Author: Wessie

The left’s obsession with symbols has gone too far

The article was originally published by Arc Digital on June 20th 2020.

Protest is a symbolic form of politics. It is about sending messages. It turns public space — both physical and now virtual — into an arena where frustrations not satisfied by the formal political system are expressed with slogans, banners, and bodies.

But protest can only be a force for good if its aims point away from the symbolic and back towards formal politics — and, beyond that, towards material reality.

Yes, filling the streets with demonstrators and the internet with hashtags can be effective in raising awareness of issues. It can be effective in bringing new movements to life. But if the issues that spur protest are real problems in society, then the sending of messages must be accompanied by practical plans to address those problems.

In this last respect, the spectacular wave of protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd three weeks ago, which has carried not just across the United States but to Europe and beyond, presents a mixed picture. At its core is the grief and righteous anger of African-Americans regarding police brutality. This is a cause that, so far as I know, has been questioned by no one anywhere near the mainstream of public life. And it is eminently capable of achieving concrete reforms.

But around that core has gathered a much more nebulous phenomenon — a culture of protest that does not just employ symbolic means, but pursues largely symbolic goals. In the U.S., African-American grievances have been overshadowed by white progressives expressing their prodigious guilt and shunting it onto one another. Witness the rituals of purification where crowds have gathered to kneel or lie prostrate on the ground.

The iconography of Black Lives Matter — especially the resonant statements about injustice presented in white text on black background — has been widely co-opted by mega-corporations seeking to endear themselves to consumers. Meanwhile, the demonstrations have coalesced around a vacuous slogan, “defund the police,” which is clearly a rallying cry for further protest rather than a serious policy proposal.

In the United Kingdom (where we are always copying our cousins across the Atlantic), the protests have become similarly ingrown. Beginning as a statement of empathy for African-Americans and a warning that we have our own issues of racial inequality to address, they quickly descended into an argument about historical figures represented in public statues and the names of buildings and streets. The focus on iconoclasm has now blown back into the United States, as seen in this week’s wave of statue-toppling and defacing.

To the extent that all this symbolic activity makes racial minorities feel they have solidarity with society at large, this is good. But there is a point at which the politics of gesture becomes so dominant that it distracts from practical efforts at reform, or even hinders them. When manifestly crazy ideas like defunding the police become attached to the protests, it undermines legislators seeking genuine solutions by giving their opponents a brush to tar them with. Making an issue of public monuments (London Mayor Sadiq Khan has announced a new “Diversity Commission” for this purpose) diverts attention from a hundred more consequential issues we could be discussing.

Of course to view these events in isolation would be to miss the forest for the trees. The symbolic turn of progressive activism is part of an ongoing culture war over the norms that govern our language, manners, and institutions.

Part of the progressive strategy in that war has been to establish a kind of semantic hegemony, or effective control over the meaning of symbols. This involves emphasizing the symbolic dimension of all kinds of things — words, gestures, intellectual practices, works of art and entertainment — and then insisting on what they signify. Thus a statue is considered not a historical artifact but an expression of racism, or particular words and actions deemed manifestations of white privilege rather than of the intentions that motivated them.

The performative character of the recent protests — the emphasis on gesture for its own sake, the fixation with symbols of oppression — certainly fits into this wider picture. This is why commentators, both supportive and skeptical, are now talking less about policing and concrete forms of racial inequality than about a “cultural revolution.” It is also why many conservatives, old school liberals, and social democrats are freaking out. They are imagining a society in which, simply to have a career, people will have to accept the meanings assigned onto things by the progressive worldview.

But there is still a question as to whether this cultural revolution will actually help the people it purports to. This is the question, or it ought to be. Can a politics so heavily focused on language, meanings, and manners create the conditions for minority individuals and communities to lead more secure and fulfilling lives?

To some degree it can. Dignity — or the entitlement to claim one’s right to full participation in civic life — is a necessary condition for any individual or group to flourish. And dignity does have a lot to do with that amorphous realm of social norms and meanings. It is ultimately manifest at the level of subjective experience, as self-assurance and an inner sense of belonging, but can only be guaranteed by the respect of others. There is at present, among younger generations especially, a genuine desire to ensure that the way we talk and act does not prevent minorities from claiming the dignity that is their due.

On the other hand, meaning is an uncertain, fuzzy thing, such that a politics which focuses too heavily on it can easily become Sisyphean — fighting endless battles over symbolic territory without achieving any real forward progress.

Indeed, in recent years progress towards social justice has become both a closed circle and an infinitely receding frontier. As the progressive mind has become preoccupied with attaching meanings to things — with telling us how we should interpret social phenomena, statues, words, pictures, etc., — it has granted itself the power to endlessly create new symbolic obstacles to be overcome.

This project seems especially futile in light of the fact that so many issues of racial inequality, both in the U.S. and in Europe, are also issues of social class. The cultural revolution is largely the preserve of the highly educated — academia, media, advertising, and managerial bureaucrat type people whose daily lives revolve around the interpretation and manipulation of symbols.

Far from expanding the circle of dignity, their arcane theories represent yet another barrier that excludes poorer people of all ethnicities from the conversation. Meanwhile, luminaries of the symbolic struggle can justify their endeavors by pointing to the very inequality which they subtly reinforce.

So the protest style we are seeing of late, which prioritizes grand gestures over concrete achievements, is indicative of a wider problem. A fixation with symbols is of little use if it comes at the expense of practical engagement with other, equally important dimensions of social life: economic opportunity and public services and community formation and the justice system.

That the symbolic mode of activism is so good at stoking passion, and at extracting equally symbolic gestures from cowed institutions, is just another indication that more substantive issues are being crowded out.

The politics of crisis is not going away any time soon

This essay was originally published by Palladium magazine on June 10th 2020

A pattern emerges when surveying the vast commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic. At its center is a distinctive image of crisis: the image of a cruel but instructive spotlight laying bare the flaws of contemporary society. Crisis, we read, has “revealed,” “illuminated,” “clarified,” and above all, “exposed” our collective failures and weaknesses. It has unveiled the corruption of institutions, the decadence of culture, and the fragility of a material way of life. It has sounded the death-knell for countless projects and ideals.

“The pernicious coronavirus tore off an American scab and revealed suppurating wounds beneath,” announces one commentator, after noting “these calamities can be tragically instructional…Fundamental but forgotten truths, easily masked in times of calm, reemerge.”

Says another: “Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.”

You may not be surprised to learn that these two near-identical comments come from very different interpretations of the crisis. The first, from Trump-supporting historian Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution, claims that the “suppurating wounds” of American society are an effete liberal elite compromised by their reliance on a malignant China and determined to undermine the president at any cost. According to the second, by The Atlantic’s George Packer, the “smell of buried rot” comes from the Trump administration itself, the product of an oligarchic ascendency whose power stems from the division of society and hollowing-out of the state.

Nothing, it seems, has evaded the extraordinary powers of diagnosis made available by crisis: merciless globalism, backwards nationalism, the ignorance of populists, the naivety of liberals, the feral market, the authoritarian state. We are awash in diagnoses, but diagnosis is only the first step. It is customary to sharpen the reality exposed by the virus into a binary, existential decision: address the weakness identified, or succumb to it. “We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear,” writes Packer, “the alternative to solidarity is death.” No less ominous is Hanson’s invocation of Pearl Harbor: “Whether China has woken a sleeping giant in the manner of the earlier Japanese, or just a purring kitten, remains to be seen.”

The crisis mindset is not just limited to journalistic sensationalism. Politicians, too, have appealed to a now-or-never, sink-or-swim framing of the COVID-19 emergency. French President Emmanuel Macron has been among those using such terms to pressure Eurozone leaders into finally establishing a collective means of financing debt. “If we can’t do this today, I tell you the populists will win,” Macron told The Financial Times. Across the Atlantic, U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has claimed that the pandemic “has just exposed us, the fragility of our system,” and has adopted the language of “life or death” in her efforts to bring together the progressive and centrist wings of the Democratic Party before the presidential election in November.

And yet, in surveying this rhetoric of diagnosis and decision, what is most surprising is how familiar it sounds. Apart from the pathogen itself, there are few narratives of crisis now being aired which were not already well-established during the last decade. Much as the coronavirus outbreak has felt like a sudden rupture from the past, we have already been long accustomed to the politics of crisis.

It was under the mantra of “tough decisions,” with the shadow of the financial crisis still looming, that sharp reductions in public spending were justified across much of the Western world after 2010. Since then, the European Union has been crippled by conflicts over sovereign debt and migration. It was the rhetoric of the Chinese menace and of terminal decline—of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” to quote the 2017 inaugural address—that brought President Trump to power. Meanwhile, progressives had already mobilized themselves around the language of emergency with respect to inequality and climate change.

There is something deeply paradoxical about all of this. The concept of crisis is supposed to denote a need for exceptional attention and decisive focus. In its original Greek, the term krisis often referred to a decision between two possible futures, but the ubiquity of “crisis” in our politics today has produced only deepening chaos. The sense of emergency is stoked continuously, but the accompanying promises of clarity, agency, and action are never delivered. Far from a revealing spotlight, the crises of the past decade have left us with a lingering fog which now threatens to obscure us at a moment when we really do need judicious action.

