Month: April 2023

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Counterpoises

‘Tulips’, borrowed from Sylvia Plath’s poem, is the title of a recent series of work by the British artist duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings. On view at Tate Britain until 7 May, the series consists of six, two-by-two-metre fresco paintings mounted on five-centimetre-thick wooden panels, accompanied by a graphite drawing on paper that bears the title of the series. Paying homage to Italian Renaissance masters such as Masaccio and Uccello, these works explore power dynamics and structures in modern societies.

Quinlan and Hastings began their artistic partnership around 2014, a year after they graduated from Goldsmiths College in London. Their first collaboration involved building gay bars in studios and holding live events to critique male-dominated sex culture. Using a Go-Pro camera, they spent nine months filming interior spaces of more than one hundred gay clubs across the UK, documenting their closures as a result of austerity, and at the same time recording a transition to hybrid forms of queer spaces. In 2016, the moving images they had assembled were condensed into a five-and-a-half-hour moving image archive titled UK Gay Bar Directory.

Quinlan and Hastings’s work combines contemporary practices such as filming, installation and performance with traditional techniques including wall rubbing, drawing, etching and egg tempera painting. Through drawing, they developed a passion for Italian Renaissance art. Their figures tend to be muscular and androgynous, offspring of those created by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. Their strategy of deconstructing power by re-presenting it bore fruit in a series of twelve etchings, which became the centrepiece of a joint solo exhibition in 2021 titled Disgrace: Feminism and the Political Right. The prints, created with hard-ground etching and aquatint, map out a timeline of right-wing feminism, starting with Imperial Ladies Auxiliary, which depicts women’s complicity in the construction of Empire since the Edwardian era, and concluding with I’m Not a Woman I’m a Conservative and We Will Not Be Silenced, which challenge the ‘Women2Win’ rhetoric and trans-exclusionary views in today’s politics.

Their enthusiasm for Renaissance paintings and interest in critically examining public spaces led to their latest experiment: fresco painting. Fresco as an ancient technique developed in an intimate relationship to architecture. It usually involves painting with water-based pigments directly onto wet lime plaster spread over a wall surface. Because of the strict requirements of drying time – the painting must be completed while the plaster is wet – a fresco is painted section by section in what is called a giornata (a day’s work). Once dry, the pigment absorbed by the plaster, the painting becomes an intrinsic component of the walls of the building. With a monumental style, historical frescoes often carried the function of illustrating the moral codes of a society. The six paintings on show at the Tate derive inspiration from frescoes at the Brancacci Chapel in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence. The main portions of the chapel were painted by Masolino and Masaccio in the 1420s and the rest was completed by Filippino Lippi sixty years later. The narrative centres on Saint Peter, re-establishing the authority of the Church and the primacy of the Roman Pontiff, both of which had been under threat since the Great Occidental Schism of 1378. In these compositions, the physical appearance of the figures corresponds to their moral status. Saints are usually depicted as standing with both feet firmly positioned on the ground. Solidity of posture conveys spiritual gravity. Good and evil are discernible at a glance.

Depictions of postures are more complicated in Quinlan and Hastings’s adaptations of the quattrocento convention. In the Brancacci Chapel frescoes, clothing can function as a visual device carrying ethical implications, either exposing or disguising a figure’s stance. One example is Masaccio’s treatment of Peter and the tax collector in the central scene of Tribute Money. Although the saint’s pose mirrors that of the tax collector, the moral inferiority of the latter is revealed by his unstable stance, clearly visible because he has bare legs, whereas the saint’s rock-solid reputation appears intact as his legs are concealed by the garment he wears. In Quinlan and Hastings’s paintings, modern outfits such as trousers and miniskirts allow legs to become a more visible element in the composition.

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Common Subjects, 2022, Photo © Tate (Sonal Bakrania).

In the painting titled Common Subjects, the six figures in the foreground are divided into two groups. The four on the left wear police uniforms, three men in trousers and a woman in a skirt. They are looking at two young women a few steps away, both dressed up and wearing high-heeled shoes. The police all stand firmly, their body weight evenly distributed between their slightly parted feet, a typical Renaissance manifestation of moral authority. The legs of the two women form a stark contrast: one stands with legs crossed, the other adopts a contrapposto, her weight shifted onto her left leg. The finger-pointing of the police at the two women seems to suggest some perceived immoral behaviour. A prison-like kiosk looms in the middle background, ominously suggesting how such encounters can end. However, any hasty conclusion about the gender and racial power dynamics is complicated by the dark skin colour of two of the police officers, and by a group of figures further back at the kiosk. Among them are two half-naked young men, one inside the kiosk, the other leaning cross-legged against it. The figures with upright postures are a woman and a girl, both wearing shorts and both turning away from the viewer.

The style of Quinlan and Hastings’s figures marks a significant divergence from their fifteenth-century inspiration. Masaccio was known for bringing a realistic vision into early Italian Renaissance art through making use of models and incorporating a sculptural approach into his painting. In the paintings of the two contemporary British artists, figures are collaged from street photographs in historical archives taken in Western metropolises such as London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Their intention, as the artists described in an interview, was to create a ‘horizontal rather than hierarchical relationship to history’. Their colours are conceptual as well as perceptual. The sharp division between the pink pavement and the dark grey street in Disinherited looks more like the edge of Mantegna’s abyss. Yellow is sometimes used to navigate between foreground and background. Tonal gradation appears to have been achieved through a digital process of separating tones into different shapes. These metamorphoses of photographic reproductions play tricks on the viewer. Some figures appear to resemble certain public figures or celebrities at first glance, but just as one feels on the verge of identifying them, the figures become slippery and dissolve one’s sense of déjà vu. The suited man in A History of Morality looks as though he could have walked out of a noir film, but the more one studies him, the more he seems to belong in front of the tulip bushes in the painting.

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, A History Of Morality, 2022, Photo © Tate (Sonal Bakrania).

Urban spaces in Quinlan and Hastings’s paintings are rendered in a muted palette and using large shapes, with details kept to a minimum. This creates a world that looks both familiar and strange. Buildings tend to be obliquely located so that vanishing points fall outside of the pictorial space rather than converging on a central figure. Conflicts, which are acted out on street corners, in parks, under the foliage of suburban trees or in public gardens, are open to interpretation. The semi-circle structure, which conveys a sense of camaraderie in the Renaissance frescoes, here signifies exclusion and banishment. In A History of Morality, a woman sitting on the ground apparently weeping is surrounded by a group of people formally dressed as though for church. The garden setting and the woman’s hand covering her face allude to Masaccio’s portrayal of Adam being expelled from Paradise. We don’t know what has happened, but the woman’s humiliation is clear; a woman in a yellow suit bends over and reprimands her, while a policewoman stands by, watching. In another painting titled Expulsion, figures are constructed from archival images of drag queens being arrested in New York night clubs in the 1950s. Superimposed onto a British suburban street, with handcuffs and police officers removed, the painting turns into a choreographed confrontation between two loosely assembled clans, half serious and half playful.

If the police have been deliberately expunged in Expulsion, they are physically present in all the other paintings. In the first three, if one follows the exhibition clockwise, the police occupy a prominent position in the foreground. Their involvement becomes more subdued, however, from one painting to the next. In the first piece, titled Disinherited, a constable raises his right arm with a gesture reminiscent of a Nazi salute to block a woman from walking off the pavement. In the next painting, the arms of the police officers are all bent, their gestures accusatory. The hands of the policewoman in the third painting are behind her back, though visible to the viewer (she is depicted from behind). In both Public Decency and Testimony, the police recede into the background, standing and chatting, as if leaving the disciplinary functions to the women in dress suits in the foreground: to remind the squatting girl of public decency, or to take the testimony of the brawler who stands beside a man collapsing on the lawn. The two passers-by in Public Decency are taken from Masolino’s Healing of the Cripple and Raising of Tabitha. While the gazes of Masolino’s onlookers direct the viewer’s attention to the two miracles performed by Peter, the two gazes here – one staring directly out at the viewer and the other a little off to the side – create the uneasy feeling that state surveillance is omnipresent even when it is invisible.

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Tulips, 2022, Photo © Tate (Sonal Bakrania).

Once the viewer becomes aware of the symmetry in the installation of the six fresco paintings – three on the left with the police in the foreground, three on the right with the police withdrawn – the benches in the middle of the room, where one can sit down and examine the paintings at ease, are transformed into an axis pointing all the way to the drawing on the wall at the far end of the room. Made in 2022 in response to the adoption of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act in the UK, putting more restrictions on protests, the drawing is a pastiche of Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano in the National Gallery, re-imagined with the British police in full riot gear mounted on horses. Medieval armour and spears are substituted for bulletproof vests, flanked by batons and pistols. The eyes looking through flame-proof balaclavas and shielded helmets are equally icy-cold, and the horses are as voluptuous as ever, with their tails carefully groomed. The spectacle of state power is on full display. In the background, haystacks are scattered across fields, where some people are dancing and some are marching, all bearing a resemblance to the figures from the etching series. Between the pastoral scenery in the background and the flamboyant menace in the foreground is a glossy foliage of trees and shrubs populated by pomegranates, roses and tulips.

All this is drawn with graphite, a dry medium that in the hands of Quinlan and Hastings produces a Florentine sharpness and detached clarity. Their communal way of working, unusual among contemporary artists, is another echo of bygone eras of art-making, when, as they observed in an interview, groups of artisans would collaborate in workshops headed by a master (‘We work like artisans, but we have no master’). In the same interview, the artists discuss their approach to drawing: ‘The hardest thing to get “right” is the psychological dimension of drawing; everything else can be achieved in a pragmatic and straightforward way, even talent. The right attitude to drawing is to understand the steps that the image requires you to complete and to follow these steps in an organized and fearless manner. The wrong approach to drawing is to become emotionally involved with the pencil, when this happens you lose perspective and it’s inevitable that you become completely hysterical and unable to perform basic tasks.’

Read on: Marcus Verhagen, ‘Making Time’, NLR 129.

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Đukanović’s Defeat

Montenegro's former prime minister and long-ruling Democratic Party of Socialists leader Milo Djukanovic speaks during a celebration after presidential elections in Montenegro's capital, Podgorica, Sunday, April 15, 2018. The apparent winner of Montenegro's presidential election, Djukanovic says his triumph means Montenegro will stay on the path toward joining the European Union. (AP Photo/Risto Bozovic)

In Montenegro, they’re calling it ‘the twilight of the idols’. Milo Đukanović, the man who ruled for nearly 33 years, lost the presidential election in the second round on 2 April. The longest reigning European leader, christened ‘the smartest man in the Balkans’ by Radio Free Europe, now looks likely to fade from the political stage. What this means for the country, however, is the subject of intense dispute. For some, including Montenegro’s liberal Atlanticists and many among its minority groups, the defeat represents a victory for Vladimir Putin – one that might threaten the very existence of the independent state. For others, including the sizeable Serbian population and a diverse range of Montenegrins, the election marks the end of a dictatorship.

To his detractors, Đukanović was a strongman who turned Montenegro into an authoritarian mafia state. Crime and corruption were rampant, nepotism ruled, critical journalists were attacked and even killed, and ethnic and religious divisions were deliberately stoked. All this was tolerated by the West because Đukanović supposedly guaranteed ‘stability’ and proved willing to work with the US to achieve its foreign policy objectives in the region, most recently ushering Montenegro into NATO.

Đukanović, a former basketball player, rose to prominence during the late 1980s as a partisan of Slobodan Milošević’s ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’: an elite revolt that saw old political cadres swept away with the aim of centralizing power around those loyal to the leadership of the Socialist Republic of Serbia. With Milošević’s blessing, the young politician was appointed prime minister in 1991. Later that year, Montenegro drew international condemnation for shelling the UNESCO World Heritage City of Dubrovnik in Croatia, an operation launched ostensibly to safeguard the Serbian minority following the Croatian declaration of independence. In Montenegro, the Siege of Dubrovnik was justified as an attempt to protect Yugoslavia from Croatian fascism. Đukanović, referring to the chequered pattern on Croatia’s flag, declared that he ‘would never play chess again’.

