Month: August 2023

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Non-Events

Narrative painting in the European tradition tended to depict drama and action: scenes from biblical tales, classical mythology and historical events such as military confrontations and nuptial pagaentries. By contrast, the Chinese tradition of narrative painting was less overtly dramatic and more detached – ‘interstitial’ rather than ‘architectonic’, to borrow terms Andrew Plaks applied to classical Chinese fiction and historiography. Chinese literary narratives put equal, if not more, emphasis on ‘non-events’, or the interstitial spaces between events – purposeless gatherings and inconsequential conversations. Even battle scenes in Chinese historical fiction are often slowed down and their tension diffused using devices such as interspersed verse, discursive digression and frequent recapitulation, producing a ritualised ‘hiatus’ rather than a climactic action. Analagous effects can be seen in traditional Chinese narrative painting, always closely connected to history and literature, and where the ‘interstitial’ quality is if anything more pronounced since paintings convey narrative spatially rather than temporally.

The equivalent of ‘narrative painting’ in Chinese is xu shi hua (picture that tells a story) or gu shi hua (picture of an ancient event).The two concepts are intertwined. Sometimes a contemporary incident was indirectly depicted through the evocation of the past – especially common when the painting served a political purpose. Narrative painting flourished during the political turbulence of the Jin dynasty (1115–1234), when North China was conquered by the Jurchens, ethnically the same group as the Manchu who would seize the whole of China in the seventeenth century, later adding what are today Tibet and Xinjiang to their conquests. The Jurchens defeated the Northern Song, pushing the Han rulers south of the Huai River, re-established as the Southern Song (1127–1279). In the south, the court painter Li Tang produced Duke Wen of Jin Recovering His State, using this ancient story of dynastic revival – from the seventh century BC – to express Emperor Gaozong’s ambition to reclaim the lost land. In the north, Yang Bangji, a Chinese literatus serving at the court of Sinicized Jurchen ruler Hailing (1149–61), depicted the Song’s humiliating tribute mission in A Diplomatic Mission to the Jin, in an effort to legitimize the Jurchens’ rule over North China.

Among the political paintings of the time, the theme of Mingfei chusai (Consort Ming Departing for the Frontier) stands out on account of its female protagonist. Consort Ming refers to Wang Zhaojun (54 BC–19BC), a lady-in-waiting. According to Han Shu (History of the Former Han), she was sent by Emperor Yuan to marry the ruler of the neighbouring Xiongnu empire – an early example of heqin, a diplomatic marriage alliance to ensure peace between China and surrounding states. This historical episode was fictionalised in a collection of short stories, Xijing zaji (Miscellaneous Records of the Western Capital) some three centuries later. There, a corrupt court painter, whom Zhaojun is too proud to bribe, produces a deliberately flawed portrait of the royal consort – so flawed the emperor decides to send her away. Just as she leaves, the emperor appreciates her beauty for the first time, regrets his decision to exile her and has all his painters executed. The legend stirred the imaginations of Chinese literati and street performers alike. Generations of poets commemorated Zhaojun in their verses and made pilgrimages to her hometown. Demoted mandarins compared their own loyalty to Zhaojun’s patriotism, blaming their exiles on deceitful opponents like the villainous painter.

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Gong Suran (12th–13th century), Mingfei chusai tu (Consort Ming Departing for the Frontier), preserved at Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts, Japan.

The handscroll Consort Ming Departing for the Frontier is one of the earliest visual representations of the legend. The scroll, which many attribute to the Jin dynasty, is currently preserved in the Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts in Japan. It measures 30.2 cm vertically and 160.2 cm horizontally when fully spread out. It shows Zhaojun being escorted into exile. The sand hills in the background are indicated with light-tone washes. Wind is suggested by the fluttering banner, waving ribbons and the sleeves half-covering the faces. The composition comprises four sections, arranged horizontally in a linear fashion. Those who came to look at the painting at the time would have unfolded the scroll from right to left. What they would see first would be the two Xiongnu men on horseback leading the procession, one carrying a flag, with a foal trotting alongside. Next would appear the lady-in-waiting herself and her maid, both riding a horse led by a servant. Wearing a fur hat with earmuffs and dressed like a warrior, Zhaojun grips the reins and looks ahead. The maid turns around as if trying to catch a last glimpse of her disappearing hometown. She carries a pipa, the four-stringed Chinese lute which, according to legend, Zhaojun played well. Following them is a group of seven men, among them a Han envoy holding a fan to shield his face from the wind. The last section depicts a Xiongnu man on horseback holding a falcon, and a hound loping along slightly ahead of the horse and its rider. The scene was painted with ink on paper, in delicate brushstrokes reminiscent of the baimiao style of the Northern Song master Li Gonglin (1049–1106). The narrative is minimal: instead of the drama of the send-off or arrival, the scene presented is, in essence, a ‘non-event’, its figures simply on their way. Yet the circumstantial details of this ‘interstitial’ space trigger the imagination, carrying a train of associations: their daily meals would come from hunting using the falcon, the sorrowful melody emitted out of the pipa would make wild geese linger, the foal trotting ahead of Zhaojun’s horse suggests the motherhood that would inevitably follow her marriage in a foreign land.  

Gong Suran, Mingfei chusai tu (detail), preserved at Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts, Japan.

Little is known about the identity of the painter, who signed the scroll ‘Zhenyang / Gong Suran hua’ (‘painted by Gong Suran of Zhenyang’. They were once assumed to be a Taoist woman artist because the signature was misread as ‘Zhenyang Gong / Suran’, ‘gong’ meaning temple. The current consensus is that Gong is the surname of the artist, and that Zhenyang was today’s Zhengding county in Hebei province, which fell under the Jurchen rule at the time. The stamp above the painter’s name reads ‘seal of zhao fu shi’, referring to a temporary post in charge of military affairs during wartime. Some speculate that the seal belonged to Wu Xian (?–1234), who was assigned the post in Zhenyang in 1217 and organized military resistance against Mongols, who frequently attacked the Jin state. In 1214, after Genghis Khan besieged Jin’s capital Zhongdu (the southwestern part of present-day Beijing), the Jurchens sent a diplomatic delegation to the Mongols, offering ‘gold and silks, five hundred boys and girls, three thousand horses’, as well as the Jurchen Princess Qiguo, daughter of Emperor Wanyan Yongji, to be married to Genghis Khan. It is possible that Gong’s painting of the legend of Zhaojun was commissioned to record the contemporary heqin event. The hypothesis is consistent with the scroll’s pictorial details: the black flag with a white sun in the middle is the symbol of the Jurchens; the clothes of the Xiongnu riders resemble those worn by the Jurchens and the Mongols; the hair style of two of the envoys was typical among the Mongols. One of the three colophons appended to the painting appears to confirm the theory. The poem ridicules heqin as desperate politics and sympathizes with the painter who, their intention delicately concealed, had succeeded in making the viewer feel sorrow about both the ancient story and contemporary matters.

Was Gong Suran a woman? If so, the painting would be a very rare representation of a woman protagonist by a woman painter concerning a political theme. It would certainly challenge the conventional conception of woman painters in dynastic times as courtesans who depicted willows on fans to reject clients’ advances, or as gentry who picked up their skills from brothers or fathers only to produce paintings as gifts in social exchanges. Museum labels tend to refer to Gong as a woman, but this is an assumption likely based on the name’s feminine intonation. There is no historical evidence available to confirm the painter’s gender or anything else about them. Perhaps the question should instead be: what was the general experience of women under Jurchen rule, especially if we see the image of Zhaojun as not only a historical icon but also a mirror of contemporary lives? Literary sources, such as Jinshi (History of Jin), praise women for their military skills – for leading troops and defending cities. Jin society appeared to be less hierarchical: one Song envoy visiting the Jin state was astonished by the sight of Emperor Aguda’s wife sitting next to him receiving guests and a second wife rolling up her sleeves to serve food. Acculturation went both ways. Elite Jurchen women started to wear silk and read Chinese classics; Han women, meanwhile, had more access to public venues under Jurchen rule than their counterparts in the Southern Song where foot-binding and Confucian ethics would confine them to interior spaces. In a large Jin mural (1167) at Yanshan temple in Shanxi province, women can be seen walking freely on the streets, mingling with men, shopping at the market, playing pipa in an open-air pavilion. This forms a stark contrast to the depiction of women in the Northern Song masterpiece Qingming shanghe tu (Along the River during the Qingming Festival), completed sixty years earlier: of the eight hundred figures featured in the scroll, only a dozen or so are women, many half hidden behind windows or peering from sedan chairs.

Zhang Yu (12th–13th century), Wenji guihan tu (Lady Wenji Returning to Han, detail), preserved at Jilin Museum, China.

The composition of the Gong scroll is almost identical to that of another Jin painting, now stored at the Jilin Museum. It was signed by a court painter named Zhang Yu serving at the Commission of Palace Services. The crucial difference in the Zhang scroll is the omission of the maid figure carrying the pipa. Later generations titled the painting Wenji guihan tu (Lady Wenji Returning to Han). Cai Wenji (177–239), of the Eastern Han dynasty, was abducted by Xiongnu invaders but eventually returned home after twelve years’ captivity. During the Song–Jin period, Wenji’s tale was frequently depicted in paintings, many in sequential scenes based on a verse epic called Hujia shiba pai (Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute), composed by the Tang poet Liu Shang (727–805). Like Zhaojun, Wenji also had a contemporary reincarnation. When the Jurchens captured the last two emperors of the Northern Song, they also took captive Empress Dowager Wei, who had to spend sixteen years in Manchuria until her son, by then Emperor Gaozong of the Southern Song, signed a peace treaty with the Jurchens in exchange for her release. Questions remain as to whether the Gong scroll copied the Zhang scroll or whether both were based on an earlier painting. Whichever is the case, there is an undeniable relation between them: a poem on the Gong scroll juxtaposes Zhaojun’s pipa with Wenji’s flute; Emperor Qianlong’s inscription on the Zhang scroll contrasts Wenji’s rehabilitation with Zhaojun’s permanent expulsion. In this alternative tradition of visualizing human experience, the drama of departure or return is out of frame. Instead, a hiatus: an interstitial space that seems directionless and endless.

Read on: J. X. Zhang, ‘The Roar of the Elephant’, NLR 131.

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Embracing Failure

Mario Tronti, who died earlier this month at the age of 92, was best-known as the author of Workers and Capital (1966). Consisting mostly of essays written in the first half of the sixties, his magnum opus was the most influential text of operaismo, the theoretical current that was then emerging in Italy amid a wave of labour militancy and factory occupations. ‘Workerism’, in the approximate translation, placed renewed emphasis on working-class struggle and consciousness. Foregrounding the primacy of labour in capitalist accumulation, the operaisti argued that the principal focus of Marxism should be not the abstract laws of capital, but workers themselves, without whom capitalism cannot function and who ‘push capitalist production forward from within’. In the bold vision of operaismo, workers act and capital adapts. ‘We too saw capitalist development first and the workers second’, Tronti wrote in ‘Lenin in England’, his editorial in the inaugural issue of Classe Operaia, a journal he co-founded in 1963. ‘This is a mistake. Now we have to turn the problem on its head, change orientation, and start again from first principles, which means focusing on the struggle of the working class.’

