DOUGALD HINE

Category: Essays

  • The Price of Life

    https://open.spotify.com/show/5xgoppriB1m3ahUB83cheA

    Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.

    Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto

    Kent: Is this the promised end?
    Edgar: Or image of that horror?

    King Lear, V.iii.264-5

    We’d walked eight miles already, on a warm July day, when the accident happened. That detail matters, because my mum is in her mid-70s, but this was nothing like what you think of as an old lady taking a fall. It was a slip and a headlong tumble on a steepening slope: a treacherous, skidding slope, like nothing I’d met in the six days since setting out from London. That morning in Reading, my parents had been waiting under the bridge, behind the Thames Water building, along with my friend Lloyd, to join us for the stretch to Streatley. Now my mum was in an ambulance, speeding back across the distance it had taken us hours to cover, to the A&E department of the Royal Berkshire Hospital. Later, one of us heard from a nurse who had been on duty when she came in that they hadn’t expected her to pull through.

    She did – and eight months later, she’s doing well – but this week, as the unfolding reality of the Coronavirus pandemic has spread itself across all our lives, I’ve found myself thinking back to those days in the hospital. Because there is a particular quality to this pandemic, a particular encounter to which it is bringing us. It’s not the whole story, but it’s a big part of it: what we’re going through right now is a collective encounter with parental mortality on a planetary scale.

    Just imagine, if you can bear it, how things would be right now if the group this virus mainly took was children under the age of ten. Or if, like HIV in Africa, it scythed through the middle generation, taking healthy adults in their 30s and 40s, leaving the kids to be raised by the grandparents. Compared to the visceral panic we would be living through, if either of those were the case, the panic we are actually witnessing looks like what it partly is – a live-action role play for the bored citizens of the late capitalist West, hoarding supplies of toilet roll, taking ‘shelfies’ of emptied supermarket aisles and posting them on Instagram.

    I don’t want to diminish the real fears that are at large. There are people I love who have been through bad pneumonia in recent years, or whose immune systems are whacked for other reasons, who are right in the firing line of this virus. Do all the sensible things you are being told to do. Look out for those who are most vulnerable, whether to the virus itself or to the falling dominoes of what we call an economy. And then, somewhere in the middle of all this, make time to feel the strangeness of the moment we are in – this sudden, forced interruption of business-as-usual – and the collective encounter that it calls us to.

    If you study Shakespeare, you soon learn that what marks a comedy from a tragedy is not how many laughs it raises, but how the story ends. A comedy ends with young people getting married; a tragedy ends with young people dying. Since getting married implies having children, comedy is a successful completion of the intergenerational cycle, while tragedy is the interruption of the intergenerational cycle. At some level, you’re dealing with the deepest fear and the deepest satisfaction of any human community: are our kids going to have kids and keep the show on the road? What makes this such rich material for storytelling is that the price is so damned high, and so nearly universal.

    I remember being a kid and the sheer force of wanting to grow up! I used to think this had to do with all that’s mad about the ways we corral children into schools, and no doubt there’s something in that, but now what strikes me is that this was the force that Dylan Thomas wrote of: ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age.’ Something absolutely primal pushing us up, pushing up through us, towards adulthood. And somewhere along the way, it hits you that the price of your growing is your parents’ ageing, their journey towards death. The marriage that seals the comedy might be overseen by the parents, they may seem to be in command, but it augurs the end of their time as ‘the parents’, the handing on of that role and the entry into old age.

    It happens in lurching steps, the encounter with parental mortality. Many years may go by after that first loss of innocence that comes with knowing the price of your growing up, but for most of us there will be an event that brings the knowledge home. It stops being a fact that you can see out of the corner of your eye, and you are confronted with this reality, the tangle of thoughts and feelings it tows behind it, the mundane practicalities and the deep pulls on the heartstrings. And in the middle of it all, there is a lurching shift in the balance of power between the generations: these people who cared for you in your earliest vulnerability, with whom – if you’re lucky – you achieved some kind of adult relationship, are now pitched into vulnerability themselves. They will need you to care for them, now or soon, and sooner or later, they will be gone.

    Shakespeare takes the pathos of this power shift to its extreme with King Lear, where the old king is pitched into vulnerability and madness. Yet this pathos is not what makes the play a tragedy: what makes it a tragedy is the ending, in which Lear lives to see the death of his faithful daughter. The journey into age and death can involve great sadness, but a parent dying ahead of their children does not disorder the world in the way that a child dying ahead of their parents seems to do.

    Those of us who have parents over a certain age already live with the knowledge that there is a non-trivial likelihood of their dying in any given year. We know the journey they are on. I remember the spring my mum turned seventy, scrambling up Arthur’s Seat together, thinking to myself, we won’t be doing this in ten years’ time. Still, for a long while, this knowledge can hang out there at the edge of the field of vision. Every day, there are falls, diagnoses, ambulances rushing to hospital; events that bring this knowledge home to thousands of families, that call us out of ordinary time and into the strange moment of our vulnerability, of our participation in the great mystery of living and dying. But it doesn’t happen to us all at the same time, not usually. Not until now.

    The first death from the virus in Britain happened two weeks ago at the Royal Berkshire Hospital. I think of the maze of its corridors that we got to know over those 11 days last July.

    I get a message from Lloyd, who walked the first few miles with us from Reading that morning but left to catch a train home before we came to the hill where the accident happened.

    ‘Until this week,’ he writes, ‘I don’t think the younger half of us really believed that the older half would ever be gone.’ That has changed, quite suddenly, he suggests; and with the tangle of feelings which the change drags up, there comes a release of energy. ‘It has to do with letting go of the idea that we all need to wait until mummy and daddy have finished talking. It’s the release that most people experience more naturally when they go through mourning the actual death of a parent.’

    There’s something obscene, isn’t there, about admitting that the death of a parent can bring release? It brings other things too, and it comes wrapped in grief, but it’s best to own the shadowed complexity of all this. And the release is foreshadowed in this sudden, disorienting shift in the balance of power between the generations.

    In Italy, they are running out of coffins. Beloved old ones are buried or cremated without ceremony. Elsewhere, we wait and watch the numbers, knowing the likelihood that such a crisis will reach us soon.

    There is so much that we don’t know yet. It is so easy to fill the gaps with the stories we are used to telling. We’re too close to this event to tell its story yet, but we can notice things about it and feel the places where it roots down into truths that were always there. We can tell the kinds of stories that don’t try to fill the gaps, that leave room for the mystery, that set a place at the table for the stranger. How do we open our hearts and make ourselves hospitable, when we have to close our doors and keep our distance from each other’s bodies? To name the strangeness of what is called for, that in itself can be a start.

    The price of life is so damned high. It always was, but maybe we forgot this for a while, numbed to all the cycles we belong to and depend on. Whatever it is, this moment, and whatever stories will be told of it, let us find in its dark soil a seed of anamnesis, ‘unforgetting’, from which the next world can begin.

    First published in the online edition of Dark Mountain.

  • The Dream-led Dance: Ten years of learning to publish Dark Mountain

    The Dream-led Dance: Ten years of learning to publish Dark Mountain

    for Charlotte Du Cann & Mark Watson

    In dreams begins responsibility.

    W. B. Yeats

    Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.

    Mierle Laderman Ukeles

    The books live under the stairs. There are boxes of back issues stacked in a Narnia wardrobe. Twice a year, a truck pulls up in the lane outside the cottage and offloads the latest issue, stacked on wooden pallets. If they are lucky, the truck driver stops to help Charlotte and Mark get the boxes indoors, where they will be repacked and sent out to over a thousand subscribers.

    This work could be outsourced. There are distributors who take on publications like Dark Mountain and they probably charge less per copy than the handling fee the pair of them get paid, but the money would no longer go towards paying the rent on this old cottage which serves not only as depot but as editorial headquarters and the home of the people who carry the day-to-day responsibility for the whole operation as it heads into its second decade.

    I visit in early June and it’s still chilly enough to light a fire in the wood stove in the living room. (Those pallets don’t go to waste.) It’s a rare chance to work together face-to-face, rather than the hundreds of hours we’ve spent on Skype, as I hand over the last of my responsibilities for the publication I co-founded a decade ago.

    We walk from Reydon into the small town of Southwold, a seaside place where London people come at weekends. Charlotte takes me to see the mural of Orwell under the pier. We stop in at the Sailor’s Reading Room where Sebald stops off in The Rings of Saturn and I realise that it’s time I read that book again. At the beachfront café, we find a sheltered table to eat our ice creams. Soon we’re joined by Heidi, the new bookkeeper, who lives in a flat above the market square.

    On the way back, we call in at the Post Office, where all those books get posted. The postmaster comes out to shake my hand. ‘Thank you,’ he says with feeling. ‘You don’t have to put your business through us and it makes a huge difference.’ In recent years, Dark Mountain has grown to be his biggest customer, sending thousands of packages a year. There must be cheaper and more efficient ways to do this, but to change it now would be unthinkable. Standing here, I feel what it means that our small publishing operation has become a part of the economic ecosystem of this corner of Suffolk. It’s one of the reasons why Southwold still has a Post Office, when many English places of its size do not.

    I wish I could say that we set out to create a publishing operation which embodied a Polanyian idea of the social embedding of economic activity, but the truth is things ended up this way more by accident than design.

    Like the stapled together news-sheets I made as a child, or the photocopied zines of my late teens, Dark Mountain was the product of the pleasure of making a platform together with the necessity of doing so in order to write the things I wanted to write. Something similar applied to my co-founder, Paul Kingsnorth, whose idea it was in the first place, and our collaboration was born of a hunch that we weren’t the only ones in need of this platform.

    The first few hundred copies of our manifesto lived under my bed in Brixton. Orders got sent out when I remembered, or when readers emailed to ask why theirs still hadn’t come. The way that leads from dreams to responsibility was a shaky one. Even the crowdfunding of the manifesto was a close thing: a few months later, the site we had used went bust, taking with it the funds of any outstanding campaigns.

    The playwright Mark Ravenhill gave a lecture a few years ago at the opening of the Edinburgh fringe festival. He started with a story from the Facebook feed of a younger theatremaker, describing a dream in which he is at dinner with a man who plans to kill his wife. No one else knows about his plan. The man is also the owner of a fleet of rental vans. If the dreamer keeps quiet, he’ll give him a cheap deal on a van to get his show to Edinburgh. He wakes before the choice is made, but is troubled to realise he was tempted.

    To get our artistic dreams on the road, Ravenhill goes on to argue, we have to make a cut between two sides of ourselves, to be like Jekyll and Hyde, or the heroine of a play by Bertolt Brecht. On the one side:

    to be a good artist you have to be the person who walks in to a space and tells the truth. That’s what marks you out from the audience and why they’re sitting over there and you’re standing up there: you are the most truthful person in that room.

    On the other side, how do you get there? ‘Chances are by being a liar, a vagabond and a thief.’ You have to be cunning and ruthless enough to make your own luck.

    I don’t want to play the innocent, to pretend I don’t recognise what Ravenhill is getting at, and I’ve quoted his speech with enthusiasm elsewhere. That line about the duty to be ‘the most truthful person in that room’ catches at something important. Yet as I reflect on a decade as writer, editor and publisher at Dark Mountain, it makes me want to unsettle the neatness of the binary he sets up, because it is in danger of affirming an idea with which I cannot hold: the separation between the high, true work of art and the low, grubby business that supports it, a necessary evil and a source of contamination from which the art itself must be protected.

    For a start, it should be obvious that art deals in a tricky kind of truth. It’s hardly as though we leave our cunning at the stage door. To make theatre is to traffick in illusions: I think of Simon McBurney inThe Encounter, alone on stage, whispering into a cast of microphones, turning the audience’s headphones – the ultimate technology of isolation – into a device of hair-raising intimacy. To be an artist is to be a trickster, and that holds for poets, performers, playwrights and painters alike. Picasso had a point, old monster that he was, when he said, ‘Art is the lie that tells the truth.’ Having tried it on for size in the early years of Dark Mountain, I’d caution against the mantle of the artist as lonely truthteller. Self-proclaimed honesty is a dodgy business, as the signs over used car salesrooms attest. Do what you have to do and let others be the judge of how close to the truth you came.

    Meanwhile, the clean cut between the truth-work of art and the wheeler-dealing that underpins it sits uneasily with me, too. I want to call instead on the Maintenance Art of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, refusing to respect the cordon sanitaire between high and low status work, making the shit-work visible, maybe even playful, honoured instead of taken for granted. I’d call too on the cunning and grace of an artist like Theaster Gates, and on Kate Rich’s Feral Trade, where the art is another way of doing business. I don’t say we got close to the way these artists work in the practice of publishing Dark Mountain, only that the times when the work felt truest for me were the times when I caught a glimpse of those possibilities.

    ‘Poets are a special case,’ I wrote in Issue 1 of Dark Mountain. ‘Yeats is allowed to be silly, because poetry is not required to make sense.’ It’s a theme to which I’ve returned more than once: the artist as a special kind of grown-up, the only grown-up allowed to go out in public without wearing the clothes of economic rationality. The other side of this strange coin is that the everyday economic reality of life for the average artist in many modern societies has involved a degree of precarity that was, until recently, beyond the experience of most of their fellow citizens. One consequence is that many of the artists and writers I have worked with show signs of post-traumatic stress in their relationship to money.

    This colours the tensions that exist between the artistic vision of a project and its economic viability. Among the initiators of artistic projects, the work of book-writing might be seen as a higher calling than the work of bookkeeping, but it seems that society at large does not agree, since bankers make fortunes and accountants rarely worry about how to pay the bills, while award-winning authors often struggle to make ends meet. In the background of all this is a pervasive though rarely disclosed assumption: that pay should come as a reward for doing things you didn’t want to do. The very self-directedness of artistic work, the sense that we do things we love, contributes to the vulnerability of the artist as economic actor. The experience of being out of place in the economic game, of knowing the work you do doesn’t make sense according to the logic that dominates the society you live in, can breed an aversion to thinking about the economic aspects of that work. So you insist that a spreadsheet is beyond your comprehension, because innumeracy has become a matter of identity, a sign and a symptom of being on the side of the poets.

    The time would come when I made my peace with spreadsheets, but early on I was as prone to this as anyone. It was a humbling moment when it finally hit me how much of the hassle we went through with Dark Mountain might have been avoided if we had set the price of our first issue five pounds higher, but I don’t remember putting any serious thought into that decision at the time. We didn’t model its implications, we just plucked a number from the air.

    In the first two years, we ran the project unfunded, fitting the work in around other paying gigs, raising money through crowdfunding to cover the upfront costs of publication, paying ourselves a bit when there was money spare. By year three, this approach was under strain, as the workload grew. With the help of Michael Hughes, a friend and supporter, a funding proposal was put together. This was immediately successful, securing a grant of £10,000 per year for the next three years from the Deep Ecology Foundation, along with a one-off donation of £5,000 from a radical philanthropist in the UK.

    Together with the profits from book sales, this allowed us to set up a modest part-time salary for a team of two: Paul was paid for ten days a month as director, with Sophie McKeand as his assistant for one day a week. By this point, I was burning out and moving countries, but I remained sufficiently involved to share responsibility for the decisions that followed.

    There’s a pattern I’ve seen a few times now where money comes into a project previously held together by love and bits of string, and instead of this steadying the ship and allowing those involved to do what they’re already doing without making fools of themselves, it inspires a flurry of further activities. There was a touch of that over the next two years: when the last copies of Issue 1 sold out, we decided to splash out on reprinting it; we put time and energy into an album of music made by friends of the project, and the crowdfunding campaign for this was the first in which we missed our target. The premise of our funding proposal had been to bridge the way to self-sufficiency, to a point where sales of books would cover the work of running the operation, but there was no process in place to get us from here to there. Meanwhile, a decent desire to cheer each other on and avoid shame or blame could lead to a reluctance to name our mistakes and see them clearly.

    Towards the end of year four, we hit a crisis: our small non-profit company was weeks away from running out of funds. For me, this was the moment when responsibility arrived. Having let others carry the weight of the project up to this point, I now became its existential backstop, the catcher in the rye who would do what it took to keep this thing from running off a cliff. That meant dropping other commitments, teaching myself new skills and taking on tasks I would hardly have chosen, because there was no one else around to do them and they needed to be done. 

    So I ditched the crowdfunding model that had funded the first three books, because it meant much of our energy went into banging the drum to bring in money from the same 200 readers every time we wanted to go into print. To launch the rolling subscriptions system that replaced it, I had to plan out a business model that meant we could be confident of fulfilling our readers’ subscriptions, and then build the section of the website where they would subscribe. This worked – and when it proved that seven out of ten subscriptions rolled over smoothly from one year to the next, we finally had a path towards the self-sufficiency we had promised our funders. In the meantime, though, we had to cut back what we spent on paying ourselves to half of the already frugal budget. Rather than take a slice of this for myself, I dropped the creative and editorial side of my involvement to allow time for other jobs that could help pay the rent. Though the truth is, the biggest funder of Dark Mountain in the years that followed was my partner Anna, who brought in the regular income that allowed me to put in so many hours unpaid.