Six years later, Đukanović performed a volte face, proclaiming his firm opposition to Milošević. This change of course came after Đukanović witnessed the large-scale Zajedno protest movement in 1996 and concluded that the Serbian leader had become ‘obsolete’. There were other factors at play in his pivot: a longstanding personal animosity toward Milošević’s powerful wife, Mira Marković, plus cajoling from Washington, which was keen to cultivate him as a potential counterweight to Milošević. Đukanović won the 1997 presidential election by a thin margin, amid allegations of irregularities and intimidation. The US immediately recognized his victory.

Incensed by Đukanović’s betrayal, Milošević reduced federal funding to the Montenegrin authorities. But the West would help fill in the gaps. Between 1999 and 2001, Montenegro received 765 million Deutschmarks from the US and EU. As the chief disseminators of foreign aid, Đukanović and his inner circle were able to create lasting patronage and clientelist networks. He also assumed control of the lucrative smuggling channels used to circumvent sanctions and thereby forged extensive links with organized crime. Đukanović oversaw a vast smuggling network that allowed cigarettes to be delivered via speedboat to the Italian port of Bari. The EU learned early on that this operation was costing it billions in tax revenue each year – and Italian prosecutors became increasingly eager to indict Đukanović for having ‘promoted, run, set up, and participated in a mafia-type association’. Yet he was protected by diplomatic immunity, and the US quietly advocated on his behalf before the government in Rome.

After Milošević was removed from power in 2000, Đukanović understood that he had lost much of his strategic value to the West. He set about remaking himself and his Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) – now a liberal outfit with no left-wing credentials – as champions of the independent Montenegrin nation, at a time when Montenegro and Serbia were still conjoined in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. A deeper identity conflict thereby emerged: ‘Montenegrin’ became associated with support for independence, while ‘Serb’ denoted support for the unitary state. Ahead of the 2006 referendum on independence, the DPS courted the Albanian, Bosniak and Croat minorities, adopting the rhetoric of multiculturalism less out of any meaningful conviction than out of political expedience. Most of them needed little arm twisting to get behind the idea of separating from Serbia, and on referendum day 55.5% of participants voted for independence, while 44.5% favoured preservation of the union. Tiny Montenegro – population 615,000 – was reborn as an independent country.

From that point on, Đukanović consolidated his rule by depicting opponents as a threat to Montenegro’s independence. He took particular aim at the Serbian population. In the Balkans, Serbian nationalism is often thought to entail Kremlin sympathies: an assumption that Đukanović exploited to depict Serbs as a threat to Montenegro’s modernizing, Euro-Atlantic orientation. The minority group was labelled a ‘fifth column’, an enemy of the state, a neo-fascist bloc – and thus significantly underrepresented in national and local government. Serbs frequently complained of voter disenfranchisement and other forms of political exclusion. The receipt of welfare benefits, too, was often contingent upon support for the DPS.

While Đukanović’s overreach was criticized by domestic opponents, his agenda was praised by allies abroad. Robert Gelbard, the former US Envoy to the Balkans, called him ‘a real hero’ for ‘building Montenegro as an independent, democratic state, a country that is founded on strong democratic and free market principles and one that has a clear vision of the future that accords with the way the US sees the world.’ John McCain described Đukanović’s push for Montenegrin independence as ‘the greatest European democracy project since the end of the Cold War’. Across the enlightened West, his austerity policies and privatization of public assets were applauded.

The irony is that, although Đukanović is now known as an ardent supporter of NATO, he spent his early political career cozying up to Russia. In the years after Milošević was overthrown, the West was initially reluctant to support an independent Montenegro, fearing it might undermine the fragile new democratic coalition in power in Belgrade. So Đukanović sought support elsewhere. Following the 2006 referendum, Russia was the first country to recognize Montenegro as a sovereign state. Putin valued Russian investments in Montenegro at $2 billion – roughly equivalent to the country’s entire economic output at the time. Russians also purchased the majority of shares in Montenegro’s industrial sector, along with vast swaths of its Adriatic coastline. Soon enough, every third yacht in Montenegro was owned by a Russian.

But with the annexation of Crimea, relations entered a new, icier phase. Montenegro joined the EU in imposing sanctions on Moscow. While Đukanović had long spoken of the prospect of NATO membership for Montenegro, the war in Ukraine made it a matter of greater urgency. The circumstances of the country’s accession were dramatic: Montenegrin authorities claimed that on election day in October 2016, Russia orchestrated an attempted coup d’état with the aim of assassinating Đukanović and preventing Montenegro from joining the Atlantic military alliance. The opposition expressed doubts about this narrative, which they described as a ‘cheap, staged vaudeville coup’, intended to preserve Đukanović’s power at a moment when he faced a formidable electoral challenge. But it was no matter. Đukanović was victorious once again, and Montenegro joined NATO in June 2017.

More recently, tensions between Serbs and Đukanović have centered around the powerful Serbian Orthodox Church, to which 70% of the country belongs. In December 2019, the government passed Đukanović’s controversial law on Freedom of Religion, allowing the state to appropriate property granted to the church after 1918. Protests, in the form of public liturgies and processions, were held throughout Montenegro. Such discontent dominated the 2020 parliamentary elections, as the church launched an ‘anyone but them’ campaign aimed at dethroning the DPS. The result was an unprecedented victory for the opposition, spanning both pro-Russia and pro-EU political blocs, which won 50.7% of the vote. Though Đukanović remained president, his challengers cobbled together a fragile new government that was instantly beset by crisis. It was felled by a no-confidence vote after just a few months in office. A subsequent opposition government met the same fate.

Yet, however crisis-addled the new opposition has been, the DPS remains in steep decline – having lost in 11 of 14 municipalities in local elections last year and anticipating a similarly poor result in upcoming parliamentary elections this June. In the recent presidential contest, Đukanović was defeated by Jakov Milatović, a 36-year-old Oxford-educated economist who ran as the candidate for ‘Europe Now!’, a new pro-EU centrist party. Milatović, who campaigned on an anti-corruption platform, served as economy minister since the opposition triumphed in 2020. During his tenure, the minimum wage more than doubled: the largest hike in Montenegrin history. But this reform, welcomed by citizens hurting from the Covid crisis, came with a price: gross salaries no longer include mandatory health insurance. In other words, the part of one’s salary that would have previously gone to the government for health care now goes directly into one’s pocket. Milatović’s economic programme retains universal healthcare as a basic right, funded by other means, but such means have yet to be clarified – and the increase in public spending is currently contributing to the country’s debt levels.

Đukanović derided his opponent’s policies as a dangerous form of ‘economic populism’ that would threaten the stability of the public finances and precipitate a so-called ‘Greek scenario’ (the charge of populism is dubious, given Milatović is a bland technocrat who spent years at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development). He also claimed that Milatović was an apologist for Serbian nationalism who had tricked the West into believing that he was a harmless liberal. This was a classic case of guilt-by-association: because many Serbs supported Milatović as a welcome alternative to Đukanović, this meant that Milatović himself must be an ultranationalist extremist. In this sense, Đukanović’s electoral campaign relied on collapsing the distinction between pro-Kremlin parties and Europeanist ones, portraying them all as crypto-Serbian nationalists intent on reabsorbing Montenegro into ‘Greater Serbia’.

In the end, Milatović’s victory was less a referendum on his policies than a decisive rejection of Đukanović’s narrative. Supporters of both the pro-Russian Democratic Front and smaller pro-EU parties ultimately banded together behind the opposition. This was evident in the pattern of votes between the two rounds. In the first, held on 19 March, Đukanović received 35% while Milatović won 29%, while in the second Đukanović received 41% and Milatović netted almost 60%. The ineluctable conclusion was that Đukanović’s polarizing strategy had foundered. Sixteen years after independence, his attempt to divide Montenegrin patriots from Serbs was no longer viable. Instead, a majority of voters from different ethnic and ideological backgrounds united to kick him out of office. Whether his replacement can deliver on his promises – to clean up Montenegro’s kleptocratic system and kickstart economic growth – is another matter.

Read on: Marco D’Eramo, ‘They, The People’, NLR 103.

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Capital’s Militant

He’s not as rich as Jeff Bezos, not a social media star like Elon Musk, nor an icon like Bill Gates. Yet he is the most interesting of the Silicon Valley tycoons, for more than any other he embodies the new breed of capitalist ideologue. Rather than using politics to make money, he uses his billions for politics, in the hope of emancipating the rich from ‘the exploitation of the capitalists by the workers’. Peter Thiel (b. 1967): German by birth, American and South African by upbringing; according to Forbes, he is worth $4.2 billion. Equipped, in contrast to his peers, with a degree in philosophy and a doctorate in law, he likes to affect the posture of a philosopher king. In his most ambitious piece of writing, The Straussian Moment (2004), he sketches a kind of Geistes Weltgeschichte in light of 9/11, citing with carefully cultivated intellectual effrontery Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Pierre Manent, Roberto Calasso, and name-checking Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Nietzsche and Kojève.

Ever since his university days, Thiel has been devoted to a kind of impudence of position, always embracing the most conservative one possible (he has been an admirer of Reagan since high school). According to his biographer Max Chafkin, Thiel felt that ‘mainstream liberals had accepted communists, but conservatives were unable to bring themselves to associate with members of the far-right…He really wished the right would become more like the left’. Enrolling at Stanford, the most reactionary of the top-tier universities, Thiel spent his time railing against what he saw as the institution’s endemic leftism, co-founding the Stanford Review with the blessing of conservative guru Irving Kristol and financial backing via the Olin Foundation (a key entity in funding and organizing the neoliberal counteroffensive, as documented in my forthcoming book, Masters: The Invisible War of the Powerful Against their Subjects). It campaigned against multiculturalism, political correctness and homosexuality. Its editorial board was composed exclusively of men.

On LGBT rights, the review claimed that ‘the real scourge was homophobia-phobia, that is, fear of being labelled a homophobe… anti-gay bias should be rebranded “miso-sodomy” – hatred of anal sex – to focus on “deviant sexual practices”’. According to The Economist, the article ‘even defended a fellow law student, Keith Rabois, who decided to test the limits of free speech on campus by standing outside a teacher’s residence and shouting “Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!”’. (Rabois would later become one of Thiel’s closest business partners.) Thiel went on to co-author The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford (1995), published by a right-wing think tank, the Independent Institute, thanks again to a grant from the Olin Foundation. Formidable chess player that he is (a ‘Life Master’), Thiel already understood that to fight the battle of ideas effectively, adequate funding was required. He complained that ‘only one in four Stanford alumni were millionaires’ – further proof, in his eyes, of the uselessness of the traditional academic curriculum.

Following brief stints as a lawyer and derivatives trader at Credit Suisse, Thiel returned to California in 1998 and established his own investment fund, Thiel Capital Management, with $1 million raised thanks to ‘friends and family’ (in all the biographies this episode is vague; as we know, the first million is always the hardest). The turning point came in 1999, when Thiel founded PayPal with a group of friends (thanks especially to Max Levchin, a Ukrainian-born cryptographer who thought up the basic algorithm for the system of online payments). This economic venture claimed an ideological motivation: ‘The driving ideal of PayPal’, he wrote, was to create ‘a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution – the end of monetary sovereignty, as it were’. The so-called PayPal mafia was formed: a famous photo depicts the audacious youths (all men) dressed as Italian-American mobsters of the prohibition era. Six would become billionaires. It’s notable that three had a past in apartheid South Africa: Thiel, Musk and Roelof Botha, PayPal’s CFO, later partner at the investment fund Sequoia. Thiel has a difficult relationship with Musk: amongst other things, he removed him as CEO of PayPal when the latter was on his honeymoon.

Thiel made $55 million from PayPal in 2002, launching him into the world of venture capital. The list of companies he has invested is extensive (Airbnb, Asana, LinkedIn, Lyft, Spotify, Twilio, Yelp, Zynga). His fame as a far-sighted capitalist was cemented in 2004 when, as the first external investor, he gave (a mere) $500,000 to Mark Zuckerberg in exchange for 10.2% of Facebook’s shares, earning him over a billion dollars. If instead of realizing his stake, however, he had participated in Facebook’s recapitalization, he would now have around $60 billion. This hasn’t been his only mistake. In 2004 he refused to invest in Tesla and YouTube (both founded by ex-members of the PayPal mafia). In 2006, when Musk needed funds to develop Tesla’s electric cars, Thiel passed on the opportunity – a costly choice, given capitalization surpassed $2 billion in 2010 and peaked at $1,061 billion in 2021, a growth of 50,000% (by April 2023 this had dropped back to $584 billion, but still represents a rise of almost 30,000%). Musk put Thiel’s refusal down to ideological reasons: ‘he doesn’t quite fully buy into the climate change thing’.