***

Crises are a perennial feature of modern history. For half a millenium, human life has been shaped by impersonal forces of increasing complexity and abstraction, from global trade and finance to technological development and geopolitical competition. These forces are inherently unstable and frequently produce moments of crisis, not least due to an exogenous shock like a deadly plague. Though rarely openly acknowledged, the legitimacy of modern regimes has largely depended on a perceived ability to keep that instability at bay.

This is the case even at times of apparent calm, such as the period of U.S. global hegemony immediately following the Cold War. The market revolution of the 1980s and globalization of the 1990s were predicated on a conception of capitalism as an unpredictable, dynamic system which could nonetheless be harnessed and governed by technocratic expertise. Such were the hopes of “the great moderation.” A series of emerging market financial crises—in Mexico, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Russia, and Argentina—provided opportunities for the IMF and World Bank to demand compliance with the Washington Consensus in economic policy. Meanwhile, there were frequent occasions for the U.S. to coordinate global police actions in war-torn states.

Despite the façade of independent institutions and international bodies, it was in no small part through such crisis-fighting economic and military interventions that a generation of U.S. leaders projected power abroad and secured legitimacy at home. This model of competence and progress, which seems so distant now, was not based on a sense of inevitability so much as confidence in the capacity to manage one crisis after another: to “stabilize” the most recent eruption of chaos and instability.

A still more striking example comes from the European Union, another product of the post-Cold War era. The project’s main purpose was to maintain stability in a trading bloc soon to be dominated by a reunified Germany. Nonetheless, many of its proponents envisaged that the development of a fully federal Europe would occur through a series of crises, with the supra-national structures of the EU achieving more power and legitimacy at each step. When the Euro currency was launched in 1999, Romano Prodi, then president of the European Commission, spoke of how the EU would extend its control over economic policy: “It is politically impossible to propose that now. But some day there will be a crisis and new instruments will be created.”

It is not difficult to see why Prodi took this stance. Since the rise of the rationalized state two centuries ago, managerial competence has been central to notions of successful governance. In the late 19th century, French sociologist Emile Durkheim compared the modern statesman to a physician: “he prevents the outbreak of illnesses by good hygiene, and seeks to cure them when they have appeared.” Indeed, the bureaucratic structures which govern modern societies have been forged in the furnaces of crisis. Social security programs, income tax, business regulation, and a host of other state functions now taken for granted are a product of upheavals of the 19th and early 20th centuries: total war, breakneck industrialization, famine, and financial panic. If necessity is the mother of invention, crisis is the midwife of administrative capacity.

By the same token, the major political ideologies of the modern era have always claimed to offer some mastery over uncertainty. The locus of agency has variously been situated in the state, the nation, individuals, businesses, or some particular class or group; the stated objectives have been progress, emancipation, greatness, or simply order and stability. But in every instance, the message has been that the chaos endemic to modern history must be tamed or overcome by some paradigmatic form of human action. The curious development of Western modernity, where the management of complex, crisis-prone systems has come to be legitimated through secular mass politics, appears amenable to no other template.

It is against this backdrop that we can understand the period of crisis we have endured since 2008. The narratives of diagnosis and decision which have overtaken politics during this time are variations on a much older theme—one that is present even in what are retrospectively called “times of calm.” The difference is that, where established regimes have failed to protect citizens from instability, the logic of crisis management has burst its technocratic and ideological bounds and entered the wider political sphere. The greatest of these ruptures was captured by a famous statement attributed to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in September 2008. Pleading with Congress to pass a $700 billion bailout, Bernanke claimed: “If we don’t do this now, we won’t have an economy on Monday.”

This remark set the tone for the either/or, act-or-perish politics of the last decade. It points to a loss of control which, in the United States and beyond, opened the way for competing accounts not just of how order could be restored, but also what that order should look like. Danger and disruption have become a kind of opportunity, as political insurgents across the West have captured established parties, upended traditional power-sharing arrangements, and produced the electoral shocks suggested by the ubiquitous phrase “the age of Trump and Brexit.” These campaigns sought to give the mood of crisis a definite shape, directing it towards the need for urgent decision or transformative action, thereby giving supporters a compelling sense of their own agency.

***

Typically though, such movements do not merely offer a choice between existing chaos and redemption to come. In diagnoses of crisis, there is always an opposing agent who is responsible for and threatening to deepen the problem. We saw this already in Hanson’s and Packer’s association of the COVID-19 crisis with their political opponents. But it was there, too, among Trump’s original supporters, for whom the agents of crisis were not just immigrants and elites but, more potently, the threat posed by the progressive vision for America. This was most vividly laid out in Michael Anton’s infamous “Flight 93 Election” essay, an archetypal crisis narrative which urged fellow conservatives that only Trump could stem the tide of “wholesale cultural and political change,” claiming “if you don’t try, death is certain.”

Yet Trump’s victory only galvanized the radical elements of the left, as it gave them a villain to point to as a way of further raising the consciousness of crisis among their own supporters. The reviled figure of Trump has done more for progressive stances on immigration, healthcare, and climate action than anyone else, for he is the ever-present foil in these narratives of emergency. Then again, such progressive ambitions, relayed on Fox News and social media, have also proved invaluable in further stoking conservatives’ fears.

To simply call this polarization is to miss the point. The dynamic taking shape here is rooted in a shared understanding of crisis, one that treats the present as a time in which the future of society is being decided. There is no middle path, no going back: each party claims that if they do not take this opportunity to reshape society, their opponents will. In this way, narratives of crisis feed off one another, and become the basis for a highly ideological politics—a politics that de-emphasizes compromise with opponents and with the practical constraints of the situation at hand, prioritizing instead the fulfillment of a goal or vision for the future.

Liberal politics is ill-equipped to deal with, or even to properly recognize, such degeneration of discourse. In the liberal imagination, the danger of crisis is typically that the insecurity of the masses will be exploited by a demagogue, who will then transfigure the system into an illiberal one. In many cases, though, it is the system which loses legitimacy first, as the frustrating business of deliberative, transactional politics cannot meet the expectations of transformative change which are raised in the public sphere.

Consider the most iconic and, in recent years, most frequently analogized period of crisis in modern history: Germany’s Weimar Republic of 1918-33. These were the tempestuous years between World War I and Hitler’s dictatorship, during which a fledgling democracy was rocked by armed insurrection, hyperinflation, foreign occupation, and the onset of the Great Depression, all against a backdrop of rapid social, economic, and technological upheaval.

Over the past decade or so, there have been no end of suggestions that ours is a “Weimar moment.” Though echoes have been found in all sorts of social and cultural trends, the overriding tendency has been to view the crises of the Weimar period backwards through their end result, the establishment of Nazi dictatorship in 1933. In various liberal democracies, the most assertive Weimar parallels have referred to the rise of populist and nationalist politics, and in particular, the erosion of constitutional norms by leaders of this stripe. The implication is that history has warned us how the path of crisis can lead towards an authoritarian ending.

What this overlooks, however, is that Weimar society was not just a victim of crisis that stumbled blindly towards authoritarianism, but was active in interpreting what crises revealed and how they should be addressed. In particular, the notion of crisis served the ideological narratives of the day as evidence of the need to refashion the social settlement. Long before the National Socialists began their rise in the early 1930s, these conflicting visions, pointing to one another as evidence of the stakes, sapped the republic’s legitimacy by making it appear impermanent and fungible.

The First World War had left German thought with a pronounced sense of the importance of human agency in shaping history. On the one hand, the scale and brutality of the conflict left survivors adrift in a world of unprecedented chaos, seeming to confirm a suspicion of some 19th century German intellectuals that history had no inherent meaning. But at the same time, the war had shown the extraordinary feats of organization and ingenuity that an industrialized society, unified and mobilized around a single purpose, was capable of. Consequently, the prevailing mood of Weimar was best captured by the popular term Zeitenwende, the turning of the times. Its implication was that the past was irretrievably lost, the present was chaotic and dangerous, but the future was there to be claimed by those with the conviction and technical skill to do so.

Throughout the 1920s, this historical self-consciousness was expressed in the concept of Krisis or Krise, crisis. Intellectual buzzwords referred to a crisis of learning, a crisis of European culture, a crisis of historicism, crisis theology, and numerous crises of science and mathematics. The implication was that these fields were in a state of flux which called for resolution. A similar dynamic could be seen in the political polemics which filled the Weimar press, where discussions of crisis tended to portray the present as a moment of decision or opportunity. According to Rüdiger Graf’s study of more than 370 Weimar-era books and still more journal articles with the term “crisis” in their titles, the concept generally functioned as “a call to action” by “narrow[ing] the complex political world to two exclusive alternatives.”