Born to a working-class family in Rome, Tronti studied philosophy at Sapienza under Della Volpe in the 1950s, when he became a partisan of the PCI. Led to question the orthodox Marxism he absorbed from the party after the USSR’s invasion of Hungary in 1956, and inspired by Della Volpe’s attack on positivism, Tronti began to criticize dialectical materialism as a form of naïve metaphysics. He took the view that classical Marxism was at once too historicist and evolutionary, and too oriented to a far-off future. What was needed was not a theory of history but a ‘science’ of present-day realities. ‘Marxism’, he would write in Workers and Capital, ‘has to engage with Marx not in his time, but in our own.’

In the early sixties, he joined a group of sociologists who, profoundly influenced by Max Weber and led by the socialist Raniero Panzieri, founded Quaderni Rossi (1961–66). The first of several spirited, short-lived operaist publications, the journal was devoted to the study of postwar Italian capitalism and aimed to galvanize the rebellious workers in the country’s industrial north. Noting the close imbrication of capitalism and industrial progress – as Panzieri argued, ‘the two terms capitalism and development are the same thing’ – the aim of their research was to study workers’ efforts to become autonomous from and even halt that development. This critique of productivism became the premise of Classe Operaia (1963–67), which Tronti launched along with the historian Alberto Asor Rosa and the philosopher Antonio Negri.

Focusing on Fiat’s enormous plants in northern Italy – a cornerstone of the economy – the Quaderni Rossi circle argued that factory, society and state had become tightly interconnected; industry was fundamentally a political tool deployed to control labour and standardize society. As a result of the growing dominance of industry, society was becoming what Tronti called ‘an articulation of production’: ‘the whole society lives in function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domain over the whole society.’ Yet the tentacular reach of manufacturing and the importance of industrial workers also gave shop-floor struggle broader social significance and immediate political potential. The conflicts underway inside the factories were therefore not only between the needs of labour and the imperatives of the firms, but between workers and the state itself. At this pivotal conjuncture of Italian capitalism, Tronti contended, workers in key industries had the strategic power to reshape the state. A ‘vision of the part, to see the whole’, operaismo insisted that the refusal of productive labour – through absenteeism, strikes and other industrial actions of the period – was a threat to the system as such.

Above all, operaismo mounted a profound critique of work, one that questioned the place of labour in our lives. In a world in which the assembly line seemed to foreshadow the standardization of society, ‘the only plausible present-day minimum programme for the working class challenges for the first time the whole of productive activity that has hitherto existed. This challenge will abolish work. And in so doing it will abolish class domination.’ This was the basis of Workers and Capital’s admonishment of socialism, along with capitalism: both were systems that viewed ‘society as a means and production as an end’. In ‘all the upheavals of the past’, Tronti noted, ‘the type of productive activity was left intact. It has always exclusively been a question of the distribution of productive activity, redistributing labour to new groups of people’. To abolish work did not mean eradicating productive activity tout court, but it implied the difficult – perhaps impossible – task of dismantling an economy where the end of production was production itself. Only then would the ground be laid for a world with many ends.

The call for a ‘working-class struggle against work’ became a slogan, some would say a cliché, embraced by the new generations dreaming of a life free from drudgery, who often came into conflict with the PCI. But although it was among the emerging social movements that Workers and Capital found its most devoted readers, Tronti was not aiming to assemble a ‘new left’, nor did he endorse any of the myriad groupuscules operating outside the Communist Party. He was critical of the PCI’s ‘national-popular’ path and of the institutions of the classical workers’ movement (capitalism, he observed, ‘no longer manages its own ideology but has the workers’ movement manage it in its stead’). But he continued to believe in the need for a left government in the interest of workers, and for a mass politics anchored in parliament. Alluding to Machiavelli, Tronti insisted late in life that ‘the class remained the Prince, the primacy was still the struggle, but in order to try to give them a winning outcome, the instrument of the party was needed.’

In the 1990s, Tronti became a senator for the Partito Democratico, the successor to the Partito Democratico della Sinistra, which had evolved out of the dissolution of the PCI in 1991. His elevation to the commanding heights of the political apparatus was an emblem of what the workers’ movement had achieved during the economic boom of the postwar era. Yet by this time, deregulation and globalization had undermined the use of legislative power for progressive reforms, and many old comrades criticized Tronti for failing to appreciate that parliament was an ineffectual arena for social change. In another operaist journal, Contropiano (1968–71), Tronti had written that there is ‘capitalist economic development on the one hand and workers’ political power on the other – two forces . . . in a long war in which we can see neither the end nor who the victor will be.’ Ultimately, he seemed to accept that capitalist development had triumphed. In a late interview he came close to embracing failure: ‘I am defeated, not a victor. The victories are never final. But we have lost – not a battle – but the war of the twentieth century.’

*

Despite its lasting fame, Workers and Capital has often been interpreted as belonging to a distinct, operaist phase of Tronti’s work. His early interest in working-class subjectivity and his optimism about the industrial militancy of the sixties are sometimes contrasted with his later emphasis on what he termed ‘the autonomy of the political’: the need to consolidate the struggles in the factories through the power of the state, passing laws defending the interests of workers against the imperatives of the market – instituting worker self-management, shortening the working day, raising wages. Yet as students of Tronti’s work such as Franco Milanesi and Gigi Roggero remind us, this overlooks the essential unity of his oeuvre. As Tronti himself would later insist, it was operaismo that ‘discovered the autonomy of the political’. Meanwhile, the political realism, even pessimism, made explicit toward the end of his career, was firmly rooted in his early writings. One member of Classe Operaia, Rita di Leo, recalled Tronti remarking to her in 1966 that ‘We are left to explain, you why capitalism keeps winning, and I why socialism still cannot make it.’ In a 2001 preface to Workers and Capital, he insisted that ‘in spite of everything, in spite of the transition through the culture of crisis, of European nihilism, of the artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century, there was still too much historicism, too much progressivism, too much faith in the final victory of good over evil’ in what he enigmatically called the domain of history.

Yet if his pessimism was latent from the outset, the utopian strain in Tronti’s thinking endured, even as he appeared to concede an utter defeat. Tronti postulated a ‘choice between history and politics: two legitimate horizons, but which each stand for a different class’. Capitalist history is nothing but the development of the global market; politics, on the other hand, is the attempt to arrest its course according to the needs and desires of the exploited. Tronti insisted that ‘politics stands against history’, and never stopped hoping for an organization that could subdue ‘the rhythm of the machine’. To stand with one’s back against the future, as Walter Benjamin had pictured it, facing what Tronti called the ‘body of history’ was for him ‘the soul of politics’. History has no soul, since souls – interior lives – belong to individuals, and in a world of dashed expectations and numbing alienation, our inner lives become political precisely because we are trapped in a history that promises no way out.

This anti-historicist line of thought had paved the way for Tronti’s studies of anthropology and theology beginning in the 1980s. His turn to theology may seem surprising given his rebuke of what he saw as the eschatological fantasies and millenarian expectations of the 1960s, though he was not alone among operaists in finding inspiration here. Negri lauded John Paul II and has often returned in his work to the Second Vatican Council and Francis of Assisi, while Sergio Bologna wrote a dissertation, recently reissued, on the antifascism of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a founder of the dissident Protestant movement Die Bekennende Kirche in 1930s Germany. In a discussion in 1980, Angelo Bolaffi noted that the weakness of the left consisted in the fact that it had produced a ‘theology of revolution’. To this Tronti responded without hesitation: ‘Precisely because there has been a failure of revolution in the West, revolution has become theology.’ For Tronti, theology was an attempt to rethink the possibility of politics in a period that offered no salvation, and to find meaning amid exploitation, suffering and the seemingly quixotic attempts to resist them.

Writing in Bailamme, a journal of spirituality and politics Tronti launched in 1987, he clarified the spirit of his anti-historicist politics by quoting the theologian Sergio Quinzio: ‘The meaning of this whole historical adventure is in its progress towards destruction so that the kingdom of God may be established’. This kingdom, which in the Gospel of Luke is said to be ‘within you’, was for Tronti a specific way to view and engage with the world. By this point, his perspective had also expanded beyond industrial capitalism to the longue durée of class oppression; he became increasingly interested in the category of the poor. Memory also became important for him: as a ‘weapon’, a means ‘to combat the present’, by linking us, not to history itself – the way things turned out – but to prior attempts to alter its course, inspiring us to change the present even if we cannot yet discern a better future.

Simone Weil once remarked that the Marxian notion that mass struggle was a ‘paradise-producing mechanism’ is ‘obviously childish’. In 2019 Tronti reflected that if the operaisti had initially been ‘outside and against’ the traditional workers’ movement, and then ‘inside and against it’, it was now time for a posture of ‘beyond and against’ – to transcend the conflicts between Western capitalism and Eastern socialism, something the PCI always refused to do. He wrote that ‘the working class was too much a product and part of industry, too much cause and negation of modernity, too much thesis and antithesis of a historical dialectic’ to resist capitalist development. The workers’ movement had never sought to alter ‘the type of productive activity’ that Tronti thought had rendered the socialism of the 20th century a terrible copy of capitalism. In an essay collected in Con la spalle al futuro (1992) he even suggested that ‘perhaps the working class couldn’t become a ruling class. And, consequently, perhaps the insurmountable limit of the experiment of socialism is not found in the backwardness of material conditions, in the isolation of the project, in the reality of war, internal and external, and much less in the iniquity or mediocrity of men’. The problem might be that it is impossible to rule over history.

Yet if, as Weil also suggested, ‘the idea of weakness as such can be a force’ – visible in the need of masses and minorities to struggle for their dignity – it might be possible to view victory and failure in a different way, one suggested by Tronti’s work taken as a whole. He was a speculative and in a sense even mystical thinker, who maintained that in a world where capitalism never seems to move beyond itself, an escape might nevertheless be found. The conflicts between ‘the body of history’ and ‘the soul of politics’ – over the meaning of our lives and the systems of production and reproduction that shape our existence – might not promise salvation. But they can, according to Tronti, produce a people who do not care for victory in this kingdom of history where only the rich and powerful count. The remnants of lost utopias can still confront the forces that reduce the end of productive activity to production itself. To embrace failure, then, is not to give up, but to reject the nihilistic idea that the good life is a victorious life, rather than one that begins to reshape our idea of happiness in the here and now.

Read on: Mario Tronti, ‘Our Operaismo’, NLR 73.

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Reviving Correismo?