What does Thiel buy into? Between 2004 and 2014 he busily expounded his world-view at conferences; in articles for the Wall Street Journal; in The Straussian Moment; essays such as ‘The Education of a Libertarian’ (2009) for the Cato Institute (a think tank financed by the Koch brothers) and ‘The End of the Future’ for the National Review; another book entitled Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (2014) based on a course he taught at Stanford. (This was co-authored with one of his students, Blake Masters, later chief operating officer of Thiel’s investment firm, Thiel Capital, and president of the Thiel Foundation; in 2022 Thiel generously supported his failed campaign for the United States Senate).

In a typical move, Thiel often presents himself and his allies as victims. Just like the French who claim to be victims of North Africans, or Israelis who say the same of Palestinians, the rich are bullied by the poor. Like any reactionary, his is also a tale of decadence. For Thiel, we are in full-blown cultural decline, ‘ranging from the collapse of art and literature after 1945 to the soft totalitarianism of political correctness in media and academia to the sordid worlds of reality television and popular entertainment’. The cause is democracy, in particular its extension to women and the poor (note the association between the two): ‘The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.’

Enlarging the franchise is said to have hindered the technological and scientific progress which in the past permitted the generalization of a certain quality of life, even to those who didn’t deserve it. Since the 1970s – with the exception of the tech industry – this has stalled, with no great innovation registered in transport, energy or even medicine. Thiel concludes that progress is ‘rare’ in human history (perhaps not as rare as he thinks; the invention of the keel for watercraft seemed inconsequential in the medieval period, but it eventually made oceanic navigation possible). His solution: we must return to some kind of monarchical regime, because history’s great inventions have all been produced by companies (or startups) which function as absolute monarchies, or monopolies.

Thiel’s publicity efforts are often dedicated to extolling the parallel virtues of monarchy and monopoly: ‘Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can’t. In perfect competition, a business is so focused on today’s margins that it can’t possibly plan for a long-term future. Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits’. In a typical intervention for the Wall Street Journal, ‘Competition is for Losers’, he argues that competition produces copies or improvements of what already exists, but never true novelty – a fact that leads him to argue that ‘actually, capitalism and competition are opposites’.

It feels almost futile to note the logical inconsistencies of these arguments. Thiel maintains that progress is rare in human history, yet absolute monarchies have been the norm, from which one can only deduce that absolute monarchies have seldom generated progress. Monopolies don’t come from nowhere but arise precisely when a firm beats its competitors. One might in fact say that in an unregulated market monopoly is an inevitable result of competition: competing implies winners and losers, and as the winner is increasingly successful it becomes easier for them to dominate. This is why in the proto-history of capitalism of every country, we see the emergence of monopolies. To avoid their formation, it has always been necessary for states to implement anti-trust laws. Moreover, as soon as they’re established, monopolies cease to innovate and tend to live off rentierism. 

There is an even more fundamental contradiction here. How can someone declare themselves a libertarian yet support absolute monarchy? Whose freedom is he talking about? How many monopolies can the world accommodate? Freedom for the very few, slavery for the vast majority is the destination. Many have discussed the influence of Nietzsche on Thiel’s thinking, but perhaps the more precise reference is Max Stirner. Not for nothing, in Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844) the ‘Unique’ or ‘Ego’ is defined by its ‘property’, and may use any means – fraud, deception – to realize its power. For Stirner also, free competition is a limitation on freedom, given that it can only be ensured by a state which begets servitude. How can one be against the tyranny of the state and in favour of absolute monarchy: the most despotic, intrusive and arbitrary kind of state? The answer is Stirner’s notion of the absolute instrumentality of every position. The Unique can say anything it likes if it is useful to him. Thiel has been accused of inconsistency and self-contradiction, but he is merely putting this Stirnean strategy into practice.

One example. Thiel spends his time denigrating Stanford and higher education in general (even financing, with much fanfare, a foundation for students who abandoned university to found their own startups – with extremely limited results). But he then paid money to teach a course at that very same university, which in turn allowed him to publish a best-selling book legitimated by the Stanford brand (the true number of copies sold remains uncertain: a million, a million and a half, even three million according to various claims, but the real number could be much lower). Another: Thiel spent his youth berating gay people only to come out in 2016, marrying a man and simultaneously admitting to a romantic relationship with a male model. If the ostentatious homophobia of his time as a student can be attributed in part to an anti-PC, anti-diversity crusade, it’s less clear why Thiel would bring a lawsuit against the website Gawker for outing him in 2011. The explanation offered by his biographer is that amongst the major investors in Theil’s capital venture are ‘Arab sovereign wealth funds controlled by governments that considered homosexuality to be a crime’.

This libertarian advocate for absolute monarchy also has no qualms about making money through mass surveillance. In 2003, he founded Palantir, which specializes in big data analysis and immediately received funding from the CIA’s investment fund, In-Q-Tel. Contradiction? In The Straussian Moment, just as he founded Palantir, Thiel wrote: ‘Instead of the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates that resemble Shakespearean tales told by idiots, we should consider Echelon, the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana.’ Echelon is the most intrusive planetary surveillance mechanism yet devised in human history.

Palantir floundered until in 2011 a rumour began circulating that the company had ‘helped kill Osama’. From then on, contracts abounded, with the German police even seeking its services, which include not only software but also the manpower to use it (the Germans have now changed their minds and want to rescind on the deal). A paradox of capitalist profitability, Palantir is valued at $17.6 billion – without ever generating profits – and today forms the most substantial part of Thiel’s fortune. On the one hand, this libertarian makes his money helping the state spy on people; on the other, he promotes Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as instruments of emancipation from the tyranny of states (as I discussed in a previous article for Sidecar). This is not a question of incoherence or contradiction: it is pure and simple cynicism. Even his self-image as a ‘contrarian’ is part of the game, the goal being to present himself as an oppressed minority, an outsider, an underdog, an anticonformist. But what kind of anticonformism is it to wish to become rich and powerful? Even the defence of monopoly is perfectly aligned with the zeitgeist: think of the rehabilitation of monopoly by the neoliberals, the veritable ‘revolution in corporate law’ guided by Henry Manne. 

To be sure, this total lack of scruples recalls the attitude of the Nietzschean Übermensch, for whom everything is permissible – to be a libertarian and simultaneously flirt with Opus Dei, participate in the Bilderberg Group, fund Steve Bannon, become for a time Donald Trump’s sponsor in Silicon Valley then standard-bearer for a Trumpism without Trump and finally a promoter of the New Right. (Thiel’s jeremiad against political correctness echoes Nietzsche’s lament in On the Genealogy of Morality about the revolt of slave morality: ‘the higher man is liquidated, the morality of the common man emerges victorious’.) His desire is to oversee a permanent secession not of the plebs from the patriciate, as occurred in ancient Rome (as in the fable of Menenius Agrippa) but of the patriciate from the plebs. Hence the acquisition of a 477-acre estate in New Zealand, and his financing of Seasteading, a project for a self-sufficient community located far out in international waters, which after serious mishaps reduced its ambitions to operating 15 miles from the coast, only to then be shelved entirely. This separatist impulse is also present in his investment in Space-X with Elon Musk: Thiel is far less tepid about the idea of isolating himself in space than ‘the climate change thing’.

Yet the question arises: to what end? The price of nihilism is the meaninglessness of life itself, of one’s own troubles, of wanting to go to one’s grave loaded with gold. It’s no surprise that fear of death seems to be a dominant motivation. It reminds one of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), in which a knight plays his final game of chess against death. This consummate chess player believes death is ‘nothing but a bug in the feature set of mankind, and one he can buy his way out of’. This is why he throws bags of money at ventures such as Halcyon Molecular, Emerald Therapeutics, Unity Biotechnology, Methuselah Foundation, financing start-ups which promise to lengthen life to at least 120 years, the definitive cure for Alzheimer’s and so on. And if all this doesn’t work, he’s ready to have his brain frozen and wait for his reincarnation once technology makes it possible. (He’s not the only billionaire hoping to outsmart death; Jeff Bezos and Larry Page both fund the Alcor Life Extension Foundation ‘which has been freezing bodies and brains of the dead since 1970’.)

The contempt Thiel nurtures towards the rest of humanity must be almost equal to that which he appears to harbour towards the female gender, if he believes us slaves to be so masochistically inclined as to be ready to accept his morality. If he succeeds, he would be the first political activist to win over his audience not by promising anything in particular, but by guaranteeing hell as the only future we – the herd – deserve. The name that has been coined for this new manifestation of global capitalism is truly appropriate: the Dark Enlightenment. Switching off the lights is indeed the inevitable result.

Read on: Marco D’Eramo, ‘Celebrity Thaumaturge’, NLR 74.

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Alien Minutia

Dramatist, Peter Weiss stands beside his painting, 'People in a Tram 2', of 1934. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

Peter Weiss’s novella, The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body, begins in an outhouse – the narrator notes the ‘lava-like mound’ of excrement beneath him – and ends amidst copulating shadows. It is a plotless fiction in which the body’s functions exert grotesque forces on an inert world. We follow the nameless narrator through a series of enervated, dreamlike scenes set in a dreary rural boardinghouse. His encounters with the other boarders – the captain, the housekeeper, the father, the boy, the eponymous coachman and so on – offer brief and reticent dramas ruthlessly mined for their black comedy. The narrator, a failed writer and consummate voyeur, is an immaterial figure. He doesn’t live his life so much as passively perceive it. The confines of his sight, in particular – colour, space, shape, motion – continuously calibrate the text. While lying in bed, he applies grains of salt to his eyes in order to induce the blurred images that stimulate his memory. These recollections are neither fantastic nor interesting in themselves: work, rest, meals, accidents, arrivals and departures. But in Weiss’s austerely hypnotic prose they achieve a strange and painterly texture. It is a vision of reality stripped for component parts, as in this scene of the nightly supper:

Hands holding spoons are now lifted toward the pots from all sides; the housekeeper’s hand red, swollen, dishwaterlogged; the captain’s hand with polished, grooved fingernails; the doctor’s hand with bandage slings between all fingers; the hired man’s hand spotty with dung and mud; the tailor’s hand trembling, skinny, like parchment; my own hand, my own hand; and then no hand, in an empty space waiting for a hand.

In Weiss’s bleak, materially contiguous world, social life is reduced to image or tautology, alienating in its utter apartness or else estranged by repetitive action. Reading the work, I was constantly in mind of its cubist effect, as of a piling of limbs. Multiple hands hold the same vibrating cup; mouths talk, chew, and laugh simultaneously. Weiss offers a banality eviscerated by its own secret excesses and perversities. Reality cracks audibly, like warming ice.

Born in Berlin, in 1916, to a Hungarian Jewish father and a Christian mother, Peter Weiss knew something of persistent estrangement. His family moved often – first to Bremen, then Chiselhurst, near London, then Prague – before settling in the permanent exile of Stockholm following Hitler’s invasion of the Czech Sudetenland in 1938. Weiss was a painter and experimental filmmaker before trying his hand at fiction. He wrote his first novels and plays in Swedish. Like Paul Celan, he wrestled with the language of his birth in the wake of the Holocaust. In the autobiographical novel Exile (1968), he describes his eventual revelation: ‘This language was present whenever I wanted it…And if it was hard to find the right words and images this was not because I did not belong anywhere…but only because many words and pictures lay so deep down that they had to be long sought for.’ Despite the range of his work, he is mostly remembered outside Germany as a politically engaged dramatist. The play-within-a-play Marat/Sade (1963) gained him an international audience, though later prose works like the three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975, 1978, 1981), a complex meditation on the concordance between revolution and imagination, solidified him as a titan of the cultural Left. He died of a heart attack, in Stockholm, in 1980.

New Directions has recently published two of Weiss’s self-described ‘micro-novels’, Coachman – notably his first work written in German – and Conversation of the Three Wayfarers. Originally published in 1960 and 1963, they are cryptic experiments written before Weiss’s name-making plays. Neither autobiographical nor explicitly political in nature, they are transitional texts in which elements of his past life – painting, film-making – emerge through a sometimes severe, often compelling formalism. Together they suggest the latent surrealism of his formidable oeuvre, an animating fluid within the granite eminence.

