Nikil Saval’s
Political Imagination

Rarely does the juxtaposition of personal habit and political belief offer even remotely meaningful insight into a political figure. Think of Barack Obama’s Spotify playlists, or Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated attempts to spout pop-culture in her decidedly uninspiring appeal that young voters Pokemon-Go-to-the-polls. To call these attempts strained politely misses the sense of herculean effort required by these ambitious political personas to play at being a person. Attempts to espouse organic individuality in the hands of era-defining politicians have come to expose the narrowness of political imagination in America today.

So when Saval gently tossed his lightly-used iPhone 11 onto a linen blanket when we sat down to talk in a quiet South Philly park this past July, just a month after his primary win, it was somewhat impossible to ignore the glass-encased metaphor that had landed quietly before us. Almost one year ago to the date, Saval had read closely into his—and the world’s—relationship to Johnny Ives’s modern wonder. For the New Yorker, Saval wrote that the iPhone possessed a “sinister beauty” that lulls humans into a state of semi-coma, with an involuntary gravity during conversational pauses and in-between the courses of meals.

When I ask if his relationship to the object has improved in the time since, Saval fiddled with it and laughed. “It sucks. I mean, it doesn’t suck as much as it would if I used it for email.”

Nor does Saval use the phone for Twitter. “I would open it and be like, ‘Tweets?’” This, too, sucked, Saval explained, so he deleted the app from the device. Nor does he read the news on his phone. Texting, it seems, is something he does sporadically, and maybe begrudgingly, having opted to return my text messages with a phone call to schedule our meeting. Saval may also be one of a few millennials on the earth who pines for the mechanical action of T9 texting, or the now ancient feeling process of tapping out messages on a nine-digit keypad. After explaining that he was actually quite good at it, Saval pondered the utility of his talent: “Is that a marketable skill or anything?”

During the two hours we spent together, he sat on the ground several feet across from me in a relaxed pose. His black hair was the recognizable pandemic shag. And with his boxy brown glasses, dark linen pants, slip-on sandals, plus a homemade-cotton mask, Saval looked more like a young dad than a state senator-in-waiting, which he technically is. He spends his days taking care of his son, as he prepares for November elections, while his wife Shannon works full-time as a preservationist for the city of Philadelphia. In early June, when Saval and his wife participated in a city-wide march protesting the murder of George Floyd, he realized that it was the first time he’d been apart from his toddler in months.

Originally born in Los Angeles to parents, who immigrated from Bangalore, Saval will be the first person of South Asian descent elected to statewide office in Pennsylvania. Recently, in a video taken during a large protest march down Philly’s Broad Street, Saval addressed the crowd while wearing a low-hanging cotton Kurta. Through a facemask, he decried the twin evils of American racism and imperialism in a jittery delivery offset by a noticeably tubular Californian intonation.

That he will soon be a state senator (barring a catastrophic mishap with his paperwork, he joked) is still difficult to comprehend. Instead, Saval is preserving his political imagination by doing what he’s done so successfully since he first moved to the city in 2011: The practical work of local organizing. He is a co-founder of Reclaim Philadelphia, a progressive political organization founded in 2016 and mostly staffed by a loose-network of former volunteers who worked on Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign. Philadelphia’s reform-minded district attorney, Larry Krasner, was first drafted to run for office by the group. His election minted Saval and Reclaim as something of a political force to be reckoned with in the city. Much of Saval’s campaign staff was drawn from the ranks of Reclaim, and as November approaches he is planning to activate the organization, both to raise money to get out the vote for Democratic candidates in more competitive districts across the state—not to mention sewing up a historical swing state for Joe Biden in the most consequential presidential election in our lifetime (actually).

For now, his mind has become something of a conterminous boundary separating his agenda as a candidate from his new responsibilities as a soon-to-elected official during a moment of unrelenting crisis in the country. Rather than being overwhelmed or daunted by this terrain, Saval told me that he feels challenged by it. “I’ve never seen these kinds of movements that are radical, multiracial, largely young, that are challenging the foundations of capitalism—literally the founding of the country.” he said. “It’s very exciting. But it’s also like: ‘Oh, I’m going to be this elected official, and I actually have to be equal to this time.’”

Saval’s most marketable skill is his critical relationship to the objects and architecture that influence every aspect of human life. As an undergrad at New York City’s Columbia University, a close friend convinced him to explore urban studies. Saval pursued the topic at great length for Brooklyn’s n+1 magazine, where he eventually became co-editor. During his time at n+1, Saval worked a series of editorial assistant jobs at publishing houses in the city, earning a salary that failed to cover his most basic expenses. A failed attempt to organize his co-workers into a union led to Saval quitting publishing entirely to pursue a doctorate at Stanford in 2007, where he would study under the Marxist literary critic Franco Moretti.