Although the republic was most popular among workers and social democrats, the Weimar left contained an influential strain of utopian thought which saw itself as working beyond the bounds of formal politics. Here, too, crisis was considered a source of potential. Consider the sentiments expressed by Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school of architecture of design, in 1919:

Capitalism and power politics have made our generation creatively sluggish, and our vital art is mired in a broad bourgeois philistinism. The intellectual bourgeois of the old Empire…has proven his incapacity to be the bearer of German culture. The benumbed world is now toppled, its spirit is overthrown, and is in the midst of being recast in a new mold.

Gropius was among those intellectuals, artists, and administrators who, often taking inspiration from an idealized image of the Soviet Union, subscribed to the idea of the “new man”—a post-capitalist individual whose self-fulfillment would come from social duty. Urban planning, social policy, and the arts were all seen as means to create the environment in which this new man could emerge.

The “bourgeois of the old Empire,” as Gropius called them, had indeed been overthrown; but in their place came a reactionary modernist movement, often referred to as the “conservative revolution,” whose own ideas of political transformation used socialism both as inspiration and as ideological counterpoint. In the works of Ernst Jünger, technology and militarist willpower were romanticized as dynamic forces which could pull society out of decadence. Meanwhile, the political theorist Carl Schmitt emphasized the need for a democratic polity to achieve a shared identity in opposition to a common enemy, a need sometimes better accomplished by the decisive judgments of a sovereign dictator than by a fractious parliamentary system.

Even some steadfast supporters of the republic, like the novelist Heinrich Mann, seized on the theme of crisis as a call to transformative action. In a 1923 speech, against a backdrop of hyperinflation and the occupation of the Ruhr by French forces, Mann insisted that the republic should resist the temptation of nationalism, and instead fulfill its promise as a “free people’s state” by dethroning the “blood-gorging” capitalists who still controlled society in their own interests.

These trends were not confined to rhetoric and intellectual discussion. They were reflected in practical politics by the tendency of even trivial issues to be treated as crises that raised fundamental conflicts of worldview. So it was that, in 1926, a government was toppled by a dispute over the regulations for the display of the republican flag. Meanwhile, representatives were harangued by voters who expected them to embody the uncompromising ideological clashes taking place in the wider political sphere. In towns and cities across the country, rival marches and processions signaled the antagonism of socialists and their conservative counterparts—the burghers, professionals and petite bourgeoisie who would later form the National Socialist coalition, and who by mid-decade had already coalesced around President Paul von Hindenburg.

***

We are not Weimar. The ideologies of that era, and the politics that flowed from them, were products of their time, and there were numerous contingent reasons why the republic faced an uphill battle for acceptance. Still, there are lessons. The conflict between opposing visions of society may seem integral to the spirit of democratic politics, but at times of crisis, it can be corrosive to democratic institutions. The either/or mindset can add a whole new dimension to whatever emergency is at hand, forcing what is already a time of disorientating change into a zero-sum competition between grand projects and convictions that leave ordinary, procedural politics looking at best insignificant, and at worst an obstacle.

But sometimes this kind of escalation is simply unavoidable. Crisis ideologies amplify, but do not create, a desire for change. The always-evolving material realities of capitalist societies frequently create circumstances that are untenable, and which cannot be sufficiently addressed by political systems prone to inertia and capture by vested interests. When such a situation erupts into crisis, incremental change and a moderate tone may already be a foregone conclusion. If your political opponent is electrifying voters with the rhetoric of emergency, the only option might be to fight fire with fire.

There is also a hypocrisy innate to democratic politics which makes the reality of how severe crises are managed something of a dirty secret. Politicians like to invite comparisons with past leaders who acted decisively during crises, whether it be French president Macron’s idolization of Charles de Gaulle, the progressive movement in the U.S. and elsewhere taking Franklin D Roosevelt as their inspiration, or virtually every British leader’s wish to be likened to Winston Churchill. What is not acknowledged is the shameful compromises that accompanied these leaders’ triumphs. De Gaulle’s opportunity to found the French Fifth Republic came amid threats of a military coup. Roosevelt’s New Deal could only be enacted with the backing of Southern Democratic politicians, and as such, effectively excluded African Americans from its most important programs. Allied victory in the Second World War, the final fruit of Churchill’s resistance, came at the price of ceding Eastern and Central Europe to Soviet tyranny.

Such realities are especially difficult to bear because the crises of the past are a uniquely unifying force in liberal democracies. It was often through crises, after all, that rights were won, new institutions forged, and loyalty and sacrifice demonstrated. We tend to imagine those achievements as acts of principled agency which can be attributed to society as a whole, whereas they were just as often the result of improvisation, reluctant concession, and tragic compromise.

Obviously, we cannot expect a willingness to bend principles to be treated as a virtue, and nor, perhaps, should we want it to. But we can acknowledge the basic degree of pragmatism  which crises demand. This is the most worrying aspect of the narratives of decision surrounding the current COVID-19 crisis: still rooted in the projects and preoccupations of the past, they threaten to render us inflexible at a moment when we are entering uncharted territory.

Away from the discussions about what the emergency has revealed and the action it demands, a new era is being forged by governments and other institutions acting on a more pressing set of motives—in particular, maintaining legitimacy in the face of sweeping political pressures and staving off the risk of financial and public health catastrophes. It is also being shaped from the ground up, as countless individuals have changed their behavior in response to an endless stream of graphs, tables, and reports in the media.

Political narratives simply fail to grip the contingency of this situation. Commentators talk about the need to reduce global interdependence, even as the architecture of global finance has been further built up by the decision of the Federal Reserve, in March, to support it with unprecedented amounts of dollar liquidity. They continue to argue within a binary of free market and big government, even as staunchly neoliberal parties endorse state intervention in their economies on a previously unimaginable scale. Likewise, with discussions about climate policy or western relations with China—the parameters within which these strategies will have to operate are simply unknown.

To reduce such complex circumstances to simple, momentous decisions is to offer us more clarity and agency than we actually possess. Nonetheless, that is how this crisis will continue to be framed, as political actors strive to capture the mood of emergency. It will only make matters worse, though, if our judgment remains colored by ambitions and resentments which were formed in earlier crises. If we continue those old struggles on this new terrain, we will swiftly lose our purchase on reality. We will be incapable of a realistic appraisal of the constraints now facing us, and without such realistic appraisal, no solution can be effectively pursued.

Protest and the pressures of lockdown

Was the lockdown the catalyst for the riots sweeping the United States during the past few days? The question will never be definitively answered, but it is difficult to believe that the psychological tension and economic hardships of shutting down society have not contributed to the unrest. Race relations in the US have long been a tinderbox, but the fears and frustrations of the last few months have surely made the situation a good deal more combustible.

Politics in the United Kingdom tend to offer a polite, sotto voce echo of those in the US. We too have seen the effects of lockdown fatigue, not in the form of burning cities but of indignation at the thought that the Prime Minister’s advisor, Dominic Cummings, may have breached lockdown regulations. Again, the furor which greeted that scandal – a tempest in a teacup by American standards – suggested a nation whose nerves had started to fray. Over the weekend, socially distancing measures were being widely flouted in London, not least by crowds of demonstrators showing solidarity with their counterparts in the United States.

On both sides of the Atlantic, it is now difficult to imagine another lockdown being successfully imposed. Should there be a second spike in Covid cases, one can already see how the blame-game will be played: one side will condemn the government’s incompetence and lack of moral authority, the other will deflect by pointing to the protestors’ irresponsibility.

A broader problem for democratic societies is revealing itself here. At moments of crisis, the use of public space has traditionally been a crucial part of the political process. But if gathering in public spaces increases the danger posed by infectious disease, then there may be a serious conflict between the demands of public health and the health of the political system.

The scenes of egregious violence coming from American cities should not make us overlook the importance of demonstrations and protests. The descent of civil unrest into lawlessness and brutal destruction poses its own set of questions: chiefly, what kinds and degrees of illegality are morally justifiable in a given set of circumstances. But however we reply to this – wherever we draw the line between acceptable protest and unacceptable violence – it remains the case that some forms of protest can and must be accepted.

Protests are not just a way of expressing an opinion or trying to bring about change; they also have a cathartic value. They are pressure valves allowing the pent-up tensions to be released in a way that, while potentially bringing about changes in policy or in the political system itself, can in the long run prevent the system from collapsing into chaos. Again, the fact that such a collapse can begin with protest is neither here nor there. The kinds of seething resentments which can make protests a catalyst for wider chaos must be addressed elsewhere in the political system; suppressing protest on these grounds would only make those resentments worse.

Even if you disagree with protesters – even if you think their protests are unjustified, irresponsible or downright dangerous – shutting down protest in a political culture where it is seen as a legitimate form of expression tends to be a self-defeating strategy.

This puts us in quite a bind when it comes to the ongoing Covid-19 threat. It has been said time and again that national or statewide lockdowns are an unprecedented social experiment whose effects cannot be predicted. These policies, justified though they may be in terms of public health, have amounted to forcing citizens into total passivity as their lives are reshaped by their governments’ frantic attempts to stay on top of the situation. Recent events in the United States, for all their other causes, suggest an early result of the lockdown experiment. I don’t expect other democracies to see unrest on a remotely similar scale, but in nations like Britain and France, which have their own traditions of protest, we should not be surprised if some people feel a desire to make their voices heard together and in public.