They are works that seem to reach us from a great distance. The dream logic of Kafka is present here, though it is further complicated by a slivering of the basic units of narrative. The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body, lucidly translated by the poet Rosmarie Waldrop, unfolds in small, concrete observations, stacking one piece of visual or auditory information upon the next. Little in the way of purpose or motivation is offered. There is only the ingress of what is seen and heard, as reported by the blurred and blurring narrator. Neither desire, nor ambition, nor envy drive him forward. He is largely unrecognizable in terms of human capacities. He exists only to perceive and thereby recall the splinters of a cramped and puzzling life. When he sits in the outhouse among stacks of old newspapers, he writes of their curious lure: ‘one gets absorbed in small, mixed-up fragments of time, in events without beginning or end’. This is a succinct precis for the novella itself. Reading it is like sifting through an alien minutia.

Speech, too, is reduced to particulate matter. There are no quotation marks and no conversations, only words and syllables the narrator hears or mishears, what he calls ‘breath and…tongue motions’:

From the conversation into which the son is drawn I get the following: words of the father’s like early, usefulness, Mr. Schnee’s activity, looked on long enough, show for once, barrow, shovel, sand, seven, eight, nine stones, cart away, clean, lineup; words said by Mr. Schnee like of course, be cautious, careful, understand what about, three thousand seven hundred seventy-two stones to date, learn from the beginning, count on remuneration too.

This is not communication, but a baffled accounting of voice, like a sociologist’s report from a foreign colony. So abstracted is the narrator that speech bears only partial intelligibility, even if the act itself remains compelling, a kind of ritual in which he may have once participated. It is perhaps a way of navigating the anxiety of meaning, this making of language into a debris out of which things are suggested, if not expressed. For a writer whose work has ‘never yet gone beyond always new, short, broken-off beginnings’, this is a recognizably compensatory measure. The narrator’s meticulous observations can be taken as a desperate response to his own stifled art.

Augmenting this sense of fragmentation are the visual collages Weiss includes throughout the novella. These cryptic juxtapositions – anatomical figures, suns, insects, geometric abstractions, broken limbs, horses, playing cards – obliquely rhyme with various aspects of the text. They present a kind of topographic unconscious, highly affecting in their grotesque mystery, often striking with the force of troubling dreams. Weiss’s technique prefigures W. G. Sebald’s use of inscrutable photographs by almost forty years. The Rings of Saturn or The Emigrants, seem, to me, unimaginable without his example.

The novella offers little in the way of climax or closure. The coachman, conspicuously missing throughout, finally arrives towards evening, an event that happens three days before its telling. (The narrator admits he has been unable to sleep or write ever since.) That night he sees the shadow of the coachmen having sex with the shadow of the housekeeper, which plunges him into a curious sort of despair. The coachman’s life, rounded by routine, appetite and action, throws into relief the inertness of the narrator’s own existence. Such immediacy can only ever be imagined by the failed writer. At best, he is a shaper of shadows.

Conversation of the Three Wayfarers is the more raucous of the pair. In some ways more traditional than Coachman, its vaulting, absurdist momentum carries the novella into a strange kind of sense-making. Its three narrators – Abel, Babel, and Cabel – share an indiscriminate first-person narrative in which various scenes and stories jostle for position. Often incongruous, they center on various comic-mythic creations: a rowboatman, his seven sons, Jam, Jem, Jim, Jom, Jum, and Jym, an unplaceable, oneiric metropolis, etc. The capering energies and sudden abysses of these mini-narratives offer no sense of plot, threaded or otherwise. They are rather a bundle of velocities, or a loose affiliation of vigorous oddities. Here is story as a floating circus.

As the book’s translator, John Keene, notes in his introduction, we find ourselves moving away from the modernism of Coachman into an anticipation of the postmodern, a smashing together of tones and registers. In Conversation’s cumulative structure, the contours of a complex perspective emerge, one that looks askance at a Germany (and a continent) in flux. Ultramodern technologies exist in timeless, illusive atmospheres; cinematic cuts and fadeouts offer appealing caesuras to Chaplinesque pratfalls; high and low cultures blend into myths embossed with the cheap language of advertising and adventure. This is a jagged, funny and largely hopeless vision of Europe after the upheaval of the great wars, a book of non-sequitur feats and winking despair.

Like John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror or Renata Adler’s Speedboat, the book is nearly unquotable, its fragments robbed of their potency in isolation. I underlined almost at random, taking in the bits of persiflage and Steinian repetition, offhand exemplars of a beautiful and batty poetics: ‘My fear lay spread about in the grasses’; ‘the city outside already again was as it always was, as it always was’; ‘for the first time I saw what leaves are’. The first-person construction, shared by the three narrators, makes for a chorus of possibility. It describes an entropic world nonetheless coalescing in pockets of chance, risk, or providence. As the men aimlessly walk and talk, they seem to be striving for something the world has left behind, an antiquated notion half-glimpsed amongst the rubble: something like legibility.

Read on: Peter Weiss, ‘The Necessary Decision’, NLR I/47.

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Fantasies of Israel

Watching the news in Israel this month, you’d think the country was under attack from all sides. Three Anglo-Israeli settlers were killed by guerrillas in the West Bank; an Italian tourist was killed and seven others injured in Tel Aviv, in what may have been a car accident but was widely presented as a terrorist incident; and the IDF claimed to have intercepted the largest salvo of rockets fired from Lebanon since 2006. As is usually the case, these reports studiously ignored the killing fields of the occupied territories, where Israeli soldiers are murdering young Palestinians in ever growing numbers, either execution-style or by bombing their houses into the dust. Yet what was novel about the media coverage was its air of bewilderment: how could Israel’s hard-right government fail to provide security – or at least a sense of security – for its Jewish citizens? Who was to blame for this lapse?

For Benjamin Netanyahu, responsibility lay with the ongoing protest movement. Since early January, demonstrators have turned out in their hundreds of thousands to oppose his judicial reforms – which would enable the political takeover of the courts, allow the Prime Minister to escape conviction in his corruption trial, and increase the influence of Orthodox Judaism in both public life and the legal system. Netanyahu has accused his critics of dividing and weakening the nation, while lashing out at the reserve soldiers who threatened not to show up for duty were the measures passed. People close to him have also spread the rumour that the US was bankrolling the demonstrators (this was fake news, but it carried water given President Biden’s public condemnation of the reforms).

Judging by the recent polls, Netanyahu’s message has failed to cut through. For many Israelis, it was the PM himself who created such security risks. His popularity has reached a historic nadir, and he would likely lose elections were they held today. Having bungled his attempt to regain the trust of erstwhile supporters – bringing them into the warm embrace of the Zionist consensus under the threat of war supposedly emanating from Iran and its allies – he must now choose between two unappealing options: either jettison the reforms and quell the street-level resistance, or push ahead with them and deepen divisions among Jewish citizens. The prediction that these divisions could undermine the Israeli state from within seems premature at this stage. But there is no doubt that they have exposed serious cracks in the Zionist edifice – ones that may well widen over the coming years.

If social breakdown is not on the immediate horizon, that is largely because of the country’s mammoth security apparatus. Israel is still very much an army with a state rather than a state with an army. There can be no substantive changes to security policy without the assent of leading military figures – whose hand will not be forced, even by the new authoritarian government. This stratum has clearly signalled its investment in maintaining the current framework. In essence, that means continuing the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians, the practice of home demolitions and the sanctioning of settler pogroms. It means enforcing institutionalized discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are denied the right to free speech and assembly. And it involves the regular bombardment and besiegement of Gaza, as well as almost weekly air raids on Syria.

The apparatchiks who design and execute these activities comprise the core group behind the recent demonstrations. Military officials who have committed countless war crimes in the Gaza Strip, and before that in the West Bank and Lebanon, are now playing a crucial role in the emerging opposition bloc. They form part of a wider Ashkenazi (European Jewish) elite, which views Netanyahu’s policy as an attack on their power bases within the state: not just the security apparatuses, but also the financial institutions, the judicial system and academia. They sense that the reforms would weaken their hold on these institutions, while empowering an insurgent coalition of orthodox Jews, settlers and Mizrahi (Eastern Jewish) Likud supporters who wish to make Israel more religious, more nationalist and more expansionist. As they see it, the triumph of this neo-Zionist coalition would threaten their secular lifestyle, compromise the state’s security and further tarnish its international image.

Hence, Western media’s depiction of the protests – as an attempt to save Israeli democracy from political overreach – is hopelessly distorted. The movement is not seeking to protect the rights of minorities (the first duty of any democracy) let alone the rights of the Palestinians on either side of the green line. During the first hundred days of the new administration, while secular Israeli Jews fought to preserve their hegemony, almost a hundred Palestinians – many of them children – were killed by Israeli forces. This killing spree did not feature in any of the demonstrations. Those who tried to raise Palestinian flags alongside the Israeli ones were forcibly ejected. Arabs evidently have no place in this feud between the Jewish families of Israel.

Instead, the protesters are motivated by what one might call the fantasy of Israel: that of a secular democratic state with enough moral capital to justify its occupation of Palestine at home and abroad. They are happy to be seen as exceptional nation – which must subjugate the Arabs to preserve the dream of a Jewish homeland – but they are also desperate to conform to the ‘civilized’ standards of the Global North. Their liberal Zionism is founded on a series of oxymorons: Israel as an enlightened occupier, a benevolent ethnic cleanser, a progressive apartheid state. Thanks to Netanyahu’s government, this image is now under threat; its contradictions are no longer containable. The state’s reputation is being damaged not only domestically, but also among the ‘international community’ that typically hails Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East and Tel Aviv as the LGBT capital of the world, while ignoring the besieged Gaza ghetto a few miles south.

This is why half a million Jews – mostly liberal, mostly secular, mostly of Western origins – have taken to the streets to defend the apartheid regime. Though they have forced Netanyahu to delay his proposed changes, their ultimate chances of success remain uncertain. Even if the reforms are scrapped, Israel will still be constitutively divided, with a secular Tel Aviv existing alongside a religious Jerusalem. How this tension might play out politically is anyone’s guess. But one thing is clear: it will have little concrete effect on state policy towards the Palestinians. For all their differences, the two Israeli camps are united in their support for the settler-colonial project on which the nation was built. Settler colonialism invariably entails the dehumanization of colonized peoples, viewed as the principal obstacle to political harmony. It is based on the wish to eliminate the native population – either through genocide, ethnic cleansing, or the creation of enclaves and ghettos. In Israel, every Palestinian must be perceived as a savage or potential terrorist, every Palestinian territory as a theatre of war.

This underlying logic means that the Palestinians have nothing to gain from a return to the status quo ante. Indeed, the previous government, led by the ‘centrist’ Yair Lapid, was just as committed to maintaining the violent occupation. Its inclusion of an Arab party brought no tangible benefits for Israel’s Palestinian minority. They were still liable to be shot by the criminal gangs or trigger-happy police officers while the state turned a blind eye; still designated second-class citizens under the 2018 apartheid law; still subject to legal and financial discrimination; and still spatially strangled by the proliferation of Jewish towns and settlements. By extolling ‘democracy’ while ignoring such abuses, the current protest wave has highlighted Israel’s fundamental paradox: it cannot be both democratic and Jewish. It will either be a racist Jewish state, or a democratic one for all its citizens. There is no middle ground.

For precisely that reason, Israel is now viewed unfavourably by large sections of the global population. Although it has so far managed to maintain strategic alliances with governments in the West, the Arab World and occasionally the Global South, it risks becoming internationally isolated. The protesters rightly fear that if the country cannot sustain its fantasy image, it could suffer a fate similar to that of apartheid South Africa: a gradual decline in credibility, such that politics from below gains the ability to influence politics from above. In that case, Israel may still be viable on account of its military strength – but nothing more. This in turn could seriously jeopardize the Zionist project; yet, as with South Africa in the 1980s, it may also be the moment when the regime attempts to save itself by resorting to the worst forms of brutality.