At that time, the Iraq War was a daily tragedy, the early sugar rush of American success worn off thanks to 24-hour cable news coverage. Saval began to immerse himself in Black liberationist reading, histories of the Vietnam war, and literature on third-worldism. Not long after, he learned that his parents had been forced to sell their home and return to India after the pizza restaurant they owned closed, another casualty of the economic recession. A feeling of displacement is the feeling he most remembers about that time. “Those experiences, plus not being able to pay my rent—it was all over-determined,” he said. “I started reading histories of the Left, I wanted to understand how to organize. I read this book, Labor and Monopoly Capital, by Harry Braverman, which was about the degradation of work over the course of the Twentieth Century. And I could see myself in it. That was important for me.”

This, plus his experience as an exploited white-collar worker, would become Saval’s first book, a chronological history of the modern American office space. Eventually published in 2014, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace was enthusiastically reviewed and pronounced an “important exploration” of work. To Saval, this is a story with a clear moral: that the relationship between humans and their lived-in environments is mostly a story of failed design and flawed reasoning, each guided by an exploitative impulse at each step. Capitalism’s best attempts to format our societies, and create efficient conditions for productivity, have led to wide-scale immiseration passively accepted by millions of people every day.

“I meant to write a book about the history of labor and white-collar work, and then it ended up becoming this history about design’s attempts to solve issues that were, fundamentally, labor issues,” Saval told me. “There was this relationship between design and work—and design and capitalism—whether it was architecture or interior design. That became the thing I found most exciting to think through.”

Cubed’s success led to Saval becoming a regular contributor at The New Yorker and T Magazine, for whom he recently profiled the Japanese conceptual architect Sou Fujimoto. (Saval filed the story in late 2019, just days before announcing his state senate run.) Even now, this writing focus is still deeply satisfying to Saval. He’s already several chapters into his second book, tentatively titled “Everything is Architecture,” which will focus on the history of modern design told through the stories of the designers Ray and Charles Eames, Buckminster Fuller and Ettore Sottsass.

While the unbridled fascism that occupies the executive branch and various corridors of power throughout the federal government, other corners of America are experiencing a surge of transformational politics. Much like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who in 2018 surged from Bronx bartender to the most visible political figure in the United States, candidates of the “new left” see their non-traditional backgrounds as central to their electability. They are people, like you and me, who have suffered under decades of economic inequality. They are burdened by student loans, crumbling infrastructure, and a thread-bare social safety net. They have suffered the violence of discrimination for reasons of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Their parents have lost homes and slipped down the ladder of economic progress. They are products of a social environment built precisely to the time-honed standards of a callous capitalist schematic.

Amongst a flood of unabashedly socialist and progressive candidates winning elections, Saval’s victory is the one that most clearly signals a yawning expansion of political imagination in this country. And in a political system currently overpopulated by wealthy lawyers and businesspeople, it’s proof that people are willing to stake their futures on those who possess a sense of possibility. Systems and situations are not immutable structures, and they can be changed. The shift is palpable in the failure of now-cliché attempts to trigger voters with words like “socialist.” As anecdotal proof, Saval told me that he heard about his challenger testing a negative line of attack, assailing Saval as the “editor of a magazine for literary Marxists.” This attack, however, was never used. Voters in the district were unphased by the claim.

“For most of my life, I haven’t felt optimistic,” Saval said. “I do come from a Marxist tradition, which, historically, is optimistic.” In the time since Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign that sense of optimism has only increased, Saval said. (Just weeks before the primary, Sanders unexpectedly endorsed Saval’s run.) True to form, as a cultural critic, Saval isn’t processing that optimism simply as a monolithic whole. It’s a graduated and nuanced hope, the kind rarely expressed in conversations about “blue waves” or polling data, and is instead a manifestation of a more fluid politics, less rigidly defined by unchallenged notions about electability or personal backgrounds.

A focus on the political has freed Saval to indulge his personal fascinations about our social environments. This has further clarified his politics and sharpened his vision of the future. It’s a model for personal liberation. Good politics can make for better culture; better culture, in turn, creates a more progressive politics. In the future that Saval is working to build, through organizing communities and through winning elections, people will have the right to affordable housing or a fossil-fuel free infrastructure or free healthcare, so they can fully pursue their right to—well—happiness. For Saval, that pursuit happens to be writing stories for glossy magazines about any bit of cultural minutiae that pleases him. “I just want to live in a world where these things are still important,” he said. “You want a world where people are free to make culture. Where it can be both this fucked up thing and also not fucked up. If you can’t do this, then you’ve really lost. It’s like, what are you fighting for?”

Nathan Taylor Pemberton is a writer and editor from Florida who currently lives in Brooklyn.