Starting from a place of extreme negativity, political speech can brush the bright membrane that forms literature’s impossible horizon.
The rent is too high in Los Angeles. Consider a number: “One in ten renters pay over 90 percent of their household income for rent.” Another: “More than half of L.A. renters are rent-burdened—paying more than 30% of their income on rent—and many are just one rent hike away from losing their home. If this doesn’t describe you, it probably describes a friend, family member, or co-worker.” Living under the rent burden means cutting back on clothing, food, anything at all that might be forced to fall under “leisure.” It also means feeling the city a little differently. Heat waves, traffic jams, aerial thrum of police helicopters, car horns, inconvenient sidewalk cracks. The habits of good social form—saying hi to your neighbors, smiling at strangers—suffer attrition, get whittled down to a thin wafer preserving the remnants of who you’d like to be while staving off, as best it can, the incursions of an astonishing savagery. If this doesn’t describe you, it probably describes a friend, family member, or co-worker.
The friends, family members, co-workers exist – as a group – somewhere in the middle haze of everyday interaction and vague abstraction, buried in a contacts folder on your phone. They don’t hang together, or they do but only in instants, sudden crystallizations in which you can see, with magical vision, the bright line that runs through you. Zohran Mamdani, winning the Democratic mayoral nomination on June 24, articulated this with lyric cadence:
It was 7 p.m. The weekend had arrived. For most people, the time for work was over. But this is New York, where the work never ends. Waiters carried plates on 181st Street, conductors drove the subways that rattled high above 125th and world-class musicians tuned instruments as we passed Lincoln Square…Long past midnight, New York worked. Garbage trucks weaved through empty streets, fishmongers carried in tomorrow’s wares and when we finally arrived at the Battery at 2:20 a.m. in the morning, the workers who run the Staten Island Ferry were on the job too, just as they are every hour of the day every day of the week.
A ribbon of light arcs through these words, flooding the L.A. kitchen where you’ve been following the N.Y. election and linking you, as if through ether, to the enormous, unknown, yet intimate mass moving in synch to a shared rhythm.
Doing that is literature’s classic ambition. But within literature itself, the desire to convoke a commons exists as negative pressure on any actually-existing attempts made in its name—which is to say, if the ambition is necessary, it is also, and in equal measure, impossible. Deformed by the weight of the demand, literature lets us glimpse its necessity through that very deformation. This is more or less Ben Lerner’s argument when he writes, movingly, about the hatred of poetry. The impossible demand of speaking the Universal, because impossible, brings all poetry to the condition of failure. The pressure of the demand burns through actual poems and what ends up being registered instead is the fact of the demand, the force of its presence. Lerner’s example is Whitman, whose capacious language strove to channel the political idea of America through its own poetics—to make the two poles touch, render them indistinguishable, his writing “a poetic correlative to the American political project.” But even Whitman fails to make himself into a medium for America because he remains, no matter how he would deny it, not an unmarked Universal in which the demos might realize itself but the particular historical Walt.
Zohran Mamdani isn’t Walt Whitman. He isn’t a poet. He’s a Democratic Socialist mayoral candidate, a politician. And politics, this deep into the fascist vortex that is 2025, has been brought utterly low for us, dragged into filth such that engaging in the political is itself, now, an unclean act. (Disgraced mayor Eric Adams’s War on Rats is, in this sense, an apt literalization of the stakes of contemporary politics: to detoxify the site of political activity. Those are stakes he profoundly cannot meet, and in his failure to do so, Adams lets us glimpse the force of its necessity.) The strains in political speech that had been building slowly, some would say across the long history of politics’ mediatization, have burst wide open so that what political speech now stages is the speaker’s right to cruelty, perverse right to express, incite, and celebrate delight in the violent suffering of others. This is politics in the negative, acquiring its consistency to the degree to which it succeeds in convoking a public around the spectacle of sadism. This is the site from which any politician must now speak. Its successful installation as norm means that any and all political expression has to establish itself in reference to it, thereby smeared by its ubiquitous vomit.
It is this negative condition of universal filth against which Mamdani’s words take shape, and it is against the downward pull of its dark gravity that his speech cuts a path to escape velocity. If the literary demand to speak in the name of a universal crushes literature with the weight of that positive utopia— weighing down every work of literature even as it strains towards a utopia of pure light and goodness— then the universal defilement of political speech saddles every utterance with such a burden of filth that, crushed and starting from within a dystopia that has already occurred, political speech can briefly, vanishingly, in the fragile space of an instant, attain the condition that literature cannot. Starting from a place of extreme negativity, political speech can brush the bright membrane that forms literature’s impossible horizon. Or: one can sob at Mamdani videos as unexpectedly as a theatre audience in catharsis, purified by the surprising upsurge of wrenching emotions.