One of the main differences between opponents and supporters of the current government is that the former care what global civil society thinks of Israel while the latter do not. The Ashkenazi elite are defending a form of ‘Zionism with a human face’ which the far-right administration is increasingly willing to abandon. The outcome of this conflict will partly determine whether Israel can preserve its aura of immunity and exceptionalism. During the recent history of Israel–Palestine, world opinion has often been diverted by other developments: first the Arab Spring, now the war in Ukraine. But the cause of the Palestinians has endured despite this wavering attention. Can it exploit the present moment to turn Israel into an international pariah?

Read on: Perry Anderson, ‘The House of Zion’, NLR 96.

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Gunshots in Khartoum

On 15 April, clashes began in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, pitting the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), loyal to Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the general who runs the country’s governing council, against the paramilitary forces of his deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, otherwise known as ‘Hemedti’ (little Mohamed), the Bonapartian pretender to Sudan’s throne. Initially, Hemedti’s militias, known as the RSF, or Rapid Support Forces, seemed to have the advantage. They took control of several airbases and installed themselves in Khartoum’s residential areas, auguring a difficult campaign of urban warfare for Burhan. By the end of 16 April, however, the SAF’s superior weaponry was telling, with fighter jets strafing RSF barracks and dislodging the paramilitary force from positions around the city. Much about the situation remains uncertain, even for those on the ground. All I can tell you, one friend wrote to me, is where the smoke is coming from. Unlike during the coup d’état of October 2021, the internet is still working, yet it has brought little clarity. The facts are concealed by claims and counterclaims, all delivered via Facebook posts.

What is clear is why this confrontation erupted. Tensions between the two sides had been mounting since the signing of an accord in December 2022, the so-called Framework Agreement, which was supposed to pave the way for a transition to a civilian-led government and the departure of the military junta that had ruled Sudan since October 2021. The agreement kicked all the difficult issues into the long grass. Crucially, it did not address the integration of the RSF into the army – a development that Burhan wishes to take two years, and Hemedti, ten. The political process it initiated had the rare distinction of being both extremely vague and entirely unrealistic. Delicate compromises that would have taken months to achieve were expected within weeks, according to a timetable largely created for international consumption. These demands heightened latent tensions between the two sides, prompting the RSF to believe that Egypt – a longstanding backer of the Sudanese military – would intervene. Hemedti deployed his forces next to the Merowe airforce base at the beginning of Ramadan, providing the catalyst for the current clashes.  

To understand the roots of the struggle between the army and the RSF, one must go back to the formation of the Sudanese state. Sudan’s first civil war began in 1955, the year before its independence from the British Empire. Postcolonial strife followed the lineaments of colonial rule, with a riparian elite in Khartoum and its satellite cities, dominated by a few families, fighting against the multi-ethnic peripheries of the country, which they exploited for labour and resources. One civil war (1955-1972) was soon followed by another (1983-2005). In the 1980s, a debt crisis almost bankrupted Sudan, and Khartoum struggled to pay for its army, while the conflict continued at the country’s margins, largely in the south.

From these unpromising foundations, Omar al-Bashir, then an army brigadier who took power in a coup d’état in 1989, forged an enduring form of rule. Rather than providing services in the peripheries, he used militias to wage a counterinsurgency on the cheap, setting Sudan’s many ethnic groups against each other. He privatized the state, carving it up into fiefdoms ruled by his security services, which he multiplied and fragmented in order to coup-proof his regime. The Sudanese army was soon competing with the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS), and later had to contend with Hemedti’s RSF, to name only a few of the security organs. Each of these forces built up its own economic empire. The Sudanese military ran construction firms, mining services, and banks, while the RSF took control of gold mining and lucrative mercenary services.

Bashir made a Faustian pact with Sudan’s cities: accept terror in the country’s margins in exchange for cheap commodities and subsidies for fuel and wheat, whose import required foreign currency obtained from the sale of resources produced in the peripheries. Oil had begun to flow in 1999, largely from southern Sudan. Income from its sale subsidized urban consumption and greased the wheels of a transactional machine with Bashir at its centre, acting as fixer-in-chief for an unwieldy coalition of security services and politicians. Were the margins able to control their own resources, this machine would inevitably grind to a halt. Thus, their interests were structurally opposed to those of the centre – a class relation articulated as a geographical antagonism.  

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In 2003, as the war in southern Sudan was coming to an end, a new war in Darfur broke out. Bashir decided to repeat the trick he had used in the south – where militia forces had fought against a southern rebel force – and arm Darfur’s Arab communities to fight non-Arab rebels. Nicknamed the ‘Janjaweed’ (the evil horsemen), these militias quickly metastasized into a force of tens of thousands, which waged a vicious war against Darfuri rebels and civilians alike. This was the war that would make Hemedti. A camel-trader from the small Mahariya tribe of the Rizeigat Arabs, which live in both Chad and Darfur, he became a war chief, quickly assembling a force of 400 men. In 2007, he briefly became a rebel, but only in order to leverage violence for a better position in the government. Five years later, with Bashir’s control of the Janjaweed faltering, Hemedti presented himself as the man who could fight Sudan’s rebellions as the head of the newly created RSF, which absorbed much of the Janjaweed.

Hemedti grew close to Bashir, and quickly became his chosen enforcer. It’s said that Bashir became so fond of Hemedti he affectionately called him ‘Himyati’ (my protector). Yet while Hemedti inflicted a series of defeats on Darfur’s rebel movements, Bashir’s regime was struggling. In 2005, under international pressure, the Sudanese government signed a peace agreement with southern rebels, with the promise of a southern referendum on independence. In 2011, South Sudan voted to secede, depriving Khartoum of 75% of its oil revenue. Without dollar liquidity, Bashir’s transactional machine started to seize up.

The regime tried to diversify its economic base by selling land to the Gulf states and getting into gold mining. Hemedti led the way. He used his position as the head of the RSF to build up an economic empire, founding a holding company called al-Jineid and taking over Sudan’s most lucrative gold mine. Like all great entrepreneurs of violence, Hemedti soon expanded his interests – sending RSF forces as mercenaries to fight against the Houthis in Yemen on the Emirati payroll. He also became involved in organizing migrant passage in the Sahel: first by stopping migrants crossing the country (an enterprise once funded by the EU), and then by forcing the same migrants to buy their freedom. By 2018, Hemedti was running a business empire that included real estate and steel production, and had built up a patronage network that rivalled Bashir’s. Few in the centre were happy. For the riparian political elite and the Sudanese army alike, Hemedti was an uneducated usurper from the peripheries. Though he was an Arab, he didn’t come from the narrow coterie of families that had long ruled Sudan, and his economic empire was a direct threat to Sudanese military dominance.

Despite Bashir’s efforts to find alternative sources of foreign currency, by 2018, the economy was in a terminal nose-dive. In desperation, the dictator cut subsidies on wheat and fuel, breaking his pact with Sudan’s cities. Protests began in the peripheries and quickly spread across the country. The Sudan Professionals Association (SPA), an umbrella group of white-collar trade unions, led the way, and soon began calling for his resignation. By January, it had joined with a loose coalition of opposition political parties in a grouping called the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC).

Protests in Khartoum were organized by a number of resistance committees and had a carnivalesque atmosphere, offering mutual aid and free healthcare in an explicit rebuke to the violence and repression of the regime. As the revolt intensified, Bashir’s backers in the Gulf prevaricated and the military became increasingly uneasy. It was one thing to kill people in the peripheries, quite another to mow down the urban youth of Khartoum, many of whom came from the soldiers’ own families. On 10 April 2019, Bashir allegedly gave an order to open fire on the sit-in. Hemedti claims he refused this order, and by the next day, Bashir was gone.

*

The security services hoped that by deposing Bashir, they could conserve control of their own economic empires. For a moment, the soldiers were heroes, and Hemedti even found some popular support in Khartoum, a city that has always thought of him as an outsider. But it was only a moment. The protesters wanted a civilian government, not a new military dictator, and rather than disperse, they staged a sit-in in front of the military headquarters in Khartoum. The security services played for time and hoped they could wear down the protesters, but as the months dragged on, the military became alarmed, and the SAF and the RSF would find common cause in repressing civilian unrest.

Early on the morning of 3 June, the security services, including the RSF, attempted to disband the sit-in. By the end of the day, approximately 200 protesters were dead and some 900 injured. Nevertheless, the protests continued. On 30 June, the thirtieth anniversary of Bashir coming to power, a million people marched against the junta. Yet the opposition’s political leadership were divided over how to proceed. Many resistance committees thought that the 3 June massacre had destroyed the army’s credibility, and that the time was right to prepare for a general strike to push them out of power. But the FFC opened negotiations with the military – which was under pressure from the US and Britain, via Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to enter into a transitional government with civilians. On 1 July, the SPA announced plans for two weeks of protests leading to a general strike. A few days later, the FFC announced a verbal agreement with the military, and the SPA changed course.

The agreements that were finally signed in August 2019 brought the FFC into a transitional government with the military, but they deferred Sudan’s most substantive issues, which were to be resolved in the distant future. Elections would be held in 2022, and until then the country would be ruled by a sovereign council composed of military officers and civilian politicians, with Burhan at its head and Hemedti as his deputy, overseeing a technocratic cabinet led by the former-UN economist Abdalla Hamdok.

Belatedly, the West became interested in Sudan’s struggle for independence. At stake was regional realignment – Sudan was to normalize relations with Israel – and the reformation of the national economy. To listen to the diplomats and World Bank officials that invaded Khartoum’s air-conditioned cafes after the revolution was to regress to the End of History. For them, a democratic utopia would emerge through austerity and the elimination of subsidies. Hamdok’s cabinet were early converts to this doctrine, even if it meant riding roughshod over the socio-economic goals of the revolution that had toppled Bashir. Upon taking office, the first Minister of Finance, Ibrahim Elbadawi – a World Bank alum – announced that the aim of the revolution was to free the country from its debt crisis by cutting subsidies.

Many of the FFC’s actions seemed designed to appeal to an international audience, and the organization was otherwise stymied in its domestic agenda by a military establishment that, far from disbanding the economic engine of the old regime, was intent on picking it over for scraps. Military finance fell outside the purview of the civilian part of the government, and security sector reform never got started. Hemedti continued to increase his military and economic power: the RSF recruited across the country, and not simply in Darfur, leading some of his supporters to claim that it was his paramilitaries, rather than the SAF, that constituted Sudan’s real armed forces.

Hemedti also took the lead in dealing with the peripheries. The August 2019 agreement had sidelined the Sudan Revolutionary Front, a grouping of many of the armed rebels from the country’s margins. Once again, power had been hoarded by the centre. For this reason, some rebel commanders saw the FFC as merely the latest iteration of riparian rule, and hoped that while Hemedti had inflicted grievous defeats on them during the previous decade, he might be someone with whom they could do business. While it was the civilian government that formally took the lead in subsequent negotiations with the rebels, Hemedti exercised informal control over the process. In October 2020, a deal was signed between the transitional government and the rebels that guaranteed them seats in government and promised greater political devolution. In the end, almost none of the agreement’s more ambitious measures were implemented. Instead, the rebels’ integration into the Khartoum government allowed Hemedti to use Bashir’s playbook – fragmenting opposition forces and setting them against each other – against his rivals. From October 2020 onward, Hemedti used the rebels to split the centre.

At this point, public frustration with Hamdok’s government was growing, with some protesters calling for his resignation and the military heightening the pressure. The rebels, now incorporated into the government, organized Potemkin protests outside the military headquarters, mimicking those that had led to the fall of Bashir. They claimed that Hamdok’s government had lost its way: it was only interested in the centre, not in justice for Darfur or in changing the geographical inequalities that had long blighted the country. There was much truth to this rhetoric, but beneath it lay a different political motivation – to destabilize the country and lay the groundwork for a coup.

*

That coup, long predicted, came as a shock only to the apparatchiks of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, who never imagined that the military could willingly forgo the international investment that would dry up in the event of a power grab. Burhan and Hemedti, promised funds from the Gulf, had no such hesitations. On 25 October, Burhan thanked Hamdok for his service and then declared a state of emergency. International commentators bewailed a season of coups, and placed Sudan in a motley line-up next to Myanmar, Mali and Guinea. But in truth, Sudan’s coup was never going to usher in a military dictatorship in the Egyptian mould. Unlike Bashir’s regime, which had ruled with the assistance of Sudan’s Islamists, at least for the first decade, Burhan’s junta had no ideology and no real social base. Their takeover was effectively a negotiating move, designed to push Hamdok back into government with a weakened cabinet while preserving the military’s powerbase.