    The next turning point came as we hit year eight. Book sales and subscriptions had steadily grown, and with them the everyday work of running the operation. On paper, we were covering our costs, and we had begun to raise the fees we paid to editors, but in reality much of the work going into the books was underpaid. Two things exacerbated this: a drift in the relationship between work and money, and a lack of communication. When Paul and Sophie started getting paid, the principle was simple, with each of them paid the same amount per day. But as roles changed and were handed on, the memory of this was getting lost, and there was no process for checking how the principle was working out in practice and making changes. In fact, outside of the editorial process for a particular book, there were no regular meetings between those of us involved in running Dark Mountain, apart from an annual gathering that was usually tagged on to the excitements and exhaustions of a public event. Into this gap came all the ordinary human misunderstandings, the stories we tell about who is acting how and why.

    There was a moment when it could have ended badly, but instead out of this drama came a recognition that we were no longer the ad hoc, books-under-the-bed operation of our beginnings. These days, we had a well-organised Narnia wardrobe! And we needed to organise ourselves in other ways. So I undertook to create just enough process to give some rhythm to our work, without draining the life from it. The old structure of directors assisted by staff – which sounds so formal, but had come about by default – gave way to a publishing collective, made up of the half dozen of us involved in the month-to-month running of the project, joined by a couple of members of the wider pool of editors. I instituted a monthly call for this collective and this was met with some resistance: when work already expands beyond the hours that any of us are paid for, spending another two hours together on Skype can feel like the last thing that’s needed. Yet the difference it made to our work together soon dissolved any scepticism. Most months, the first half hour would be spent just checking in, telling each other what we could see outside the window or talking about the books we had been reading. With a small team spread over three countries, some anchor point of shared presence is needed, however artificial it felt at first.

    The other thing that came out of the year eight crunch was a written policy for how we ought to handle work and money. It started by acknowledging the gap between what we could pay ourselves, those of us doing this because it was Dark Mountain, and what we paid outsiders whose skills we needed. Handling our accounts, keeping the website up or printing the actual books: by now, we’d learned the hard way that having these services handled by friends of friends could be a formula for chaos, so we needed to be ready to pay the going rate. When it came to paying ourselves, the starting point was different: if all the work going into the books was paid at the rate it deserved, there wouldn’t be any books, but recognising this, we had to work towards a sustainable relationship between work and money, not just as an ethical commitment, but as a practical necessity. If those on whom the publishing of Dark Mountain depended were paid at a rate that meant they couldn’t make ends meet, it didn’t matter how much they cared about the project, sooner or later they would have to walk away. 

    With this spelt out, I proposed an ordering of priorities: first came the work that goes on week in, week out, handling orders, replying to emails, editing the website, because if the work you do for the project is part of your bread and butter, it has to be paid properly. Then came the project work, the editors who take on a time-limited task as part of the team coming together to work on an issue. This is intensive, hands-on work during the core weeks of the editorial process, but within the shape of your working year, it is feasible to balance it with other work that pays more and means less, so in the process of improving how everyone gets paid, this came second to the ongoing maintenance work. Finally, the hardest part, the payment of contributors to the books: hard because all of us on the publishing collective were also freelance writers or artists, and putting this work to the back of the queue felt like reproducing a pattern we had been on the wrong end of ourselves. From early on, we had commissioned covers for our books and paid the cover artists, but the work inside came from an open call. To pay the 50 or 60 people whose words and images appeared in a typical issue was an ambition we’d long held and one that still seemed out of reach.

    It took until year ten, but we got there. After raising the pay for the core team and the book editors, after experimenting with small commissioning budgets, with Issue 15 – the last before I left – we were finally able to offer a fee to everyone whose work appeared in the pages of a Dark Mountain book. How best to do this was a challenge in itself: should we try to differentiate between a full-length essay, a twelve-line poem and a piece of flash fiction, or between a photograph documenting an existing art project and a drawing made for this book? What to do about the different situations and expectations of our contributors? In the end, my answer was to be as open with them as possible. We set aside a contributors pot, £1,200 in the first instance, and wrote to everyone whose work appeared in the book, explaining the situation:

    From conversations with contributors over time, we know that there are those who are trying to make a living from their creative work (or simply to make ends meet), as well as others who are in full-time positions or have other means of support and would therefore be happy to go on contributing without a fee.

    Contributors were invited to opt in or out, based on which of these best described their situation, with the pot split equally between everyone who opted in. (‘And if you have any hesitation,’ the instructions continued, ‘then we would encourage you to choose Yes.’)

    In the event, the contributors to that book split half and half between Yes and No. Those who chose to receive a fee were paid just under £60 each. Not a great amount, but a start.

    How strange to write so many words about Dark Mountain and hardly touch on its subject matter, the questions it asks, the claims it makes, the hunches explored within its pages! That story has been told already many times, by me and others: there’s half a shelf’s worth of books, the original manifesto, hundreds of press articles and interviews, and even the odd PhD thesis.

    This other story I’ve been telling is only one of the lines that could be traced through this web of practice, the dream-led dance of how we became accidental publishers and learned to take responsibility. Name some of those other lines: Charlotte creating the role of producer, corralling editors and setting the tempo and holding the relationship between words, images and design; Mark holding the subscriptions system together and making it work; Ava Osbiston devising a submissions process for a publication that is not exactly a literary journal, that looks for raw potential as well as accomplishment, for the stories our editors can help to tell as well as the ones that arrive fully formed; Nick Hunt taking the website from a simple blog to an online edition that matches the richness of the books; Paul, from the very start, finding that our writing had created expectations and carrying responsibility for its consequences. Then there’s the physical work of printing, taking place beyond the horizon of our publishing team, under the direction of Christian Brett of Bracketpress, the one person to have worked on every single Dark Mountain publication. Each of them could tell another story.

    Within this web of tasks and responsibilities, there is work that is unavoidably monotonous. Where this exists, the aim should be that it is done as humanly as possible, rather than as efficiently as possible; that those doing it are in charge of how it is done, that they know and feel why it matters, that their work is not forgotten or belittled, and that they have the chance to combine this work with involvement in other parts of the creative life of the project. The responsibility for making sure this is the case is shared by everyone involved in making decisions about the running of Dark Mountain.

    Yet it would be a mistake to group together all the maintenance work and background process on which the artistic vision of a project depends and file it under that heading. My experience has been that it is possible to bring a degree of thought and care to these responsibilities that is in alignment with the more obviously artistic aspects of the work I got to do with Dark Mountain. There is an attitude here that can translate into many of the tasks that make up the practice of publishing.

    To take one example: when the need arises to write to readers and supporters, asking them for money, this can be approached as something you hate but have to do. At that point, I’ve seen gifted writers descend into grating cliché, turning out a bad impression of a sales spiel, because they are approaching the task as an evil that cannot be avoided. The alternative is to find a way of writing that message in words that ring clear and true, that embody what you are doing and why it matters. There have been days when I think I found that tone.

    Without making any stronger claim than that for the work I’ve done, I do believe there is a way of working that has truth in it. It isn’t easy, but nor is it complicated. At its heart, this way is about attention, which is why it has a lot to do with art. Attend to experience and let it show you what is missing from the stories you are telling. Attend to the relationships on which the work depends. Attend to what matters and whether it still matters. Attend to the alignment between what we say matters and how we treat each other. Look out for the moment when it’s time to stop.

    First published in OEI Issue 86-87, Publishing Practices, Publishing Poetics.

  • Seeing in the Dark: A Tribute to John Berger

    Seeing in the Dark: A Tribute to John Berger

    The news came last thing at night. Next morning, the loss lay quietly over everything, like a fall of snow. John Berger, who once wrote that all storytellers are Death’s secretaries, had died.

    Storyteller was what he liked to be called, a term that could stretch to take in the many roles he played. Among them, the role of thinker. He thought through stories. He was a thinker who wrote from the heart, who refused the separation between heart and head that runs deep in the dominant culture against which he fought with every sentence. One of his last books takes the form of a dialogue with the 17th century philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, to whose work he had been drawn as a young man on account of ‘his rejection of the Cartesian division between the physical and the spiritual, between body and soul.’

    With words he made spaces into which the reader could enter. All writers do this, but he was more aware of it than most, because he started as a painter. Handled with skill, paint opens out beyond the two dimensions of the canvas. In his hands, the linearity of the written word deepened into a space to be inhabited, a space in which you could find shelter. Like many others, I found shelter in his words.

    After his death, his friend Anthony Barnett wrote: ‘He ended a form of isolation in many he never met.’ Strictly speaking, this is true; at least, it was my experience. I was twenty-five. I’d just walked away from the beginnings of a career at the BBC. When The Shape of a Pocket landed in my hands one lunchtime in a bookshop in south London, it read like a letter from the wiser friend I badly needed. Yet we did meet — and not only that one time, years later, at the British Library, but many times, and I know I am not alone in this experience: his books were places where we met. They were shaped by the commitment to hospitality which was central to his way of being in the world. This is why the grief feels so personal: we have lost someone we knew and felt known by, someone whose generosity touched our lives.

    Writing this, I catch myself hesitating between ‘we’ and ‘I’. There are writers you meet at the right time in your life, books that you find at a crossroads.(‘This is a book about keeping rendezvous,’ Berger wrote. ‘The ones I failed to keep are another story.’) I know that I do not speak for myself alone, but also that my experience is not everyone’s. In particular, I wonder how differently those who know Berger only or mainly through his most famous work — the TV series and the book of Ways of Seeing, the Booker-winning G.— encounter him? Watching him on camera in that famous shirt, or in the scene where he has invited a group of women to discuss the female figure in art, for all that he may have grasped the insights of feminism, there is something of the playboy to him, an echo of the seducer at the centre of that novel. Soon afterwards, this was gone.

    Both the novel and the series were made in 1972. A year later, he came to settle in the village of Quincy in the Haute Savoie. His neighbours were among the last generation of peasants in western Europe. For the next forty years, he lived and worked alongside them, bearing witness to their way of living. He did so with an unmistakeable respect, as unable to romanticise the hardships of their lives as he was unwilling to accept the categories through which the world at large would see them. Much changed in his work from that point. The nature of this change was not a turning away — ‘Yes, I’m still amongst other things a Marxist,’ he could write in 2005, still true to the pledge made in the title of his first collection, Permanent Red — but a deepening, hinted at in those ‘other things’.

    He belonged to that generation of European intellectuals who were in their late thirties or early forties in 1968. Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard: all of them were born between 1924 and 1930. As much as any of them, Berger’s work was shaped by the events with which that year became synonymous:

    In 1968, hopes, nurtured more or less underground for years, were born in several places in the world and given their names: and in the same year, these hopes were categorically defeated. This became clearer in retrospect. At the time many of us tried to shield ourselves from the harshness of this truth. — Ernst Fischer: A Philosopher and Death (1974)

    The work of coming to terms with that historical disappointment was the context within which what we think of as postmodernism took shape. Struggling with the esoteric idiolects of its major theorists, the uninitiated reader may suspect that she is swimming through clouds of intellectual squid ink, thrown up as they made their retreat from the streets to the seminar room. If this is not entirely fair, still the contrast to the hospitable quality of Berger’s prose is striking. He wrote with a desire to be understood.

    He did his thinking through stories. It would never have occurred to him to construct an explicit architecture of theory, though he referred with appreciation to the work of others who did just that. Still, among the many ways of seeing Berger, I find it helpful to see him as a postmodernist, albeit of a different type. Running through his later work is a careful attempt to disentangle the ethical commitments of his Marxism from the logic of progress and the historical optimism of modernity, and to re-entangle it with a vernacular metaphysics, tested against the hard experience of life on the wrong side of the walls that divide the world. There is a universality to this writing, but it is arrived at through a grounding in place, the particular soil of Quincy, which he called ‘my university’. He did his thinking around the kitchen table or in the cowshed, rather than the seminar room, and this is why his work seems to belong within the category which Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash proposed in the title of their 1998 book, Grassroots Postmodernism: the search for routes out of the dead end of modernity, not as a theoretical exercise, but a matter of life and death, among the billions of people whose ways of living are subject to ongoing processes of so-called modernisation.

    When I arrived in Mexico in 2011, I found that his book on migrant workers in Europe — written in the mid-1970s — had just been translated and published there in Spanish; its account of the migrant experience spoke directly to those away in the North and to the families they had left behind. The morning after we heard the news of his death, my partner’s Facebook feed was full of tributes from friends in Palestine. Few European thinkers of our time have mattered more to people on the wrong side of history’s walls.

    His death comes at a time when the world seems to be darkening. There is much in his work that can help us learn to see in the dark. I think of the speech he gave to fellow members of the Transnational Institute in the early 1980s:

    Suppose… that we are not living in a world in which it is possible to construct something approaching heaven-on-earth, but, on the contrary are living in a world whose nature is far closer to that of hell. What difference would this make to any single one of our political or moral choices? All that would have changed would be the enormity of our hopes and finally the bitterness of our disappointments. — Leopardi (1983)

    At a time when many on the left seem to insist that there can be no sense of belonging or commitment to place which does not darken into blood-and-soil fascism, his example shows that this is false — though his insistence on hospitality challenges those who are trying to articulate the importance of place and belonging to do so without sliding into the mentality of the wall-builders. Meanwhile, the kindness which everyone who knew him remembers, and which shines through his writing, challenges us to find less destructive modes of expression than the culture of performative indignation that pervades the space of political conversation in the age of Twitter. And when despair closes in, when the struggle to make sense of the world seems lost, I will find myself going back to his words, to passages like the one that closes his essay on Leopardi:

    The production of reality has never been finished, its outcome has never been made decisive. Something is always in the balance. Reality is always in need. Even of us, damned and marginal as we may be.

    That afternoon, it began to snow. I sat down to write to a friend who had been working closely with him over the last few years. I wrote of the sense of a great debt, one that could never be repaid — and then the realisation that what we received from him had never been meant as a loan, but as a gift. What a lifetime of generosity. How lucky we were.

    Published in Contemporary Theatre Review: Volume 27, Issue 3.

  • Childish Things

    Childish Things

    It was September and I hadn’t seen Ruben all summer, but there he was, the same as ever, gangly and lounging, his hair cropped almost to the bone, his eyes alert; a kid from the wrong side of town who turns the skills his childhood taught him into art. That summer, I’d become a father. The weeks of July and August tightened into the small world of our new family, living by old rhythms of bodily need. (I must have said something about this – about the way it shatters whatever illusions you had of your own centrality, how it locks you into the chain of generations and releases you from any compulsion to make your one life a story in itself.) And I asked him, ‘So, how was your summer? What have you been up to?’

    ‘I gave my sermon on the mount,’ he said, like it was a matter of fact, and it turned out that it was.

    One Friday night, 150 mostly young people had followed him up a rocky hill on the edge of town (the town where he grew up, an hour south of Stockholm) to where the birch trees clear, and they sat on the ground and listened as he spoke. There were no flowing robes; he wore an Adidas tracksuit top and carried a binder with his notes. He wasn’t playing the messiah, trying to start a cult; nor was he playing the artist, making a point by appropriating the forms of religion. As the sun went down over the pines, he talked about life as a journey through the woods at dusk, each of us carrying a pocket-light of reason: its beam cuts a bright tunnel, but throws everything outside this tunnel into darkness; if we use it thoughtlessly, we forget that we have other senses with which to find our way.

    When the sermon and the discussion that followed were at an end, the congregation made their way quietly down among the trees, the twilight deepening around them.

    * * *

    A few years before, I had made a book with the video artists Robert and Geska Brečević, who operate as Performing Pictures. Around the time we met, their work took an unexpected turn as they began collaborating with craftworkers in Oaxaca and Croatia, building roadside chapels and producing video shrines that set the saints in motion. Our book was a document of this work but also an enquiry into how it came about, what had drawn them to the folk Catholicism of the villages where they were now working, and the reactions this had provoked among their art-world contemporaries. About these reactions, I wrote:

    We are used to art that employs the symbols of religion in ways seemingly intended to unsettle or provoke many of those to whom these symbols matter. Yet to the consumers of contemporary art, those who actually visit galleries, it is more uncomfortable to be confronted with work in which such symbols are used without the frame of provocation.

    That may still be the case, yet these days I am struck by how many of the artists, writers and performers I meet find themselves drawn to the forms and practices of religion.

    I think of Ben who went off to Italy to start an ‘unMonastery’, a working community of artists in service to its neighbours. The name suggested a desire to distance themselves from the example of the religious community, even as they found inspiration there. A couple of years facing the difficult realities of holding a community together, however, deepened their appreciation for the achievement of those who had maintained monasteries for generations, and this was reflected in a series of conversations which Ben went on to publish with abbots of established religious orders.