Ecuador’s elections on 20 August produced some surprises even as they seemed to mark a return to a familiar pattern. After the shock of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio’s assassination on 9 August, a crowded field of contenders narrowed to produce a run-off between a Pink Tide restorationist and a scion of the Ecuadorean elite: on 15 October, Luisa González, the candidate of former president Rafael Correa’s Citizens’ Revolution Movement, will face off against the centre-right’s Daniel Noboa, a US-educated businessman and son of banana magnate and five-time failed presidential aspirant Alvaro Noboa. Yet hopes for an end to Ecuador’s political turbulence remain slim: the second round will yield only a brief presidency and a short-lived parliament, as the victors serve out the rest of President Guillermo Lasso’s original term before fresh votes are held in 2025.

August’s snap elections came two years ahead of schedule thanks to Lasso’s decision to dissolve congress in May. He narrowly survived a vote to remove him from office in June 2022, but starting in January 2023 faced mounting allegations of corruption – including reports tying members of his family to powerful Albanian mafia figures operating in Ecuador. In May, after the National Assembly began impeachment proceedings, he invoked the 2008 Constitution’s ‘muerte cruzada’ provisions – literally, ‘two-way death’ (though ‘mutually assured destruction’ might be a better translation). Article 130 allows either the executive or the legislature to remove the other from office, on condition that new elections be held for both branches. Designed to prevent deadlock, here it was deployed to save Lasso from being unceremoniously booted out of power.

The new election cycle also shifted attention away from Lasso’s record. As well as presiding over a continuing economic slump – Ecuador’s per capita GDP shrank by 5% from 2019 to 2022, the worst performance in South America – his mandate coincided with a surge of violence. From having one of the lowest homicide rates in Latin America in the mid-2010s, Ecuador now has the fourth highest, nestling between Colombia and Mexico. In 2022, the murder rate hit 26 per 100,000 – double the figure from the year before – and the 2023 figure is likely to be higher.

Nearly half of this year’s murders have occurred in the city of Guayaquil alone. The geography of the violence points to its source: as the country’s main port, Guayaquil is a highly strategic resource for organized crime. Ecuadorean narco groups, in coalition with Mexican drug cartels and Balkan mafia networks, have gained in wealth and power in recent years, their reach stretching from the country’s prisons to the heart of the political elite, if the investigation into Lasso’s family is anything to go by. Since 2021, Lasso has declared 10 separate security-related states of emergency in different parts of the country, but these have done nothing to stem the tide of killings. Alongside plummeting living standards, the violence has been one of the major factors driving a massive increase in out-migration: 1.4 million Ecuadoreans left the country in 2022, and another 800,000 have left so far this year.

Concerns about security were already high on the agenda before Villavicencio’s death catapulted them to international attention. He was not the first political figure to be targeted. Over 30 candidates and local politicians were attacked either side of local elections earlier this year; in February the mayor of Puerto López was murdered, and in July the mayor of Manta and a local assembly candidate in Esmeraldas province were both killed. But Villavicencio’s assassination was seemingly of another order – especially because it came so soon after the candidate had revealed he had been threatened by an imprisoned gang leader. Within hours of his death, the authorities arrested six Colombians allegedly working for Ecuadorean narcos, though Villavicencio’s family also hinted at state complicity in the crime.

A former union leader in the oil sector and later a journalist, Villavicencio became an anti-corruption campaigner in the 2010s and was a prominent opponent of the Correa government. Forced into hiding and then into exile, he returned after Lenín Moreno took office in 2017, and entered parliament in 2020. Besides assailing corruption, his 2023 campaign platform included anti-crime proposals such as building a new maximum security prison, militarizing Ecuador’s ports to strangle the drug trade, and creating an ‘anti-mafia unit’ that would draw on foreign support.

Villavicencio was not the only law-and-order candidate: there was also Jan Topic of the Social Christian Party, a former mercenary in the French Foreign Legion who has professed his admiration for the mano dura policies of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. González, by contrast, placed more emphasis on prevention in her programme, which otherwise offered faint echoes of the Correa government’s social agenda, promising increased spending on health and education and renegotiation of the country’s debts.

Come election day, the Citizens’ Revolution candidate performed in line with expectations, but few would have anticipated the rest of the results. On a high turnout of 81%, González’s 33% of the vote was just one percentage point more than the total secured in the first round in 2021 by her running mate Andrés Arauz. Like him, she also scored highest along the coast – winning 38% in Guayas province and hitting 50% in Manabí. Far less predictable was the identity of her closest rival. Daniel Noboa had been polling in the single digits in the run-up to the election, and was rarely mentioned as a possible contender, despite his august family name and self-presentation as a youthful technocrat. Yet he secured 24% of the vote overall, and came first in 6 of Ecuador’s 24 provinces.

To this unforeseen outcome we can add the scale of the votes that went to Villavicencio and Topic. Villavicencio’s name was still on the ballot on 20 August, and it seems likely that feelings of grief, outrage or sympathy added to his tally. Polling in fourth or fifth place in the weeks before his death, in the end he finished third with 17%. In 4 provinces he topped the list, and in 15 of them he pulled in between 20% and 30% of the vote. Topic, meanwhile, finished fourth with 15%, though he came third in half a dozen provinces.

Perhaps the most startling result, though, was Yaku Pérez’s disastrous showing. In 2021, he had run for the indigenous Pachakutik party and, channelling anti-correista sentiment and discontent with Ecuador’s extractive economic model, had scored 19% in the first round. Barely edged out by Lasso, his call for abstention in the second round, rather than support for Citizens’ Revolution candidate Arauz, had effectively paved Lasso’s path to power. This time, with Pachakutik divided and endorsing no candidate, Pérez got only 4% of the vote. The collapse in his support was all the more surprising given the success of two referendums challenging the extractive model. In one, the nation as a whole voted against further oil exploration in the Yasuní national park by 59% to 41%, while in the other, voters in Pichincha province agreed on measures to block mining in the Choco Andino forest by 68% to 32%. How far these verdicts actually shape policy remains to be seen, but they will be hard to ignore.

Under the muerte cruzada provisions, elections for the National Assembly were also held on 20 August, and here the voting produced a similar fragmentation. The Citizens’ Revolution Movement did better than its presidential candidate, scoring 39%, as did Villavicencio’s Construye (Construct), which scored 21%; but Noboa’s National Democratic Action did worse, with 15%, as did the Social Christian Party with 12%. The results mean that no party will have a clear majority in the chamber, and blocking minorities may come together more easily than a ruling coalition. Whoever wins the presidency in October will likely find the going hard.

Though the outcome of the run-off is hard to predict, Noboa arguably stands the better chance. With González securing 33% of the vote and Noboa 24%, just under half the electorate is effectively in play. Judging by the first-round results, it is unlikely to split evenly. Between them, Villavicencio and Topic – both law-and-order candidates of a supposedly post-ideological kind – pulled in more than 30% of the vote. Which way their supporters tilt in October seems likely to be decisive. On the face of it, both sets of voters would seem to have more in common with Noboa’s than González’s. Yet although Topic has already endorsed Noboa, it’s not obvious that Social Christian Party voters will follow suit: some may – as they have at times in the past – side with correismo. Still, the bond markets have already perked up at the prospect of a win for the ‘market-friendly’ candidate, which suggests which way the odds are stacked.

The main difficulty confronting González is that of extending her support base enough to build a majority. The similarity between her first-round score and Arauz’s 2021 result points to the solidity of the Citizens’ Revolution core vote, but at the same time defines its limits. Reaching beyond that will involve some skilful coalition-building and horse-trading. Meanwhile, hovering over those efforts will be the spectre of Correa himself: González has widely been seen as a proxy for the ex-president, currently in exile after being handed an eight-year prison term for corruption in 2020. Given the interim character of the government to be elected in October, a González victory would likely be a prelude to Correa’s return to the country, and to a potential presidential run of his own in 2025.

In more ways than one, then, the October run-off will be framed as a battle between correismo and anti-correismo. Here González faces a further obstacle. Ecuador’s August vote in many respects conforms to the region’s anti-incumbent pattern – Javier Milei’s candidacy in Argentina the most glaring example, Bernardo Arévalo’s win in Guatemala the most hopeful. Not only did Topic and Villavicencio perform well, but Noboa too has presented himself as offering ‘new ideas’. In this context, González’s pledge to bring back the better days of the Pink Tide may prove double-edged. And while her appeal rests on repeating Correa’s successes, both in Ecuador and in Latin America as a whole, the social and economic panorama is much bleaker than it was at the Pink Tide’s peak.

Read on: Tony Wood, ‘Retrocession in Ecuador’, NLR 129.

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Costly Propositions

On 20 July, Fitch Ratings, the credit scoring agency, downgraded its measure of Kenya’s ability to repay long-term foreign debts from ‘stable’ to ‘negative’. The Kenyan state has been on a borrowing spree in recent years, and some of those bills are coming due, including a $2 billion bond in 2024. Fitch noted that the government needed to widen its ‘narrow revenue base’ to meet its many costs, but that it faced ‘execution risks’ due to ‘social unrest’ – a reference to the protests that have gripped Kenya in recent months, brewing since March and reaching their height in mid-July.

Although the demonstrations have subsided, dissatisfaction remains rife, and the conditions that brought people to the streets persist: a cost of living crisis triggered by soaring food and fuel prices and exacerbated by new taxes. In contrast to Fitch’s view, for many Kenyans the government’s revenue base feels anything but narrow. During the decade-long rule of President Uhuru Kenyatta, taxes were raised and their remit expanded – a process that continued apace after last year’s election of Kenyatta’s deputy, William Ruto. Now, new legislation promises to increase taxes even further, including doubling levies on petrol. The IMF, eager to lend more to Kenya, is pushing this reform as a precondition, justified in the name of reducing carbon emissions. It is a costly proposition for millions, at a time when mandatory contributions to the National Health Insurance Fund and a tax on telecoms are also squeezing incomes. The situation on the ground is worse than the official narrative suggests because most Kenyans not only pay legal taxes but are also forced to make private payments to police and other state officials.

Meanwhile, everyday expenses and prices for basic goods spiral. Some blame the war in Ukraine; others point to Covid-19. The reality, though, is that life has been getting more expensive since well before 2020. In Nairobi, the supply of affordable, decent housing is paltry. Huge numbers of modern apartment buildings have sprouted across the landscape, but very few are accessible to the majority. People remember a two-kilo bag of maize flour, a staple food, costing perhaps KSh.80 ten years ago. Today it goes for KSh.250. Declining public schools mean even working-class parents feel they must pay for private education. Underinvestment in public health services has likewise pushed many Kenyans into for-profit medical care. A recent Oxfam study documented dozens of cases of private hospitals imprisoning patients until they agreed to pay up. More and more Kenyans are taking on debt to afford treatment.