Hamdok duly returned to office a month after the coup, only to resign amid continued street protests six weeks later. By October 2022, it was clear the military regime was flailing. The Gulf had failed to deliver on its financial promises to the junta, inflation and hunger were spiralling, and there was no let-up in public demonstrations. The coup proved that the basic antagonism of the Sudanese revolution remained intact. On one side was Bashir’s security council (only nominally transformed in the absence of Bashir himself). On the other, with the FFC sidelined, were the urban citizens of Sudan, wedded to civilian rule and represented by the various resistance committees.

For the Americans and British, the military were not going anywhere, so realism required a new civilian-military transitional government. In diplomatic circles, Burhan isn’t considered an Islamist, and is therefore someone whom the West can tolerate. For its part, the junta reckoned the best way to preserve the coup was to end it and form a new transitional government, on which the military could subsequently blame Sudan’s deepening economic woes. This was the background to the Framework Agreement, signed on 5 December 2022, which brought together some of the FFC and some of the Sudanese political parties in a new government with the military. UN officials and Western diplomats pronounced their satisfaction – while, throughout Sudan, the deal was met with protests.

Yet again, the agreement refused to face up to the country’s most pressing issues. The dynamics of the security sector, the place of the RSF, and the role of the military in government were all left to Phase II, which was given the absurdly short time-frame of one month. The deal foregrounded Hemedti, who was at pains to criticize the coup, and attempted to position himself closer to the civilian FFC. This worried Egypt, which feared the marginalization of the SAF and so established a separate negotiating framework in Cairo, including some of the rebel groups that had joined the government prior to the coup.

With the signing of the Framework Agreement, the civilian-military opposition that had previously dominated Sudanese politics became considerably more complicated. Burhan and Hemedti began searching for both civilian and rebel support, while also looking for regional backers. This meant the reform of the security forces was almost impossible to envisage, as the country’s two main military actors were increasingly at loggerheads: Egypt aligned itself with Burhan while Hemedti was in business with Russia’s Wagner Group.

By March, workshops were provisionally underway on the deeper issues affecting the country’s conflict, including the place of the RSF within the Sudanese military. The head of the UN mission to Sudan, Volker Perthes, announced to the UN Security Council on 20 March that he was ‘encouraged by how little substantive difference there remains among the main actors.’ Yet the rest of Sudan was not convinced. My friends who live in Khartoum felt that a conflict between Burhan and Hemedti had become inevitable.

*

And so it was. The can, kicked down the road for so long, hit a wall. Burhan expelled representatives of the RSF from a meeting on security sector reform, while the RSF started building up its forces around Khartoum in preparation for clashes. The arbitrary timetables of the diplomats, who wanted a government by the end of Ramadan, no doubt intensified these divisions. Now, as fighting enters its third day, there is little chance of a ceasefire in the immediate future. The rhetoric of both men is bellicose. For Hemedti, this is in all probability his first and only shot at rule. If he is defeated, and the RSF is dissolved into the army, his support base will be eroded and the dissolution of his economic empire will follow. For Burhan, backed by Egypt, there remain more options for negotiations, but the depth of rancour felt by the army against the Darfuri upstart should not be underestimated. Despite the SAF’s strength – and Egyptian support – it is unlikely to be an easy battle. The RSF are embedded in the civilian areas of Khartoum, and some of the most deadly fighting has already occurred in Darfur, on Hemedti’s home turf.

Whatever the outcome of the conflict – and the likelihood is that it will lead to a devastating loss of life – it will mark a new era for Sudan. The three previous civil wars were fought in the peripheries, and preserved the geographically-inflected class relations associated with Bashir. By contrast, this civil war – if that’s what it becomes – is taking place in Khartoum and its satellite cities. Hemedti, who came to prominence through Bashir’s transactional politics and his instrumentalization of militias, now has a political life of his own. His outsider status is a challenge to Sudan’s riparian elitism – one that is playing out in the streets and skies of its urban spaces.

Read on: Alex de Waal, ‘Exploiting Slavery’, NLR I/227.

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Immersive Hell

In Travels with My Aunt, Graham Greene tells the story of a man who decides to travel the world as he believes it will ‘make time move with less rapidity’. After suffering a stroke in Venice at the beginning of his tour, he buys a crumbling Italian villa, where he resumes his journey on a different scale, moving weekly from one bedroom to another. A year later, he dies ‘on his travels’ – dragging his suitcase to the last of his fifty-two rooms. In a similar fashion, the British artist Mike Nelson equates the exploration of interiors with larger travels in time and space. But while Greene’s story is strangely upbeat, Nelson’s installations are grim. Though absorbing and at times witty, their depiction of today’s world is unflinchingly bleak.

Nelson originally made his name with maze-like immersive installations such as The Deliverance and The Patience, which was mounted in a derelict brewery in Venice in 2001 and has now been recreated for an ambitious survey of his work at London’s Hayward Gallery, on view until 7 May. Like his cult piece Coral Reef (2000), it consists of a bewildering network of dingy rooms and twisting corridors. One room, its walls painted lurid shades of blue and purple, contains an old chest that doubles as a multi-faith altar, with various ceremonial objects – animal skulls, a small buddha, pseudo-Egyptian busts – arranged on top of it. There are two cramped bars, one decorated with tacky maritime paraphernalia, the other with old countercultural symbols: an image of Elvis, a picture of a hemp leaf. Elsewhere rumpled sleeping bags lie on a patched-up camp bed. Scraps of fabric cover a work bench in what appears to be a sweatshop. Beyond is a gambling den and a poky travel agency with yellowing posters of passenger planes. The surfaces are worn, some of the walls are bashed in, the furniture is manky. A musty smell pervades the work, the tang of objects collected from skips and car boot sales.

The Deliverance and the Patience, 2001 (detail).

Many of Nelson’s signature motifs are present here, in the electric fans and bare lightbulbs, the old sockets, foreign cigarette packets and mirrors. These and other items suggest neglect and precarity; many point to the difficulties faced by migrants in the UK, whose disorientation is evoked through the overarching motif of the labyrinth, the multiple doors that confront the visitor at every turn. The rooms reek of boredom, off-the-books employment and naked exploitation. Signs of travel dovetail with those of entrapment: the whole installation is windowless.

As ever with Nelson, the title is crucial. It refers to a large group of sailors and contracted settlers who set off from Plymouth in 1609, bound for the Jamestown colony in Virginia. Shipwrecked just off the coast of Bermuda, they decided to stay and set up an autonomous community on the island, but were eventually forced to build the ships – The Deliverance and The Patience – that then took them to Virginia, where a much harsher life awaited. Hence, while the title inverts the axis of migration, Nelson also uses it to hint that in the present, as in the seventeenth century, the hopes of migrants are misaligned with their prospects. The utopian echoes in the names of the two ships, as well as the reference to the Bermudan interlude, acquire an ironic tinge as they run up against the squalor of the rooms.

Nelson’s preoccupation with dispossessed subjects is evident in other early works on display at the Hayward. The Amnesiacs (1996- ), for instance, is a tableau made out of found materials in a chicken-wire cage. It is named after a fictional biker gang of First Gulf War veterans suffering from PTSD and memory loss. The cage, apparently, is their den. A motorbike is fashioned out of a large pot, a wooden trunk, bullhorns and a wool pelt, a snake out of a stick and a plastic bottle. Motorbike helmets are carved to look like skulls. A stool and the top of a plastic vat become a dog; a bike chain stands in for a necklace or whip. The whole scene sits on a bed of newspapers strewn with crab claws and razor shells. In its playfulness, Nelson’s handling of these materials jars with the overtones of violence, confinement and impotence. Implicitly, the biker-veterans are delusional: they can’t tell the difference between bullhorns and handlebars, a stool and a dog. Fantasy here is more demeaning than consolatory.

On the upper level at the Hayward the visitor finds a large installation – conceptually more streamlined but equally desolate. Triple Bluff Canyon (the woodshed), made in 2004, is a replica of the shed that the US artist Robert Smithson buried under tons of earth on the campus of Kent State University in 1970, shortly before four students were killed there by National Guardsmen at a protest against the Vietnam War. Nelson is presumably drawn to Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed because it has come to be read in light of the killings. It would seem that for him the original shed, which eventually collapsed under the weight of the soil, conflated natural decay and violence. Burying his own shed in a sand dune rather than a mountain of earth, he presents the work, initially conceived for Modern Art Oxford at the time of the Iraq War, as a monument to the insanity of the US-led invasion. Today, it also reads as a commentary on creeping desertification. The shredded tyres added to this new version – signs of fossil fuel consumption – support both interpretations, recalling a war triggered partly by thirst for Iraqi oil while also providing a vision of environmental disaster.

Triple Bluff Canyon (the woodshed), 2004, and M25, 2023.

These projects of the 1990s and early 2000s display an obsessive attention to detail in the design and construction of the immersive spaces and the selection and arrangement of found objects. Take the doors in The Deliverance and The Patience: most are scuffed, their paint flaking, a couple have reinforced glass panels, others have pull handles. Each one is different – and together they conjure poverty, cheap DIY solutions, spaces that are neither properly domestic nor public. Nelson’s art describes hellish places, each keyed to a juncture in the recent past through the accretion of suggestive features.

The bleakness of these environments is relieved by occasional moments of humour. A door leading to another grimy room has ‘Sanitary Department’ etched into its glass window; a map showing ‘Global Natural Perils’ hangs on a wall in the travel agency; ‘Exit’ signs proliferate in a maze. A helmet, a means of protection, does duty as a skull. The works are littered with such darkly comic asides. And the details, as they add up, become proto-narratives. They invite speculation, asking to be read as clues to the identities of the people who work, sleep and drink in these spaces, to their travels and aspirations, their memories and present rituals. These incipient storylines raise uncomfortable questions for Nelson’s audience. What are our roles, our motivations for looking? The works cast us as inquisitive outsiders, using their narrative openings as bait for voyeurs. Hence the cage in The Amnesiacs: it doesn’t just confine the bikers; it also offers them up for our inspection. As the curator Ingrid Swenson observed of The Deliverance and The Patience, ‘you felt really self-conscious, as if you were somewhere you shouldn’t be.’

Some of the more recent works on display at the Hayward fare less well, The Asset Strippers (2019) in particular. When this collection of used industrial and agricultural appliances was shown in Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries before the pandemic, it was starkly impressive. Among the machines were a surface grinder, a mechanical hacksaw, a paint sprayer and hay rake, all shown on makeshift plinths that were themselves made up of industrial implements, including steel trestles and a lorry ramp. As the artist explained in a text written for the Tate and reproduced in the Hayward catalogue, the work looks back to the postwar period, when members of his family worked in textile factories in the East Midlands. The title alludes not just to the decline of manufacturing but also to the rise of the digital economy: Nelson bought the appliances at asset strippers’ online auctions. In the Tate, these hulking machines were at once incongruous and oddly fitting: they brought working-class labour into the museum, showcasing the bluntness and immediacy of that confrontation, yet their imposing stage presence was also a match for the pomp of their surroundings. Nelson pointed out that Duveen had made his fortune selling art objects to wealthy industrialists. In bringing mechanical relics into the museum, the artist was reminding us that industrial labour was already present in those vast galleries. It had paid for them.

The Asset Strippers (Khorsabad, shed), 2019.

At the Hayward, however, this conflictual dialogue between the work and its context is lost. Here, the industrial appliances – a smaller selection – stand in a white cube. The potency of the original piece lay in its site-specificity. In the current show, the machines look massive and intriguing but ultimately tame. Nelson once hoped that his immersive work would ‘obliterate’ the gallery, thus evading capture by the art market and its attendant media circus. Yet he wrote that he became disillusioned after taking over the British pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, and subsequently turned to monumental sculpture. At the Hayward, it is difficult to see how his more recent sculptural pieces inhibit their metabolization by the art world. On the contrary, they seem to have a strong art historical pedigree, as Nelson signals in his text when he likens them to the work of Jacob Epstein and Henry Moore. With The Asset Strippers he revisits the modernist sublime, giving it a nostalgic twist that diminishes the installation’s original abrasiveness.