    For some, it’s a question of taking on the roles religion used to play, using the tools of ritual to address the ultimate. When I run into Emelie, a choreographer friend, she’s just back from a small town in the middle of Sweden where a group of artists has taken over the old mine buildings. It’s the kind of place that lost its purpose with the passing of the industry which called it into being. The project started with two brothers who grew up there – and this weekend, they have been celebrating the younger brother’s birthday. The way I hear it, the celebration was a three-day ritual which saw participants building their own coffins only to be lowered into them, emerging after several hours to be greeted with music and lights and a restorative draught of vodka.

    In another mining town a thousand miles away, Rachel Horne made her first artwork at the site of the colliery where four generations of her family had worked. Out of Darkness, Light was a memorial event: one night on the grassed-over slag heap above the town, 410 lamps were lit, one for each of the men and boys who died in the century in which coal was mined there. On a boat travelling along the river below, a group of ex-miners and their children told their stories. This was art as ritual, honouring the dead in such a way as to bring meaning to the living.

    Last time I spoke to Rachel, we talked about an event that she had put on a few weeks earlier. ‘You know,’ she said with a sigh, ‘it was like organising a wedding!’ I knew: months of energy building up to a big day and afterwards everyone involved is exhausted. Weddings are great, but how many do you want to have in a lifetime? It hit me, as artists we’re good at ‘weddings’, but sometimes what’s called for is the simplicity of the weekly Sunday service. Soon afterwards, I came to a passage in Chris Goode’s The Field and the Forest where he quotes a fellow theatre-maker, Andy Smith:

    Every week my mum and dad and some other people get together in a big room in the middle of the village where they live. They say hello to each other and catch up on how they are doing informally. Then some other things happen. A designated person talks about some stuff. They sing a few songs together. There is also a section called ‘the notices’ where they hear information about stuff that is happening. Then they sometimes have a cup of tea and carry on the chat.

    Both Smith and Goode are impressed by the resemblances between the Sunday service and the kinds of space they want to make with theatre. The connection is not made explicit, but when Goode ends his book with a vision of a ‘world-changing’ theatre where ‘once a fortnight at least, there’s someone on every street who’s making their kitchen or their garage or the bit of common ground in front of their estate into a theatre for the evening’, I think back to that passage and the distinction between the wedding and the weekly service.

    * * *

    I could go on for a while yet, piling up examples, but it’s time to pull back and see where this might get us. The artists I’ve mentioned are all friends, or friends of friends, so I can’t pretend to have made an objective survey. I don’t even know if such a survey could be made, since much of what I’m describing takes place outside the official spaces of art. Even the objects produced by Performing Pictures, though they sometimes hang in galleries, are made to be installed in a church or at a roadside.

    There is nothing new, exactly, about artists tangling with the sacred – indeed, the history of this entanglement is the thread I plan to follow through these pages. Yet here in the end-times of modernity, under the shadow of climate change, I want to voice the possibility that these threads are being pulled into a new configuration. There’s something sober – pragmatic, even – about the way I see artists working with the material of religion. The desire to shock is gone, along with the skittering ironies of postmodernism; and if ritual is employed, it is not in pursuit of mystical ecstasy or enlightened detachment, but as a tool for facing the darkness. I’m struck, too, by a willingness to work with the material of Western religious tradition, with all its uncomfortable baggage, rather than joining the generations of European artists, poets and theatre-makers who found consolation in various flavours of orientalism.

    All this has set me wondering: what if the times in which we find ourselves call for some new reckoning with the sacred? What if art is carrying part of what is called for? And what if answering the call means sacrificing our ideas about what it means to be an artist?

    A Strange Way of Talking About Art

    We have been making art for at least as long as we have been human. Ellen Dissanayake has made a lifelong study of the role of art within the evolution of the human animal, and she is emphatic about this:

    Although no one art is found in every society … there is found universally in every human group that exists today, or is known to have existed, the tendency to display and respond to one or usually more of what are called the arts: dancing, singing, carving, dramatizing, decorating, poeticizing speech, image making.

    Yet the way such activity gets talked about went through an odd shift about 250 years ago. In Germany, France and Britain, just as the Industrial Revolution was getting underway – and with colonialism pushing Western ideas to the far corners of the world – a newly extravagant language grew up around art. The literary critic John Carey offers a collage of this kind of language, drawn from philosophers, artists and fellow critics:

    The arts, it is claimed, are ‘sacred’, they ‘unite us with the Supreme Being’, they are ‘the visible appearance of God’s kingdom on earth’, they ‘breathe spiritual dispositions’ into us, they ‘inspire love in the highest part of the soul’, they have ‘a higher reality and more veritable existence’ than ordinary life, they express the ‘eternal’ and ‘infinite’, and they ‘reveal the innermost nature of the world’.

    Bound up with this new way of talking is the figure of the artistic genius. There have always been masters, artists whose skill earns them a place in the memory of a culture. In his account of the classical Haida mythtellers, the poet and linguist Robert Bringhurst is at pains to stress the role of individual talent within an oral literature, where a modern reader might expect to encounter the nameless collective voice of tradition. Yet a fierce respect for mastery does not presuppose a special kind of person whose inborn capacity makes them, and them alone, capable of work that qualifies as ‘art’. Rather, as Dissanayake shows, in most human cultures, it has been the norm for just about everyone to be a participant in and appreciator of artistic activity.

    The ideas about art which took hold in Western Europe in the late 18th century spread outwards through cultural and educational institutions built in Europe’s image. Were anyone to point out their peculiarity, it need not have troubled their proponents, for the contrasting ideas of other cultures could be assigned to a more primitive phase of development. Today, that sense of superiority has weakened and become unfashionable, although it remains implicit in much of the thinking that shapes the world. Under present conditions, a critic like Carey can take glee in mocking the heightened terms in which Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer wrote about art; yet the result is a deadlocked culture war in which defenders of a high modern ideal of art are pitched against the relativists at the gates.

    Rather than pick a side in this battle, it might be more helpful to ask why art and the figure of the artist should take on this heightened quality at the moment in history when they did. If a new weight falls onto the shoulders of the artist-as-genius, if the terms in which art is talked about become charged with a new intensity, then what is the gap which art is being asked to fill?

    That the answer has something to do with religion is suggested not only by the examples which Carey assembles, but also by the sense that he is playing Richard Dawkins to the outraged true believers in high art. And there have been those, no doubt, for whom art has played the role of religion for a secular age. But this hardly gets below the surface of the matter; the roots go further down in the soil of history. It is time to do a little digging.

    The Elimination of Ambiguity

    In 1696, an Irishman by the name of John Toland published a treatise entitled Christianity Not Mysterious. This was just one among a flurry of such books and pamphlets issuing from the London presses in the last years of the century, but its title is emblematic of the turn that was taking place as Europe approached the Enlightenment: a turn away from mystery, ambiguity and mythic thinking.

    As the impact of the scientific revolution reverberated through intellectual culture, the immediate effect was not to undermine existing religious beliefs but to suggest the possibility of putting them on a new footing. If Newton could capture the mysterious workings of gravity with the tools of mathematics, then the laws governing other invisible forces could be discovered. In due course, this would lead to a mechanical account of the workings of the universe, stretching all the way back to God.

    In its fullest form, this clockwork cosmology became known as deism: a cold reworking of monotheistic belief, offering neither the possibility of a relationship with a loving creator, nor the firepower of a jealous sky-father protecting his chosen people. The role of the deity was reduced to that of ‘first cause’, setting the chain reaction of the universe in motion. Stripped of miracles, scripture and revelation, deism never took the form of an organised religion or gained a substantial following. It attracted many prominent intellectual and literary figures in England, however, in the first half of the 18th century, before spreading to France and America, where it infused the philosophical and political radicalism which gave birth to revolutions.

    The religious establishment recoiled from deism and its explicit repudiation of traditional doctrine. Yet mainstream Christianity was travelling the same road, accommodating its cosmology to the new science in the name of natural theology, applying the tools of historical research to its scriptures and seeking to demonstrate the reasonableness of its beliefs. The result was a form of religion peculiarly vulnerable to the double earthquake which was to come from the study of geology and natural history. Imagine instead that the rocks had given up their secrets of deep time to a culture shaped by the mythic cosmology of Hinduism: the discovery would hardly have caused the collective crisis of faith which was to shake the intellectual world of Europe in the 19th century.

    To this day we live with the legacy of this collision between naturalised religion and the revelations of evolutionary science; militant atheists clash with biblical literalists, united in their conviction that the opening chapters of Genesis are intended to be read as a physics and biology textbook. It is an approach to the Bible barely conceivable before the 17th century.

    * * *

    Mystery can be the refuge of scoundrels; ambiguity, a cloak for muddle-headedness. The sacred has often been invoked as a way of closing off enquiry or to protect the interests of the powerful. We can acknowledge all of this and deplore it without discarding the possibility that reality is – in some important sense – mysterious. It takes quite a leap of faith, after all, to assume that a universe as vast and old as this one ought to be fully comprehensible to the minds of creatures like you and me.

    Among the roles of religion has been to equip us for living with mystery. This is not just about filling the gaps in current scientific knowledge or offering comforting stories about our place in the world. Across many different traditions there is an underlying attitude to reality: a common assumption that our lives are entangled with things which exceed our grasp, which cannot be known fully or directly – and that these things may nonetheless be experienced and approached, at times, by subtler and more indirect means.

    This attitude shows up in the deliberate strangeness of the way that language is used in relation to the sacred. The thousand names of Vishnu, the ninety-nine names of Allah: the multiplication of such litanies hints at the limits of language, reminding us that words may reach towards the divine but never fully comprehend it. A similar effect is achieved by the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God in the Hebrew Bible, written without vowels so as to be literally unspeakable.

    For Christians, a classic expression of this attitude to reality appears in Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, from the chapter on love that gets read at weddings:

    When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1 Corinthians 13:11–12)

    The emphasis is on the partial nature of knowledge: in relation to the ultimate, our understanding is childlike, a dark reflection of things we cannot see face-to-face. The most memorable of English translations, the King James Version gives us the image of a ‘glass’, but the mirror which Paul has in mind would have been of polished brass. Indeed, it is carefully chosen, for the Greek city of Corinth was a centre for the manufacture of such mirrors.

    The thought that there are aspects of reality which can be known only as a dark reflection calls up another Greek image. The myth of Perseus is set in motion when the hero is given the seemingly impossible task of capturing the head of the Gorgon Medusa, whose gaze turns all who look on her to stone. The goddess Athena equips Perseus with a polished shield; by the reflection of this device, he is able to approach the monster, hack off her hissing head and bag it safely up. In the shield of Perseus we glimpse the power of mythic thinking: by way of images, myth offers us indirect means of approaching those aspects of reality to which no direct approach can be made.

    Few passages in the Bible are more at odds with the spirit of the Enlightenment than Paul’s claim about the limits of human knowledge. To put away childish things was the ambition of an age in which the light of reason would shine into every corner of reality. What need now for dark reflections – or mythic shields, for that matter? By the turn of the 18th century, such things were no longer intellectually respectable: the unknown could be divided into terra incognita, merely awaiting the profitable advance of human knowledge, and old wives’ tales that were to be brushed away like cobwebs.

    The institutional forms of religion were capable of surviving this turn away from mystery, though much was lost along the way, and none of the later English translations of the Bible can match the poetry of the King James. Meanwhile, if anyone were to go on lighting candles at the altars of ambiguity, it would be the poets and the artists, the ones upon whose shoulders a new weight of expectation was soon to fall.

    Toys in the Attic

    When the educated minds of Europe decided that humankind had come of age, the immediate consequence for art was a loss of status. If all that is real is capable of being known directly, then the role of images and stories as indirect ways of knowing can be set aside, relegated to entertainment or decoration.

    I say immediate, but of course there was no collective moment of decision; we are dealing rather with the deep tectonic shifts which take place below the surface fashions of a culture, and the extent to which the ground has moved may be gauged as much through the discovery of what was once and is no longer possible, like the epic poem. The pre-eminent English poet of the first half of the 18th century, Alexander Pope aspired to match the achievement of Milton’s Paradise Lost by producing an epic on the life of Brutus; yet, despite years of telling friends that the project was nearing completion, all that he left upon his death was a fragment of eight lines. The failure seems more than personal, as though the mythic grandeur of the form was no longer available in the way it had been a lifetime earlier.

    In Paris in 1697, a year after Christianity Not Mysterious had rolled off the London presses, Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé launched the fairy tale genre, committing the stories of oral tradition to print with newly added morals. By the time the first English translation was printed in 1729 – ‘for J. Pote, at Sir Isaac New-ton’s Head, near Suffolk Street, Charing Cross’ – the publisher could advertise Perrault’s tales as ‘very entertaining and instructive for children’. Stories which had been everyone’s, which carry layers of meaning by which to navigate the darkest corners of human experience, had now been tamed and packed off to the nursery.

    Meanwhile, a strange new form of storytelling arose which put a premium on uneventful description of the everyday and regarded unlikely events with suspicion. ‘Within the pages of a novel,’ writes Amitav Ghosh, ‘an event that is only slightly improbable in real life – say, an unexpected encounter with a long-lost childhood friend – may seem wildly unlikely: the writer will have to work hard to make it appear persuasive.’ A masterful novelist himself, Ghosh is nonetheless troubled by the 18th-century assumptions encoded within the form in which he writes. What troubles him most is the thought that these assumptions underlie the failure of the contemporary imagination in the face of climate change.

    In the kinds of story which our culture likes to take seriously, all of the actors are human and most of the action takes place indoors. Such realism is ill-equipped to handle the extreme realities of a world in which our lives have become entangled with invisible forces, planetary in scale, which break unpredictably across the everyday pattern of our lives. The writer who wants to tell stories that are true to this experience had better go rummaging in the attic where the shield of Perseus gathers dust among the toys, the sci-fi trilogies devoured in teenage weekends and the so-called children’s literature where potent materials exiled to the nursery grew new tusks.

    But writer, beware: the boundaries of the serious literary novel are still policed against intrusions of myth or mystery, and the terms used to police them are telling. In notes for a never-finished review of Brideshead Revisited, written on his own deathbed, George Orwell marks his admiration for Waugh as a novelist, but then comes the breaking point: ‘Last scene, where the unconscious man makes the sign of the Cross … One cannot really be Catholic and a grown-up.’ Almost half a century later, Alan Garner met with the same charge when his novel Strandloper was published as adult literary fiction. The Guardian’s reviewer, Jenny Turner, found the author guilty of crossing a line with his insistence on depicting Aboriginal culture on its own terms:

    … such a phantastic view of history cannot ever rationally be made to stand up. This underlying irrationality usually works all right in poetry, which no one expects to make a lot of sense. It’s okay in children’s writing, which no one expects to be psychologically complex. But in a grown-up novel for grown-ups, it just never seems to work.

    Carrying the Flame

    As Paganini … appeared in public, the world wonderingly looked upon him as a super-being. The excitement that he caused was so unusual, the magic he practised upon the fantasy of the hearers so powerful, that they could not satisfy themselves with a natural explanation.

    So wrote Franz Liszt on Paganini’s death in 1840. The Italian violinist and composer had been the model of a virtuoso: a dazzling performer who stuns audiences with technical audacity and sheer force of personality. The term itself had taken on its modern meaning within his lifetime, shaped by his example. In those same years, an unprecedented cult of personality grew up around the Romantic poets, while in the theatres of Paris and London a strange new convention had emerged, according to which audiences sat in reverential silence before the performers; half a century earlier, theatres were still such rowdy spaces that an actor would be called to the front of the stage to repeat a favourite speech to the hoots or cheers of the crowd.

    A new sense was emerging of the artist as a special category of human. The conditions for this had been building for a long time. In ‘Past Seen from a Possible Future’, John Berger argues that the gap between the masterpiece and the average work has nowhere been so great as within the tradition of European oil painting, especially after the 16th century:

    The average work … was produced cynically: that is to say its content, its message, the values it was nominally upholding, were less meaningful for the producer than the finishing of the commission. Hack work is not the result of clumsiness or provincialism: it is the result of the market making more insistent demands than the job.

    Under these conditions, to be a master was not simply to stand taller than those around you, but to be looking in another direction. In the language of Berger’s essay, such masterworks ‘bear witness to their artists’ intuitive awareness that life was larger’ than allowed for in the traditions of ‘realism’ – or the accounts of reality – available within the culture in which they were operating. Dismissed from these accounts were those aspects of reality ‘which cannot be appropriated’.

    Berger warns against making such exceptions representative of the tradition: the study of the norms constraining the average artist will tell us more about what was going on within European society. Still, exceptionality of achievement fuelled the Romantic idea of the artist set apart from the rest of society. If the Enlightenment established lasting boundaries around what it is intellectually respectable for a ‘grown-up’ to take seriously, then the Romantic movement inaugurated a countercurrent which has proven as enduring. In Culture and Society, Raymond Williams identifies a constellation of words – ‘creative’, ‘original’ and ‘genius’ among them – which took on their current meanings in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as part of this new way of talking about the figure of the artist.

