spectacles of violence” (Evans). Neoliberal values are the catechism of dystopian realism, where a society is concerned primarily with “consumption, privatization, deregulation” and “accumulating profits,” as well as individual success, and living the good life as opposed to a good life (Insurrections 185-86). Mainstream American politics today meet these criteria: a carnival of violence spun out across various news and social media outlets; the prevalence of catastrophe narratives about everything from climate change to nuclear war; and a total individuation of health, wealth, and mental illness. Dystopian realism becomes the lived experience of a subject in that society, one where all problems are personal; profit and production are more important than social welfare; and where the impending doom of apocalypse, by some means or another, seems inevitable. So how does one challenge dystopian realism, “tear a hole in [that] grey curtain” (Fisher 81)? This is where the public intellectual plays a critical role.

            To challenge what one believes to be reality, one must both see the world differently and gather differently within it: a radical twinning of resistance (to an imposed vision) with solidarity (among varied individuals). Seeing the world differently requires some kind of “educative” experience, one that public intellectuals can create when they use “language not merely to demystify but to persuade” their audiences that the troubles they face are not only personal but are deeply related to both the historical and political structures that shape their life presently (“Educated Hope in Dark Times”). Today, musicians, journalists, artists, and other cultural producers are (or, at least, can be) these public intellectuals. The public intellectual is defined by public recognition; they speaks to a general audience. They, and the educative experience they offer, do not seek to make people “feel comfortable;” rather, they enable people “to think critically, challenge common-sense assumptions, take risks, make informed judgements, use their imaginations, and come to terms with their power” (“Fascist Politics”).

When artists/intellectuals create work that audiences flock to or take up en masse, they create “the conditions for modes of mass resistance” and “enable the development of sustained social movements” (“Educated Hope”). Is it any wonder why writers, journalists, and poets are so often silenced in fascist regimes? When audiences meet around art that moves them, that rends and renders, it threatens to tear a hole in the fabric of dystopian realism in two ways: first, by causing one to see the conditions of one’s existence, or one’s world, differently; and second, by making possible the conditions in which disparate people can gather and speak in ways that show that they are not alone, that they are in community and solidarity, and that their personal troubles are shared matters of public issue and historical context.

But how does this work in practice – how are public intellectuals challenging dystopian realism, and where might we look for contemporary examples of shared sites of rupture? I suggest we turn to three case studies of the American artist in/as public intellectual: the musician Lil Peep; the independent journalist, Andrew Callaghan; and the poet, Ocean Vuong. They each work in vastly different mediums, but all rose to fame within a similar timeframe (2015-2020) and address similar themes in their work. An application of C. Wright Mill’s theory of the sociological imagination to Peep, Callaghan, and Vuong’s work exemplifies the threat that artist-intellectuals pose to dystopian realism (Mills 5). The “sociological imagination” is a way of thinking that connects “personal troubles” to “public issues,” and grounds them both in a bedrock of “historical facts” (Mills 6, 4, 8-9). To possess or foster the sociological imagination is to link the personal to the political to the historical in an effort to reveal that which has been obscured in the banality of daily life in an age of “neoliberal capitalism:” information, accountability, and truth (“Fascist Politics”). Artist-intellectuals such as Peep, Callaghan, and Vuong not only possess the sociological imagination – they stimulate its development within their audiences.

Described by some as making “music to cry to,” (Peisner) Peep’s art is a festering wound of “personal troubles” according to the logic of neoliberalism: mental illness, addiction, poverty, and suicide (Mills 4). Born in 1996 to a long line of highly educated historians, professors, and teachers, Peep grew up in Long Island, New York, where his aptitude and creativity, particularly for music, was noted by his family and teachers from a young age and he was placed in accelerated classes (C.M.). Peep became plagued with depression and severe anxiety in high-school, and he turned to recreational drug-use to self-medicate (Peisner). When he later went to college, he was on the Dean’s list – but Peep did not aspire to follow in the footsteps of his family and eventually dropped out, going so far as to get his first face tattoo as a show of his commitment to avoiding “the straight life” (Peisner). His mother, an elementary school teacher, says that both Peep and his brother were “budding socialists,” and that Peep wanted to reveal the “horrible” effects of “American capitalism” (Peisner).