Even those pieces that lend themselves more readily than The Asset Strippers to recreation in another location are not at their best in the current exhibition, which brings together a number of works by an artist who has in the past shown one project at a time. His pieces don’t line up neatly like paintings on a wall. They tend to annex spaces, the immersive works in particular. To attend to one is to enter a world and briefly accept its parameters – its inhabitants, as identified by their traces, its spatial configuration and situation in time. At the Hayward, the visitor is asked to do that over and over again. One account, that of his career, serves as the master narrative, of which all the stories he tells then become illustrations. For those artists who, like Nelson, ordinarily produce exhibitions rather than discrete works, the survey show is an awkward fit.

In 2022, Nelson made one more immersive work: a tiny room with a camp bed and, all around it, travel guides on book shelves. Titled The Book of Spells (a speculative fiction), it is on display at Matt’s Gallery on Webster Road in South London until 23 April. As claustrophobic as any of the chambers in The Deliverance and The Patience, it again pits travel against the forces that constrain it, which here include the Covid pandemic. In an interview, Nelson intimated that every item in the room is designed to support this overall impression: ‘that’s why I’m desperately looking for an old door closer as the door needs to close behind you – because when you see the outside world, the spell is broken.’ That is partly what happens at the Hayward: the outside world intrudes, in the form of the gallery, its architecture, the curatorial tradition of the survey show. To an extent, the spell is broken.

But it would be wrong to make too much of this. The show remains hugely compelling. For visitors who couldn’t travel to Venice for the first incarnation of The Deliverance and The Patience, or to Oxford for Triple Bluff Canyon, it is an opportunity to see these pivotal works in person. They still captivate viewers and ‘force them to look’, as Nelson wrote of his early work in 2019. Although ‘force’ may not be the right word here; rather, they persuade us – and they do so by striking a kind of bargain. Visitors can enjoy trespassing, clocking details and following leads. They can enjoy the intricacy of the works as story-telling devices, but only if, in the process, they take a clear-eyed look at some of the more toxic effects of our current political conjuncture. The grimness of seeing is the price he exacts for the pleasure of looking.

Read on: Marcus Verhagen, ‘Art in a Narrow Present’, NLR 135.

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Plenipotentiary

Before the release of his latest film, Todd Field appeared to have become a marginal figure in Hollywood. Having won critical acclaim for his dark family dramas In the Bedroom (2001) and Little Children (2005), the auteur subsequently set his sights on ‘material that was probably very tough to get made’, as he put it: an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, a political thriller co-written with Joan Didion, a series adapted from Jonathan Franzen’s Purity. Now, after a fifteen-year hiatus, Field has assured lasting notoriety with Tár: the story of a star classical music conductor – Lydia Tár, played by Cate Blanchett – who is working on a live recording of Mahler’s Fifth with the Berlin Philharmonic until she is felled by a spectacular MeToo scandal. Accused of sexually abusing younger female musicians, and ultimately driving one of them to suicide, she is subjected to the crowd justice of social media, ousted from her position and exiled to an anonymous East Asian megacity.

Were viewers dealing with a film hostile or sympathetic to cancel culture? Pro- or anti-‘woke’? In the New York Times, Ross Douthat praised Tár for resisting the seemingly inexorable spread of social-justice ideology. By contrast, The Spectator’s arts editor, Igor Toronyi-Lalic, described it as a betrayal of the medium: ‘a New Yorker long read masquerading as cinema’. At the New Yorker itself, Richard Brody recoiled from Field’s supposed apologism for his protagonist, while the Guardian’s Wendy Ide saw a straightforward condemnation of the ‘monstrous maestro’. Such clashing interpretations reflected the difficulty of locating the film politically. Reviews that positioned it on either side of the ‘culture war’ seemed inevitably reductive. Its reception exposed a Weltanschauung increasingly helpless in the face of artistic ambiguity: the ‘intolerance of ambivalence’ that Freud once saw as the hallmark of the neurotic personality.

For many of its detractors, Field’s story was simply not believable. In De Standaard, Gaea Schoeters chastised him for making the film’s offender a lesbian given the fact that LGBT people make up a small minority of sexual abusers. Another commentator asked whether ‘we need another lesbian predator in lesbian cinema at a time when “grooming” hysterias have reached a new fever pitch among conservatives’. Marin Aslop made a similar case in the pages of the Sunday Times – declaring, ‘I’m offended by Tár as a woman, as a conductor, as a lesbian’ – while Emma Warren remarked that its depiction of gender politics in the classical music scene was a misleading fantasy. A peculiarly inflexible aesthetic ideal underpins these arguments: art must offer a faithful reflection of reality, a statistically valid median. Only by this method can it secure its moral collateral.

Tár seems to both elicit and frustrate this type of reading. On the one hand, the film is devoted to verisimilitude. Real life constantly intrudes upon the narrative: the opening scene features the New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik playing himself; Lydia’s fictional mentor closely resembles the non-fictional Herbert von Karajan; and at one point, when Lydia is rushing to delete a batch of potentially incriminating emails, we recognise the names of several contemporary composers in her inbox. Throughout, Field meticulously evokes the authentic world of the Bildungsbürgertum: the conductor’s snapback and winged fashion coat, the grand piano in the pied-à-terre in Friedenau, the concrete corridors of the metropolitan flat, the chrome-black Porsche which shuttles her through Berlin. If one types the words ‘Is Lydia’ into Google, the first suggestion reads ‘Is Lydia Tár a real person?’ It is clear why Schoeters et al. would criticize Field for betraying the factual truth-criteria that the film seems to establish.

On the other hand, by eschewing the most common MeToo formula – in which the culprit is a Weinsteinesque patriarch – Tár simultaneously attempts to transcend such literalist readings. It suggests that the power structure undergirding gendered oppression will always predominate over the people occupying it. Hierarchies predate abuse, and gender roles are often fluid. If Field’s depiction of a lesbian predator puts us at somewhat of a distance from reality, this may allow for more sophisticated reflection on the forces and relations that shape it. This is perhaps why the moralistic commentary on Tár runs into an explanatory impasse; for it is not Lydia’s personal culpability but these impersonal forces that are the real subject of the film.

The most obvious among them is the stratified sphere of classical music – in which the lower ranks can only improve their career prospects by cultivating informal relationships with those higher up the ladder. Musicians who are easily replaceable must render themselves irreplaceable by courting favour with the maestro. Ultimately, Lydia’s crime is to push this dynamic beyond the acceptable limits designated by the industry. In exchanging professional advancement for sexual or emotional intimacy, she exposes the inherent asymmetry of this coercive labour market. The protagonist seems to recognize this towards the end of the film, when – upon entering a massage parlor in Asia – she is nauseated by the apparent interchangeability of the female servants. As Slavoj Žižek pointed out in his review, the arrangement of the masseuses resembles the orchestral hierarchy that we see throughout the film: Lydia at the head of her band, the plenipotentiary who gets to pick between the subordinates. In Berlin, this setup was naturalized. Abroad, it provokes disgust.

This structural tension between maestro and musicians overlaps with a series of broader cultural conflicts that are illustrated by Lydia’s fall from grace. One of them, as Zadie Smith noted in the New York Review of Books, is a growing generational gap at the heart of Atlantic liberalism. Lydia is a Gen-Xer with boomer affects, while her staff and students are mostly millennials and zoomers. In the wake of the 2008 crash, these cohorts have drifted to the edges of two different professional cultures: divided not only by life prospects and asset wealth, but also by received notions of political correctness and propriety. Yet while living in these separate lifeworlds they must continue to inhabit the same workplaces: a combination that can easily prove combustible.    

The second, related conflict concerns the commercial interests that shape the institutions of classical music. After the allegations against Lydia are made public, the directors of the opera house evince little interest in their truth value. She may or may not be guilty. In predictably postmodern fashion, the question is one of public perception: if enough of their customers believe she is culpable, then – in strict accounting terms – she must be. A crucial pillar of high culture is thus eroded: classical music can no longer sustain itself through its intrinsic worth; its marketability must take precedence.

A third conflict concerns the dynamics of globalization. Some years ago, Lydia left her native New York to devote herself to the high arts in the Old World – where, she may have assumed, the ‘woke mob’ would not be banging on the gates. Yet her professional disgrace registers a fatal cross-pollination: Berlin is now rapidly Americanizing, assailed by those same moralists roving on the home front (a process accelerated by the transatlantic alignment that followed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine). Protesters wield banners outside Lydia’s house theatre; Twitter users post images that purportedly show her entering a hotel with a young woman; Field’s theatre stewards talk like Anglo-Saxon marketeers. If Lydia thought she could take refuge in Europe, she was mistaken. Just as classical music is no longer insulated from the pressures of the dominant culture, neither is its birthplace.

Tár is, above all, a guide to these twenty-first-century symptoms. For Lydia, their antithesis is the great American conductor Leonard Bernstein. Towards the end ofthe film, she watches one of his performances on an old VCR recording in the house where she grew up, her face covered in tears. When she was a child, it was Bernstein who inspired her to embark on the musical career that lifted her out of her modest circumstances. At that time, the subaltern classes could still look up to the most ennobling elements in Western culture. Highbrow composers were writing popular musicals and introducing TV-viewers to Wagner. Harold Rosenberg famously derided Bernstein as an embodiment of the kitsch implicit in all pop culture – yet, in a typically contemporary reversal, the kitsch of 1958 has morphed into the haute culture of 2022. Today’s bourgeoisie has not only shut its gates but dynamited the fortress itself. The students in Lydia’s Julliard class represent a ruling caste that grew up watching Marvel movies and Disney Plus: a cohort that can no longer honour the supposed ideals of their social stratum. To them, Beethoven is a dead white man; Bach a misogynist. In this new conjuncture, Bernstein represents a lost world – a fusion of high and low that was fleetingly possible in the post-war period and has now vanished forever.

In depicting this cultural ideal, Tár evokes another film about the task of the composer: Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971). Both Lydia and Aschenbach are artists who descend from the Apollonian into the Dionysian. In Visconti’s final scene, the syphilitic protagonist stumbles across the beach to the tones of the Adagietto in Mahler’s Fifth. In the ephebe Tadzio, he thought he’d found salvation; but ultimately, only the Fall beckons. The conclusion to Tár, however, is somewhat different. We watch Lydia overseeing her orchestra; but now it is posted abroad, performing video game soundtracks to an auditorium of Asian teenagers. Here, there can be no triumph of the irrational. Dionysus will not be crowned king, and Lydia will not collapse as Nietzsche before his horse. Instead, she will stubbornly continue to practice her art amid the ruins of the 2020s.

Is this a moving elegy for a more democratic culture, or a self-pitying ode to a historically outdated idea of craftsmanship? Once again, Field suspends judgement. As viewers, we must do without deployable certainties. Such reticence is welcome amid the dogmatic debates at which contemporary liberalism has proven so adept. As a director, Field is trying to reinstruct his audience in the virtues of ambivalence. Yet this ambiguity could also be said to serve a different purpose: an alibi for evasion, an impotent postponement of politics. What, after all, is Tár about? Power, generational struggle, hierarchies, gender, classes, culture, art. All of that? It is as if Field clears his throat for a shocking pronouncement but never dares to make it.

An earlier version of this article appeared in Sabzian.

Read on: Emilie Bickerton, ‘What’s Your Place?’, NLR 136.

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Finland’s Turn

Finland is gripped by wartime mania. News reports show mothers baking celebratory NATO cakes, online sales of NATO flags are soaring, and a Savonlinna-based brewing company has recently rolled out a NATO-themed beer, Otan olutta (the first word is a play on the French acronym for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; the full name means ‘I’ll have some beer’ in Finnish). The outgoing Social Democratic Prime Minister Sanna Marin has repeatedly emphasized the similarities between the 1939 Finnish–Russian War and today’s conflict in Ukraine. Hundreds of Finns, including the former chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, have paid to have personalized messages inscribed on Ukrainian artillery shells fired at Russian forces.