If that desire continues to manifest itself, and the pandemic does return in a second wave, it will present politicians with yet another excruciating judgment. If they try to prevent protests, social distancing will be dismissed as a pretext for silencing opposition. That could cause anger to grow, or lead to widespread rule breaking which would leave the relevant government’s authority in tatters. But if protests are allowed, it could hardly be an exception: restrictions would have to go altogether.

The management of civil unrest is a perilous business at the best of times. Setting limits to protest is necessary for a regime to maintain credibility, but knowing where to set those limits requires a deft reading of the mood. This has just been made considerably more difficult by a threat which both ramps up political tensions and constrains the use of public space. To the medical and economic challenges posed by Covid-19 we can now add another dilemma: that of judging when it is necessary to sacrifice the rules for the wider stability of the system.

 

Ancient liberties, novel dangers

Until very recently, the British political landscape was drearily familiar: each new argument about Brexit, the dangers of populism, or the excesses of cultural liberalism seemed identical to the last. It has taken an act of nature to force us out of that rut, but here we are. Thanks to the Covid-19 outbreak, the nation not only faces a public health emergency, but also an unprecedented suspension of civil liberties, as parliament this week granted the government powers to disperse public gatherings and confine people to their homes. 

Now we are seeing politics in a new light. On the left, many who were in the habit of portraying Boris Johnson as a budding authoritarian dictator found themselves pleading for the state-enforced lockdown which has now arrived. It is on the right that opinion has been divided. Though some have relished the state flexing its muscles during a crisis, it has equally been some of the nation’s most conservative voices that have expressed reservations about the infringement of civil liberties.

“End of freedom,” bellowed the front page of The Daily Telegraph on Tuesday morning. Thatcher biographer Charles Moore conceded that “it would be bold” to say the lockdown was wrong, but warned of a herd-like population becoming “blindly dependent on rigid orders.” Meanwhile, Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens, who has been loudly insisting that the government response is disproportionate to the threat posed by the virus, declared the emergency powers “a frightening series of restrictions on ancient liberties.”

This is a useful reminder that, on the subject of personal freedom, there are important crosscurrents between liberals and conservatives. Whereas liberals are more inclined to say you should be able to do as you like, they are also more comfortable with the state protecting its citizens from harm. Even Daniel Hannan, the closest thing modern Britain has to a 19th-century Whig, has supported the right of government to restrict liberties on the grounds that risk of infection is, in the language of neoclassical economics, an externality we impose on one another.

British conservatism, on the other hand, though traditionally keen on law and order, also contains a deep strain of suspicion with respect to the state meddling in civil society. There are various uncharitable explanations for this instinct. Conservatism has historically been concerned with protecting the wealth and status of certain elites. Since the 1980s, it has additionally been susceptible to libertarian dogma about free markets. More simply, the conservative worldview tends to attract a certain kind of grumpy individualist who resents the bureaucracy of modern society (even when it is trying to protect him from a plague).

In its purest Burkean form, however, the conservative case for liberty rests on the much richer philosophical grounds of the trans-generational contract. Given what we know about the fallibility of human judgment, and about the difficulty of clawing back rights once they have been lost, we should conclude that the freedoms which previous generations have struggled for are not ours to give away at a moment’s notice, but to guard jealously for those who come after us. Hence the emphasis on “ancient liberties,” and on pausing for thought especially during an emergency.

I take this argument seriously, regardless of whether it is actually what motivates conservatives today. I take it far more seriously than the libertarian case against an overbearing state, which rests on a dubious view of human beings as autonomous contract-making individuals, and on unrealistic injunctions against coercion. The Burkean paradigm emphatically does not value freedom in and of itself. Rather, it posits that the cumulative experience of generations has established the value of particular freedoms within the context of a particular society.

Even if, like myself, you think it was correct for the government to enforce the lockdown, I think we should still adopt the spirit of mild paranoia which animates the “ancient liberties” outlook. We should be alert to the possibility that certain emergency measures might outlive the emergency in one form or another. We should push back against authorities who seem to be enjoying their new powers too much. And we should think about how this experience of trading freedom for safety might influence expectations in the long term.

Yet these same considerations also point to a major weakness of thinking about civil liberties in primarily historical terms. Namely, it can lead us to fixate on traditional rights and customs, and consequently, to overlook new kinds of threat – a problem aptly illustrated by those who seem to think the worst part of the lockdown is that British people can’t go to the pub.

I don’t think the real danger of our present situation has much to do with the forced closure of businesses, or with physical confinement to our households. The damage these measures are inflicting on our economy, and the immense financial burden the state is assuming as a consequence, make it irrational for even the most power-crazed despot to maintain them longer than necessary. In any case, I get the impression the public is fully aware that these are emergency precautions, and won’t take kindly to prolonged interference in such matters.

Rather, it seems to me the threat is most acute with respect to the state’s technological capacity. As I mentioned in a recent post, there is a good chance that the Covid-19 crisis will prompt various industries to develop technologies which allow them to do more remotely. We should expect a similar trajectory in terms of state power. The administrative challenge of responding to the epidemic, and of facilitating economic and bureaucratic activity during the lockdown, will surely incentivise the state to strengthen and centralise its digital resources. It would, in the process, become more adept at collecting, managing, and utilising information about its citizens, while learning new ways of enacting its most intrusive powers.

Admittedly the British government, which does not even have an emergency messaging system for contacting citizens on their mobiles, does not yet seem very threatening in this respect. But elsewhere there has been plenty of evidence that new techniques of surveillance and control are being forged in response to the crisis (I recommend reading this piece by Jeremy Cliffe in The New Statesman), and we could yet see similar developments here, especially if expanding digital infrastructures turns out to be a matter of economic competitiveness.

It may well be, of course, that we want our government to take some of these steps if it helps us weather the current storm. But that is precisely where the risk lies. If we think it necessary to empower the state in new ways, we need to devise new forms of oversight and accountability. To that end, thinking about our freedoms as keepsakes from the past is of limited use; we also need to think imaginatively about how they can be extended into the future.

The politics of this crisis will be grim. We should prepare now.

Last weekend, which now feels like a lifetime ago, I nervously attended what will probably be my last social gathering for several months. Despite a general mood of uneasiness, at least one of my friends was hoping that there would be a silver lining to the looming Covid-19 epidemic. Did I not think, he asked, that confronting this challenge together might finally instil some solidarity in our society?

I heard similar sentiments being expressed throughout last week. In a BBC Newsnight interview, the Rabbi Jonathan Sacks suggested that “We are going to come through this… with a much stronger commitment to helping others,” adding that it was “probably the lesson we needed as a country.” Some of those rushing to join community aid groups have expressed similar optimism. Even on social media, the shared experience of confinement has given rise to something of an upbeat communal spirit.

Solidarity is obviously welcome, and action to help the vulnerable is more welcome still. I am as hopeful as anyone else that little platoons will play their part in this emergency. But we should not fool ourselves about what lies ahead. Though many commentators have been drawing parallels to the Second World War, the emerging consensus among economists is that the shock now underway will dwarf that of the early 1940s. The blow to demand dealt by social distancing measures points towards a spiral of business contraction and redundancies simply unprecedented in modern history. The forecasts flying around in recent days vary considerably, and are of limited use given how quickly the situation is developing. But I have yet to see any evidence that the swiftly approaching economic crisis will not be brutal – and that is before we consider the effects of the financial crisis unfolding alongside it.

This means that our efforts as individuals and communities ultimately pale by comparison to the responsibility which now rests on the state. Only the state can manage the gargantuan tasks of coordinating healthcare, propping up collapsing industries, and mitigating the financial damage in the population at large. As the multi-hundred billion pound measures announced by Chancellor Rishi Sunak last week attest, we are undergoing a transformation of the government’s role in the economy on a scale not seen in living memory. And we are only at the beginning.

What is more, it’s becoming apparent that the flag around which many of us have been rallying in recent weeks – the necessity of aggressive containment measures to ease the stress on our healthcare system – will only take us so far. At the moment, our priority is to slow the virus’ spread by reducing interpersonal contact as much as possible. But if, as is widely suspected, any attempt to return to normality will only cause infections to rise again, then there will be truly horrendous trade-offs between ongoing economic damage and the likely deaths resulting from interaction. (The dimensions of that dilemma may become clearer in the coming days, as the Chinese authorities begin to relax their brutal lockdown of Wuhan province).

All of this points to inevitable and legitimate political conflict in the coming months and years. The fissures which have threatened to emerge following each of Sunak’s announcements last week – between homeowners and renters, between businesses and workers, between employees and the self-employed – are just a glimpse of what lies ahead.

As the state rapidly expands into a Leviathan, acting as insurer of last resort for much of the population, it will assume responsibility for the survival prospects not only of thousands of individuals at risk of illness, but of entire sectors of the economy. There may be hopes of a swift “bounce-back” recovery, if the government’s attempts to flood the economy with borrowed and printed cash manage to shore-up demand, but we should not delude ourselves that we can somehow just resume where we left off. Countless businesses and careers that entered this crisis as perfectly viable will needed ongoing targeted support to survive, and the state will need to decide which are most worthy of that support.