If taxes are not actually funding decent schools, hospitals and other public services, what are they being used for? Much of the country’s tax revenue goes towards repaying the expensive dollar-denominated debts incurred by the previous government. Kenyatta’s administration spent the years 2013 to 2022 cycling through loans from private markets, Chinese creditors and the Bretton Woods institutions. Under his watch, public debt more than quadrupled. Ostensibly, the increased borrowing was used for infrastructure projects that would enable capitalist development: roads, railway, dams and so on. The government argued that improved transport and electrification would attract foreign investment, creating the reliable income sources that so many citizens lack. Tax hikes were the price of maintaining credibility in the eyes of lenders.

Whether the original expenditures were wise remains contested. When Kenyatta approached the World Bank to finance a new railway line to supplant the colonial one, for instance, he was turned away. The Bank deemed it likely to be a financial mistake – with high costs and little economic benefit. Kenyatta pushed ahead anyway, securing funding from China. Another recent infrastructure project is the elevated expressway that now runs through Nairobi, dwarfing the parliament buildings and enveloping one of the city’s few public parks in exhaust fumes. When we drove along it in July, the monstrosity was largely empty because the toll price is out of reach for most.

Much government spending over the past ten years has also disappeared amid a series of massive corruption scandals. Some of it simply cannot be accounted for. Kenyan analysts speak of ‘state capture’ to describe the thoroughgoing appropriation of public monies by self-interested officeholders. The former Auditor-General, Edward Ouko, claimed such appropriation is so commonplace that official budgets are prospectively inflated, with a shadow system of allocations directed not only to the corrupt and their clients but also to those who might try to bring them to account.

Debt-fuelled infrastructure binges are as old as the Kenyan state (the settler-colony was founded to pay the cost of the railway to Uganda). State contracts and tenders have long been dependable mechanisms for the privatization of public wealth. Recent instances have been more egregious, though, in part thanks to the proliferation of foreign financial sources. The latest scandals include dams financed by Italian money, railways by Chinese, and roads funded by the African Development Bank. Countless examples circulate through Kenya’s public sphere, known by shorthands – SGR, NYS, Afya House, Eurobond – each indicative of profligate spending and unaccountable elites.

In the past three years, the Kenya shilling has lost around a third of its value against the dollar, making all these unproductive foreign-denominated debts harder to repay. Creditors have thus far been assuaged by boosted domestic financing, but as the large payments come due, even that tap is insufficient. Structural adjustment, international market strictures and the imperative to earn foreign exchange make the choices stark. Instead of attempting to claw back ill-gotten wealth or renegotiate with international lenders, the government has thus far decided that making ordinary people bear the cost is the best path.

Public disquiet about inflation and tax hikes has been growing. Since March, the opposition faction of Kenya’s elite has tried to capitalize by orchestrating a series of protests (known in Swahili as maandamano), led by the veteran politician Raila Odinga, who blames Kenyans’ economic travails on President Ruto. Odinga was an important advocate of multiparty democracy during the repressive rule of Daniel arap Moi. He has contested several presidential elections without success (including a number clouded by credible allegations of misconduct), sometimes on a redistributive platform and carrying the banner of the marginalized. Despite this, he is very much of the Kenyan ruling class, with substantial business interests, intermittent government posts and his own share of questionable dealings. As a result, some critics accuse Odinga and his allies in the Azimio la Umoja Coalition of manipulating supporters in order to relitigate the 2022 election he narrowly lost to Ruto.

Earlier this summer, maandamano gained momentum. Azimio la Umoja politicians held a large rally in Nairobi on 7 July, a symbolic date associated with the nationwide protests in 1990 that eventually led to multiparty elections. As in 1990, police violence followed, presaging a more elaborate government effort to isolate Odinga and his message. On 10 July, he surprised everyone by sneaking into downtown Nairobi on a public bus, attracting crowds and sending the state into a panic. Two days later, the police attacked another planned opposition rally. More protests coalesced, both in neighbourhoods typically associated with Odinga’s supporters and in more unexpected places, including along the new Nairobi highway. Pollsters reported a steady uptick in popular discontent with the government and its handling of the economy.

While it was predominantly young, urban men who participated in the always-risky street protests, their networks of support and shared feeling reach much further across society, and the extent of the demonstrations surprised many. The events the week prior could not be reduced to the will of politicians – they were only harnessing public anger arising from the generalized pressure on working-class Kenyans. Did the protests augur more widespread unrest, even a popular insurrection? When Odinga called for three more days of maandamano the following week, the tension was palpable in Nairobi. At least one large international organization cancelled trips to Kenya in fright.

When the three protest days arrived, some observers thought them muted; others labelled them a failure. It would be more accurate to say they were suppressed. Caught off guard by the upheavals the week before, this time the state’s repressive apparatus was ready. Opposition politicians and their bodyguards were arrested. Military-grade weapons and vehicles were deployed to poor neighbourhoods, urban centres and other strategic locations. Demonstrators were met with tear gas and live fire, especially in Odinga’s stronghold, the western city of Kisumu. Dozens were killed. Some of this made it into the press, more circulated on social media, but much went unreported, known only through the sound of gunfire at night or worried texts from friends. For its part, the government has been unrepentant.

Why have the protests petered out? It is not only state violence and informational vacuums that stymie popular movements. The country’s history of ethnic competition has long been inflamed by an elite strategy of divide and rule, with politicians instrumentalizing identity politics to curtail class-based alliances. Although Kenyans from across the country are critical of government policy – inflation and taxation cut across ethno-linguistic divides – longstanding accusations that Odinga principally represents people from the Luo ethnic group make it easy for some to reduce maandamano to an old narrative of ‘us versus them’.

If the message resonated less loudly in some corners due to the ethnic identity of the messenger, its traction was also limited by the deep-seated capitalist ethos that courses through the country, making it hard to sustain a solidaristic politics. Ruto’s presidential campaign promised to favour ‘hustlers’, a term he cribbed from the country’s youth culture to invoke an everyman entrepreneurialism – the striving not only of the working poor but also better-off Kenyans who supplement their main income with a side gig or two. For some, this amounted to economic populism, perhaps even class politics; yet ‘hustling’ is about self-advancement and independence, not redistribution and solidarity: a hustler is self-made, demanding neither social welfare nor revolution. A broad-based opposition to elite predation – whatever its ethnicity – would need a vision beyond the hustle.

Perhaps an even more important factor in weakening the protest movement was the precarious position of so many Kenyan workers. Unlike a waged working class that can count on a monthly salary – however small – most Kenyans live day-to-day: selling goods, driving taxis, earning tips in service work. Attending a march means they cannot make money that day, and without meaningful savings, they risk going hungry. Widespread insecurity is what summoned the maandamano crowd, but at least in this case, poverty also demobilizes. Even the threat of large protests and a police crackdown deprives many people of their daily income, as shops pre-emptively close, cab drivers keep off the roads and parents have to stay home to look after children whose schools are closed. In such conditions, with livelihoods at stake, potential support can easily slide into resentment.

For both the opposition and the government, such public nervousness makes for a delicate dance. By August, Ruto’s government was making confused gestures on economic policy – temporarily resinstating fuel subsidies while still increasing taxes. The opposition coalition and the government are scheduled to enter talks superintended by Nigeria’s former president, Olesegun Obasanjo. But economic fundamentals are being sidelined – they are just one among several items on an agenda, which gives the impression Kenya’s woes can be solved through simple bureaucratic reorganization. The talks present at most a chance for elite reconciliation.

Meanwhile, working people continue to struggle with rising costs. The international credit agencies are right: the outlook is negative. Improving it will require more than another loan or a broader ‘revenue base’. Yet for Kenya’s streets to erupt in sustained revolt, there would have to be a real rupture between the people and the ruling class. That would require a collective movement that bypasses politicians and challenges the state – not merely its leadership.

Read on: Paul Nugent, ‘States and Social Contracts in Africa’, NLR 63.

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Loose End

The writer Victor Heringer (1988–2018) did not consider himself properly Brazilian. Spending formative years in Chile and Argentina – after which he had to relearn Portuguese – he once explained that any affection for his country sprang from a kind of ‘uncomfortable amazement’. His claim to be apátrida, stateless, reflected a fundamental repudiation of tribalisms and ideologies of all kinds. Today there can be no vanguards, no faiths, or as he proclaimed in Pessoa magazine: ‘Down with Progress! Long live Walter Benjamin!’ His true homeland was irony, something he half-joked was unknown to his compatriots. In a 2014 article – all his contributions to Pessoa are collected in Vida desinteressante (2021) – he defined this not as the pointed drawl that indicates the opposite of the ostensible utterance, but as Scott Fitzgerald defined intelligence, ‘the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function’. Its ruling instance was the compenetration of life and death: ‘Infinity is inscribed into our perishable flesh’.

Simultaneity is the theme of Misantropical, Heringer’s incantatory video made with the musician Dimitri BR for the 2012 São Paulo Biennale, and begets other reverberations in his video work, poetry, journalism and fiction, setting up frictions between melancholy and playfulness in inconsistent ways especially suited (he often said) to the restless attention-style of digital culture. Of course, the new and the old were for him entwined; he was at the same time updating his great hero Machado de Assis. And while he milked the irony of a Brazilian being the greatest ironist of all time, it’s surely because Machado, a mulatto as well as disabled and epileptic, was equally an outsider in his own culture. My failure to find anything online about how Heringer fits into the national literary scene could be simply because he doesn’t.

His debut novel, Gloria (2012), contrasted two phenomena, online life with its witty self-fakery and the growth of Pentecostalism, through two incurably depressed brothers; it was high on metafiction, using anachronistic language registers and pseudo-footnotes. The Love of Singular Men (2016), published this year in a remarkable translation by James Young, is more earnest, despite its slowly emerging snares, and therefore perhaps more daring. It is about first love and aloneness (‘singularity’). Partly set in the mid-seventies on the edge of Rio, in a poor district where the one big house belongs to the narrator Camilo’s family, it is dressed in his shifting subjectivity. We first meet him as a disabled, introverted thirteen-year-old with wildly dysfunctional parents who don’t allow him out except to school, on the day his father inexplicably brings home a ‘coffee-with-watered-down-milk colour’ boy named Cosme to live with them. Camilo instantly hates him, ‘who knows why. Hate has neither reason nor purpose.’

In a refreshingly anti-psychological novel, this is the condition of most emotions, offered as facts that observably succeed each other, typically in the form of physical sensation rather than as inner processes. Love is as arbitrary as hate: ‘After I walloped him with my staff, my hate no longer took Cosme’s name or shape. And so, with a single blow, I began to love him.’ Over the course of fragmentary encounters, love and lust become somehow requited. But what consciousness is remembering all this, yet never trying to make retrospective sense of it? Chapter five introduces a different time frame, that of fifty-something Camilo, still on crutches, in the present day. ‘After more than thirty years away, I came back to Queím. I want to die right where I was born. Everyone likes a little symmetry.’

A double narrative now unfolds. One, Camilo reliving his days as the overwhelmed naïf discovering the streets with Cosme, learning how to masturbate with the boys, the surprise first kiss, the terror of abandonment, Cosme’s homophobic murder. Two, Camilo today as the grumpy misanthrope, railing against the sameness of people or Rio’s cheap upgrades, lamenting the fading of memories that are nevertheless brutally vivid in the telling. Cosme’s death spelled the end of Camilo’s freedom as a teen. As a solitary adult, a period of dealing antiques provided some meagre human connection: ‘our bonds are cardboard boxes full of junk’.