Hence, the focus on mental illness, addiction, poverty within his music: in his first single, “Star Shopping,” which came out in 2015, Peep raps about finally “makin[g] money” to support himself, and doing drugs to cope with his depression, but knowing he “is nothing like” what some people “in [his] family want [him] to be” (“Star Shopping”). His first full-length studio album, Come Over When You’re Sober Pt. I, chronicles these themes in more detail, confessing to fans that he’s suffered “every…kind of abuse,” is slipping further into drug dependency, often questioning if his life is worth living, and that his depression drives him to consider suicide (Come Over). Peep does not assume the traditional hyper-masculine bravado so common to the rap or rock genre – aesthetically, Peep was slim, pretty, and queer; topically, his music focused more on weakness than strength, in a personal and political statement that illustrated the extent to which he saw mental illness, poverty, and addiction plaguing young American men. In 2017, Peep passed away from an accidental overdose, a lethal combination of Xanax laced with fentanyl, on his tour bus in Arizona (Peisner). He was 21 years old (Peisner). At the time, he had 2 million followers; now, this number has soared to over 8 million (Peisner, @lilpeep).

If Peep’s music sounds self-indulgent and sad, it is – but it was never hopeless. Peep’s goal was to “save people’s lives” like how “his was saved” (C.M.), in part by destigmatizing the “personal troubles” (Mills 4) he faced and showing how, far from being personal, their prevalence in American youth is the result of shared historical and political conditions (C.M.). Peep spoke openly to his fans about how, even as he was breaking, even as his “attachments to the world,” were always being severed (“Why Chasing”), his own life was saved, and his own way of being in the world re-imagined, through “artists” that “helped” him feel less alone and caused him to critically reflect upon the personal and political “problems people are having” (C.M). Peeps’ music resists the bounded individualism and manufactured happiness of neoliberalism, for it shows how his personal pain is connected to and shaped by various public issues, including a lack of social supports and welfare. In the end, Peep’s music does what he aspired to do: it gives voice to the injured, the alienated, the lonely. As one of his teenage fans says, Peep’s audience does not congeal around his work for its glorification of sadness, drugs, or celebrity, but for the ways in which he “spoke for” them and identified “things [they] could never put into words” or connect  together (Peisner). Peep’s music acts as a contemporary example of how musicians can employ a popular pedagogy to challenge dystopian realism and how, when audiences congeal around these sites of rupture, there is the possibility for them to both see the world differently and gather differently within it. This is a form of educated hope.

Andrew Callaghan’s journalism, too, is a site of rupture that challenges dystopian realism. Callaghan, 26, rose to popularity in 2019 with his YouTube channel All Gas No Brakes, before creating his independent digital media company Channel 5 News, funded by himself and donations from his 2.5 million followers (“Career”, @Channel5Youtube). Callaghan is known for his distinct style of gonzo journalism, seen prominently in his November 2023 segment on the “San Francisco Streets” (“San Francisco”). Throughout this segment, Callaghan interviews a variety of different people in downtown San Francisco – drug users, public health employees, members of the public, and law enforcement – to discern who is on the streets, what voices are being represented by mainstream news organizations, and why addiction and homelessness are so prevalent (“San Francisco”). His interviews form a mosaic of first-person testimony that he then splices with, or situates within, historical and political context: in this case, he includes information on the history of fentanyl, the zoning regulations that impacted San Francisco’s urban development, and the economic and political conditions that shaped the American opioid crisis from 1980 onward (“San Francisco).

Callaghan both exemplifies and cultivates the “sociological imagination” (Mills 6) for his audience by connecting the personal problems of those he films (i.e. their fentanyl use, unemployment, difficulty affording rent) to their historical context (i.e. American drug manufacturing, urban zoning regulations, and political and economic policies), and linking both to the broader public issues currently plaguing the city (addiction, homelessness, and poverty) (“San Francisco”). His work also humanizes those he interviews without portraying them as pure, saintly, or ineffably resilient. As a result, Callaghan’s journalism challenges the neoliberal logic belying dystopian realism by refusing to tie personal problems to the fibre of one’s moral character – indeed, I think his work asks audiences to question how one’s character, and their ability to exercise agency, is dramatically influenced by the conditions they are forced to inhabit. Furthermore, by juxtaposing clips of Fox news coverage of homeless encampments in San Francisco with Callaghan’s own clips showing the lived testimony from those within the camps (“San Francisco”), the lie of neoliberal rhetoric – that homelessness can be avoided if only one works hard enough! – slips, and viewers can catch a glimpse of the truth without Callaghan needing to state it so plainly.