In other words, whatever the settlement that emerges from a prolonged period of extraordinary state intervention, there are bound to be winners and losers. As the aftermath of the 2007-08 financial crisis taught us, a perception that bailouts have been distributed unfairly will lead to toxic resentments. The coming recession has every likelihood of bringing such tensions back to the surface. As a recent report by the Resolution Foundation pointed out, the sectors being hardest hit by the downturn are disproportionately staffed by those with low incomes, with little or no savings, and without the option to work from home. One can already imagine a scenario in which handouts to firms deemed too big or strategically important to fail coincide with a sense of powerlessness among a burgeoning population of underemployed workers and debt-laden small businesses.

There is no doubt that in the short term, our efforts must be directed toward mitigating a public health emergency which, sadly, has yet to reach its peak. I accept that this will entail seeking political conciliation wherever possible, so as to focus on the challenge at hand.

In the medium-term, however, we need to think about what solidarity really means in these circumstances. It should, surely, involve an acknowledgement that the careful mediation of political disputes will be essential to riding this crisis out. That will require, above all, a framework in which competing interests can make their claims without the resulting conflicts becoming too incendiary.

Such a framework precisely what our political culture has already, in recent years, shown itself to be lacking. In a strange throwback to the “grand bargains” that characterised mid-20th century politics, the government has promised to consult with representatives of business and the unions going forward. But trade unions today represent barely a fifth of the workforce, with memberships skewed towards older, well-paid public sector workers. Like many other advanced economies, modern Britain is a patchwork of groups whose economic interests appear to align, but which lack the social cohesion necessary to realise and articulate those interests. They exist only as statistical entities.

It is crucial, therefore, that we think about the role of institutions in channeling some of the solidarity that is generated by this crisis towards conflict resolution. This should be an opportunity for the Labour Party to address the problem of who in modern Britain is most in need of its representation, and to provide constructive opposition to the government on that basis. It should be an opportunity for the media to break out of last decade’s culture wars and identify on whose behalf the government should be held to account.

We will also need new institutions to represent those socially dispersed interests who will struggle to be heard in the halls of power during a new era of corporatism. Perhaps this is where the little platoons will make a difference after all. Could community aid groups, or the professional networks which are already springing-up among the unemployed, gradually morph into such bodies?

Admittedly it seems perverse to talk about the necessity of conflict at a time like this. Yet if we suppress the political fallout from this crisis, we will only be storing-up demons for later.

Coronavirus and the spectre of the closed network

How will the world be reshaped by coronavirus? Answers to this question have almost become a genre unto themselves. Such speculation – even if it is just speculation – can be valuable, and not just insofar as it helps us to grapple with the particular threat facing us. Moments of unexpected shock like this one, when drastic change suddenly seems possible, can shake us out of our engrained ways of thinking and refocus our attention on the forces at play in our lives.

To be sure, the arrival of a global pandemic has not escaped the immense gravitational force of familiar arguments. Many conservative commentators have taken it as confirmation of long-held suspicions over globalisation: a pathogen bred in unhygienic Chinese animal markets seems an obvious reminder that bad things as well as good can spread through porous borders. There is, moreover, nothing quite like the prospect of collapsing supply chains to stir vague longings for autarchy. “If Britain were ever isolated from the rest of the world,” a columnist in the UK’s Telegraph opines, “It would need healthy farms.”

No more surprising have been the efforts to redirect discussion of the virus towards issues of prejudice and discrimination. The most cartoonish illustration of this remains the statement of the World Health Organisation director general that “The greatest enemy we face is not the virus itself; it’s the stigma that turns us against each other.”

Neither of these responses are entirely without merit, of course, but they are illustrative of the overly simplistic way we have come to think about the interconnected world in which we live. In the western democracies, a decade of political trench warfare over issues of national sovereignty, immigration and the domestic consequences of a globalised economy has led us to reduce the complex reality of networks and connectivity to questions about openness.

How should we weight the benefits of mobility and change versus those of stability? How flexible should our culture be? What responsibilities do we have towards the rest of the world? Should we be “somewheres” or “anywheres”? These are important questions, but they have absorbed our attention to the extent that we have not kept track of the conditions which allowed them to be posed in the first place. They seem to assume that a capacity for an ever-increasing interconnectedness is like an escalator towards an ever more open and fluid world; our decision is merely whether or not we should step onto it.

All the while, however, a different story has been emerging under our noses. Those very debates about the merits of openness have been facilitated by a boom of network technology, and this has itself brought about new kinds and degrees of fragmentation and mistrust. The division fuelled by social media, the cultural isolation manifest in personalised algorithms, the capture of audiences through disinformation and propaganda – these are only the most visible symptoms of that paradox.

Since the 1980s, the emergence of the so-called knowledge economy – where patents and other intellectual property are increasingly reliant on the management and analysis of vast seas of information, made available through connectivity – has exacerbated the social, cultural and economic decoupling of wealthy urban centres from resentful heartlands. As the economist Paul Krugman noted in a recent interview, the internet has made it possible for firms “to actually separate the low value activities from the high value activities, so that your back office operations can be some place where land is cheap and wages are low, but you can keep your corporate headquarters and your high-level technical staff in lower Manhattan.”

The coronavirus’ disruption of our habitual social and economic interactions has led to a dawning realisation that we have already adopted a suite of technologies with immense potential for social fragmentation. In The Atlantic, Ian Bogost points out that the infrastructure already exists for a privileged section of society to retreat into a virtual enclave of remote work, shopping, education and entertainment. Quarantine, he writes, “is just a raw, surprising name for the condition that computer technologies have brought about over the last two decades: making almost everything possible from the quiet isolation of a desk or chair illuminated by an internet-connected laptop or tablet.”

Similarly, much of the cosmopolitanism that exists in our societies today – and which is also centred in the hubs of the knowledge economy – has stemmed from the incentives for migration produced by an abundance of service sector jobs. These, too, could be made redundant by a greater leveraging of connectivity. As Ed Conway recently speculated in the London Times, the coronavirus shock could help to stimulate “a new model of globalization,” based on technologies such as 3D printing, artificial intelligence and robotics. This would allow labour and resources from around the world to be coordinated more efficiently, thereby reducing the unreliability which comes from actual people and things having to be in certain places at certain times. Conway asks us to imagine “hotel rooms in London being cleaned by robots controlled by cleaners in Poland, or lawns in Texas mowed by robots steered by gardeners in Mexico.”

Now, I have no idea whether coronavirus will launch a fourth industrial revolution, or hasten our evolution into housebound recluses sustained by Netflix, Amazon and telecommuting software. My point is this: connectivity does not exist on a simple scale of more and less, and nor does it axiomatically entail a high degree of openness. Rather, connectivity can come in many forms, and the world can continue to become more densely interconnected without any concomitant increase in the freedom or willingness to interact.

The implications of this reality do not favour communitarian “somewheres” any more than the liberal “anywheres,” to return to our troublesome dichotomy. For it means that we can have all the alienating effects of connectivity with none of the benefits. One can easily imagine an expansive network capable of harvesting huge amounts of information, and of coordinating vast resources, but where the majority of people who provide the inputs remain in many respects isolated, with limited ability to use the network for their own ends. They would be “connected,” but as mere nodes, not as agents. The obvious precedent here is China, where technology has enabled a previously unimaginable degree of surveillance and social control, including control over the circulation of information.

We can, of course, still argue about whether we should try to bring about a more cosmopolitan world. But the possibilities raised by coronavirus should, at the very least, drive home the realisation that networks cannot simply be presumed to facilitate the politics of openness. G.W.F Hegel famously said that the owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk, and we have been proving him correct by arguing over a world on which the sun is already setting.

The end of extraordinary politics?

I’ve been overseas for a few weeks, so I missed the election results coming in on December 12th, and most of the ensuing media frenzy. Based on the odd headline I did see, it seemed as though the British political system had just been administered an enormous quantity of laxative; though whether Boris Johnson’s breaking of three years of parliamentary deadlock was a moment of profound relief or terrifying incontinence was, naturally, a contentious issue.

When I got back to the UK a couple of days ago, sleep-deprived after my journey and struggling to work, I decided to watch some of the election night coverage. Amidst all the praise and recriminations in response to Johnson’s victory, one interview in particular stood out to me. It was with Nicholas Soames, a former minister and one of the MPs who had been kicked out of the Conservative party in September for obstructing Johnson’s theatrical drive for Brexit. The interviewer, Andrew Neil, put it to Soames that Conservative gains in the north and midlands would entail a fundamental transformation of the party. It was, Neil suggested, “the end of your kind of Tory party – a party that was pro-EU, was more southern than northern, was quite posh.”