More parks, more beauty, more light, said either Zohran Mamdani or Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway, the writer of sentences so bright and sharp they sliced right through the gristle of desiccated habit, wrote in 1933 a short story that sits in the center of his work, crystallizing its poetics. It’s very short. Most of it’s just dialogue. Some of the dialogue is pretty funny, as one tired and irritable waiter complains to the other, older waiter about the last customer at the café, an old man drinking numerous glasses of brandy and preventing, through this perusal of his pleasure, the waitstaff from locking up and going home. The young, irritated waiter, impatient to go home to his wife, eventually refuses to serve the old man more brandy—banishing him from the peace and pleasure of the café and back into the anonymous night. The other waiter thinks he understands the customer and how he feels, because he feels it too. In trying to explain what it is that the old man is experiencing and why he must stay at the café so late, he ends up just describing the café itself: “This is a clean and pleasant cafe. It is well lighted. The light is very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves.” The words are simple, therefore both clear and opaque. “Clean,” “pleasant,” and “very good” are far from superlatives. One might think of them as the lowest tier of acceptable description, the minimal criteria a place—any place—must meet in order to be at least tolerable, at least bearable. This is partly correct—but only partly. The simplicity of the words opens a pocket inside themselves, a little extra space where we come to see that they mean more than they seem to mean. The style of description mirrors the place being described. The minimalism of this style is itself suffused with the stance towards the ‘real’ world of concrete things that Clean Well-Lighted Place stages as its theme. Its spare syntax and plain speak strip space of all excess, expense, and intricacy to make the case that a clean, well-lighted place is more than a clean, well-lighted place. It’s one’s most basic necessity. It’s rarer than rare. Which is also, it must be argued, the position that literature—aesthetics itself—occupies in a life, its very role: to be the luxury that isn’t a luxury. Here, then, is one way that literary language can work: straining not for utopia but gesturing instead to what is already here, which it reveals as both ordinary and sublime.
Mamdani’s genius is his conduction of these feelings in the language of public governance. The fragile space that Hemingway limned with exquisite care in his short story comes to be staged in the brute zone of public rhetoric. Asked about the ideas he drew on in his victory speech, Mamdani articulates a vision of democracy’s positivity, reaching for the things it can still name in everyday life. The achievements of a former mayor like La Guardia, Mamdani says, teach us “what the fruition of democracy looked like…more parks, more beauty, more light.” The promise of a revivified democracy is the revivification of public space: more parks, more beauty, more light. It’s a promise that’s in on the secret of a clean, well-lighted place. Making it supremely fitting that the photo immediately after this quote shows Mamdani seated at a (clean, green, well-lighted) café in Astoria, smiling.
In feeling “Mamdani feelings,” as we might as well call them, does one accede to a hopeless, even dangerous naivete? A naivete that closes its eyes to the trajectories of political careers and the game of party politics? That may well be countered to a reflection such as this, which finds in political rhetoric a poetic register—disregarding the long-standing philosophical division between these two registers, politics and poetry, and the caution against mixing them. That classical division was based on a paranoia regarding the aesthetic, wary of its power to mislead because it was artful, rather than truthful, discourse. Something like that paranoia runs through the wary tone some struck after Mamdani’s successful candidacy, reminding each other that politicians don’t serve “the people.” The correct way to be progressive, in this view, is to be skeptical of party politics in toto, to be above naïve belief, to be well-guarded against emotion itself—associating emotion with the manipulations of broadcast pundits. The caution is understandable. It is also wildly aristocratic, constructing for itself an Archimedean point from which it might stand outside this moment and issue its rational critique. Mass gullibility cannot begin to explain the cascade of “I cried” comments on, say, Mamdani’s October 11 Until It’s Done video paying tribute to Sylvia Rivera, iconic gay and trans rights activist (set, strikingly enough, to Sophie’s breakout number It’s Ok to Cry).
What if we took the song at its word? What if it is ok to cry at Mamdani videos, and what if it doesn’t mean ceding the charge of criticality, of making sure a politician, any politician, Mamdani too, keeps their campaign promises? That’s where the aesthetic can take us. The impassable gap between the aesthetic desire to create a universal and the dire need for that universal make it such that one can suspend oneself in the space between them and consider, newly, the world from that vantage. If they touched, if a poem actually did what it wanted to do, it would stop being a poem and become a fact. There is an inherent impossibility to a poem’s striving for utopia. There is an inherent impossibility to a politician delivering redemption. Instead of redemption and utopia, though, there is also the revelation of what is already here, seen anew. In that altered vision, the grammar of this world spectralizes for an instant and something very beautiful becomes possible.
“You’re an artist,” Mamdani says to Shakira Crawford, a hotel housekeeper and member of the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council Union. She’s just laid a fresh sheet on a bed, showing Mamdani how she likes to do it—her favorite part of her job, she says. The whole thing has to “flow,” a singular wave moving through arm and wrist and cloth so that the fabric falls over the bed in one connected motion, seamless. “It gives me chills,” Crawford says. She runs her hands across the taut sheet and it does give you chills, the sound of skin over cloth and the sense that this is perfect motion, without waste, labor harmonizing with itself. Mamdani is right to call her an artist. This is art, the conduction of feeling through a working day. A single connected arc that brings work, pleasure, self, and strangers touch, poetry becoming fact.
Art’s beautiful world is ordinary, unexceptional, already here, and it belongs to everyone.
Ali Raz is the author of Alien and Human Tetris (co-authored with Vi Khi Nao), both from 11:11 Press. She lives in L.A. with two literally perfect cats.