Callaghan’s work reveals. It ruptures. In a world of moral relativism, digital misinformation, and journalistic punditry, his work tessellates personal troubles with historical context and public issues, and allows his audience to see and make the connections between the three themselves – rending a gash in the curtain of dystopian realism in the process. Callaghan’s work illustrates how modern journalists can provide opportunities for audiences to glean knowledge, accountability, and truth. It offers a moment of pedagogical awareness as the impetus for a renewed politics.

Poets are also not known for shying away from a truth that rends, and Ocean Vuong is no exception. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1988, Vuong immigrated to Hartford, Connecticut with his working-class family when he was a toddler (“About”), and has since become one of the most “successful poets of his generation” (Mosley). Vuong’s work was strewn across mass-market bookstores in 2019, when his first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, was published and immediately became an international best seller (Mosley). His mother passed away that same year, and his latest poetry collection, Time is a Mother (2021) chronicles Vuong’s attempt to find life after, and through, his grief (Mosley).

Time is a Mother exemplifies rupture in every sense: poems that speak to the “heartbreak” one experiences when their attachment to the world is “betrayed,” and the search for meaning after, in, or through that state of broken-ness (Berlant). That effort – of finding meaning in the rend – is captured in Vuong’s poem “Not Even,” where he places disparate moments alongside one another in a way that illustrates, for his readers, that there is a connection pulsing between personal problems, public issues, and historical context. Vuong, who is Asian and queer, first touches on how his race and sexuality seem to be a misplaced source of envy in the recent political climate: a white girl in Brooklyn tells him he’s “lucky” for getting to write about “war and stuff” because “yellow pain, pressed into American letters, becomes gold,” (46). Shortly after, he recalls how the Vietnamese were made to “dance to machine-gun fire,” during the Vietnam war, and how Americans became used to seeing his people “mangled” under the “Time photographer’s shadow” (47). By summoning these images of Vietnamese death from the past, Vuong calls attention to the ways in which public spectacles of violent death tacitly normalize and reinforce a politics of disposability (of Vietnamese lives, and racialized others) in the present. Vuong concludes the poem by reflecting on a man standing alone in a field, while he himself glides by on a train: the stillness of the man makes Vuong “lose it,” calls to mind an image of his “mom” in a “body bag,” and the unspeakable truth of this encounter rends him (Vuong 50). Like “a knife wound in a landscape painting,” Vuong “caved and decided it will be joy from now on,” after which he is “lifted, wet and bloody, out of [his] mother, into the world, screaming” (51).

What strange imagery we’re offered, here! For only in the unutterable truth of grief, only in the caving, does Vuong discover the ability to “decide” that it will be “joy from [then] on” and experience a sort of rebirth into a new world – or, perhaps, a new way of being in the world (Vuong 51). Vuong’s poetry does more than rupture – it enacts. His poetry walks audiences to a site of rend and then puts them through it, showing, by his own example, how one might reckon with that which undoes them, and find reason to go on through and within those conditions, without denying the fact of their existence or surrendering one’s ability to imagine otherwise: might grief be an open wound in which joy can still be found? In Time is a Mother, grief ruptures reader and poet alike, in an awful sort of pedagogical awareness, where one learns how it is possible to lose their “world”, and must unwittingly reimagine the way in which one will reform it (Berlant). Vuong offers something different than didactic academic articles, history books, or grief counselling. He offers a form of educated hope that eschews both baseless optimism and endless despair. Vuong unites elements of personal troubles, public issue, and historical context by taking his own experience with grief and placing it alongside the history of the Vietnam war and current American politics of representation and disposability. Vuong is a stunning example of how poetry can be a site of rupture around which people will congeal because of what it has the capability to reveal. It is in and through this rupture, this painful truth of educated hope, that we may glimpse a politics of possibility, because, to borrow an expression from Cree poet, Billy-Ray Belcourt, “this wound is a world” (Belcourt).