    The artists themselves were active in creating this identity. Here is Wordsworth, in 1815, addressing the painter Benjamin Haydon:

    High is our calling, Friend! – Creative Art …
    Demands the service of a mind and heart
    Though sensitive, yet in their weakest part
    Heroically fashioned – to infuse
    Faith in the whispers of the lonely Muse
    While the whole world seems adverse to desert.

    Keats’ formulation of ‘Negative Capability’, the quality required for literary greatness, is among the clearest statements of the role which now falls to the artist, a figure who must be ‘capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’

    * * *

    I have been making a historical argument, though it is the argument of an intellectual vagabond who goes cross-country through other people’s fields. Since we are now coming to the height of the matter, let me take a moment to catch my breath – and recall an earlier attempt at covering this ground, made in the third chapter of the Dark Mountain manifesto:

    Religion, that bag of myths and mysteries, birthplace of the theatre, was straightened out into a framework of universal laws and moral account-keeping. The dream visions of the Middle Ages became the nonsense stories of Victorian childhood.

    The claim towards which I have been building here is that those elements which became increasingly marginalised within respectable religious and intellectual culture by the middle of the 18th century found refuge in art. In many times and places, and perhaps universally, the activity of art has been entangled with the sacred, with the rituals and deep stories of a culture, its cosmology, the meaning it finds or makes within the world – and all of this wound into the rhythms which structure our lives. What is new in the historical moment around which we have been circling is the sense that the sacred has passed into the custody of art: insomuch as it dwells with mystery, ambiguity and mythic thinking, it now fell to the artist to keep the candle alight. Here, I submit, is the source of the peculiar intensity with which the language of art and the figure of the artist is suddenly charged.

    * * *

    If art has carried the flame of the sacred through the cold landscapes of modernity, it has not done so without getting burned. The scars are too many to list here, but I want to touch on two areas of damage.

    First, the roles assumed by artists over the past two centuries have overlapped with those which might in another time or place have been the preserve of a priest or prophet. In a culture capable of elevating an artist to the status of ‘super-being’, there is a danger here: the framework of religion may remind adherents that the priest is only an intermediary between the human and the divine, but there are no such checks in the backstage VIP area. The danger is that the show ends up running off the battery of the ego instead of plugging in to the metaphysical mains. Even when an artist sees her role as a receiver tuned into something larger than herself, without a common language in which to speak of the sacred, the result may be esoteric to an isolating degree. How much of the self-destruction which becomes normalised – often romanticised – as part of the artistic life can be traced to the lack of a stabilising framework for making sense of the mysteries of creative existence?

    Another danger arises from the exceptional status of the artist. While the reality of artistic life is often precarious, there exists nonetheless a certain exemption from the logic which governs the lives of others: the artist is the one kind of grown-up who can move through the world without having to explain their rationale, whether monetary, vocational or otherwise. In theory, at least, if you can get away with calling yourself an artist, you will never be required to demonstrate the usefulness, efficiency or productivity of your labours. Where public funding for the arts exists, if you can prove your eligibility, you may even join the privileged caste of those for whom this theory corresponds to reality. (And you may not: ‘performance targets’ for funded arts organisations can be punishingly unreal.)

    The danger of the artistic exception is that it serves to reinforce the rule: get too comfortable with your special status as the holder of an artistic licence and you risk sounding at best unaware of your privilege, at worst an active collaborator in the grimness of working life for your non-artist peers. (Arguably, the only ethical model of artistic funding is a Universal Basic Income, which is how many young writers, artists and musicians approached the unemployment benefits system of the UK as recently as the 1980s.)

    Begin Again

    And here we are, back in the early 21st century, where the legacies of the Romantics and the Enlightenment are both persistent and threadbare. We don’t know how to think without them, and yet they seem out of credit, like a congregation that attends out of habit rather than conviction, or not at all.

    A few years back, there was a fire at the Momart warehouse in east London. Among the dozens of artworks that went up in smoke were Tracey Emin’s tent and the Chapman brothers’ Hell. John Carey has some fun setting the reactions of callers to radio phone-ins against all those high-flown statements about the spiritual value of art: ‘Only in a culture where the art-world had been wholly discredited could the destruction of artworks elicit such rejoicing.’

    Under these conditions, do I truly propose to lay a further weight on the shoulders of my artist friends – to charge them with the task of reconfiguring the sacred? Not quite.

    If art gave refuge to the sacred and served as its most visible home in a time when it was otherwise scoured from public space, I believe the time has come for art to let it go. In the world we are headed into, it won’t be enough for an artist caste to be the custodians, the ones who help us see the world in terms that slip the net of measurable utility and exchange. One way or another, the ways of living which will be called for by the changes already underway include a recovery of the ability to value those aspects of reality which cannot be appropriated, which elude the direct gaze of reason, but which so colour our lives that we would not live without them.

    This is not a call for a new religion, nor for a revival of anything quite like the religions with which some of us are still familiar. I have met the sacred in the stone poetry of cathedrals and the carved language of the King James Bible, but buildings and books never had a monopoly. For that matter, art was not the only place the sacred found shelter, nor even the most important – though it was the grandest of shelters and the one that commanded most respect, here in the broken heartlands of modernity. Out at the places we thought of as the edges, there were those who knew themselves to be at the centres of their worlds, and who never thought us as clever as we thought ourselves. Even after all the suffering, after all the destruction of languages and landscapes and creatures, there are those who have not given up. But if we whose inheritance includes the relics of Christianity, Enlightenment and Romanticism have anything to bring to the work that lies ahead, then I suspect that one of the places it will come from is the work of artists who are willing to walk away from the story of their own exceptionality.

    And though I know that I am drawing simple patterns out of complex material, it seems to me that something like this has begun, at least in the corners of the world where I find myself. I don’t think it is an accident that several of the artists I have invoked here returned to work in the towns where they grew up; the pretensions you picked up in art school are not much use on the streets where people knew you as a child.

    Unable to appeal to the authority of art, you begin again, with whatever skills you have gathered along the way and whatever help you can find. You do what it takes to make work that has a chance of coming alive in the spaces where we meet, to build those spaces in such a way that it is safe to bring more of ourselves. This does not need to be grand; you are not arranging a wedding. A group of strangers sits around a table and shares a meal. A visitor tells a story around a fire. You half-remember a line you heard as a child, something about it being enough when two or three are gathered together.

    Published in Dark Mountain: Issue 12 ‘SANCTUM’, a special issue on the theme of ‘the sacred’.

  • How Climate Change Arrives

    How Climate Change Arrives

    The sun is out, the sky is a cloudless blue and the kids around me on the train are talking football. On mornings like this, it’s hard to hold onto the sense that we are in trouble, let alone that this trouble might be deep enough to derail our whole way of living.

    Even the numbers involved are underwhelming: two degrees of warming by the end of the century, three degrees, four… We’ve heard all the warnings, and still it is hard to equate these numbers with disaster, when they are smaller than the variations on the weather map from one day to the next.

    The year before last, I got a Facebook message from a Sami woman, a reindeer herder whose family follows the animals north each summer across the mountains from Sweden to Norway. A few days later, we were sitting drinking coffee in a meeting room in Stockholm. She talked about a journey to fix up her uncle’s cabin in early May, travelling on a winter road, the kind of road that runs across a frozen river. The river is always frozen until the third week of May — you can count on it — but this time, when they get there, it already thawed. There’s no getting across. Further north, the same summer, they come to a mountain where they always store food in the ice of a glacier, but this year the glacier is gone. In July, the temperature stays over thirty for three straight weeks as the reindeer huddle, miserable in the heat. This is not the future, not a warning about what happens if we fail: this is how things are, already. If your life is bound to the seasons, you don’t need charts or projections to know that something is going badly wrong.

    Our lives are bound to other things. Where we live, you can change seasons almost as easily as channels on the TV. Summer or winter are only ever an air ticket away. We see strawberries in Tesco in December and the strangeness of this hardly registers. Our liberation from the constraints of the seasons is assumed to be progress, but it might be wiser to call it an illusion. All that food in the supermarket is coming from places where the seasons still count. We still live off soil and sun and rain. There is no question of going ‘back to the land’, because we never left: we just stretched the chains that link us to it so far, we lost sense of what lies at the other end.

    For now, a sharp tug on the supply chain means an unwelcome bulge in our grocery bills, a corner to cut somewhere else in the household budget. Elsewhere, the consequences cut deeper. The Arab Spring started when Tunisian police confiscated the fruit stall of street-trader Mohamed Bouazizi. He burned himself to death in a desperate protest against corruption, but the waves of protest that followed across North Africa and the Middle East were fuelled by years of sharply rising food prices. The brutal war in Syria came on the heels of five years of drought. This is how climate change arrives, not as a clean case of cause and effect, but tangled up with the cruelties of dictators and the profits made from commodity market speculation, washing up in boats on package holiday coastlines.

    I don’t mean this as a call to guilt or despair. If you write about climate change, there’s a pressure to be upbeat, to talk about changing lightbulbs and the falling cost of solar panels. Not long ago, Britain went a day without burning coal for the first time since the Industrial Revolution. These things are also part of the story. I want to tell you, too, about all the knowledge that is barely on the maps we were given at school. Like how, even today, only 30% of the world’s food is produced within the agro-industrial system, while half of it is grown by peasant farmers, people who still have one foot in ways of making life work that are older than the fossil fuel economy. A Somerset farmer has three Syrian teenagers sent to him on a scheme: the first morning, they clear a weedy patch of land in no time, then one lad picks up a handful of soil and squeezes it in his hand. ‘Good humus,’ he says. Those already living with the consequences of climate change are not simply victims, they may yet be carriers of badly-needed knowledge in the tight times ahead.

    So yeah, I don’t want to doom you out. I just think we owe ourselves a little sobriety, a willingness to look hard at where we find ourselves and get a sense of what may be at stake. That last bit is tricky: one moment, we’re urged to ‘Save the Planet’ — like the stars of a superhero movie — and the next, we’re looking at a poster behind the Marks & Spencer’s checkout that says, ‘Plan A: Because there is no Plan B.’ And the more times you look at that poster, the more you have to ask, ‘No Plan B for who?’ For M&S and Tesco and strawberries in December and holidays in the Greek islands — or for liveable human existence? Or is that not a distinction we’re willing to consider?

    Don’t get me wrong: I’ll be stopping in at the supermarket when I pick up my son from nursery this afternoon. It’s just that my dad can remember when the supermarkets arrived: my gran would ride half way across Birmingham and back on the buses to claim the free frozen chicken you got on opening day. I can’t pretend the convenience doesn’t suit me. But if we’re really saying the future of our 4.5 billion-year-old planet is in doubt, then I’m not sure it’s wise to stake everything on getting to hang onto a way of doing things that’s been around for less than a lifetime.

    This essay first appeared in The Precariat, a newspaper published by the organisers of Planet B festival and distributed in Peterborough in July 2017.

  • The Fall of the Murdoch Wall

    The Fall of the Murdoch Wall

    The kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux, soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us…

    Tony Blair, 2 October 2001

    I didn’t make it to bed on election night, so it took till Saturday morning to have the experience of waking up in this new reality. All day, I felt a lightness, like the laws of physics just changed slightly — and scrolling through Facebook, I see others trying to make sense of this strange sensation. Mixed in among these posts, though, there are others that boil down to, ‘Will you all stop smoking whatever it is you’re smoking?’

    With that in mind — and with one or two sobering caveats — I want to explain why I’m convinced what happened last Thursday is among the two most important and hopeful events in British politics in my lifetime. And why that’s still true, even if you have no time for Corbyn’s politics or his party. (In which case, you can probably skip the next couple of paragraphs.)

    First, the sobering bit. Labour lost — it just lost less badly than everyone expected. May is back in Downing Street, promising another five years of Tory rule, only this time propped up by the even-nastier party. There’s plenty been said already about why the role of the DUP is troubling — not least, its potential to jeopardise what must be the most important and hopeful development in British politics in most of our lifetimes, peace in Northern Ireland. Oh yes, and meanwhile, a prime minister who couldn’t manage a competent election campaign is about to embark on the multidimensional chess of the Brexit negotiations.

    Now, you can come back against some of that: Labour’s vote grew by more than at any election since 1945, the party has momentum on its side, and neither May nor anyone else will be leading a Tory government for a full term. If it doesn’t fall sooner, a handful of lost by-elections will wipe out this government’s majority. (A thought sure to concentrate the minds of by-election voters — and Westminster averages about five by-elections a year.)

    But I want to talk about something more important.

    We’ve just had an election in which the full weight of The Sun and The Daily Mail was thrown at destroying Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party — and, by any standards, failed to do so. This is so big that, among the rest of the post-election turmoil, I don’t think we’ve grasped what it means yet.

    Since the 1980s, British politics has been locked in a basement by a gang of abusers, systematic perverters of democracy, chief among them Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre. 8 June, 2017 should be remembered as the day that we escaped.

    That look you see on the face of Labour MPs who spent two years opposing Corbyn at every turn — it’s the baffled gaze of battery chickens who find the door to their cage left open. Their every reflex was formed by fear of a corrupted and corrupting media. Now, they are disoriented by the possibility of freedom.

    I want to talk about why the current Labour leadership is strangely well-placed to take advantage of this new altered reality — and why seeing what just happened in these terms may be more helpful, when it comes to bridging divides, than assuming that resistance to Corbyn within the parliamentary party was all about ideological divisions.

    So, there are going to be four parts to this story: the first is about the British media, the second about Labour, the third about the Tories, and the fourth about what kind of an event this is — and where things go next.

    The Media

    When Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour party, the British press went into overdrive. According to a study by LSE researchers, only 11% of articles about Corbyn represented his views without alteration; in 74% of articles, his views were either ‘highly distorted’ or not represented at all. The leader of the parliamentary opposition was systematically delegitimised ‘through lack of voice or misrepresentation’, ‘through scorn, ridicule and personal attacks’ and ‘through association’ with terrorists and dictators.

    A newspaper can be as partisan as its editor and owner want it to be, but UK broadcasters are subject to a duty of impartiality. Yet the BBC seems to have been at best powerless to stop — and at worst complicit in — the capture of British democracy by a small ring of powerful abusers. It became so systematic, so embedded in the culture, that complaints weren’t taken seriously: when the BBC Trust upheld a complaint over a report in which Laura Kuenssberg made it look like Corbyn was answering a different question to the one he was asked, the director of BBC News dismissed the finding. Eighteen months later, in the final days of the election campaign, that misleading clip was still being shared widely with nothing to alert viewers to the upheld complaint. Overall, the role of broadcasters has been to recycle and amplify the newspaper attacks on Corbyn—something Barry Gardiner called out the Today programme over early in the election campaign.

    The intensity of the press attacks on the current Labour leader may have been unprecedented, but it is part of a pattern of abuse that goes back — well, how far? I’ll be 40 this year, I’ve followed every UK election since 1987 (listening to Radio 4 on a transistor radio in the school playground), and I can’t remember a time when we had a normally-functioning democracy.

    But the point where it became undeniable was the 1992 election and the famous front-page claim: ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’. Whether that was true hardly matters — for the next 25 years, British politics has been conducted on the assumption that it was. Until last Thursday.

    The Breaking of Labour

    Like a lot of the manoeuvres accompanying the birth of New Labour, Tony Blair’s courtship of Rupert Murdoch could be cast as a necessary evil. Yet there was always an excess to it; a suspicion that submission to Murdoch left him feeling excited, rather than sullied. The sense of betrayal which many Labour people feel when they think of Blair is usually explained in terms of Iraq, or of a preference for purity and principles over power; but when you think about what The Sun had done to Labour the last time around, the way Blair cultivated — and took pleasure in — his power-friendship with its owner was a fuck-you to the movement he was meant to be leading. And the impression of a weird edge to their relationship was bizarrely confirmed, after he’d left office, when he first became godfather to one of Murdoch’s daughters, then got accused by News Corp insiders of having an affair with Murdoch’s soon-to-be ex-wife.

    Gordon Brown’s experience with the press was more straightforwardly miserable. He fretted about what Murdoch would say, but lacked Blair’s knack for flirting with Labour’s natural enemies, and his attempts came off clumsily. (Remember the time he invited Margaret Thatcher to Downing Street?) Thinking back on the tormented figure he cut, the stories of rages and sulks and thrown computer hardware, I’m wondering now — was this the behaviour of a decent man who thought politics was a serious business, but found himself trapped instead inside a game where every move had to be calculated for how it would play on the front of the next day’s Sun?

    This brings us to Ed Miliband. Of all the politicians from New Labour’s ‘next generation’, he came closest to seeing the possibilities which Corbyn has now made a reality. Even his much-mocked meeting with Russell Brand in the closing days of the 2015 election campaign looks a lot less daft, given the wave of young and disenfranchised voters who showed up at the polls last week. But the instincts that drew Miliband in this direction were tripped up by a tendency to hesitation and to pessimism about politics.

    Two quick stories that show this.