When this sad man lures into his home an untethered boy rather like Cosme, the two strands begin to chime in unacknowledged, disturbing ways. Believing (on flimsy grounds) that Renato is Cosme’s killer’s grandson, yet developing a fondness for him, Camilo is batted between feelings that must be gleaned between the lines – quasi-affection, anger, arousal – given his petrification ever since the murder of his love. This pudeur is one of the most moving figurations of authorial compassion in the novel.

The narrator’s passivity demands active work from the reader. On top of the irregular alternation and overlap of the two timeframes, key information is not released chronologically. We know from the start that Cosme will be killed, steeping each moment of the pair’s two-week idyll in dread as we read. We learn much later of Camilo’s mother’s theory about Cosme’s origins, communicated in a posthumous letter. Cosme was possibly the child of a victim of his father under the dictatorship – suddenly revealed to his son as a torturer – but ‘I never tried to get to the bottom of it . . . It might have been an invention of her bitterness’. What if Renato’s identity is likewise an invention of Camilo’s bitterness? The hum of uncertainty and its implications are amplified by the novel’s literary and sonar patchwork: sharp sensual detail, foggy ambiguity, realism both social and magical, contradictory opinions, different orders of fantasy. The very concept of ‘first’ love is simultaneously upheld and subverted, as Camilo never loved a second time. The several pages dense with the names of real people’s first loves, which Heringer solicited from the internet, both embrace and exclude Camilo: ‘Like André loved Luca, like Tayana loved Nanda, I love my Cosme, my first and only.’

When it comes to fantasy, one scene stands out. The pair go to meet their usual gang of young toughs in the derelict slave house, and stage a kiss. The others freeze, while Camilo steels himself for extravagant violence; instead, a stylized brawl unfolds in slow motion and peters out. ‘Afterwards, for something to say, Knots commented that I was white and Cosme was brown, I was rich and he was poor . . . and then laughed . . . And that was that.’ Such easy acceptance of gayness from street kids in 1976 is surely wishful writing. It sends me to something that Heringer’s brother, in a recorded memorial, said about him: Victor often used the word ternura, tenderness; he did love the world, but really it was ‘more of an aspiration . . . He had an extraordinary capacity for both love and hate’.

In the slave house scene, then, love is wilfully made to prevail, as it also does – more pathetically – in the present, at the novel’s end. After a slapstick revenge fantasy, in which Camilo’s attempts to murder Renato are repeatedly thwarted by his disability, the tension lifts and the chapter numbers start going backwards. We move into the third person. Camilo has become a normal, fussy parent-figure to Renato; but he’s right back in the insecurity that tormented him with Cosme.

As if to adulterate a still too-pure form, various graphic elements appear. Here are Camilo’s childhood drawings, there, stills from a documentary Renato is watching, elsewhere the reproduction of a school attendance sheet. A kind of emoji, a circlet of commas, appears whenever the sun (which paleface Camilo hates) is mentioned, and is used to illustrate other violent evocations, such as scattered brains. The sign is complexly suggestive; the other visual extras – lacking, say, Sebald’s allusive distance in which meaning floats in the disjunction of text and image – provide little more than pleasing illustration. The book remains this side of putting language itself into question.

Was it all conscientiously planned? Heringer once said that he loved the serendipity of creation, like exploring a mountain and discovering new places to twist your ankle. His commitment to heterodoxy, singularity and incongruity made him an artist of the loose end. He killed himself aged twenty nine, when he was beginning to make his name. Perhaps the ‘who knows why’ that whispers through all his work applies also to this.

Read on: Roberto Schwarz, ‘Competing Readings’, NLR 48.

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Fossil Media

Few people outside France have heard of far-right billionaire Vincent Bolloré’s takeover of the Journal du Dimanche. Yet it marks an important moment in the country’s political trajectory. The JDD is a weekly newspaper, founded in 1948, which acts as a sort of unofficial governmental gazette. It is carefully read by most journalists, politicians and CEOs. Despite its modest circulation – 135,000 per week, compared to Le Monde’s 500,000 daily sales – it is often used by senior politicians to announce new legislation and set out their agendas. Its bland centre-right orientation means it can align itself with both the Republicans and the right of the Parti Socialiste. More recently it has been described as ‘Macron’s Pravda’, and online memes have mocked its tendency to feature glorifying portraits of different cabinet ministers on its front page each week.

Yet earlier this summer, Bolloré launched a coup against this bastion of establishment politics. Having spent years patiently building a majority stake in Lagardère, the media group that owns the JDD, he announced the appointment of a new chief editor: the notoriously reactionary journalist Geoffroy Lejeune. Lejeune had previously worked at the magazine Valeurs actuelles, where he was involved in countless controversies: publishing a fictional piece that depicted the black MP Danielle Obono as a slave being sold in Africa, as well as an antisemitic cover story that described George Soros as a ‘global financier plotting against France’. His new role was anathema to the JDD’s staff, who responded by launching indefinite strike action – preventing the newspaper from being published for several weeks.

For Bolloré, this was nothing new. He had previously bought the TV broadcasting group Canal Plus and replaced its executives with his hand-picked stooges, triggering a lengthy strike which ended with the departure of most journalists at I-Télé – France’s equivalent of CNN. He then set about recruiting a new team and remaking the channel as CNews, modelled loosely on Fox. The mogul also purchased Hachette, the largest European publishing company, whose subsidiaries play a major role in producing educational textbooks. Bolloré is now the twelfth wealthiest individual in France with a net worth of €11.1bn. In the early days of his career he was lauded for importing cutting-edge financial techniques to France from the US. He adapted a variant of the 1980s leveraged buyout procedure and rebranded it poulies bretonnes after his home region – an innovation that helped to earn him the nicknames Petit Prince du cash flow and Mozart de la finance in the French business press.

Yet Bolloré was not above more traditional methods of accumulation. In fact, he has most consistently operated in old, declining sectors. The ailing business he inherited from his father specialized in cigarette paper. After selling it, he began to focus on postcolonial assets, particularly the port infrastructures and plantations that comprise the shadowy world of Françafrique. He owns approximately 500,000 acres of plantations across various countries including Cameroon, Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire. Until recently, Bolloré Africa Logistics presided over port infrastructures in most West African countries from Senegal to Congo. Its owner also acquired fossil assets, including oil depots in France and Switzerland, building a carbon empire through numerous acquisitions. All the while, Bolloré has crafted a public profile that personifies French family capitalism. To celebrate the bicentenary of his company, he donned some old-style Brittany velvet clothing and posed in front of his village church with his sons, whom he told to start planning for the next two hundred years. His political interventions typically promote right-wing Catholicism, unapologetic patriarchy and social hierarchy.

Bolloré’s acquisition of the Journal du Dimanche sparked indignation, with 400 prominent journalists, actors, trade unionists and former ministers publishing an op-ed opposing Lejeune’s appointment. Others denounced it as a bid for ‘almightiness’ and a ‘crusade for the Christian West’. The left and centre-right were united in their concern that French public discourse would be poisoned by this far-right insurgency. Yet such responses often misunderstood the significance of Bolloré’s actions, describing them as merely an exercise in narcissism by a vain, ageing billionaire.

Unfortunately, Bolloré is much more than that. He represents a powerful segment of the French business community, at the intersection of fossil industries, privatized utilities and postcolonial assets. The paranoid rhetoric of his outlets – on topics like the grand remplacement, ‘green dictatorship’ or ‘wokeism’ – is not incidental. It is an integral part of this business model. Racial domination is essential to the Bolloré Group’s operations in Africa. The suppression of environmental movements facilitates its dealings in the French oil sector. And patriarchy is ingrained in a firm that has been passed down from male owner to male heir over six generations.

Nor is Bolloré an isolated case. Other billionaires have gone on similar buying sprees over the past few years. In 2018, the Czech tycoon Daniel Kretinsky, who amassed his wealth in coal mining and power plants, purchased Le Monde – adding it to his portfolio of media assets including Elle, Marianne and Franc-Tireur. He is now expected to acquire the second-largest French publishing group, Editis, from Bolloré. CMA-CGM, a French maritime transportation giant and major player in logistics on the African continent, has recently taken over the business newspaper La Tribune, and plans to launch a competitor to JDD in the coming months. (The company is also currently in the process of acquiring some of Bolloré’s business ventures.) It thus appears that, while French news corporations have been historically controlled by entrepreneurs in the luxury, defence and telecommunications sectors, they are now being bought by fossil capitalists and Françafrique investors.

What explains this shift? For one thing, these sectors have experienced tremendous growth in recent years. The fact that the public considers them somewhat passé has not made them any less lucrative. In 2022, CMA-CGM achieved the all-time record for the highest profits ever made by a French company, with €23bn. Kretinsky’s fossil investments are also thriving. Thanks to the energy crisis, the profits of his firm skyrocketed from €1.2bn to €3.8bn in 2020-22, while the Bolloré Group made a record €3.4bn during the same period. This leaves such companies with ample funds left over to spend on shaping the ideological landscape to reflect their interests.

Capitalists like Bolloré have compelling motives to engage in this struggle over public opinion. France’s ability to project power in Africa has been diminished by the recent spate of coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, threatening to undermine the very architecture of Françafrique. Macron’s African policy is also less interventionist than that of his predecessors – allowing friendly regimes to collapse while letting the French judiciary investigate corrupt business practices in former colonies. At the same time, France has nominally committed to the European Commission’s plan to ban most automotive combustion engines by 2035, reach net-zero targets and discourage investments in fossil energy. Given all this, Bolloré has reason to worry about who will defend his ports, plantations and oil deposits in the decades to come. He has wagered that it is better to get on the front foot than to leave his inheritors with stranded assets.

Macron’s response to the controversy at JDD has been muted. When the strike was announced, the government was careful not to criticize Bolloré. Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne described it a ‘delicate’ issue, stressing that the state ‘should not interfere in the management of the media’. It was only the Education Minister, Pap Ndiaye, who stuck his head above the parapet, saying that he was ‘worried’ about the takeover given that Bolloré had turned his other media ventures into mouthpieces for the ‘radical far right’. In response, Bolloré’s news networks went into attack mode, denouncing Ndiaye as an enemy of free speech. At the next governmental reshuffle, Macron sacked him from his post and reassigned him to an obscure position in Brussels.

After forty days of striking, the journalists finally gave up, with many of them leaving the newspaper. The following Sunday the next edition appeared, having been written and edited in secret by another team of journalists recruited from CNews, Minute and Valeurs actuelles. Remarkably, it included an interview with one of Macron’s ministers: Sabrina Agresti-Roubache, the Secretary of State for City Planning. She later claimed that her decision to speak to the newly radicalized JDD was motivated by her support for ‘Charlie Hebdo’ and ‘free speech’ – implying that it was necessary to take a stand against the striking journalists were supposedly impeding press freedom.