In the community that forms around the work of artist-intellectuals like Peep, Callaghan, or Vuong, people are offered the ability to foster their own sociological imagination by placing individuated problems – such as loneliness, poverty, and addiction –  within the larger sociopolitical and historical contexts that inform and contribute to them. The work of public intellectuals makes forms of power visible, and thus, accountable. These intellectuals are dangerous precisely because their work employs a popular pedagogy that reveals, encourages, or incites critical thinking and radical imaginations within their audiences, creating the conditions for a “mass-based movement” (hooks 24) of disparate, but united, people who may choose to think otherwise, act other ways, and imagine how they might “do the work” of living a politics of possibility right where they are, “at home” (hooks 116).

I am not suggesting that Peep, Callaghan, and Vuong provide a single, unified vision for a future that they then implore their audiences to adopt. In fact, I think their work does quite the opposite. Their work allows only for audiences to glimpse the possibility of a different world, and a different way of imagining or understanding the self within it – without defining precisely what that world-to-come will look like. Certainly, there are implied suggestions – such as increasing social supports and welfare; eradicating forms of domination and violence; and destigmatizing addiction – but ultimately, their audiences are left to draw their own conclusions. The kind of hope that the artist/intellectual offers is one “based on critical analysis,” (Cabanas 181) that comes from a moment of “pedagogical awakening” (Evans), a hope that is “not paternalistic,” does not  “decide what is good for us on our behalf, and that does not aim to spare us from the worst, but that places us in a better situation to confront it” (Cabanas 181). I think this is what distinguishes educated hope from the false hope of neoliberalism: educated hope allows one to catch sight of a politics of possibility, whereas false hope promises a desirable, singular, and certain vision of the future to its audience, in advance of them being able to imagine it for themselves.

It is also worth noting that not all sites of rupture are sites of grief, loneliness, or despair. Such emotions are the dominant theme running through the works of the artist-intellectuals I’ve chosen to focus on in this essay – but I just as easily might have called to mind the work of John Lennon, Joan Didion, and Langston Hughes; or Rage Against the Machine, Hunter S. Thompson, and Allen Ginsberg to examine radical love or anger as other sites of rupture around which people congeal. Furthermore, can we look beyond the theme of emotion to ask: what is it about experiences that move and rupture you, more generally, that resists being commodified? Perhaps it has something to do with the way that a site of rupture refuses “opportunistic compromise” (Ayers), that diabolical trade deal of truth for ease; complexity for simplicity; disquieting information for comfortable pleasure; “knowledge and justice for happiness” (Cabanas 183). To commodify something, one must be able to fashion it into a static image, brand, or product – but the act of engaging with a site of rupture is a process, where meaning is always deferred, located partially outside of oneself, and created in collaboration with other objects, beings, or environments. Art that moves you, for example, does not say – buy me and you will be happy. It says – read me, and let me write you, in ways that you cannot predict or know wholly in advance. To be ruptured is an immaterial and implicit process of un-doing and re-doing oneself and one’s world, which may happen repeatedly and in unpredictable ways. As a result, something about that which ruptures you – whether poem or pop song, a flower in a battlefield or a fist around the heart – remains sovereign, illegible to both concentrated and disseminated forms of power.

Although “literature has been taught, traditionally, as a form of cultural capital,” perhaps in our current age, “it matters more as a technique for survival” (Zuroski 852). Throughout this essay, I have argued that the artist-intellectuals, like Peep, Callaghan, and Vuong, perform a crucial democratic function because their work can challenge dystopian realism, offer educated hope, and usher in the conditions for a politics of possibility. The public intellectual creates sites of rupture around which audiences can and do congeal, which presents opportunities for groups of disparate people to gather in solidarity and resistance – to survive. Still, I wonder: how does educated hope make itself accessible and legible, to some audiences and not others? And what responsibilities do public intellectuals have to their audiences? These questions continue to direct my thinking, and prompt me to look toward unorthodox methods of resistance for further insight on how to share and enact a different world than the one with a foreclosed future that, some say, I have been handed.

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