This was an apt point to raise with Soames. Besides being, quite literally, an embodiment of the Tory heritage – Soames is Winston Churchill’s grandson, as the hangdog expression and comb-over make clear – he had just recently railed against Johnson for turning the party into “a Brexit sect.” But Soames was in a conciliatory mood. All these contradictions, he insisted, would now be dissolved in the aura of Johnson’s “One Nation” Conservatism. He even conceded Johnson had been right to eject him from the party, and was quick to point out he had “very generously” been reinstated. In any case, his opposition had merely been “a point of principle.”

This obsequious performance resonated with many of the responses I’m seeing from long-term Conservative supporters. I don’t doubt they are genuinely thrilled by the prospect of embracing their blue-collar compatriots under a Disraelian banner of queen and country. But it is notable that this “One Nation” fervour has made them forget their longstanding reservations about what Johnson is now shaping up to do. Most obviously, a majority of Tory stalwarts were for the longest time grimly opposed to high levels of government borrowing and spending (not to mention taxing) – the very thing that all tacitly concede will be a condition of cementing their new constituency. Then there is the fact that many of them were, like Soames, less than keen on Johnson himself. Nor is this surprising, given that nobody knew what he actually wanted to do with the power he so nakedly craved, only that he would do anything to get it.

But he did get it. And that, I would suggest, is the main reason that “points of principle” are receding so sharply into the background. In hindsight, it has to be said that Johnson’s outmanoeuvring of parliament and an inept Labour party was skilfully done. Taking seats like Blyth Valley and Redcar is no small achievement; after a decade with very few notable politicians on the British scene, it looks positively Bismarckian. It is intoxicating, all this talk of realignments, watersheds, historic breakthroughs, new eras. And somehow, Johnson’s mercurial (or if you prefer, unprincipled) character makes it all the more intoxicating. That shapeless quality behind the cartoonish façade has, for the time being, revealed itself as the spirit of pure power.

It should come as no surprise that politicians prove flexible in the presence of a winner. The recent kowtowing to king Boris echoes a ritual which has played out in countless courts and privy chambers over the centuries, as erstwhile enemies and fence-sitters bend the knee to the new authority in the land. More surprising, however, is that the rancour we’ve all been through in the past few years should be settled in such a time-honoured fashion. The British constitution, with all its ceremonies, conventions and medieval fripperies, is unmatched in its insistence on cloaking the ugly business of power competition in the sacred garb of custom. One can scarcely imagine, when one sees the Prime Minister’s car gliding along to Buckingham Palace for an audience with the Queen, that just a few months ago we were witnessing a constitutional bonfire, as the executive, legislature and judiciary wrestled for control of the Brexit proceedings. Yet the question remains how much exactly has been settled by this election. After all, those wranglings within the political system were only part of a wider turbulence that shows no signs of stopping.

One of the most intriguing books I came across this year was a study called Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary by Andreas Kalyvas, professor at New York’s New School for Social Research. Borrowing from the ideas of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt, the book considers what happens when democratic politics are subject to exceptional strain or rupture, overflowing their constitutional limits and entering the domains of culture and everyday life. Needless to say, many of its themes resonated with the experience of western countries in recent years. Institutions that had seemed to operate with the assurance of natural laws are revealed as arbitrary customs. Formerly trivial issues become symbolic of wide-ranging and fundamental questions of worldview. The primacy of identity leads to a resurrection of the primitive friend/enemy distinction. In a climate of endless possibility, charisma emerges as an almost magical force, and people flock to all manner of saints and charlatans.

All of this signals a diversification of power. As politics enters new arenas, so too does an awareness of how new forms of authority might be leveraged, new constituencies mobilised. This is what much of the commentary on the contemporary left, in particular, overlooks. From the perspective of ordinary politics, the UK Labour party and perhaps also the US Democrats appear determined to make themselves unelectable. But the left faces a genuine dilemma on account of the possibilities that seem to be opened up by extraordinary politics. The emotive potential of online discourse, hegemony in cultural institutions, the emergence of leaders who exude genuine conviction – all of these forms of power rely on an adversarial, or at least selective relationship with traditional forms of authority. It is easy to portray such tendencies as delusional when the right wins elections, and this could turn out to be the correct verdict. It could turn out that the right has capitalised on the potential of extraordinary politics to effect a reorientation of the electorate, ushering in a new sense of the ordinary. Then again, it could not. Only time will tell who is backing the right horse.

It might seem cynical to speak in these terms. After all, it is often said that we are currently seeing the return of a politics based on values rather than interests. Notions like equality, justice, patriotism and solidarity are now back on the table. But if this period of extraordinary politics has taught us anything, it is surely that values and power are not as distinct as we would like to imagine. The recalibration of principles after a decisive election victory is nothing compared to what happens when political conflicts spill into culture at large and become supercharged by tribalism. There the language of values, rights and integrity quickly becomes a tool for different purposes: signalling strength, claiming territory and cultivating solidarity. Power is no longer a means to an end, but an end in itself – one which perpetually creates other ends to serve as its means. And eventually, it is difficult to tell where values stop and the desire for power begins.

Reading Antigone in an age of resistance

The play opens with two sisters, Antigone and Ismene, arguing about their duties to family versus those to the state. Their two brothers have just killed each other while leading opposing sides of a civil war in Thebes. Their uncle Creon has now taken charge of the city, and has decreed that one of the brothers, Polynices, is to be denied a funeral: “he must be left unburied, his corpse / carrion for the birds and dogs to tear, / an obscenity for the citizens to behold.”

Ismene chooses obedience to Creon, but Antigone decides to rebel. She casts a symbolic handful of dust over Polynices’ corpse, and when brought before Creon, affirms her action in the name of “the great unwritten, unshakeable traditions” demanding funeral rites for the dead. So begins a confrontation between two headstrong, unflinching protagonists. It will end with Antigone hanging herself in her jail cell, leading to the suicide both of Creon’s son (who was engaged to Antigone), and consequently of his wife.

*   *   *

 

“When I see that king in that play, the first name that came to mind was Donald Trump: arrogance, misogyny, tunnel vision.” This was reportedly one audience member’s response to Antigone in Ferguson, a 2018 theatre piece that brought a famous Greek tragedy into the context of US race relations. That tragedy is Sophocles’ Antigone, which I have summarised above. The play is now frequently being used to explore contemporary politics, especially in relation to the theme of resistance. “It’s a story of a woman who finds the courage of her convictions to speak truth to power,” said Carl Cofield, who directed another production of Antigone in New York last year. Cofield drew parallels with the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, and “the resistance to the outcome of the presidential race.”

This reading of Antigone has become increasingly common since the post-war era. Its originator was perhaps Bertolt Brecht’s 1948 adaptation, which imagined a scenario where the German people had risen against Hitler. Since the 1970s Antigone has often been portrayed as a feminist heroine, and the play has served as a call-to-arms in countless non-western contexts too. As Fanny Söderbäck proudly notes: “Whenever and wherever civil liberties are endangered, when the rights or existence of aboriginal peoples are threatened, when revolutions are underway, when injustices take place – wherever she is needed, Antigone appears.”

Such appropriation of a classical figure is by no means unique. It echoes the canonisation of Socrates as a martyr for free speech and civil disobedience, most notably by John Stuart Mill, Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King. And just as this image of Socrates rests on Plato’s Apology of Socrates, but ignores the quite different portrait in the Crito, the “resistance” reading of Antigone bears little resemblance to how the play was originally intended and received.

An audience in 5th century Athens would not have regarded Antigone as subversive towards the authority of the state. In fact, if you accept the conventional dating of the play (441 BC), the Athenian people elected Sophocles to serve as a general immediately after its first performance. Rather, the dramatic impact of Antigone lay in the clash of two traditional visions of justice. Creon’s position at the outset – “whoever places a friend / above the good of his own country, he is nothing” – was not a queue for booing and hissing, but a statement of conventional wisdom. Likewise, Antigone’s insistence on burying her brother was an assertion of divine law, and more particularly, her religious duties as a woman. Thus Creon’s error is not that he defends the prerogatives of the state, but that he makes them incompatible with the claims of the gods.

Sophocles’ protagonists were not just embodiments of abstract principles, though. He was also interested in what motivates individuals to defend a particular idea of justice. Creon, it seems, is susceptible to megalomania and paranoia. And as Antigone famously admits in her final speech, her determination to bury her brother was a very personal obsession, born from her uniquely wretched circumstances.

*   *   *

 

It’s hardly surprising that our intuitive reading of Antigone has changed over more than two millennia. The world we inhabit, and the moral assumptions that guide us through it, are radically different. Moreover, Antigone is one of those works that seem to demand a new interpretation in every epoch. Hegel, for instance, used the play to illustrate his theory of dialectical progress in history. The moral claims of Antigone and Creon – or in Hegel’s scheme, family and state – are both inadequate, but the need to synthesise them cannot be grasped until they have clashed and been found wanting. Simone de Beauvoir also identified both protagonists with flawed outlooks, though in her reading Antigone is a “moral idealist” and Creon a “political realist” – two ways, according to de Beauvoir, of avoiding moral responsibility.