Macron’s tacit endorsement of Bolloré’s growing influence may not be as surprising as it seems. After all, billionaire-owned media played a significant role in both his election campaigns, and it has been a major asset amid the recent unrest over pension reforms and racist policing. Since losing his parliamentary majority in 2022, the President has adopted an approach of strategic ambiguity towards the far right, alternately condemning and embracing its ideas. Could there be some eventual détente between the hardliners at the JDD and the centrists in the Élysée Palace? Will one tendency hegemonize the other? It remains too early to tell. What’s clear is that, together, these forces are pushing French politics in an increasingly reactionary direction. It may prove difficult to reverse course.

Read on: Grey Anderson, ‘Grander Narratives’, NLR 142.

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A Message From the Emperor

Make strong old dreams lest this our world lose heart.

Ezra Pound, A lume spento (1908).

The Emperor, so a parable runs, has sent a message to you, the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun; the Emperor from his deathbed has sent a message to you alone. He has commanded the messenger to kneel down by the bed, and has whispered the message to him; so much store did he lay on it that he ordered the messenger to whisper it back into his ear again. Then by a nod of the head he has confirmed that it is right. Yes, before the assembled spectators of his death – all the obstructing walls have been broken down, and on the spacious and loftily mounting open staircases stand in a ring the great princes of the Empire – before all these he has delivered his message. The messenger immediately sets out on his journey; a powerful, an indefatigable man; now pushing with his right arm, now with his left, he cleaves a way for himself through the throng; if he encounters resistance he points to his breast, where the symbol of the sun glitters; the way is made easier for him than it would be for any other man. But the multitudes are so vast; their numbers have no end. If he could reach the open fields how fast he would fly, and soon doubtless you would hear the welcome hammering of his fist on your door. But instead how vainly does he wear out his strength; still he is only making his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; never will he get to the end of them; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; he must next fight his way down the stair; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; the courts would still have to be crossed; and after the courts the second outer palace; and once more the stairs and courts; and once more another palace; and so on for thousands of years; and if at last he should burst through the outermost gate – but never, never can that happen – the imperial capital would lie before him, the centre of the world, crammed to bursting with its own sediment. Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.

Franz Kafka, ‘An Imperial Message’ (1919).

1883: Marx dies, Kafka is born. A metaphor that describes, explains, hints at, in its own way comprehends, indirectly expresses the following fact: it is only with the weapon of political irony that these days one can combat the tragic seriousness of history. The messenger, with his message, has not left the imperial palace; he has set off, but is still entangled in the long sequence of rooms, in the arrangement of successive courtyards, in the infinite outer houses, the inner staircases and then the other palaces, crowded with things, events, masses, institutions, guards, crowds and brawls. An impenetrable tangle. A space-time in continuous flux and change. It is this we call, this that is, modern capitalism.

The messenger has not escaped the palace, but, as he passes by, has created a disturbance within. Parts of the message have, in the meantime, been received, inspiring fear in the princes and hope in the people. It is already something, an occurrence that’s far from insignificant. All this demonstrates that the messenger had to leave, that his message was necessary. He has not completed the mission. And yet the fact that he attempted it has provoked an awareness of how things really stand: one that will be passed down to those who follow. This event is irreversible: you might argue that it was mistaken, you might forget it ever happened, but neither attitude can be sustained for long. The message was not delivered, nonetheless the message was not lost. This is what we are here to say. And were that the only thing left for us to do, it would be enough simply to know, and make known, that we have lived well.

The first letter of John the Evangelist: he whom we heard, he whom we beheld, he whom we contemplated and whom our hands touched, here, we declare unto you. And these things speak we unto you, that our joy may be complete. The start of the first century and the start of the twentieth to some extent resemble one another. The fulgurant beginning, the messianic message, the eschatological perspective that ‘shows unto you that eternal life’; against which a hard, tragic reaction – war, crisis, slaughter – returns us to the hundred-year peace: an operation of restorative innovation (a new name for the conservative revolution).

What is the workers’ movement missing? There were Desert Fathers. They were not listened to. But this is not their task, to be listened to in their own time. No, it is rather the seed cast into the field of the future. But in order that the plant comes forth, grows, bears fruit, and that the fruit not be lost, something else is needed. What is the message missing? I know it’s scandalous to even think it: what is missing is the Church form. That, it must be said, was attempted but did not succeed. The Revolution requires the Institution: to last not decades but centuries. This is the Church. To be conserved in time, for those to come, the liberatory event, always a momentary act – the taking of the Winter Palace – must be given a form. The transmutation of force into form is politics that persists, and then – only then – does it become history, comprehensive, complete and undiminished. And it is necessary to know, woe betide those who do not know it, that history, before the institution that contains it, is a permixta of good and bad.

It was Agamben who thought to go back to the young Ratzinger, reader of the Liber regularum, a work of the fourth-century Donatist heretic Ticonius. Ratzinger lingers on the Liber’s second rule, De Domini corpore bipartitio, ‘on the twofold body of the Lord’. I find this doctrine of the corpus bipartitum interesting for thinking the political. The body of the Church, insofar as it is the body of the Lord, has two sides, a ‘left’ and a ‘right’, guilty and blessed. Its two faces are found in the Scriptures: fusca sum et decora, says the bride of the Song of Songs, ‘I am black and comely’. The bride of Christ, the Church, has within itself as much sin as grace. Agamben writes:

Ratzinger emphasies the difference between this thesis and Augustine’s, who nonetheless has clearly drawn inspiration from it for his idea of a Church permixta of good and evil. ‘[In Ticonius] there is not that clear antithesis of Jerusalem and Babylon, which is so characteristic of Augustine. Jerusalem is at the same time Babylon, it includes it in itself. Both constitute one sole city, which has a “right” and a “left” side. Tyconius did not develop, like Augustine, a doctrine of the two cities, but that of one city with two sides’.

No one should think of relating these two sides to the left and the right that we nowadays discuss in the bar or between which we decide at the ballot box. This is a very serious matter. If even unto the Last Judgement there is a Church of Christ and a Church of the Antichrist, let alone in history a State of the righteous and a State of the wicked, then the good and the bad must exist not just in the same body politic, but in the very body of the Political. As Hegel said before Marx, whosoever wants die Weltändern, to transform life, must first of all come to terms with that ineliminable and irresolvable mysterium iniquitatis of the human condition and, with peace in their heart, struggle without hope of a definitive revelatio at the end of days. Kafka:

Great, tall commander-in-chief, leader of multitudes, lead the despairing through the mountain passes no one else can find beneath the snow. And who is it that gives you your strength? He who gives you your clear vision.

March–April 1917: as Kafka sent the message, Lenin wrote the April Theses. February had brought the bourgeois democratic revolution. ‘Dual power’ was in effect: the Provisional Government, which had overthrown the Romanov dynasty, coexisted with the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, which harked back to the Petrograd Soviet of the 1905 revolution. Lenin had just completed and despatched from Dadaist Zurich his Letters from Afar. To Stockholm, then through Finland, in a sealed railway carriage, with the agreement of the German authorities – an ingenious tactical use of the enemy – he had arrived in Russia. At the Tauride Palace, where the Petrograd Soviet held their meetings, he speaks to a meeting of Social Democrats, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Independents. He reads them the April Theses:

The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution – which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie – to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants. […]

The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses. […]

Not a parliamentary republic – to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies would be a retrograde step – but a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country, from top to bottom.

Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy [for publication in Pravda Lenin notes ‘i.e., the standing army to be replaced by the arming of the whole people’].

The salaries of all officials, all of whom are elective and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker. […]

Confiscation of all landed estates.

Nationalisation of all lands in the country, the land to be disposed of by the local Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. The organisation of separate Soviets of Deputies of Poor Peasants. The setting up of a model farm on each of the large estates (ranging in size from 100 to 300 dessiatines, according to local and other conditions, and to the decisions of the local bodies) under the control of the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies and for the public account.

The immediate union of all banks in the country into a single national bank, and the institution of control over it by the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.

It is not our immediate task to ‘introduce’ socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies. […]

Our demand for a ‘commune state’ [note by Lenin: ‘i.e., a state of which the Paris Commune was the prototype’]. […]

Change of the Party’s name [note by Lenin: ‘Instead of “Social-Democracy”, whose official leaders throughout the world have betrayed socialism and deserted to the bourgeoisie (the “defencists” and the vacillating “Kautskyites”), we must call ourselves the Communist Party].

Here is the message: ‘The tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution’. And here is the messenger, who departs on his mission, with Marx’s whisper in his ears, repeated with exactitude. Carr retells the story of that meeting in which Lenin read the April Theses for the first time:

Bogdanov interrupted with cries of ‘Delirium, the delirium of a madman’; Goldenberg, another former Bolshevik, declared that ‘Lenin had proposed himself as candidate for a European throne vacant for 30 years, the throne of Bakunin’; and Steklov, the editor of Izvestiya and soon to join the Bolsheviks, added that Lenin’s speech consisted of ‘abstract constructions’ […]

Lenin’s speech was attacked from all sides, only Kollontai speaking in support of it; and he left the hall without exercising his right of reply. On the same evening he re-read the theses to a gathering of Bolshevik leaders, and once more found himself completely isolated.

Pravda published the theses on 7 April 1917, but the following day a statement by the leadership signed by Kamenev stressed that the theses constituted only ‘the personal opinion of Lenin’, and the same day the Petrograd party committee rejected them with 13 votes opposed, two in favour and one abstention.

These are the first signs of the difficulties that the political message will encounter in navigating the palaces of history. But this time – ‘November sixth is early, November eighth is too late’ – the message ultimately arrived at its destination. Miracles also exist in politics. And fortunately myth continues to transmit them. From that day, future humanity will conserve it in their memory. Therefore it’s possible! It is possible to reverse power, between the low and the high: those who are above, below; those who are below, above. Certainly, the messenger is ‘a vigorous, indefatigable man’, as Giulio Schiavoni puts it in his translation, ‘a robust, tireless man’ according to Rodolfo Paoli. ‘If he meets with resistance, he points to the symbol of the sun imprinted on his chest. He proceeds more quickly than anyone else’, we read in one version. And ‘if he is obstructed, he points to his chest on which is a symbol of the sun, and proceeds more easily than anyone else’, we read in the other.

Is that all? No, not for this alone was it a victory. For the bourgeoisie the revolution led to wars, those of Napoleon. For the proletariat war led to the revolution, that of Lenin. The dialectic of revolution and restoration functioned differently in the histories of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In the first, restoration came quickly, but the revolution won in the long run. The opposite occurred in the second: the revolution lasted, even if not sufficiently for its needs, but restoration was the definitive result; perhaps it could never have happened otherwise. So it was written.