    First, in December 2010, as the student movement started kicking off, Miliband apparently wanted to come down to the UCL occupation and talk with the students — an idea that divided his advisors, and that ultimately didn’t happen. Now, we can all guess what Corbyn would have done in his place, but the point is that Miliband’s instinct was to do the same thing — yet the supposed boundaries of what you can and can’t do in British politics, without getting destroyed, made him hesitate.

    Another story… Ten years ago, I became an internet entrepreneur by accident. A small project snowballed into an educational web start-up, and by the summer of 2007, one of my co-founders was faced with a decision— was he willing to commit to the responsibility with which we were about to find ourselves? When we met, he’d been working at a think tank with close ties to New Labour — and one Sunday morning at a festival, he ran into an old friend who was now Miliband’s speechwriter. As they were talking about the choice he faced, Miliband himself strolled up and sat down beside them. Having listened for a while, he said, ‘You know, if I could start again, I’d be a social entrepreneur. That’s how you really change the world.’

    And then came Jeremy Corbyn. What mattered about this Labour leader was not that he came from so far to the left, but from so far outside the game of ‘realistic’ politics which had led the likes of Miliband into that kind of pessimism about what politics could do. Meanwhile, the certainty of all the players within that game that he was headed for destruction meant he was spared the counsel of the kind of cautious advisors who fed Miliband’s hesitancy — because, for the past two years, those people just wouldn’t touch Corbyn with a bargepole.

    The Spoiling of the Tories

    The damage done to British politics by this decades-long cycle of abuse is obviously asymmetric—maybe I’m wrong, but I can’t see many areas in which the Tories’ desires have been constrained by the influence of Murdoch and Dacre. Yet, in their different ways, both parties have been deformed by that influence.

    While the systematic abuse of democracy bred a broken generation of politicians in the Labour party, it gifted the Tories a spoiled generation:

    • Some of them appear to truly believe the grim picture of the country they aspire to govern peddled by papers like the Daily Mail.
    • Others were trained in the arts of distortion and fabrication through earlier careers as journalists and columnists — and assume these skills are adequate to the task of governing a country.
    • None of them has had to engage in a real democratic tussle over the direction of the country, where their opponents don’t enter the ring already hamstrung.

    That’s how a party once led by Winston Churchill ends up with a prime minister who resembles a malfunctioning robot — and a clownish con-man as its leader-in-waiting.

    Again, this story goes back decades — but it came to a crunch in the past year. For just when, in Corbyn, Labour at last had a leader who didn’t fear the right-wing press, the Tories found themselves led by someone who aligned herself more tightly to them than her predecessors. Theresa May sought to govern Britain as an avatar of the Daily Mail. As Anthony Barnett wrote in October, this meant a shift away from the dominance of Murdoch — which had lasted from the Thatcher era, through the New Labour years, and survived the phone-hacking scandal (in which David Cameron’s director of communications, the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, was sent to jail). More than this, as Will Davies points out, the economic irrationality of Brexit left May’s Conservatism more dependent on both Dacre and Murdoch: in contrast to Thatcherism, ‘it can’t rely on cheerleading from the CBI or the Financial Times.’

    So the scene was set for the general election of 2017. It was not the threatened Brexit election — nor was it quite an election on the radical promises made by Corbyn’s Labour. (That’s what the next one will be about…) Rather, what we got was a Tory prime minister who had tied herself to the masthead of the Daily Mail versus a Labour leader with the guts to bet that the emperors would turn out to be naked. If the question was ‘Who governs Britain?’, the surge in support for Labour gave a resounding answer: not the Dacres and the Murdochs.

    And yet, among the rest of the past week’s noise, not everyone has heard — with Michael Gove returning to the front bench, the chatter is of Murdoch’s influence over the Tories rising again. Well, long may that continue.

    What kind of event was this election?

    This feels like the angriest and the most hopeful thing I’ve written in years. Thinking about the role of Murdoch and Dacre and their co-conspirators, the hold they’ve had over democracy in the UK, I keep coming back to phrases that suggest sexual abuse — and maybe that’s distasteful, I don’t know, but the anger hits me like it did when the BBC finally had to face up to having filled our childhood afternoons with celebrity paedophiles. Maybe it’s because of how long it’s gone on, how many people have known and treated it as just how things are. And maybe I’ve no right to use such an analogy, because it’s not something that’s ever been done to me. Honestly, I don’t know.

    What I do know is that we have another frame of reference for what happens when a gang of unelected bullies takes political control over a country and turns its ‘democracy’ into a pantomime, staged within limits which they get to determine. When I was a kid, half of Europe fitted that description — and then, one autumn, young people called the bluff of the people who thought they ran their countries, and it all came down faster than anyone could believe.

    I’m not saying what just happened is as big as the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the hope that’s mixed with the anger is because I think it might just be the same kind of event.

    What do I mean? Well, firstly, that this isn’t a swing of the pendulum. Word is that Murdoch stormed out of The Times’ election party when the exit poll was announced — and well he might, because we are never going back to a world in which he gets to determine what the Labour party can or can’t do. And that means that Britain is a democracy again — not a perfect democracy, and with an electoral system that’s badly in need of reform, but a country where real democratic change feels possible.

    The generational nature of what happened matters, too. Because it gives the lie to all the smug bullshit about young people not caring — and because those young people will be back, next time around — and because, just in terms of demographics, it means that the fear-fuelled, tabloid Toryism of this election campaign is on its way out.

    A wall that ran down the middle of British society has been breached, and my guess is there are still more people pouring through it in the days since the election. That breach isn’t going to go away because the Tories find a less robotic front-person.

    As for Labour, it’s a strange chance that not only does the party find itself with a fearless and vindicated leader, but, in Tom Watson, a deputy leader who took on the Murdoch empire with courage over phone-hacking — making him a strikingly appropriate figure to help the party orient itself to a world in which Murdoch and his like are no longer to be feared.

    A final thought (or three)

    A few years ago, I sat in the office of an editor in Prague, a man who had been among the crowds in Wenceslas Square in those late autumn weeks of 1989. He’d been a student, then, and we talked about the disillusionments that followed.

    ‘I’ve lived 21 years under communism,’ he said slowly, ‘and 21 years under capitalism — and I can tell you what’s wrong with both.’

    Did he ever regret what they had done, I wondered?

    ‘I don’t regret what we did,’ he replied. ‘I regret what we let the grown-ups do, after we went home.’

    The fall of the Murdoch wall may be a huge thing for British democracy, but its rise was part of something bigger that stretches far beyond the rainy islands where I did my growing up. One day soon, I need to write up a set of thoughts that have been gathering for a year or so, about how we map the politics of ‘neoliberal realism’ and the search for the exits — a story that takes in the Brexit vote and Corbyn’s rise, but also the shifting political landscape in other corners of Europe.

    Meanwhile, beyond all this, there is the low background roar of loss, the knowledge that we are living in an age of endings. I’m writing this late at night, after the first day of a meeting on ‘rapid decarbonisation’ — and the message from the scientists here is beyond sobering. At times, it’s hard to hold in view the different scales of crisis: the unravelling of an economic ideology that’s less than a lifetime old, playing out against the backdrop of the end of a 10,000 year mild period in the Earth’s climate which happens to have encompassed all that we’ve known as civilisation, and an ongoing mass extinction, the sixth the planet has seen in its long life. All these endings are entangled with each other. We have brought about an almighty bottleneck, and it’s hard to say in what shape our kind will come through it, except that the journey will change us in ways beyond the imaginings of the things I’ve been writing about here.

    But if I stare at these realities and still, despite the woeful absence of such matters from the debate in this election, see some hope in the unexpected wave that just washed through Britain’s political system, it’s because it will take waves like this — sudden ruptures that spread like rumours through the spaces of conversation and networks of relations that make up our lives — if things are to turn out better than often seems likely in the tight times that lie ahead.

    I was going to wrap this up by saying something like, ‘Don’t go home and let the grown-ups fuck it up.’ But then I read Dan Hancox’s piece this morning on the extraordinary surge of grassroots campaigning that produced last week’s results, and I’m like — go home? As if you would. As if any of us are about to do that, now.

    Published on Medium in the wake of the 2017 UK general election.

  • Labour Through the Looking Glass: 15 Early Morning Speculations on the Corbyn Surge

    Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”

    “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

    1. If only Labour had a reason to exist…

    I keep thinking of Landon Kettlewell, the dot com entrepreneur from Cory Doctorow’s novel, Makers. At the start of the book, he has just bought up the exhausted shells of Kodak and Duracell. To an audience of puzzled Silicon Valley journalists, he explains that these companies have history, infrastructure, administrators, facilities, supplier relationships, distribution and logistics. All they lack is a reason to exist.

    To their own and everybody else’s surprise, the Labour establishment looks to be losing their party the same way they lost Scotland. That’s what set me thinking about Kettlewell. A month earlier, the Corbyn surge would have sounded impossible, a piece of wild political science fiction. Now, they were throwing every trick in the playbook at the Islingtonian candidate, to the opposite of the intended effect, and casting around for explanations as to what the hell is going on.

    So here’s one more explanation to try out: Labour is Kodak, Labour is Duracell, Labour is the shell of something that has lost its reason to exist. As it currently stands, it is useless, but it is also the heir to a whole stack of resources that could be very useful indeed, if only it had a purpose.

    Kettlewell has a solution for ‘Kodacell’: he is going to turn it inside out and put the companies’ resources at the disposal of a network, a grassroots network of tens of thousands of hackers and makers. Between them, they will make it useful again.

    And so the absurd thought came to me: what if this is what Jeremy Corbyn’s election ends up doing to the Labour party?

    2. What does this look like, if it works?

    Bear with me, this will take some time, but there may be pieces here that start to fit together.

    I’m thinking about what it looks like, if this works. No need to ask now whether Corbyn can win — that was last week’s question — but winning is the easy part and there are plenty of scenarios circulating for how things then go wrong. Could we construct a scenario for how things go right? Is there a plausible account of the next few years, in which a Corbyn victory turns out to be the best thing that had happened to the Labour party in a long while? And how would current events look, from that looking-glass future?

    I’m not a member of the Labour party, I don’t have a vote in this leadership election — and I’ve hesitated to join the ranks of the registered supporters who will get one. But in the raw hours of May 8th, I wrote something that resonated with a lot of people who would have preferred some kind of Labour-led government to five more years of rule by the rich, for the rich.

    Here’s a taste of that post:

    What we have seen is a failure of politics, a failure of democracy at a cultural level, part of a larger story playing out across the struggling countries of the post-industrial west…

    Labour is about to endure a tug of war between those who believe it needs to go leftwards and those who believe it needs to go rightwards. The truth is, neither of these directions will be much help. Right now, the only way is down.

    That came from a place of loss; I’m writing this now from the vanishing point where scepticism and hope converge. My first reaction to the Corbyn surge was that this is wishful thinking, a shortcut, an attempt to bypass the journey down the hole into which we had fallen. But it’s worth at least trying out the alternative, the possibility that this might be one route into the upside-down world we need to learn to navigate.

    A caveat, before I try to trace that route. My post-election post was about larger social and political currents. This one is about the Labour party, an organisation I only know from the outside. So it’s probably best to take what follows as one more piece of wild political science fiction. (Especially the part where I start writing Corbyn’s victory speech.)

    It is after three in the morning, the sky is getting paler, and this is a story a man is telling himself to see if it sounds believable.

    3. On the appropriate response to losing an election

    Labour, as it currently existed, was useless. If the election campaign had left any doubts, these were buried by Harriet Harman’s attempt to explain why the party would not be opposing the welfare bill.

    ‘We can’t simply say to the public, you were wrong,’ explained the acting leader of the opposition. (Except, that was, the 75% of the public who hadn’t voted for the Conservatives, or hadn’t voted at all.)

    This wasn’t an aberration, it was an unusually clear expression of a mind-set that suffused the Labour establishment. According to this mind-set, the appropriate response to losing an election is not to do a better job of making your party’s arguments, nor to do a better job of coming up with convincing alternatives that embody what your party stands for, but to do a better job of imitating the party that just beat you.

    Those who thought of this as ‘realism’ thought of themselves as the heirs to New Labour, but this did New Labour a disservice. Whatever you felt about it, once upon a time, New Labour had worked. Some combination of Blair’s talent for summoning up conviction on demand, Brown’s brute cunning and the times in which they found themselves made it a formidable operation, until the men at the heart of it spun off into various flavours of self-delusion. But if Blair and Brown had been the Gallagher brothers of Brit Pop politics, the current Labour frontbench was a dodgy Oasis tribute act. The tunes might be the same, only if you thought they were going to wow an audience, you hadn’t really grasped how this works.

    Harsh? Sure, but this matters, because it was the backdrop against which Corbyn’s leadership campaign started to make sense to far more people than even he could have expected.

    4. An unexpected legacy

    Let’s just say the Corbyn thing worked out. We’ll come to how this happened, but one consequence was to recast the Miliband legacy.

    He became the leader whose reform of the way that Labour chooses its leaders paved the way for one of the great transformations in the party’s history. And there was a certain poetic justice to this, because inside the conflicted soul of Ed Miliband, there was a politician who wanted to be in the place where Corbyn now found himself, riding a wave of networked radicalism.

    But in truth, it was a piece of luck. A reform designed to solve one problem accidentally solved another: the great conundrum of British politics, south of the Tweed, as of 2015. Like most other western democracies, a strange insurgent political energy was bubbling up from below the surface of politics as we had known it. But how could this energy ever break through in a parliamentary system locked up by first-past-the-post?

    The solution was to take over one of the existing big parties — and Miliband’s legacy was to create the conditions under which this could happen.

    5. The Return of (Groucho) Marxism

    If it took Miliband’s reforms to make it possible, it took a candidate like Corbyn to realise that possibility. The day that nominations closed, he told an interviewer he was standing because ‘It was my turn.’ As Diane Abbott and John McDonnell had carried the standard of the Labour left in previous contests, he had been persuaded to do so this time around.

    His lack of ambition was palpable — and this turned out to be his attraction. Here was the rarest thing, a politician with no hunger for power. The sincerity of this was unfakeable, backed up by the evidence of thirty years’ unfashionable dedication to his principles. (Another kind of left-winger — the roguish kind, a Livingstone or a Galloway — would not have had this effect.)

    Well beyond the natural constituency of a politician with his views, there was an appetite for this, a kind of electoral version of the Marxist theory of clubs: ‘I don’t care to vote for any candidate who is after my vote.’

    Meanwhile, as they tacked leftwards in response to Corbyn’s unexpected appeal, the other candidates seemed to embody that other Marxist dictum: ‘These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.’

    6. Occupy the Party

    As the newspaper columnists woke up to what was happening, they reached for easy historical parallels. Among the most popular was the Militant tendency, the Trotskyite group whose entryist tactics saw them expelled from the Labour party in the 1980s.

    The comparison reflects a failure to understand how the world had changed in the intervening decades. A takeover might be under way, but it was of an entirely different kind.

    Militant was a party-within-a-party, a Marxist sect with an ideological leader, hierarchical, disciplined in its tactics, wedded to its own ‘correct analysis’. It belonged to another era, an era in which you met someone who told you a totally different story of how the world worked to anything you’d ever heard, gave you a newspaper and invited you to a meeting. An era in which almost the only way to develop and sustain a critique of the society in which you had grown up was to adhere to an alternative orthodoxy, a support group of people who schooled you in a different way of making sense of the world.

    This mode of politicisation belonged to an era in which Google and Wikipedia were unimaginable. You had no way of checking or filtering the information and analysis on offer from your new friends, little chance of exploring and developing it. The experience resembled joining an evangelical sect.

    The survivors of these sects may have got excited by the Corbyn surge, but the character of the surge was quite different: it resembled the waves of networked disruption that first broke into view in the events of 2011. This was not a stealthy entryist takeover, years in the planning, it was a spontaneous movement to Occupy the Labour party, a suggestion taken up with an energy that took everyone by surprise. Such networks are like a mood in action, a rolling conversation that gathers momentum and brings the boundaries of possibility into question.

    One of the characteristics of such a network is that it learns, experiments, adapts. In Greece, Spain and Scotland, the energy of the network had already evolved from the horizontalist purity of 2011 into a series of experiments in interfacing with the top-down forms of institutional politics. On each occasion, this had happened rapidly and unexpectedly. Now, it seemed to be happening again.

    7. After all the wild words

    So much for the events leading up to Corbyn’s election and how they came to look in hindsight. Now the hard part: what had to happen after September 12th, for this not to turn out to be the disaster so widely forecast?

    The new leader had to reach out to three different groups: a parliamentary party that would never have chosen him in a million years, the movement of members and supporters that he had enthused, and the wider electorate.

    After all the wild words that had been thrown at his campaign, he had to claim the ground of common sense and pragmatism. Opposition to austerity was not some revolutionary project: it was a position backed by some of the world’s best-known economists, Nobel laureates among them. A government’s finances don’t work like the finances of a household — and yes, this is harder to explain than the ‘maxed-out credit card’ story that the Conservatives had been offering for the past five years, but so far Labour had not even tried to counter this.