So neither Hegel nor de Beauvoir recognised Antigone as the obvious voice of justice. Then again, they were clearly reading the play with the templates provided by their own moments in history. Hegel’s historical forces belong to the tumultuous conflicts of the early 19thcentury, in which he had staked out a position as both a monarchist and a supporter of the French Revolution. De Beauvoir’s archetypes belong to Nazi-occupied France – a world of vicious dilemmas in which pacifists, collaborators and resistors had all claimed to act for the greater good, and were all, in her eyes, morally compromised.

Thus, each era tries to understand Antigone using the roles and narratives particular to its own moral universe. And this, I would argue, is a natural part of artistic and political discourse. Such works cannot be quarantined in their original context – they have different resonances for different audiences. Moreover, the question of how one interprets something is always preceded by the question of why one bothers to interpret it at all, and that second question is inevitably bound up with what we consider important in the here and now. Our own moral universe, as I’ve already suggested, is largely defined by the righteousness of resistance and the struggle for freedom. Consequently, works from the past tend to be interpreted according to a narrative where one agent or category of agent suppresses the autonomy of another.

Nonetheless, there are pitfalls here. I think it is important for us to remain aware that our intuitive reading of a play like Antigone is precisely that – our intuitive reading. Otherwise, we may succumb to a kind of wishful thinking. We may end up being so comfortable projecting our values across time that we forget they belong to a contingent moment in history. We might forget, in other words, that our values are the product of a particular set of circumstances, not of some divine edict, and so cannot simply be accepted as right.

Of course we can always try to reason about right and wrong. But if we unthinkingly apply our worldview to people in other eras, we are doing precisely the opposite. We are turning history itself into a vast echo chamber, relieving us of the need to examine or defend our assumptions.

*   *   *

 

The task of guarding against such myopia has traditionally fallen to academic scholarship. And in a sense, this institution has never been better equipped to do it. Since the advent of New Historicism in the 1980s, the importance of the context in which works are made, as well as the context in which they are read, has been widely acknowledged in the humanities. But this has had a peculiarly inverse effect. The apparent impossibility of establishing any objective or timeless lesson in a play like Antigone has only heightened the temptation to claim it for ourselves.

Consider the approach taken by the influential gender theorist Judith Butler in her book Antigone’s Claim (2000). Using modern psychoanalytic concepts, Butler delves into the murky world of family and sexuality in the play (Antigone is the daughter of the infamously incestuous Oedipus, whose “curse” she is said to have inherited). Butler thus unearths “a classical western dilemma” about the treatment of those who do not fit within “normative versions of kinship.”

However Butler is not interested in establishing any timeless insights about Antigone. As she makes clear throughout her analysis, she is interested in Antigone “as a figure for politics,” and in particular, for the contemporary politics of resistance. “I began to think about Antigone a few years ago,” she says, “as I wondered what had happened to those feminist efforts to confront and defy the state.” She then sets out her aim of using the play to examine contemporary society, asking

what the conditions of intelligibility could have been that would have made [Antigone’s] life possible, indeed, what sustaining web of relations makes our lives possible, those of us who confound kinship in the rearticulation of its terms?

This leads her to compare Antigone’s plight to that of AIDS victims and those in alternative parenting arrangements, while also hinting at “the direction for a psychoanalytic theory” which avoids “heterosexual closure.”

Butler is clearly not guilty, then, of forgetting her own situatedness in history. However this does raise the question, if one is only interested in the present, why use a work from the past at all? Butler may well answer that such texts are an integral part of the political culture she is criticising. And that is fine, as far as it goes. But this approach seems to risk undermining the whole point of historicism. For although it does not pretend that people in other times had access to the same ideas and beliefs as we do, it does imply that the past is only worth considering in terms our own ideas and beliefs. And the result is very similar: Antigone becomes, effectively, a play about us.

In other words, Butler’s way of appropriating the past subtly makes it conform to contemporary values. And in doing so, it lays the ground for that echo-chamber I described earlier, whereby works from the past merely serve as opportunities to give our own beliefs a sheen of eternal truth. Indeed, elsewhere in the recent scholarship on Antigone, one finds that an impeccably historicist reading can nonetheless end  like this:

Thus is the nature of political activism bent on the expansion of human rights and the extension of human dignity. … Antigone is a charter member of a small human community that is “la Résistance,” wherever it pops up in the history of human civilisation. (My emphasis)

Such statements are not just nonsensical, but self-defeating. However valuable ideas like human rights, human dignity, and resistance might be, they do not belong to “the history of human civilisation.” Moreover, it is impossible to understand their value unless one realises this.

The crucial question here is what we do with the knowledge that values differ across time. There is, perhaps, a natural tendency to see this as demanding an assertion of the ultimate validity of our own worldview. In this sense, our desire to portray Antigone as a figure of resistance recalls those theologians who used to scour classical texts for foreshadowings of Christ. I would argue, however, that we should treat the contingency of our beliefs as a warning against excessive certainty. Ideas are always changing in relation to circumstances, and as such, need to be constantly questioned.

The Forgotten Books of Dorothea Tanning

This article was first published by MutualArt on 4 April 2019

It has often been said that Dorothea Tanning had two careers in her exceptionally long life: first as a visual artist, then as a writer. At the current Tate Modern exhibition of Tanning’s paintings and sculptures, you can read her statement that it was after the death of her husband Max Ernst in 1976 that she “gave full rein to her long felt compulsion to write.” The decades before her own death in 2012 were increasingly dedicated to literature, as she produced two memoirs, a novel, and two well-regarded collections of poetry.

Nonetheless, it would be truer to say that word and image went hand-in-hand throughout Tanning’s career. She published a steady stream of texts during the height of her visual output from the 1940s until the 1970s. Moreover, as the wealth of literary allusions in her paintings suggests, she drew constant inspiration from the horde of books she and Ernst kept in their home. Tanning told the New York Times in 1995: “All my life I’ve been on the fence about whether to be an artist or writer.”

But the most overlooked aspect of Tanning’s literary-artistic career is her involvement in numerous books of poetry and printmaking in France from the 1950s onwards. These include collaborations with several French authors, and two books of Tanning’s own French poetry and prints – Demain (1963) and En chair et en or (1974).

These works deserve more attention. For one thing, the etchings and lithographs Tanning produced for these books amount to a significant and distinctive part of her oeuvre. According to Clare Elliott, curator of an upcoming show of Tanning’s graphic works at the Menil Collection in Houston, her prints “achieve a variety of visual effects impossible to achieve with other materials. Ranging from dreamlike representation to near total abstraction, they reveal the breadth of her formal innovation.”

What is more, a closer look at Tanning’s bookmaking years can give us a unique perspective on her as an artist – her working methods, her outlook, and her relationship to the movement she was most influenced by, Surrealism.

 

Book mania

Arriving in Paris in 1950, Tanning discovered a thriving scene around the beau livre, or limited edition artist’s book. “Paris in the first fifty years of our century spawned more beau livresthan the rest of the world together,” she recalled in 1983. “To call it mania would not have surprised or displeased anyone.” Mostly these books were collaborations between an artist and a poet, “with mutual admiration as the basic glue that held them together,” as well as an editor who normally bankrolled the project.

Tanning dove straight into this milieu. In 1950 she produced a series of lithographs, Les 7 Périls Spectraux (The 7 Spectral Perils), to accompany text by the Surrealist poet André Pieyre de Mandiargues. Here we can recognise several motifs from Tanning’s early paintings – most notably in Premier peril, where a female figure with a dishevelled mask of hair presses herself against an open door, which is also the cover of a book. But with her combination of visual textures, Tanning achieves a new depth in these images, showing her embrace of the lithographic process in all its layered intricacy.

As the collaborations continued during the 1950s and 60s, Tanning’s printmaking ambitions grew. Like many artists before her, she discovered in etching and lithography a seemingly limitless arena for experimentation, attempting a wide range of techniques and compositions. And in 1963 she went a step further, replacing the poetry of other authors with her own.

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Dorothea Tanning, “Frontispiece for Demain” and “Untitled for Demain” (1963). Courtesy of the Dorothea Tanning Foundation.

The result was Demain (Tomorrow), a book of six etchings and a poem in French dispersed across several pages. Though modest in size – just ten squared centimetres – it is a punchy work of Surrealism. The poem progresses through a series of menacing images, as language breaks down in the presence of time and memory. It concludes: “The night chews its bone / My house asks itself / And deplores / Tonight, bath of mud / Evening fetish of a hundred thousand years, / My vampire.” The etchings convey a similar sense of dissolution, with vague forms emerging from a fog of aquatint.

Making Demain involved frustrations any printmaker could recognise. She would later describe watching her printer, Georges Visat, “wiping colours on the little plates while I stood by, always imploring for another try. There must have been fifty of these.” She was, however, thrilled by the result: “For my own words my own images – what more could one ask?”

Eleven years later Tanning produced En chair et en or (Of flesh and gold), a more substantial and, in every respect, more accomplished book. Its ten etchings, in which curvaceous, almost-human figures are suspended above landscapes of pale yellow and blue, show us what to expect from the accompanying poem. Everything expresses a sense of poise, a dazzling, enigmatic tension:

Body and face drift
Down with nightfall, unnoticed.
Draw near, draw nearer
Your destination.

