Aboutness: Death Stranding, Literality, and Labor

What does it mean to say that a text or artwork is “about” something? Although such a statement normally makes an outwardly simple and minimally interpretive claim—referring broadly to the work’s explicit subject or plot—recent works of criticism have put new pressure on the concept of aboutness itself. In a 2021 essay titled “Aboutness,” T. J. Clark complicates the relation between aboutness and painterly style, noting how Hieronymus Bosch’s technical decisions in The Ascent to Heaven both produce the painting’s conceptual content—“what it ‘wants to say’ about its subject matter”—and exceed it, such that the critical attempt to specify what the painting is about ends up “circling its prey and never striking.”¹ In Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism, Alex Woloch notes how the frequent emphasis that George Orwell places on the word “about,” combined with the strong “topical orientation” of his writing—its explicit concern with weighty subjects...