The discourse reached fever-pitch last week when Finland officially entered NATO, almost exactly 75 years after declaring its policy of neutrality. Some 78% of the population supported the move, but this was a recent development. In 2017, that figure stood at only 21%. The newfound Atlanticist fervour has been spearheaded by Marin, whose status as the world’s youngest Prime Minister and penchant for clubbing in Helsinki had already attracted international attention, netting her a luminous profile in British Vogue. Her tough line on Russia later consolidated her stardom. In March she visited Kyiv and laid flowers at the grave of Dmytro Kotsiubailo, a leading figure in the far-right Pravyi Sektor. She also called for heavier arms shipments to Ukraine and backed the construction of a 124-mile fence along Finland’s eastern border, replete with barbed wire to stop Russian men fleeing conscription.

Marin’s Natophilia transformed her into a beacon of hope for Europe’s new progressivism. Light on substance but eminently Instagrammable, this political tendency bases its appeal not on a coherent ideological outlook but on a feel-good millennial relatability. Its modernizing ethos owes more to the New World than the Old; it is just as at home at the Bilderberg Group annual meeting and the WEF stage as it is at the nightclub or pride parade. Under Marin, it has used the moral capital of Nordic pacifism – and the associated traditions of feminism, neutrality and social democracy – in order to destroy it.

Yet Marin’s international star power was not enough to secure victory for the Social Democrats (SDP) in Finland’s parliamentary elections on 2 April. The centre-right National Coalition Party (NCP) returned the best results with 20.8% of the vote, while the far-right Finns Party came a close second on 20.1%: their highest ever tally. Although the SDP won 19.9% and gained three seats, it could not keep its coalition afloat, as the smaller parties – the Left Alliance and the Greens – lost five and seven seats respectively. It appeared that their supporters had cast tactical votes for the SDP in a failed attempt to undermine the Finns (at the SDP’s election night party, the most expensive cocktail on the menu was called ‘Tactical Voting’).

For Marin’s opponents on the right, her main crime was fiscal mismanagement. During the pandemic, the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio jumped ten points from 64% to 74% – prompting the NCP, led by Petteri Orpo, to call for extensive cuts to unemployment and housing benefits, along with other welfare programmes. The opposition effectively exploited the discontent created by rising inflation, with the price of staple foods increasing by more than 30% and a recession on the horizon. The Finns Party meanwhile took aim at non-EU immigration, which they tried to connect to the economic crisis. Although all major parties supported NATO membership, there were notes of public scepticism about Marin’s statecraft. Some pointed out that, although the Finnish president Sauli Niinistö is supposed to hold authority over foreign policy, Marin frequently seemed to overstep her bounds; for instance, by offering to give Ukraine F18 Hornet jets without consulting anyone – including the Finnish air force – beforehand.

Coalition talks are now expected to take weeks. The result may be a deal between the NCP and Finns: a so-called ‘blue-black’ alliance of bourgeois conservatives and lumpen right-populists akin to that of Sweden. Or, if the NCP is reluctant to tarnish its respectable image, it may instead enter a ‘blue-red’ alliance with the SDP. Whatever the outcome, it is likely that the 45-year-old Finns leader Riikka Purra will soon displace Marin – who has stepped down as head of the SDP – as the country’s ascendant young politician. Purra won 42,589 direct votes to Marin’s 35,623: the fourth highest share in Finnish history, and the most of any female candidate in 75 years. Like Marin, she has used social media to create a distinctive personal brand. Her Instagram is filled with beaming outdoor selfies and snapshots of her raw plant-based diet. Other millennial members of the Finns – Miko Bergmom, Joakim Vigelius and Onni Rostila – have leveraged their large TikTok followings to secure seats in parliament. Among those aged 18-29 they are now the most popular party, with an approval rating of 26%: twice that of the SDP.

The far right’s rising fortunes have been met with curiously muted concern in foreign media outlets, perhaps mindful not to damage Finland’s standing as it enters NATO. In the days after the election, Atlanticist think-tankers and commentators were quick to point out that Marin’s loss did not signal a rejection of the military alliance. In a narrow sense, they are correct. Yet the fact remains that, following the electoral defeats of North Macedonia’s Zoran Zaev in 2021 and Sweden’s Magdalena Andersson in 2022, Marin is the third European social democrat to have brought their country into NATO before losing the next election to the right. What does this pattern tell us? Perhaps that a single-minded focus on Euro-Atlantic integration has deprived such parties of their historic purpose and neglected more pressing matters.

Read on: Pekka Haapakoski, ‘Brezhnevism in Finland’, NLR I/86.

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Farmers’ Revolt

The shock among the Dutch chattering classes on 16 March was palpable. The right-populist Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB) – established in 2019 by a small communications firm, bankrolled by the powerful Dutch agrifood complex and led by a former meat industry journalist – had massively increased its vote share in the country’s provincial elections. It is now the largest party in all twelve provinces, and expected to achieve the same status in Senate elections next month. This would give BBB veto power at both national and local levels, potentially bringing an already hesitant green transition process to a standstill. Faced with this prospect, an irate commentariat has begun to denounce the farmers as enemies of environmental progress, and speculate that voting restrictions – on the elderly, the ‘undereducated’, those in rural constituencies – might be necessary to override their resistance.

The casus belli for the farmers’ revolt was a 2019 ruling by the Dutch Supreme Court that the government had breached its EU obligations to protect 163 natural areas against emissions from nearby agricultural activities. This prompted the centre-right coalition government, led by Mark Rutte, to impose a nationwide speed limit on highways of 100km/h and cancel a wide array of building projects intended to alleviate supply shortages on the Dutch housing market. Yet it soon became apparent that such measures were insufficient, since transport and construction contributed a pittance to national nitrogen emissions. Agriculture, by contrast, was responsible for 46%. A structural solution would therefore have to involve substantial reduction of livestock. The suggestion long put forward by the marginal ‘Party for the Animals’, to slash half of the aggregate Dutch livestock by expropriating 500 to 600 major emitters, was suddenly on the table. The unthinkable had become thinkable.

The number of Dutch workers employed in agricultural activities has declined precipitously in the last century, from around 40% during the Great War to only 2% today. Yet, over the same period, the Netherlands has become the second biggest food exporter in the world after the US. Its meat and dairy industry plays a pivotal role in global supply chains, which makes its ecological footprint unsustainable large. Hence the gradual realization among the Dutch political class – accelerated by the Supreme Court ruling – that meeting climate goals meant reorienting the national economy. The level of enthusiasm for this project varied among the governing parties. For the rural-oriented Christian Democrats it was a hard pill to swallow; for the eco-modernist, meritocratic social liberals of Democrats 66 it was a golden opportunity; while for Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) it was simply the pragmatic option. As one MP remarked, ‘The Netherlands can’t be the country that feeds the world while at the same time shitting itself.’

The proposals triggered an unexpected wave of peasant protests – farmers blocking roads with their tractors, occupying squares and other public spaces, breaking into government buildings and turning up at the homes of politicians – as well as the formation of the BBB. After a brief pause during lockdown, this movement reached new heights of intensity. Since spring 2022, along the roads and highways leading into the forgotten parts of the Netherlands, farmers have hung thousands of inverted national flags: a symbol of their discontent.

Almost one fifth of the electorate, approximately 1.4 million people, turned out to vote for the BBB this month – a significantly larger number than the 180,000 farmers who comprise its core constituency. This suggests that more is at stake than simple nimbyism. Pensioners, the vocationally-trained and the precariously employed are overrepresented among the party’s supporters, and its largest electoral gains were in peripheral, non-urban areas which have been hit hard by falling public investment. Such groups have rallied around a class of farmers who present themselves as victims, but who are in fact among the most privileged in the country: one in five is a millionaire. It’s clear that this heterogeneous bloc could only be assembled as a result of deep disenchantment with mainstream Dutch politics – which has long been blighted by the arrogance and incompetence of its ruling stratum.

A number of historical factors helped to lay the groundwork for the farmers’ movement. First, the Netherlands underwent an extremely rapid neoliberal makeover since the early 1980s, resulting in the fire sale of public services, the marketization of childcare, healthcare and higher education, a steep decline in social housing, the emergence of globalized banks and pension funds, and one of the most flexible labour markets in the EU, with a third of employees on precarious contracts. Next, the 2008 financial crisis led to one of the most expensive banking rescues in per capita terms, followed by six years of austerity which served to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich. The four lockdowns imposed between 2020 and 2022 had the same effect: workers lost their jobs, saw their incomes fall and died in greater numbers. Rising consumer prices, sparked by the war in Ukraine, subsequently pushed many Dutch households into fuel poverty.

All this was interspersed with constant bureaucratic failures across a range of government departments: childcare, primary education, housing, the tax office, transport and gas extraction. At the same time, regressive subsidies were handed out to middle-class environmentalists to reimburse the costs of heat pumps, solar panels and Teslas. Add a constant trickle of high-handed insults about the lower classes from the putative experts who dominate public debate, and you end up with a combustible mixture of resentments. The situation was finally ignited in 2019 by the court ruling, at which point latent regional-cultural identities provided the raw symbolic material for the farmers’ adversarial narrative: urban versus rural, elites versus masses, vegans versus meat-eaters. With the help of some savvy political entrepreneurs, this message began to resonate far beyond the farmlands.

The French novelist Michel Houellebecq once wrote that the Netherlands is not a country but a limited liability corporation. This perfectly captures the view of Rutte’s VVD. Since it came to power in 2010, it has reimagined the Netherlands as a new Singapore on the Rhine – establishing a form of mercantilist neoliberalism geared towards attracting as much foreign capital, both financial and human, as possible. In its attempt to court foreign direct investment, the Netherlands has become one of the largest tax havens in the world. Its social security regime has been redesigned to serve highly educated expats, turning Amsterdam into an Anglophone outpost where one must speak English in order to visit a shop or a restaurant, while refugees and asylum seekers are locked away near some of the poorest villages in the Dutch outback. Public investment has predominantly flowed to metropolitan areas in the West, while largely surpassing the peripheries along the German border.

The dynamics of uneven development have been legitimated by a narrative that extols the virtues of the city and its ‘creative class’. Geographers like Richard Florida and Edward Glazer popularized the notion that post-ideological politicians must stop backing losers and start picking winners by steering massive amounts of public funding to the urban centres – which were thought to hold the key to national economic success. And so it went: while hospitals, schools, fire stations and bus lines slowly disappeared from the periphery, the core was decked with glittering metro lines. Large differences in life expectancy opened up between these regions, as well as a major divergence in people’s trust for politicians.

Rutte, the premier that has overseen it all, is now set to become the longest sitting head of state since the Kingdom of the Netherlands was founded in 1815. He is adept at playing the game of politics, but he lacks the ideological vision necessary to weather times of crisis. (Rutte has famously said that voters who want vision should go to an optometrist.) Demography, balanced budgets, the euro, Covid-19, war, climate change: these are the imponderabilia that Rutte and his ilk, backed by their battery of experts, have used to discipline Dutch voters into submission. Nitrogen emissions form part of this broader pattern. The plan to halve livestock numbers was not drawn up after a lengthy process of democratic debate; it was a snap judgment made by politicians hiding behind an unaccountable judiciary. But, this time, the government was caught off-guard by the backlash it provoked.  

It may therefore be necessary to revise the German poet Heinrich Heine’s observation that ‘In Holland, everything happens fifty years late’. Here, it seems, the revolt against technocracy has come early. The Dutch conjuncture likely foreshadows the fate of other rich countries in the Global North – as centrist governments, striving to assert their green credentials, begin to make heavy-handed policy reforms with major redistributive consequences.

What Andreas Malm calls the ‘energetic regime’ of global capitalism has so far taken up most of our political attention; but as the environmental fallout of its ‘caloric regime’ becomes unignorable, livestock farming will enter the crosshairs of governments and climate activists. Recent data from Eurostat show that livestock densities are particularly high in Denmark, Flanders, Piemonte, Galicia, Brittany, Southern Ireland and Catalonia. Soon enough, these regions will have to introduce measures similar to those currently under discussion in the Netherlands. And if the Dutch example is anything to go by, technocracy will hardly do the trick. A state that has imposed privatization, flexibilization, austerity, disinvestment and regressive environmental subsidies on its citizens cannot expect to be trusted when it comes to climate politics. Instead, it will have to redress the effects of these ruinous policies while gradually building support for a green transition through a process of meaningful engagement – one that does not shy away from democratic disagreement, nor the difficult work it entails.

Read on: Harriet Friedmann, ‘Farming Futures’, NLR 138.