Gradually, Tanning introduces notes of violence and desire, culminating in the striking final stanza: “Death on a weekend / Opened the dance like a vein / Flaming flesh and gold.”

 

Second languages

Dorothea Tanning, “Quoi de plus,” from “En chair et en or” (1974). Courtesy of the Dorothea Tanning foundation.

By the time of En chair et en or, we can identify some characteristic features in Tanning’s printmaking and poetry. Her etchings typically present coarse background textures, ghostly colours, and loosely organic forms. Her poems, meanwhile, reveal her exposure to the international Surrealist movement during the 1940s. (In “Demain”for instance, there are direct echoes of the Mexican poet Octavio Paz).

But this is not the most insightful way to approach Tanning’s books. For what really appealed to her, an English-speaking painter, about printmaking and French poetry was the opportunity to escape familiar forms of expression.

“Much of this work, and etchings that follow, have to do with chance,” she wrote about one of her collaborations, “for so many things can happen to a copper plate, depending on how you treat it, that implications are myriad.” Very few artists master the printmaking process to the degree that they know exactly what they are going to get at the end of it, but for Tanning this was part of its allure. In her comments about printmaking, she often used words like “discovery” and “adventure.” Unpredictability, in other words, was a creative asset.

The same can be said of her poetry in this period. The Irish playwright Samuel Beckett claimed that he wrote in French precisely because he did not know it as well as English, and so was less confined by conventional style and idiom. Likewise, it is striking how raw and immediate Tanning’s French poetry is by comparison with her later work in English.

All of this resonates with what originally drew Tanning to Surrealism – in her often quoted phrase from 1936, “the limitless expanse of POSSIBILITY.” In its earliest and most dramatic phase, an important aim of Surrealism had been for artists to loosen their control over expression, thus allowing more spontaneous, expansive forms of communication and meaning. This is what printmaking and French – both, in a sense, second languages – allowed Tanning to do.

Notes on The Artist’s Studio

The series of paintings known as Concetto spaziale, by the Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana, is one of those moments in art history whose significance is easily overlooked today. It is difficult to imagine how radical they must have looked during the 1960s: plain white canvases presenting nothing more than one or a few slits where Fontana slashed the surface with a blade. Moreover, as I realised when I reviewed an exhibition featuring Fontana in 2015 (you can read that review here), it is only by considering the atmosphere of post-war Europe that one can grasp how freighted with purpose and symbolism this simple gesture had been.

But there are always new ways of looking at an artwork. The other evening I was visiting some galleries near Piccadilly and found myself, unexpectedly, confronted by one of the Concetto spaziale paintings once more. Only I wasn’t looking at the painting itself, but at a series of photographs that showed Fontana in his studio making it. Where previously there had been the stark aura of an iconic artwork, now there was melodrama and a rye sense of humour. The images, taken by the Italian photographer Ugo Mulas, were arranged in a climactic sequence. First we see Fontana poised at some distance from canvas, Stanley-knife in hand, his tense wrist and neatly folded sleeve suggesting the commencement of a long-anticipated act. There is a mood of ritual silence in the room, heightened by the soft light pouring through a large window. Then Fontana is approaching the canvas uncertainly, and making the first incision on its white surface – a moment pictured first in wide-angle, then close-up. Finally, the deed done, he lingers in a ceremonious bowing posture, the canvas now divided by a metre-long cleft.

Installation shot of Ugo Mulas, Lucio Fontana, L’Attesa, Milano 1-6, 1964 (2019). Modern print. Gelatin silver print on baritated paper. Edition of 8. Courtesy of Robilant+Voena.

These are just some of the photographs Mulas took of artists in their studios during the 1960s and 70s, which can be seen at Robilant+Voena gallery on Dover Street. Much like Fontana’s paintings, Mulas’ photographs require one to step imaginatively backwards in time; they now appear so classical in style, and so gorgeous in tone, that one can overlook their more subtle aspects. In particular, I get the sense Mulas was aware of his role as a myth-maker. His images playfully pander to the romance surrounding the artist’s studio – the setting where, in the popular imagination, unusual individuals go to perform some exotic and mysterious process of magic.

*   *   *

 

I have always been fascinated by studios, probably because I grew up with one at home. This was my mother’s studio. It was located between the kitchen and my brother’s bedroom, but I was always aware that it was a different kind of room from the others in the house. A place of inspiration, yes: a realm of coffee, bookshelves, and classical music. But also a site of labour, which smelled of turpentine and had a cold cement floor, a place where my old clothes became rags to wipe etching plates. Above all it was (and remains) a very particular setting, shaped by the contingencies of one person’s working life as it had evolved over many years.

Insofar as artists’ studios really are special, mysterious places, it is because of this particularity. This is rarely reflected, though, in the photography and journalism that surrounds them. Rather, studios tend to attract attention according to how well they embody a particular conception of the artist as an outsider, an unconventional or even otherworldly being. One studio that fits this template belongs to the monk-like painter Frank Auerbach, who has worked in the same dank cell in Mornington Crescent more or less every day since 1954 (Auerbach once quipped that age had finally forced him to reduce his working year, from 365 days to 364). Not only is the room cramped and barely furnished, but to the delight of various photographers over the years, Auerbach’s scraping technique has left the floor coated in layer upon layer of calcified paint. This is nothing, however, compared to the iconic lair of Francis Bacon – a disaster zone that resembled a trash-heap more closely than a studio, and captured perfectly Bacon’s persona as a chaotic, doomed madman.

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Jorge Lewinski, “Frank Auerbach,” 1965. © The Lewinski Archive at Chatsworth.
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Perry Ogden, “Francis Bacon’s 7 Reece Mews studio, London, 1998.”

The fact is, of course, that studios are often highly utilitarian spaces – clean, carefully organised, with most consideration going to practical questions such as storage and lighting. Of course some artists are messy, but their clutter is not qualitatively different to that which exists in many workspaces. And yet, even the apparently humdrum reality of a studio can provide a mystifying effect. Journalists and visitors often dwell precisely on the most ordinary, relatable aspects of an artist’s working life, thereby implicitly reinforcing the idea that an artist is something other than ordinary. In one feature on “Secrets of the Studio,” for instance, we learn that Grayson Perry likes to “collapse in an armchair and listen to the Archers,” while George Shaw “pretty much work[s] office hours.”

This paradox was observed by Roland Barthes in his wonderful essay “The Writer on Holiday.” After noting the tendency of the press to dwell on such domestic aspects of a writer’s life as their holidays, diet, and the colour of their pyjamas, Barthes concludes:

Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mythical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasises by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanity the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pyjamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience […].

Sometimes artists themselves appear to use this trick. Wolfgang Tillmans’ photograph Studio still life, c, 2014 shows a very ordinary desk spread with several computers, a keyboard, cellotape, post-it notes, and so on. There is just a suggestion of bohemia conveyed by the beer bottle, cigarette packs and ashtray. It is tempting to interpret this image, especially when shown alongside Tillmans’ other works, as a subtle piece of self-glorification – a gesture of humility that makes the artist seem all the more remarkable for being a real human being.

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Wolfgang Tillmans, “Studio still life, c, 2014.”

*   *   *

 

We shouldn’t be too cynical, though. The various romantic tropes that surround artists are not always and entirely tools of mystification, and nor do they show, as Barthes suggested, “the glamorous status bourgeois society liberally grants its spiritual representatives” in order to render them harmless. Such “myths” also offer a way of pointing towards, and navigating around, a deeper reality of which we are aware: that artistic production, at least in its modern form, is a very personal thing. This is why we will always have the sense, when seeing or entering a studio, that we are intruders in a place of esoteric ritual.

As I said, the beauty of a studio lies in its particularity. Does this mean, then, that one cannot appreciate a studio without becoming familiar with it? Not entirely. I was recently lent a copy of the architect MJ Long’s book Artists’ Studios, in which she chronicles the numerous spaces she designed for artists during her career. These include some of the most colourful and, indeed, most widely mythologised studios out there. But as an architect, Long is uniquely well placed to tell us the specific practical and personal considerations behind them. As such, she is able to bring out their genuinely poetic aspects without falling into cliché.

That poetry is captured, I think, in some notes left by Long’s husband and partner, Sandy Wilson, to encourage her to write her book. He briefly summarises a few of their studio projects, and the artists who commissioned them, as follows:

Kitaj, scholar-artist worked surrounded by books and the works of his friends. In his studio books lie open on the floor at the foot of each easel like paving stones in a Japanese garden.

Blake works in a sort of wonderland mirroring and embodying his magical mystery world of icons that feed into his imagination.

A dance photographer required a pure vacuum charged with light but no physical sense of place whatsoever.

Auerbach’s studio is the locked cell of the dedicated solitary.

Ben Johnson requires the clinical conditions of the operating theatre shared with meticulous operatives in a planned programme of execution.