‘The tasks of the proletariat in the present revolution’ was an eschatological message. It fits into the eternal history of salvation, sacred and not secular. It is the oppressed who rise up. Not homme, but humanité in revolt. With this message, and this messenger, it was translated into political action. For the first time. This is why its victory was irresistible.

If the message whispered in the ear does not find the messenger to bear it with power, making his way by force through the crowd, then it doesn’t arrive, doesn’t escape the tangle of palaces. The great, and for this reason tragic, event of the twentieth century, has taught us this. Instead, it is only the messenger who bears no message that arrives, because he is let through. We are being taught this lesson by the minor, comic event labelled the twenty-first century. Here, the prophecy has been fulfilled: the medium is the message. The messenger is the proclamation. Only nothing is allowed to come and go, democratically; never something. The catastrophe is that everything remains as it is. Nihilism amounts to everything being accepted as it is. Perhaps Russia was the only soil capable of welcoming that seed, the only space-time where the idea could have become history. Russian spirituality is what explains, deep down, that divine madness that was the proletarian October.

De Tocqueville caught some slight glimpse of the future. Communism in Russia and democracy in America are the two vast islands upon which the Modern, on its long journey, washed up. Provisionally, because other islands on other continents are still emerging. And today, one of these two great ships has arrived in port, while the other has foundered. Democracy has been realised and made a world of itself. Communism has been frustrated and turned itself into a dream. But the Russian revolutionary impetus and the practical American spirit remain two opposed choices in life, two alternative forms of existence. And I feel like saying something that is today scandalous: that freedom lies in the former, not the latter. I will add, repeating myself, a contentious assertion: naturally one can become free passing through many routes, but in the twentieth century I consider having been a communist the royal road. Speaking for myself, I know that I would never have the freedom that I feel, inside myself, without having passed through, in my thought and my life, the historic experience of communism.

Translated by Rees Nicolas.

This text originally appeared as ‘Un messaggio dell’imperatore’, in Dello Spirito Libero: Frammenti di vita e pensiero, Rome 2015.

Read on: Mario Tronti, ‘Our Operaismo’, NLR 73.

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Darning the Planet

How had no one thought of it before? As millions sweltered in record-breaking temperatures across America and Southern Europe, a solution was hiding in plain sight. Simple, effective, and right under our noses – yet it took the perspicacity of the President of the French Republic to spot it. During Paris fashion week, Macron’s Secretary of State for Ecology, Bérangère Couillard, announced a groundbreaking new measure: from next autumn, subsidies ranging from €6 to €25 will be available to any French citizen who has an item of clothing repaired. The climate crisis will be averted by a trip to the tailor or the cobbler. Thanks to the meticulous bureaucracy of the French state, we already have the fine print of this bonus réparation textile:

For a pair of shoes:

€8 for an insole

€7 for the heel

€8 for stitching or gluing

€18 for a complete resoling (€25 if the shoes are leather)

€10 to replace a zipper

For a garment:

€7 to mend a hole, tear or rip

€10 for a lining (€25 if it’s complex)

€8 for a zipper

€6 for a seam (€8 if it’s double)

It could be argued that before it starts encouraging consumers to be less wasteful, the French government ought to encourage the textile and footwear industries to curb their practice of planned obsolescence, by imposing warranties that would oblige them to repair defective items free of charge for several years, or requiring the use of more durable materials. Educating citizens about environmentally friendly practices is certainly no bad thing. But given that – as Mies van der Rohe once said – ‘God is in the details’, it is worth taking a moment to consider the sums involved. The total amount allocated for this revolutionary measure was €154 million. Assuming that this figure doesn’t include the cost of employing bureaucrats to assess requests, disburse subsidies and supervise the quality of the repairs, this means a handsome €2.26 has been allocated for each of France’s 68 million people. Even if one were to only consider the 29.9 million ménages composed of an average of 2.2 members, each household would receive a grand total of €5.13 per year. To put this in context, recall that the French state spent some €7 billion on its pointless colonial mission in Africa, Operation Barkhane, which ended in ignominy last year; roughly €100,000 euros per year for every solider dispatched to the Sahel.

These numbers say a lot about the extent of the French government’s environmental commitments, and, more broadly, about the gigantic practical joke being played by world leaders in their ‘declaration of war’ on global warming. It is not just Macron. Look at how the rulers of countries hit by the record-breaking July heatwave behaved: as if global warming was some future menace, to be mended with the odd €6 for a jacket here and there (or €10 if it’s lined).

We’re not dealing with denialists here: they are comparatively unthreatening, for their bad faith is transparent, and they grow more pathetic by the hour despite their corporate bankrolling. Far more dangerous are those like Macron – that is, the overwhelming majority of the world’s political class, irrespective of ideological orientation – who feign concern from their air-conditioned offices and private planes, and then do nothing. Worse than nothing, in fact: for they make the public believe that the problem can be solved with half-measures and palliatives, promoting market solutions for a problem created by the market itself.  

The world is currently suffocating beneath a deluge of plastic, yet the plastic industry, which may well have the most effective lobby on the planet, is glaringly absent from environmental debates. The oil industry on which it depends meanwhile has discovered an irrepressible passion for the environment, according to its advertising campaigns; the term ‘greenwashing’ is appropriate precisely because it recalls money laundering by criminal organizations. They also propose utterly improbable solutions. Think of the electric car delusion – in order to pollute less we apparently need to build an electrical grid spanning the entire globe, replace every single car in the world (trucks and vans included) and furnish them with batteries whose production is one of the most polluting processes known to man.

Scientists contribute to these absurdities. A recent report in Nature described attempts to introduce crystals into the ocean in order to increase its alkalinity: a quarter of carbon dioxide emissions end up in the ocean, which acidifies the water, making it potentially inhospitable to life. What this plan amounts to is throwing lime (or some equivalent) into the sea. The problem is that humanity produces 37 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year (in 1950 the figure was 6 billion). A quarter of this is over 9 billion tonnes, which could only be neutralized by a quantity of crystals of the same scale, which would presumably be dropped into the sea from the air. How much CO2 would be emitted by the production and global distribution of billions of tonnes of ocean antacid (without even discussing the immense pollution that this ‘solution’ would entail)?

Every year – as CO2 emissions and plastic production continue to climb – objectives that everyone knows to be unattainable are pompously announced. The 2015 Paris summit’s overarching goal was to hold ‘the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels’ and pursue efforts ‘to limit the temperature increase to 1.5° above pre-industrial levels’, requiring greenhouse gas emissions to ‘peak before 2025 at the latest and decline 43% by 2030’. Such communiqués resemble a letter to Father Christmas; childish wishes for gifts to fall from the sky, or down the chimney. Only here governments around the world are writing Christmas letters to themselves. The World Meteorological Organization announced in May that there is a 66% chance that the 1.5° temperature rise will be reached before 2027. Yet the same organization maintains that already in 2022, the planet was 1.15 ± 0. 13° warmer than the pre-industrial average, making the last 8 years the warmest on record; that between 2020 and 2021 the increase in the concentration of methane in the atmosphere was the highest since measurements have existed (methane is far more damaging than carbon dioxide to the greenhouse effect); that the rate of ocean level rises doubled between the decade 1993-2002 and 2013-2022; that ocean acidification is accelerating. And so on.

Yet the environmental crisis is treated as a future threat, notwithstanding the warnings emanating from outlets as close to polluting corporations as the Financial Times, which sternly informs its readers that we are dealing with ‘a present reality’. The planet is becoming unliveable already. As an acquaintance recently joked to me, ‘you can’t live locked in a refrigerator’; yet the fastest growing city in the US is Phoenix, where this summer the temperature exceeded 40° for more than a month, forcing people to rely constantly on air conditioning (which further accelerates global warming).

Inspired, perhaps, by Ionesco and Beckett, today’s world leaders have invented a politics of the absurd. To get a measure of the situation, one need only compare the attention, ideological mobilization and resources devoted to the war in Ukraine with those devoted to the environmental crisis. The difference being that while the war endangers the lives of 43.8 million people and directly impacts 9 million more who live in the disputed territories, the environmental crisis endangers the lives of billions of people, condemns billions more to poverty and starvation, and has already forced 30 million people a year to migrate, with some forecasts predicting 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050. Meanwhile, Russia and NATO spend hundreds of billions on arms, while the war drives up commodity prices and government deficits. If just a tenth of these sums were devoted to the environmental crisis, the effect would be revolutionary.

This gives us a clear sense of how high the environment ranks in our ruler’s priorities. From a certain perspective, the masters of the earth behave towards nature as the US has towards Russia: waging a war against it without outright declaration. They treat the planet like marauders who plunder cities, burning everything to the ground. Why such obstinacy on behalf of our ‘cognitive aristocracy’? Why do they have it in for our planet? It’s not like they can emulate the marauders who, after sacking one city, could move on to the next. As much as they tout their mythical space industry, they will not be able to emigrate to a new planet after rendering this one uninhabitable. Pure recklessness, perhaps? A complete immersion in the present that effaces any thought of tomorrow? Boundless selfishness? The syndrome of the scorpion, for whom the earth plays the part of the frog? Or is it simple cowardice, a lack of courage to face the problem?

Perhaps a clue was recently provided by the ineffable Macron himself, when he spoke of the violence that broke out in late June among French youth – overwhelmingly children of immigrants living in the banlieues – triggered by the killing of a young man by the police. The solution, according to Macron, was simple: ‘order, order, order’. ‘Authority must be restored’ because the violence ultimately depends on a ‘parental deficit’. ‘An overwhelming majority’ of the protestors, he explained ‘have a fragile family framework, either because they come from a single-parent family or their family is on child support benefits’. In short, it’s the fault of single mothers (implied to have loose morals), who have failed to instil the values of civil etiquette in their turbulent offspring. In other words, the youth of the banlieues are violent because they’re sons of… To think we hadn’t realised! Maybe the elites exercise such violence on the planet because, without ever admitting it, they too are sons of…

Read on: Adam Hanieh, ‘Petrochemical Empire’, NLR 130.

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Rule by Junta

It’s typical of the West that it manages to make other people’s problems its own. In the Sahel, it may have some excuse. This highly peripheral region, which, until about a decade ago, was a concern only for humanitarians and the lesser departments of aid organizations, has quickly become central to Western preoccupations. First it was migration, then terrorism, now Russia; indeed, all three together at this point. In 1999, after a coup in Niger, I remember receiving a letter from a German aid worker including a tiny newspaper clipping with a single paragraph devoted to what it called the ‘Coup in die Wüste’, or ‘coup in the desert’ (the distinction between the Sahel and Sahara failed to register back then). By contrast, the Niger coup of 26 July – the latest in a series of West African overthrows that began in Mali in August 2020, continued in Guinea in September 2021 and reached Burkina Faso twice in 2022 – has provoked a global media frenzy. This time, I had to decline countless media requests simply for lack of time and headspace after granting countless others.