    ‘From now,’ he told them, ‘our job is to challenge austerity, to help people learn about how finances actually work and how the decisions that shape their lives are taken.’

    To do this, we need to work with everyone who shares our desire for a fairer, more just and more liveable society. If Labour could join forces with the Tories and the Lib Dems to campaign for Scotland to remain part of the United Kingdom, then we should be willing to work with other parties, social movements and groups within society to campaign for an alternative to austerity. That doesn’t mean we stop being the Labour party, or that we form electoral pacts that take away people’s chance of voting for a Labour MP, but we need to take up our responsibility as the largest and one of the oldest forces within a wider movement for social justice.

    8. The MPs

    The talk of an instant coup came to nothing: even the hardest Blairites could see it was suicide, and no one was really enthused by the prospect of importing another Miliband. But the parliamentary party was biding its time. Corbyn wasn’t their second choice of leader, he was their last choice, the leader no one had expected.

    Meanwhile, another unexpected effect of his victory was the split between the Blairite true believers and the bulk of the party. While it prospered, New Labour had justified itself on the grounds of pragmatism: your heart might lie to the left, but your head accepted the need to move rightwards. When Blair said he wouldn’t want the party to win with Corbyn in charge, he revealed the unspeakable truth: that he would prefer a Tory government to what most still thought of as a ‘real’ Labour government. This surprised no one, yet now that it was spoken, the internal coalition on which New Labour had been built began to unravel.

    As it became clear that, against everyone’s predictions, Corbyn was holding his own at Prime Minister’s Questions and establishing himself in the leadership, a couple of the true Blairites left parliament to spend more time with their careers. In the resulting byelections, with candidates drawn from the grassroots movement, rather than the party machine, Labour saw its majorities increase, and this steadied the party a little. Perhaps the new direction was not electoral suicide, after all.

    A surprising number of MPs began to rediscover the reasons they had come into politics in the first place. The renewal of the parliamentary party would not be complete, though, until the arrival of the 2020 cohort. For the first time in a generation, it felt like Labour was represented in parliament by people who were recognisable to their voters, who had worked in ordinary jobs, been self-employed, knew what it was like to live on the minimum wage or to queue at the job centre.

    9. The movement

    Over the past weeks, tens of thousands of people have found a faith in politics, a faith they never had, or thought they had lost long ago. It is not a blind faith nor an unquestioning one, it is not dogmatic. At its root, it is a faith in each other, as human beings, that we are something more than just self-serving consumers.

    The future of the Labour party under Corbyn’s leadership would depend on what happened next with the movement which had grown up around his candidacy. ‘The job of this movement is not over,’ he told them. ‘There are four and a half years until the next election. We can’t wait that long to start rebuilding society, we need to start today, in the places where we live.’

    There were three things that needed doing, now, he went on.

    First, to start conversations that went deeper than doorstep canvassing, those five million checkbox encounters that had amounted to so little in the general election campaign. Labour needed to listen to people, not just when they fed back the soundbite opinions circulating in the daily papers, but in spaces where they had room to reflect on their own experiences, and to start making sense of the forces shaping their lives. The task of creating those spaces started in people’s kitchens, in rooms above pubs, in empty units in shopping centres, with house parties, meet-ups or pizza nights. Members of the leader’s team would show up to these events, sometimes the leader himself, and party organisers helped find guests and speakers, people to get the conversations started and to carry ideas from one town to the next.

    The second task was for members of this movement to get active in the places where they lived, offering practical help and support to those hit hardest by austerity. ‘There’s a word for this,’ Corbyn told them, ‘an old fashioned word: it’s called solidarity.’ This was a movement for a society where no one would need a food bank, but while food banks existed, its members were going to be there, alongside the people running them and the people dependent on them, because these were the people with whom society would be rebuilt.

    The final task would be a voter registration campaign on a scale that Britain had never seen.

    10. The voters

    The panic and despair of the Labour establishment at Corbyn’s victory was based, more than anything, on their certainty that he could never deliver electoral success. (That the same people had been certain, two months earlier, that he could never succeed in the leadership election did not cause them to question this.)

    What were the factors that proved them wrong? The effectiveness of the voter registration campaign — not only in getting people onto the electoral roll, but in generating a wider sense that, this time, voting would matter — was clearly part of the story.

    But another part of it was the gap between the way the political establishment thought about voters and the messier reality of the voters themselves. Most people don’t have a political opinion or identity in the way that people who dedicate their lives to politics tend to think of these things. The left-right spectrum is irrelevant to them, not because they subscribe to any of the analyses used to argue that this frame is obsolete, but because the words just don’t mean much. What they do have is a gut-level feeling about the direction in which society is travelling and a trust in their own intuitive judgement about whether someone trying to persuade them of something believes the words coming out of his or her own mouth.

    Mainstream politicians had tried to respond to UKIP by borrowing as much of their rhetoric of xenophobia as they could get away with. Just like Gordon Brown with Gillian Duffy, the assumption was that UKIP voters were bigots, it’s just that bigots had now been identified as a target demographic. Yet this was too simple an interpretation of UKIP’s support, which was rooted in a deeper, vaguer sense that things were headed in the wrong direction, had been headed that way for a long time, and that nothing these voters heard from the mainstream politicians seemed to acknowledge this or reflect the experience of their lives.

    11. The obstacles

    Among the reasons people wrote off the chances of Corbyn’s Labour was the hostility of the press. Yet so much ink had been thrown at Red Ed and his Britain-hating dad, there was no stronger vocabulary left with which to damn his successor, so the message that Labour was lurching dangerously leftwards just sounded like more of the same. Except that what viewers identified when watching Miliband was his awkwardness, the constant sense that he was trying to work out who you wanted him to be, whereas you could see that Corbyn knew who he was and was happy with it.

    Meanwhile, somewhere in the shadows of the defence and intelligence communities, contingency plans must have been drawn up for the possibility of a prime minister committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from NATO. But whatever its calculations, there were no outward signs of the deep state moving against the Labour leader.

    The other predictable source of hostility, big business and the City, was preoccupied with the fall-out of the second wave of the global financial crisis, which broke in the autumn of 2016. It was that October that Labour first took a clear lead in the polls. The party also benefited from the damage done to the Conservatives by the deepening paedophile scandal.

    12. Back to the allotment

    Of course, in the end, the people who said Jeremy Corbyn would never become prime minister turned out to be right.

    In September 2018, in his conference speech, he announced his intention to step down as leader. The leadership campaign that followed could hardly live up to the drama of 2015, but it was historic for another reason, as it led to the election of Labour’s first woman leader. Three years earlier, when she was among the backbenchers elected to Corbyn’s first shadow cabinet, few would have identified her as on the left of the party, but the platform on which she stood combined the anti-austerity commitments of her predecessor with a pledge to reform the electoral system.

    As for Corbyn himself, he was only too happy to leave the despatch box and get back to his allotment.

    13. Beyond a nostalgia for social democracy

    It is August 2015, it’s getting close to six in the morning, and this is a story a man has been telling himself to see if it sounds believable.

    Does it even come close? I’m not sure.

    I can convince myself that there is a movement happening that could go far beyond the leadership contest, that the reach of the kind of politics Corbyn represents could go a lot wider than those who identify as on the left, and that a Labour party that confidently made alternative arguments would have a decent chance of reshaping political debate, despite the hostility of the media. (A hostility that hardly goes away if the party tries to play it safe, instead.) The hardest part is imagining the parliamentary party coming together around a Corbyn leadership, or at least giving it a chance.

    At the level of political ideas, despite a lot of what’s being written, Corbyn’s platform hardly comes across as ‘hard left’. (For comparison, try watching this televised debate with Militant from 1982, where Peter Taaffe declares that Labour should nationalise 80–85% of the economy and ‘introduce a socialist plan of production’.)

    What I do get from his campaign is a distinct flavour of ‘the Scooby-Doo theory of neoliberalism’: the idea that, if it hadn’t been for those meddling neoliberals (Friedman, Thatcher, Reagan, Blair), we could have got away with a social democratic end of history. That way of thinking always feels like it gives its enemies too much credit, makes them masters of events, rather than the opportunists that they were. Neoliberalism today is hollower than it appears, but that doesn’t mean we know what an equivalent of social democracy looks like for a world of international capital and networked individuals — or what an equivalent of social democracy looks like that knows how to include the people crossing the Mediterranean in leaky boats and climbing fences at Calais.

    These are hard questions, but the space in which we can articulate them and think carefully about them seems to be opening up. Whatever else comes of the Corbyn surge, it should help to enlarge that space.

    The most encouraging thing I’ve noticed in his campaign is the crowdsourcing of policy ideas: 1,200 people contributed to theNorthern Future document. This has to be better than a policy-making process concentrated among the London-based thinktanks and inner circles populated by PPE graduates who have never worked anywhere beyond Westminster. It seems like the best chance for developing the principles of those supporting Corbyn into a policy platform that is not simply nostalgic for the golden age of social democracy. And it’s how Landon Kettlewell would make policy, if he took over Labour.

    14. The reality-based community

    There’s one other line that’s been ringing in my head as I read the churn of comment pieces, the phrase that Karl Rove used to Ron Suskind. ‘Guys like you,’ he said, ‘are in what we call the reality-based community.’ For many, it summed up the delusions of the Bush regime, and belonging to the reality-based community became a badge of pride. But I always thought that Rove had half a point, when he made that distinction between those who study reality and those who create it.

    The alarmed voices of the Labour establishment surely think of themselves as the reality-based community. The panic grows as they find those enthused by Corbyn are seemingly immune to reasoned arguments. But reality is complex, it isn’t just composed of facts, those facts are always entangled with perceptions, and with stories that shape those perceptions. A lot of the reality to which Labour’s realists are currently appealing is made up almost entirely of perception, since its facts consist of the results of opinion surveys and focus groups. It’s worth asking whether these methods borrowed from the market research industry really plumb the depths of the electorate, or even its shallows. Not to mention, at what point perceptions that have become dislocated from the facts get to overrule them, whether in relation to the effectiveness of austerity or the impact of immigration.

    Another chunk of the reality to which the realists are appealing consists of stories. For a story to work, it needs to show a certain respect to the facts involved, but there will often be more than one story that fits the facts. When Polly Toynbee writes that her heart lies to the left of Corbyn, but the 1983 election result tells her this would be futile, she is invoking what has been the definitive story of Labour’s wilderness years and its return to power under Blair, the story of ‘the longest suicide note in history’. Other stories are available, though, including one which might mention that, when the Tories took the seat of Lewisham East from Labour at the 1983 election by a margin of 1,909, they were helped by the 9,351 votes polled by the breakaway SDP, whose candidate was Polly Toynbee.

    15. You get one chance

    It’s nearly time for breakfast. I’ve been practicing like this, the last few mornings, because I want to believe that there is a constructive insurgency going on, a wave of networked disruption that will renew the Labour party, remind it why it exists and open up the politics of the country where I did my growing up. I want to believe that the party can take this and not just tear itself apart.

    Give me a few more days, maybe I’ll have got enough practice.

    Meanwhile, here’s one thing I am sure of: if Corbyn doesn’t win, there will never be another chance for a grassroots surge of this kind within the Labour party. The system for electing a leader will be reformed all over again, the gap that Miliband opened will be sealed and the control of the parliamentary party reasserted. And perhaps the result will be that the pendulum of politics continues to swing jerkily from blue to red and back again, as if by some ahistorical force of nature, but my hunch is that the gap between the reality talked about by politicians and the realities of people’s lives will continue to grow, the pressure will continue to build, and sooner or later it will find a way to break through the cracks of the existing system. Since I’m writing this from Sweden, which many of you still think of as the spiritual home of social democracy, let me remind you how ugly that can look.

    First published on my old blog, the week that Jeremy Corbyn took the lead in polls for the 2015 Labour party leadership election.

  • The Friendly Society: On Cooperation, Utopia, Friendship & the Commons

    We are looking at a photograph from Amsterdam, 1868, thirty or so men in black and white. Even in the flesh, they would be black and white: black overcoats with blacker collars, faces pale as November and framed by various symmetries of facial hair, top hats like a row of chimneys. Despite what the hats might suggest, these men are workers, craftsmen, dressed in their Sunday clothes, outside a cafe called The Swan. They stand formally, the members of an association shortly to constitute itself as the Construction Society for the Acquisition of One’s Home. On its first night, hundreds more will join. By spring, the membership will have passed two thousand.

    Their gaze presents us with a question, and the way I remember it, our conversation in Gothenburg was an attempt to put this question into words. Ana and Marc framed it for us first, with images of abandoned, half-built housing blocks in a Spain where someone is evicted every fifteen minutes. They traced a line along which the cooperative associations of the early socialist movement had been absorbed into the great public housing programmes of the mid-20th century, only for their achievements to be liquidated in the neoliberal decades that followed, leading to the current crisis. Why is it, they asked, that we struggle to find the confidence to remake reality that we see in the actions of these men?

    Running through this discussion was a yearning for and an unease with utopias. The shadows of futures past—made concrete in the geometries of Biljemeer, Tensta, Novi Beograd or Park Hill—lean over us. The drawings of La Città Nuova look so familiar, it is hard to imagine the promise they once held. After the failure of the planned utopia, can there be a utopia from below—something improvised, emergent? Are our improvisational, networked ways of working really capable of building anything strong and lasting?

    Into this conversation, Kim brought another current of history: the stories of the commons of preindustrial England and their enclosure. Unfamiliar words evoke the strangeness of these ways of living with each other and with the land. If the workers’ movements of the later 19th century mark the beginning of one story, they also belong to the ending of another. As I have written elsewhere:

    The history of the industrial revolution is a history of massive resistance on the part of ordinary people. This resistance fell into two phases: in the first, it was an attempt to defend a way of living; in the second, which began when this way of living had largely been destroyed, it became an attempt to negotiate better conditions within the new world made by the destroyers. What had been lost was a way of living in which most production took place on a domestic scale, interwoven with the lives of families and communities. Work was hard, but it varied with the seasons and required skill and judgement. Many of the basic needs of a household could be met by its own members or their immediate neighbours, not least through access to common land, so that people were not entirely exposed to the mercilessness of the market.

    It is not necessary to romanticise the realities of pre-industrial society: the intensity and duration of the struggle which accompanied its passing are evidence enough. (In 1812, at one of the high-water-marks of this struggle, the British government deployed 12,000 troops against the Luddites in four counties of England, more than Wellington had under his command that year in the ongoing war against Napoleon.) The relationship between this first phase of resistance and the labour movement that would arise out of its defeat has most often been presented as a progressive development: the dawning of a new political consciousness, and with it new forms of organisation and effective action. Yet it was also an accommodation to what had previously been fought against: the new division of the world between the space of work, dedicated to the sole purpose of maximising production, and the domestic space, now dedicated to reproduction and consumption. The sentimental idealisation of the home as a woman’s sphere originates in this division, as established in Victorian England. Behind this advertising hoarding lay the real transformation of the home from a living centre of activity to a dormitory, a garage in which the worker is parked when not in use.⁠

    The swelling of the cities was driven by the loss of earlier possibilities for living with the land. (In England, the process of enclosing common land was generally referred to as ‘Improvement’ by those who organised and profited from it.) In the seminar, Kim talked about the persistence and reemergence of customary practices among the displaced, even in the new context of the city.⁠ New laws were required to proscribe activities which, because they took place outside the monetised economy, were illegible to both state and market.

    As the conversation went on, Kim brought us back around to those men in Amsterdam. How could they trust each other enough to realise a thing like the Construction Society together, to rely on each other for something as fundamental as meeting the need for shelter and living space? ‘Perhaps what we are really asking is, how can two thousand people become friends with each other?’ (In English-speaking countries, the mutual associations of this time were often known as ‘Friendly Societies’.)

    By now, a set of words had started to form a constellation on my notepad: friendship, utopia, commons, public, cooperative. In the relationship between them was a provisional answer to the question we had been circling around. What follows is a first attempt at spelling out that provisional answer, though perhaps it is best read as a rough sketch for a more ambitious project.

    The connection between friendship and the commons had been put into my mind by the Mexican intellectual and activist Gustavo Esteva. During a conversation we filmed in December 2012, he returned twice to the suggestion that friendship was the key to the possibility of new commons. ‘If you want to abandon that feeling of precarity, then it’s to rediscover that the only way to have a kind of security is at the grassroots. With your friends. With the kinds of new commons emerging everywhere.’⁠ Particularly in Europe, particularly in the urban context, he emphasised, if we want to talk about commons we should start with friendship. Since this is not where people usually start, and since friendship hardly sounds solid enough to be a starting point that will be taken seriously, these comments stuck with me.

    At the Commoning the City conference in Stockholm in April 2013, I spoke about this, and suggested that one reason for starting with friendship is that it gets us beyond the idea of a commons as a pool of resources. Anthony McCann has observed that ‘resource-management models’ of the commons mirror the arguments made historically by the defenders of enclosure: these discourses, he argues, ‘tend to work more in the spirit of a Trojan horse than an analytic tool.’⁠ In contrast to the discourses of resource-management, Ivan Illich made the distinction between ‘commons within which people’s subsistence activities are embedded, and resources that serve for the economic production of those commodities on which modern survival depends.’⁠ To see the world as made up of resources is already to have enclosed it in one’s mind, to reduce it to a stockpile of raw materials to be exploited for the production of commodities. Illich adds that the English language ‘during the last 100 years has lost the ability to make this distinction’. Certainly, there is little left that is not considered capable of being treated as a resource: the ecological crisis is to be solved through total ecological accounting, while we rarely think twice about the presence of ‘Human Resources’ departments within companies and organisations. In this context, friendship is an exception, one area of human experience where we still have a shared language to express the sense that not everything can or should be viewed as a resource: when someone we thought of as a friend treats us this way, we say, ‘I feel used.’

    There is another sense in which friendship illuminates the nature of commons, as we come to the distinction between ‘commons’ and ‘public’, two terms frequently used as if their meanings overlap. Instead of treating them as interchangeable, it might be more helpful to think of them as characterised by two rather different logics, founded on differing presuppositions and leading to differing atmospheres.

    A typical definition of something ‘public’—public space, the public sphere—will emphasise that ‘access is guaranteed to all’, in contrast to the private, which is by its nature ‘closed or exclusive’.⁠ The twin concepts of public and private are often seen as corresponding to the collective and the individual. This is most obvious when the terms are transposed to the political-economic structure of public and private sectors—and so to a model of politics in which the left is associated with the public and the right with the private. In a deeper sense, however, both concepts rest on an idea of the individual as possessed of certain rights that exist prior to and override the social context in which she happens to find herself.

    This kind of individualism was hardly thinkable much before the 18th century, when the concepts of public and private took shape. The high version of this story—the version that animates Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man, for example—treats the emergence of the public sphere in this period as among the great achievements of the Enlightenment and, indeed, of human history.⁠ There is a lower version to be told, however; one which sits less awkwardly with the recollection that this was also the century in which the enclosure of common lands reached its greatest intensity. In this version, we might recognise—among other things—that public space is, often literally, the subdued remnant of an older commons. A striking late example of this is the enclosure of Kennington Common, the site of the largest and last of the Chartist mass meetings in 1848; within four years, legislation had been passed to create Kennington Park, fenced and patrolled by guards under the command of the Royal Commissioners. (The artist and Kennington resident Stefan Szczelkun makes the fascinating suggestion that the curiously anonymous monuments, lacking plaques or dedications, erected during its emparkment seem to have been ‘placed strategically… just far enough from the sites of public executions and mass rallies to misdirect attention and focus from those emotive and resonant sites.’⁠ There is an analogy lurking here to the anonymity and seemingly random deployment of public art in today’s cities.)

    There seems to be a paradox by which the concept of the public, with its guarantee of access to all, is realised through the creation of boundaries of a new hardness. In the case of Kennington Park, we have a modern public space created through legislative and physical enclosure. A more general example is the establishment of public services provided on a basis of universal access, which has entailed the hardening of the boundaries of citizenship which form the practical limit to the ideal of universality. In contrast, if the historical commons were unfenced, this never implied that they were simply open to all. There were rights of use in the commons, but these were not universal: rather, they were deeply specific, a fabric of interwoven agreements, subject to an ongoing process of negotiation. This is the customary law that Illich describes: ‘It was unwritten law not only because people did not care to write it down, but because what it protected was a reality much too complex to fit into paragraphs.’⁠

    The absence of any commitment to universality in the logic of the commons sounds alarming, since—within the logic of the public—the alternative would seem to be exclusion. It is here that the example of friendship may help us discern the difference between these logics. If I claim that I have a right to be your friend, this makes no sense. The dance of sociability by which the possibility of friendship is explored takes a multitude of forms, but it can neither be rushed nor predicted.

    The logic of the commons resembles the logic of friendship, in that it is based neither on an a priori openness, nor a set of a priori criteria which determine exclusion. The journey by which a newcomer may be drawn into the web of relations which form a commons—that ‘reality much too complex to fit into paragraphs’—is determined through what happens between the people present, rather than by the application of prescribed principles. The ideal of a universal guarantee of access makes no sense here, yet nor is there anything that resembles the erection of a hard boundary of exclusion.

    The logic of the public appeals to something higher and more constant than the vulnerable threads of human relationships; but in normalising such an appeal, it has a tendency to cut through the fabric which those threads make up. The individual possessed of a set of rights begins as a fiction, contemporary and in other ways parallel to the figure of Robinson Crusoe which has held such an enduring appeal for economists.⁠

    But such fictions have a way of coming to life: the attempt to realise a society based on such rights has often framed our highest aspirations for social justice, even if the reality has fallen short, but it has also been accompanied by the creation of societies characterised by an unprecedented individualism and atomisation. We pursue the circumstances of loneliness, even as those who study public health have started to describe it as ‘an epidemic’.⁠

     The logic of the commons, according to which rights are negotiated within human relationships, rests on another understanding of the individual, one which is closer to that of Raimon Pannikar: ‘I understand a person as “a knot in a net” of relationships.’⁠

    If it makes sense to distinguish the logics of public and commons in the way that I have done so far, it is worth touching on a further aspect of this distinction, in relation to ‘space’ and ‘place’. The space of the public is Cartesian: an abstract, homogeneous, measurable void which preexists its actual contents, just as the individual (within this logic) is treated as preexisting the actual context of social relations in which she finds herself. In contrast, the commons is always somewhere, a specific place, just as its rights and laws are specific.⁠

    In this sense, among others, the logic of the public is utopian—literally, ‘placeless’—and this can be seen in one of the fullest attempts to realise its ambitions, the commune movement of the 1960s counterculture. In many ways, of course, this movement was an attempt to create a refuge from the kind of modern society which we might more often think of as embodying the logic of the public, but the refugees took with them certain core assumptions—and these played a critical role in how their dreams went wrong. Lou Gottlieb founded the commune at Morning Star Ranch in 1966, declaring it to be ‘Land access to which is denied no one’. After Time magazine turned its spotlight on the hippie phenomenon in July 1967, the numbers of newcomers arriving at the ranch grew beyond its ability to cope: the site became overwhelmed, struggling with open sewers and the hostility of the Sonoma County authorities. In 1972, at the end of a series of court cases, all but one of the buildings were bulldozed.⁠ Iain Boal adds a speculative twist to this story, pointing out that Garrett Hardin was writing his ill-founded yet hugely influential paper, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, in California in 1968 as the story of the Morning Star court hearings was on the front page of his morning newspaper.⁠ Hardin’s account of why commons are doomed to fail bears no relation to the actual history of the commons, but it does resemble what Boal calls ‘the tragedy of the communes’.⁠ The essence of that tragedy—as seen through the lens I have been grinding away at here—is the attempt to realise, in its full utopian form, the promise of universal access which is alien to the historical phenomenon of the commons but intrinsic to the logic of the public.

    One further example from the movements that came out of the 1960s counterculture illustrates the converse of the connection between friendship and the commons, the suspicion of friendship within the logic of the public. ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ is a key text from the women’s liberation movement, drawing attention to the ways in which abuse of power takes place within informal, supposedly non-hierarchical groups. Running through it, however, is a striking suspicion of friendship:

    Elites are nothing more and nothing less than a group of friends who also happen to participate in the same political activities. They would probably maintain their friendship whether or not they were involved in political activities; they would probably be involved in political activities whether or not they maintained their friendships. It is the coincidence of these two phenomena which creates elites in any groups and makes them so difficult to break.⁠

    Written in 1970, ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ was an attempt to learn from the failures of the innocence which had guided the experiments of the period to which Morning Star Ranch belongs. It contains a great deal of painfully-won insight. Yet there is a connection to be traced between the way that friendship is problematised here and a more general tendency to treat specific human relationships as interfering with the equality of individuals, as envisioned by the logic of the public: to avoid such interference, friendship should be confined (or at least seen to be confined) to the private sphere.⁠

    The politics of informal groups to which ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ draws attention is real enough and—as Kim reminded us during the seminar—an essential element of the historical commons was ‘a democratic assembly space’ within which to resolve the difficulties and disagreements that arise.⁠ We might question, though, whether friendship need really be so inimical to the social fabric—and whether a logic according to which the key to avoiding the abuse of power is to ‘break’ the connections of friendship is really headed in a direction which we would wish to take.

    How do we find our way back around to the question in the gaze of those workers in Amsterdam, a century and a continent away from the examples we have been considering? The thought that occurred to me during the seminar, and that prompted the scribbled constellation of terms on which I have tried to elaborate here, was about the peculiar position of the cooperative movement in relation to these differing logics of commons and public.

    There is always more than one story to be told about the origins of a movement, but the story most often told about the origins of cooperativism goes back to the experiments of Robert Owen at New Lanark. The waterfalls that powered the imagination of the Romantic poets also drove the first phase of the Industrial Revolution which their more practical contemporaries engineered. A short walk from the Falls of Clyde, which drew visitors such as Coleridge and the Wordsworths, Owen’s mill town straddles the mechanical and the visionary. Its founder belonged to the period described by Karl Polanyi in which practical enterprises were entered into in a spirit of intellectual enquiry, seeking to discover ‘new applications of the universal principles of mutuality, trust, risks, and other elements of human enterprise.’ (By contrast, Polanyi suggests, after the 1830s ‘businessmen imagined they knew what forms their activities should take; they rarely inquired into the nature of money before founding a bank.’⁠)

    If the communards of the 1960s thought that they were walking away from the top-down institutions of modernity, yet took with them the essential logic of the public, Owen’s projects represent a more wholehearted attempt to realise utopia on an institutional scale. When his original investors at New Lanark tired of his philanthropic experiments, he arranged for them to be bought out by a group which included Jeremy Bentham. The plans for a model community at New Harmony, Indiana drawn up for Owen by the architect Thomas Stedman Whitwell belong to the genre of the panopticon, even if the reality of the settlement—which failed within two years—was closer to the experience of Morning Star Ranch.⁠ His earlier proposal to put the poor into ‘Villages of Cooperation’ met with resistance from popular Radicals and trade unions for whom, in E.P. Thompson’s words:

    The Plan smelled of Malthus and of those rigorous experiments of magistrates … who were already working out the Chadwickian plan of economical workhouse relief. Even if Owen was himself … deeply in earnest and dismayed by the distress of the people, his plan, if taken up by Government, would certainly be orientated in this way.⁠

    Owen was ahead of his time in many ways, yet the suspicion with which his plans were viewed also anticipates the shadow side of the real achievements of public provision as accomplished in subsequent generations: the suspicion that what has been achieved is not a liberation, but the rendering sustainable of an exploitation to which we become naturalised.

    To point out that Owen’s own experiments were, by and large, failures is not to deny the significance of his legacy, but it could prompt the question as to why certain ideas with which he had been associated subsequently took on a life of their own. Thompson makes the observation that:

    Owenism from the late Twenties onwards, was a very different thing from the writings and proclamations of Robert Owen … The very imprecision of his theories … made them adaptable to different groups of working people.⁠

    It was this passage that came to mind, as we sat in Gothenburg trying to piece together the histories of the commons and the public, and that led me to add the word ‘cooperative’ to the middle of my scribbled constellation, somewhere between the clusters ‘public, universal, space, utopia’ and ‘commons, specific, place’. This is no more than a speculation, and clearly there were a variety of factors and innovations by which Owen’s ideas about cooperation as well as other experiments, some of them predating New Lanark, fused into the cooperative movement that took shape in the following decades. However, if we are trying to answer the question put to us by the gaze of those workers in Amsterdam—to understand the kind of trust which holds together a Construction Society for the Acquisition of One’s Home, or a Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, the equivalent of which we struggle to find in our own experience—perhaps it is significant that these associations were formed at a time when the practices of commoning were still within living memory among the newly urbanised?⁠ Were these self-organised institutions—organised in response to the torn fabric of rapidly industrialising societies, and which we can see as anticipating the vastly larger systems of the following century—made possible because of the living memory of older customary practices? If so, we could think of the cooperative movement as a meeting point, straddling the boundary: conceived (at least by Owen) within the logic of the public, but brought to life by something that could well be called a heritage of commons.

    First published in Heritage as Common(s): Common(s) as Heritage,University of Gothenburg Press, 2015. This essay responds to the papers given by Ana Dzokic and Marc Neelen (STEALTH.unlimited) and Kim Trogall (University of Sheffield) at a seminar at the Gothenburg School of Design & Crafts.

  • Introduction to the Fifth Anniversary Edition of the Dark Mountain Manifesto

    Introduction to the Fifth Anniversary Edition of the Dark Mountain Manifesto

    It is unusual for a twenty-page, self-published pamphlet to be given a two-page lead review in the New Statesman, and rarer still for that pamphlet to start a cultural movement that the New York Times can introduce to its readers as ‘changing the environmental debate in Britain and the rest of Europe.’ Yet those are two of the more public markers of the strange journey taken by this manifesto in the five years from its first publication to the preparation of this new edition.

    We get emails most days from readers who have found something here that resonates with their own experience. They write about hope, recognition, a sense of feeling less alone. Sometimes an email leads to a collaboration, some- times a collaboration deepens into a friendship that would not have existed were it not for this text. The fruits of those collaborations make their way into the Dark Mountain books – six books so far, and counting – where hundreds of writers, thinkers and artists from around the world have ventured further down the paths we started to sketch out here.

    Then there are the attacks. We have been called all sorts of things: Romantic dreamers, crazy collapsitarians, defeatists, utopians and nihilists. A professor of social policy used a paper in an academic journal to present Dark Mountain as an example of clinical ‘catastrophism’: ‘a temporary or sometimes recurring difficulty in getting things in perspective or proportion.’ The journalist Bryan Appleyard made the rather startling allegation that we represent ‘a form of psychosis’ likely to ‘create more corpses than ever dreamed of by even the Unabomber.’ There have been thoughtful critical responses, too, sometimes leading to conversations in which we come to understand each other better, but these are less frequent than the angry accusers and the long-distance psychoanalysts. 

    Putting all these different reactions alongside each other, trying to make out the pattern that they form, what strikes me is how little it resembles a taking of sides over a recognisable argument. Something else is going on, something that reaches into murkier corners of ourselves than are generally given space on the shores of public debate. The lines of thinking that run through this manifesto are also the contours of a dark shape, an inkblot shape of our puzzlements, doubts and fears—so that, even more than is always the case with the slippery substance of language, every reading is also a veiled reflection of the reader. There are monsters here, if you look for them; there are dead ends, but there are also slender threads of possibility waiting for someone to pick them up. 

    The text which became Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto took shape over a period of six months, starting in the summer of 2008. From this distance, it already seems like the last summer of another age. Not an innocent age – no one could call it that – but an age in which certain delusions were easier to sustain. Then, wham! Lehman Brothers came down and for a few weeks we saw the naked fear of powerful men with no idea how much of their world will be left standing. If you got any kind of a kick out of that final scene in the film Fight Club, when the music swells and the credit card companies’ skyscrapers detonate, then you had to feel some exhilaration, even as your wiser self whispered that all this was not about to end in a jubilee of cancelled first world debt. 

    As the mayhem of those weeks subsided, as the months that followed became years, we found ourselves in an age where crisis has become the new normal. An age of widening extremes and darkening horizons, when outbreaks of hope spark sporadically like broken power lines across networks and onto the streets, but the future no longer holds the promise it used to. Young people struggle to achieve the everyday security on which to build a life, something their parents took for granted. And all the while, beyond the bubble of the disorientated west, the epic of loss grows louder: more species, more languages, more landscapes every year. 

    None of this started with the financial ruptures of late 2008. But most of it intensified in the aftermath of those events, becoming at the same time harder to ignore. And if this manifesto has travelled further than we imagined, one explanation is that it has helped people to get their bearings in a world where the thin, shiny surface of prosperity has cracked. Trying to make sense of our own experience, it seems that we put words to a feeling that others shared and that has become more widespread in the years since. A feeling that there is no way through the mess in which we find ourselves that doesn’t involve facing the darkness, being honest about the scale of the unravelling that is under way, the uncertainty as to where it will end. A feeling that it is time to look down. 

    After it was published, people assumed that we must have been friends for years, but in reality Paul and I were still getting to know one another. We had met on the internet, reading each other’s blogs and recognising common ground. Both writers, both recovering journalists, both of us had been through intense periods of involvement with activism and arrived at a certain kind of disillusionment. 

    We were disturbed by the state of environmentalism. It seemed that sustainability had come to mean sustaining the western way of living at all costs, regardless of whether this was possible or desirable. As carbon emissions continued to mount, prominent campaigners spoke privately of their pessimism, but still got up at rallies to give the same rousing speeches. The movement was in danger of becoming a church where the priests have lost their faith, but don’t believe the congregation are ready for the truth. And when you tried to talk about this, it was always framed as a choice between insisting on the efficacy of more marches, petitions, boycotts and treaties, in spite of decades of failure – or giving up, which meant despair. 

    We were disturbed by the state of literature and the cultural landscape. I remember feeling that most of the books being celebrated in the Sunday newspapers were going to look irrelevant or offensive in a generation’s time, given what we already knew about where things were headed. A passage from Ian McEwan’s 2005 novel Saturday embodied this, when Henry Perowne starts musing about what will happen if ‘the present dispensation’ is wiped out: 

    the future will look back on us as gods … lucky gods blessed by supermarket cornucopias, torrents of accessible information, warm clothes that weigh nothing, extended life-spans, wondrous machines.

    The possibility that the future might view us in a different light did not seem to cross his or McEwan’s mind. Even on those occasions when writers did their best to face the entangled ecological, economic and social crises that surround us, the results tended to be unsatisfying: art deadening into a communication tool for messages from scientists and campaigners, soap-opera scale stories playing out against a backdrop of melting icebergs and failing negotiations. The literary tools inherited from the recent past seemed ill-adapted to the times into which we were heading. 

    These were the conversations we had, first over email and then in the corners of pubs, making lists in our notebooks, sharing names, mapping constellations of writers whose words we had found we could steer by. The idea of a literary journal came naturally, not because we thought it was the answer to all of this, but because it might provide a space to ask the questions. Besides, from the age of eight, I had always been starting little magazines and newspapers, and I can’t imagine Paul was any different. He had more experience of the grown-up world of publishing, not least from his time running The Ecologist, while I had been discovering the way that words can spread over networks, as one of the editors of Pick Me Up, a weekly email newsletter of DIY culture. That gave us the idea of crowdfunding for Dark Mountain, at a time when inboxes were not yet deluged with invitations to Kickstarter campaigns. 

    If we were going to start a journal, it seemed a good idea to kick this off with an essay that explained why we were doing it, that framed an invitation or a challenge. That was what we agreed at the end of an evening in early summer in a pub beside the Thames just outside Oxford. It was in the barn behind the same pub, just over a year later – on the 17th of July, 2009 – that we launched the resulting manifesto to an audience of a few dozen friends and family who between them had put up the money to fund its printing. Someone suggested afterwards that it was strange to ask people to support a manifesto before they had read it, and I suppose that is true, but I don’t think any of our funders had seen the text before that night. 

    The first edition of the manifesto was a hand-stitched pamphlet, made by our friends at Bracketpress of Rochdale, Lancashire. It went through three more printings before the number of copies needed exceeded the sensible limits of their fingers and we decided to republish it as the slim book you now hold in your hands.  

    Why go to all the bother of printing, when we could just have released it onto the internet? We got asked this occasionally, sometimes with an edge of moralising at the waste of resources, as if the servers that hold up the web run on fairy dust.  

    From the outset, the text has also been available online, and a hundred times as many people must have read it on our website as in print. But there is something about the unnecessary effort of making a physical object in a digital age that changes its meaning. So long as letters were the primary form of correspondence, their existence was functional, taken for granted. Now, think what it means today on the rare occasions when a handwritten letter arrives from a friend, and think about how different this feels to the arrival of another email in your inbox. 

    For those who believe – not unreasonably – perhaps that a manifesto should offer a set of proposals, a plan of action, a prescription for the new school of writing it intends to inaugurate, this may not be the most satisfying of manifestos. ‘What are you saying we should do?’ was a frequent reaction, put to us with varying levels of frustration, not least by activist friends. 

    Slowly, over time, we worked towards our own answers to this question. If you follow Paul’s essays through the course of the first five Dark Mountain books, they trace a journey towards one such answer. Other contributors offer their own examples, and the examples differ, because these are not loud, confident, once-and-for-all answers. They are provisional, maybe good enough for here and for now, for putting one foot in front of the other. They do not relieve you of the responsibility of finding your own answers, though they may provide clues as to what the process looks like. 

    But all that came after the manifesto, which was written when we were still working out how to frame the questions. To write a manifesto is to write loudly – ‘A manifesto,’ bellows Tristan Tzara, ‘is a communication made to the whole world, whose only pretension is to the discovery of an instant cure for political, astronomical, artistic, parliamentary, agronomical and literary syphilis!’ – but under all the sound and the fury, at the heart of this manifesto is a hunch that sometimes it is right to walk away, to withdraw, to give up on hopes that no longer ring true, even though you have no answer to the accusing questions that will follow. Sometimes retreat is the only action left that makes sense. To give up things you have held dear – beliefs, identities, habits – is an end, but it can also be a beginning, though it makes you no promises in advance. Only the chance that, having let go, as your eyes begin to adjust to the darkness, you may catch sight of something that your bright certainties had hidden from you. 

    If you were to ask either of us, five years on, do we stand by what we wrote in this manifesto, I suspect our answers would be similar. We stand by it, not as a stockade to be defended, but as a first attempt to say something, to work out how to say something, the fuller significance of which we are still discovering in the company of a growing gang of friends and collaborators, most of whom would never have met if we hadn’t been brave enough, or foolish enough, to commit these words to print in the first place. 

    Published in the 2014 and subsequent editions of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto.

  • A Five Hundred Year Moment?

    Florence, 1330. Between the weak forces of the Pope and the Emperor, in the patchwork of city states that stretches north to the Alps and spans the Italian peninsula, the first outlines of the Renaissance are starting to break the pattern of the Middle Ages. Nowhere more so than in this city, birthplace of Dante and Petrarch — this city whose banking houses now fund half the rulers of Europe. Home to more than 120,000 people, it is second in size only to Paris. The roots of its prosperity lie in the local woollen trade, which spiralled upwards in sophistication to become a proto-industrial system, drawing in the best raw material from England and Iberia, cleaning, carding, spinning, dying and weaving it into fine cloth to be sold across Europe and even in the marketplaces of the East.

    Much of this rise in prosperity took place within a single lifetime, the lifetime of a rich cloth merchant who died in the September of 1330 and left his property to be distributed amongst the destitute of Florence. His will was carried out by the Confraternity of Orsanmichele. On the appointed date, those who qualified as destitute were locked inside the city’s churches at midnight. There were 17,000 of them. As they were released, each received his or her share of the inheritance. From the records of the Confraternity, we know who qualified. The destitute fell into five categories: the orphans, the widows, anyone who had been the victim of a recent act of God (in other words, a serious injury or illness), the heads of family totally dependent on wage work, and those compelled to pay rent in order to have somewhere to sleep.

    It is these last two categories that should cause us to think twice. To be dependent on working for wages, or to have to keep up regular payments in order to have somewhere to call home — at the close of the Middle Ages, either of these things was a sign of destitution, misery and impotence. Somewhere in the intervening centuries, both have become so utterly taken for granted that the pity they once attracted is not easy to grasp. Today, we are more likely to number among the destitute those unable to find wage work. Yet if we could borrow a time machine, go back to the late 1320’s and scoop up our Florentine cloth merchant, bringing him back to the streets of Västerås or Malmö in 2014, how would our way of living look to him? No doubt he would be astounded by the tools and toys that we take for granted, by the number of us who live to old age, and by a hundred other transformations — but after a week or so, as he began to believe his eyes, would we be able to convince him to look differently on the phenomena of wage-labour and the monthly rental or mortgage payment? I am not sure.

    Our ancestors took a slower route from the proto-industrial stirrings of the late Middle Ages to the post-industrial Europe in which we find ourselves, but they did not go gently into the condition of dependence on wage-labour which is the foundation of employment as we now know it. The extent of their resistance is obscured, partly because — as we will see, shortly — it does not fit into any of the historical narratives that came to frame politics in the 19th and 20th centuries, and partly because it does not resemble the forms of action that came to define political resistance in that period.

    For a long time, the primary form of resistance to wage-labour was simply a persistent unwillingness to give up the varied activities and irregular rhythms of the day, the week and the year. In England, where full-on industrialisation came earliest, the historian E.P. Thompson catalogues the complaints of the authorities and (would-be) employers against the ordinary people:

    If you offer them work, they will tell you that they must go to look up their sheep, cut furzes, get their cow out of the pound, or, perhaps, say they must take their horse to be shod, that he may carry them to a horse-race or a cricket match. — Arbuthnot, 1773

    When a labourer becomes possessed of more land than he and his family can cultivate in the evenings … the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work… — Commercial & Agricultural Magazine, 1800

    These difficulties were resolved by the process of enclosure, a series of laws by which the ‘commons’ — land held in traditional forms of collective ownership, to which local people had a web of overlapping rights of access, grazing and foraging — were privatised. Carried out in the name of ‘agricultural improvement’, enclosure was essential to the creation of a large class with no alternative to renting out their bodies at a daily or a weekly rate.

    While rural life in England had been shaped by the customary rights of the commons, the skilled trades were also governed by longstanding customary agreements. These formed the basis of a way of living in which artisans worked largely on their own terms, combining the practice of their trade with other activities and shaping the rhythms of their work as they wished. By the early 19th century, this arrangement was under attack from new legislation and new industrial practices. When their petitions to parliament went unheard, the weavers of Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire were ready to fight rather than be reduced to the status of wage labourers in other men’s factories. This was the origin of the Luddite movement: attacking mills by night, smashing the machinery and sometimes burning the owners’ houses, it ran through the manufacturing districts of the three counties between 1811 and 1813.

    The tendency of grown men to smash up the machines contributed to the preference of manufacturers for employing women and young children. To create a modern workforce, fully accustomed to the submission of their time and energy to their employer’s command, it was necessary to start young — and so the story of how wage-labour went from a stigma to a human right forms the shadow side of the history of education. The process is described quite openly by William Temple, writing in 1770, as he makes the case for sending the children of the poor to workhouses from the age of four:

    There is considerable use in their being, somehow or other, constantly employed at least twelve hours a day, whether they earn their living or not; for by these means, we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them.

    The origins of mass education are double-edged: on the one hand, the extension of schooling was often pushed forward by those sincerely dedicated to rescuing children from the horrors of the industrial workplace in its earlier forms; on the other, it served as the means to produce an obedient industrial workforce, accustomed to the discipline of completing tasks, often meaningless to them, under the direction of an authority figure and with strict rules concerning time-keeping.

    It took generations to complete this transformation. Meanwhile, at the height of the Luddite movement, it took 12,000 troops to restore order to the three counties, a larger force than Wellington had under his command that year in the ongoing war against Napoleon. Even then, it took months before the British government felt it had the situation under control. This was only one episode in the long history of resistance to the new model of economic life represented by the factories and the wage-labour system. The way of life which the Luddites and others struggled to defend against these innovations was undoubtedly a tough one, but the intensity of their struggle is perhaps the clearest evidence of its worth to those who knew it best.

    The experience of wage-labour today differs greatly from the conditions of the early industrial factories, at least in countries like ours. The eight-hour day, sick pay, paid holidays, parental leave and the other rights that frame our expectations of working life represent the achievements of the labour movement that grew up in the generations following the defeat of the Luddites. The struggle to defend other ways of living against the dominance of wage-labour had been lost, at least in the most industrialised countries. The new movement struggled instead to achieve a better deal within the system built by the winners. If we are tempted to take its achievements for granted, we just have to think of the gap between our lives and the lives of those who make our iPhones or those who mine the coltan that goes into their making.

    Essential to the labour movement has been the normalisation of the identity of the worker. In pointing to this, I am not trying to question its achievements, only to approach a clearer understanding of where we find ourselves today. If we struggle to grasp the pity which the condition of dependence on wage-labour elicited in 14th century Florence — if we misread the fierceness with which people fought against being forced into that condition in England at the start of the 19th century, taking it for ignorant fear of technological progress — then this is probably because, for most of the intervening period, the opposed political and economic forces structuring our societies have been united in the assumption that this kind of work is normal and desirable. Wherever you look, to the left or to the right, you will have a hard time finding a politician who doesn’t want to create more jobs. They may argue over the best means to do so, but they would hardly think of asking whether employment as we know it is a good thing.

    My purpose in excavating these older and contrasting attitudes to work is to make it possible to ask that question. It is necessary to add, almost immediately, that this is not inspired by any idea of the past as a Golden Age. Not only is there much that we would not willingly give up about the age in which we find ourselves — even if we wanted to do so, it is not an option. The only time machine we have travels in one direction at a steady speed of just over 365 days per year and we have yet to find the gear stick. A politics that looks to the past with longing is no politics at all. Yet there may be other ways of looking to the past. In renouncing such romanticism, we have not necessarily exhausted the political potential of the backward gaze.

    Florence, 1345. The banking system is in meltdown. The houses of Peruzzi and Bardi have fallen, taking with them the political fortunes of the city’s aristocratic elite. The trigger is the decision of the English King Edward III to default on the debts he has built up in his war with France. In the aftermath of the collapse, records Giovanni Villani, the only people still in business are the moneylenders and the guildsmen. Larger forces will soon contribute to the tilting away from feudalism, not least the plague that is already making its westwards along the trade routes that span the old world. But it is those observed by Villani, the new men, the outsiders, who will begin to build a new kind of system in the ruins of the feudal order.

    The story is told by Paul Mason, until recently the economics editor of the BBC’s Newsnight, in a 2012 lecture at the London School of Economics. He uses it to frame a question — the best question, he suggests, that we could ask about the point in history at which we find ourselves: ‘Is this a 50-year or a 500-year moment?’ Is the structural crisis which broke out across the global economic system in 2008 more akin to the Depression of the 1930s, or to the crisis which marked the end of feudalism?

    The roots of the current crisis go back decades and, six years after that chaotic autumn of banking collapses and emergency bail-outs, it is still far from over. Interest rates remain at emergency levels, much of Europe struggles to achieve anything resembling economic growth, while bankers pioneer new forms of speculative asset which repackage subprime rental incomes into safe investments on the same principle applied so successfully to subprime mortgages. At a day-to-day level, structural economic crisis makes itself felt in the experience of employment, or its lack. A society with high levels of youth unemployment feels different, and not only for those directly affected, but for every young person whose experience of education becomes an anxious competition to avoid that fate, every parent who worries about their child’s future. Meanwhile, the deal of employment gets worse, as short-term contracts and precarity become normal in many sectors. In parts of the west, real incomes have been falling since long before the fall of Lehman Brothers: in Italy, the peak of prosperity was passed in 1997; in the US, a 30-year-old man could expect to earn 22% less in real terms in 2007 than he would have done in 1973.

    Those at the centre of existing institutions rarely put together the pieces clearly. Easier to announce new initiatives, or to focus on those elements within the economic data that point in a positive direction, even if this leads to a widening gap between the official account of reality and the experience of many voters. This gap manifests in growing support for populist parties, but also in a broader sense that things are getting worse. This April, an Ipsos poll found that only 19% of Swedes believe today’s young people will have a better life than their parents, compared to 43% who believe they will have a worse life. Responses to such questions are similar across the western countries. The future no longer holds the promise it once did.

    At this point, there may be one more historical parallel to be drawn. Feudalism was, in 1345, the most successful economic system the world had ever seen. This did not mean those at the top of that system were in a position to prevent its decline, nor did it mean that an alternative system was waiting to replace it. Instead, what followed was the uneven mixture of improvisation, idealism and opportunism out of which history is mostly made. In time, the outlines of the Renaissance that we can trace in the Italian city states of that century would become the foundations for the modern world. Yet its architects were not guided by the forward gaze that would come to characterise modernity. Their primary inspiration lay in the classical past of Greece and Rome, and it was here that they sought models for new institutions.

    If we do find ourselves in a 500-year moment, it may be that the past has more to offer us than nostalgia or romanticism, as the source for a sense of possibility that we no longer find in confident visions of the future. Because the future can only ever be a blank screen and the projections we throw up on that screen are inevitably shaped by the assumptions of the present. Whereas the past is there, like a dim mirror, and as our eyes adjust to its darkness and the strangeness of the things which the people there seem to take for granted, it can begin to reveal to us the strangeness of our own assumptions. If things are going to turn out better than often seems to be the case, in the years ahead, then I suspect it will be because we stumble upon possibilities that had been hidden from sight by the assumptions we inherited from the recent past — even assumptions such as the centrality, necessity and desirability of wage labour.

    Bibliographical Note

    The story of the Florentine cloth merchant is told in Ivan Illich, ‘Shadow Work’ in Beyond Economics & Ecology: The Radical Thought of Ivan Illich, ed. Sajay Samuel (2013). The quotes from Arbuthnot, Temple and the Commercial & Agricultural Magazine are taken from E.P. Thompson’s ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, №38 (December 1967). On the Luddites, see E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and Warren Draper, ‘The Shuttle Exchanged for the Sword’, Dark Mountain, Issue 2 (2011). A video of Paul Mason’s lecture, ‘Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions’ (2012), is available on the LSE website.

    For practical proposals that relate to the ideas in this article, see Dougald Hine, ‘The Regeneration of Meaning’ in Global Utmaning, The Baltic Edge: Reflections on Youth, Work and Innovation in the Baltic Sea Region (2013).

    First published in MOORIA magazine.