The coup took place in a fraught international context and sparked fears that it might herald a ‘Khaki Winter’ – that is, a string of copycat takeovers – in a region which, historically, has experienced the most coups on the most coup-prone continent in the world. Yet, even leaving all that aside, Niger’s putsch has some particularly dramatic features. It explodes the country’s status as the Sahel’s ‘last man standing’, a model of stability and democracy in the imagination of Western diplomats; the coup leaders have acted more recklessly than in the three other countries; and they are now being confronted more aggressively by both the West and the regional groupings of states, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WEAMU).

Exactly how and why the coup began, it is too early to tell. Western observers were almost unanimously stunned by the news. Because it did not follow the pattern of Mali and Burkina Faso, where military takeovers came about in the wake of large anti-government protests, it looked to them like a bolt from the blue. But save for the fact that a coup is necessarily surprising, being the result of stealth action, this one failed to astonish the people of Niger. It follows at least two other coup attempts since 2021, one of which occurred just two days before President Mohammed Bazoum’s inauguration. If Nigeriens did not express their discontent in the same way as the Malians and Burkinabes, this did not mean they were any more satisfied with their government; they were simply less organized. A protest coalition called M62, founded in August 2022 and named after the sixty-two years of independence from France, attempted to mobilize their resentments, but it was foiled by the regime. This unfolded in a political context where civil society activism had become a spent force and the independence of the media was considerably diminished. Over the years, both protest movements and critical journalists have been brought to heel through the Nigerien state’s liberal use of bribery and threats, including fiscal auditing and other administrative chicanery.

The previous coup attempts were merely the tip of the iceberg. In February, a military officer close to President Bazoum told me that coup-plotting had become routine, even banal, in high military circles. He added that in meetings between the president and the military command, the generals and colonels were frosty and sulking, while Bazoum was at a loss as to how to break through to them. He had to resort to continuous monitoring and engage in a game of re-appointments and disguised removals in what proved, ultimately, a futile attempt to outpace potential coup-makers. Given the degree of state surveillance, however, a coup could succeed only if it were perpetrated by the security body most trusted by Bazoum: the Presidential Guard. This body had thwarted coups not only under Bazoum but also under his predecessor, Mahamadou Issoufou. Having served under both administrations, the Guard’s commander, General Abdourahamane Tchiani, enjoyed the firm confidence of Bazoum. In an interview the detained president managed to give to Jeune Afrique from his place of custody, he denied the rumour that he was about to discharge Tchiani.

The bone of contention between these branches of the state was security policy. Under Issoufou, Niger opposed the 2011 NATO intervention to dislodge Khadafi, predicting it would destroy Libya and set off a security and migration crisis in the region. But when the prophesy came true, Issoufou decided to seek the help of the West to contain the fallout. There was a rational reason for this. Freshly into power, Issoufou and Bazoum’s party, the PNDS (or Nigerien Party for Democracy and Socialism) had plans for large-scale social spending in health and education. It also intended to replenish the civil service, which had not recruited in years. To carry through this programme, security expenditure had to be minimized, which was achievable only if someone else helped to shoulder the costs.  

On a broader level, relations between the newly elected government and military were rotten from the outset. In July 2011, after just four months in power, Issoufou foiled a coup attempt. One of the alleged plotters, Lt. Ousmane Awal Hambaly – a member of the Presidential Guard – saw his case dismissed and was released in 2012, but was subsequently involved in yet another coup attempt in 2015. At his second trial, he claimed that he had been ‘baited’ by Tchiani, who convinced him to plan the coup along with other military officers. Tchiani had by this time acquired a reputation for cooking up coup plots that he would then defuse, in order to make himself indispensable to his presidential patrons. Whatever the truth of the matter, such coup attempts served to make Issoufou paranoid about the military. According to hard-to-verify anecdotes – the non-existence of investigative journalism means that Niger’s public opinion relies mostly on gossip and rumours – such paranoia got in the way of beefing up the army for the fight against the Jihadists.

The reign of the PNDS began with good intentions, but was soon beset by serious flaws that made a viable security policy more difficult to achieve down the line. Two, in particular, turned the public against the ruling party. The first was endemic corruption, which had given democracy a bad name in Niger, and which the PNDS had promised to root out. In 2011, the government created a toll-free number to denounce acts of corruption, as well as a permanent body to combat it, raising hopes of reform that were later dashed. The second flaw was the recasting of the political system. Throughout the 2000s, Nigerien politics operated on the basis of opposing coalition blocs that jockeyed for position and forced each party to compromise with one another. This created a political balance that gave hope to opposition forces and reduced the public’s fear of being excluded from political rent-seeking or participation. It was this balance that the PNDS set out to destroy, in a bid to consolidate its permanent hold on power. Opposition parties were fragmented (Nigeriens use the energetic French term concassage, as in the crushing of a hard material), then absorbed through the lavish disbursement of treasures: plum jobs, contracts, tolerance for embezzlement and other improprieties. PNDS-led governments made room for dozens of ministers – always more than forty – along with hundreds of advisers and ‘high representatives’. Parties that refused this form of ‘inclusion’ were persecuted, notably by the above–mentioned anti-corruption body (the toll-free number was discontinued early on). The one organization that resisted assimilation throughout the PNDS’s tenure was the Moden (Nigerien Democratic Movement), better known as Lumana, which had a stranglehold on the country’s western region, including the capital, Niamey. Its candidate, Hama Amadou, spent the 2016 presidential campaign in jail.

The dominance of the PNDS had deleterious consequences for Niger’s democracy. It depoliticized the public sphere, which thereby increased the politicization of other areas of national life, including the civil service, where promotion came to depend on allegiance to the party and its coalition, and the army. De facto single-party rule was established. The cost was the deep unpopularity of the regime, the weakening of democratic institutions and the law – which were forced to serve partisan goals – and a declining sense of national unity, as people in the west of the country, and more generally in the south, felt they were second-class citizens compared to those in the Tahoua region (fief of the PNDS) and the north. Trust in elections was eroded. If the system of political balance was corrupting, the de facto single-party system was no less so, as well as being oppressive and non-inclusive. Nigeriens called it ‘the Gouri System’, from the Hausa word for ‘wish’, taken from one of President Issoufou’s slogans.

Thus, by the end of the 2010s, Niger had two pressing problems: unrelenting Jihadist violence, and a diseased democracy unable to deliver true legitimacy to the elected. In this context, the presence of the West looked like an added problem. It was more limited than in Mali, where the French counterterrorism Barkhane force and the UN’s peacekeeping MINUSMA mission operated. Before falling out with Mali’s junta and moving the remnants of Barkhane to Niger in late 2022, the French were active mostly in the north of the country, where they protected uranium mining sites. For their part, the Americans have two bases for the surveillance of the vast wastes of the central Sahara, while European forces offered training and technical assistance. This foreign presence was seen as intrusive, and the PNDS could not sell it to the public because of its own divisive style of rule. In the era of compromise politics, it could have made its case to opposition parties and genuinely independent civil society groupings, and a trusted, independent press could have been engaged. The public could have been swayed through debate. But the PNDS presented any criticism as a threat issuing from a radicalized opposition (PNDS activists called their Lumana counterparts ‘the delinquents’), rather than a legitimate grievance. In any case, the government seemed able simply to ignore popular discontent, since their police forces could deal with it easily enough. The only place where it erupted was Niamey, a city divided half-and-half between locals and migrants which, unlike the capitals of Burkina Faso and Mali, Ouagadougou and Bamako, lacks a unified identity base.

More grievously, the PNDS lost its bet that the West would help eradicate the Jihadist presence. Had this bet been won, the party would be in power today. But not only did the West fail to help on that front; it became an obstacle to collective security once the putsches in Mali and Burkina Faso brought to power juntas that chose not to rely on it. Prior to these developments, the three countries, together with Chad and Mauritania, were building momentum for the G5 Sahel: a collective security apparatus that would encompass the whole Sahel. Junta-led Mali and Burkina Faso crashed out of it in 2022 and made clear they would not work with Niger on collective security matters as long as Niger partnered with the French. From then on, Niger faced a dilemma, especially since the elite in the Sahel, and in Francophone West Africa more broadly, traditionally tends to scapegoat the French for their own failures, relying on the familiar yet elusive concept of Françafrique. In addition, a more recent ideological brew that combines decolonial radicalism, fringe ideologies like Kemetism (a religious belief that Black Africa is heir to Pharaonic Egypt), and the prickly sovereigntism of the weak, has seeped into the public via social media networks, sometimes from sources in France’s Black community. A Russophilia that was peculiar to Mali, going back to the reign of independence leader Modibo Keita, also percolated in this mixture. And France’s own mistakes, which stemmed from its highly inegalitarian relations with its African partners, poured fuel on the fire.

The PNDS’s Niger saw no reason to break its agreements with the West. But the military, who were influenced by the same ideological messaging, thought collective security with Mali and Burkina Faso was more important than partnership with these foreign powers. That’s why they sulked in meetings with the government. Bazoum, it seems, tried listening to them. Early this year, his chief of defence, Salifou Mody, was sent to Bamako to negotiate collective security measures. It is possible that Bazoum heard he did more than that, since he removed him in April and gave him the embassy in the Emirates, a potential source of rich pickings. But this manoeuvre failed to save the incumbent. Brought to power by the coup as second in line, Mody is now busy building ties with Bamako and Ouagadougou, and the Niamey junta has ‘denounced’ the partnership with France.

In theory, the coup could fix Niger’s two main problems. It could ‘reboot’ its democracy, which had been frozen by the Gouri System, and it could lead to the development of a better security policy. If the PNDS’s trajectory is any indication, the two outcomes are related. But does the junta care about democracy? And what about the West and Nigeria, both of which responded harshly to the putsch, the first suspending all aid, the second threatening war?

The process of restarting democracy by coup is no extraordinary occurrence in Niger. In fact, it has happened three times in the past, in 1996 (arguably), 1999 and 2010. But now the domestic and international climate is different. Niamey’s putschists are inspired by the examples of Bamako and Ouagadougou, whose juntas have weathered sanctions and stood up to the ‘international community’ and ECOWAS, while barely committing to a return to democratic governance. As in these other countries, the Nigerien junta is currently enjoying the adulation of the public, glad to see the fall of the Gouri System. They may interpret this as a form of legitimization that exempts them from having to return to the democratic process. Meanwhile, the ideological climate pushing toward a rupture with France and the West will also help to set the stage for authoritarianism – even though the West could be criticised for turning a blind eye to the PNDS’s own authoritarian tendencies and abetting them by default. The events in Burkina Faso and Mali indicate that, after a year or so, genuine support for juntas dwindles to the committed ideologues and those who have staked their future on their regime. Others tend to accept them because the material changes to their lives are minimal. If there is still a dearth of political participation, there is also a traditional Sahelian acceptance that this is what military rule looks like. The result is a form of political regression – although democracy as practised under Mali’s Ibrahim Boubakar Keita or Niger’s Gouri System hardly amounted to progress either.  

In all three countries, then, democratic restoration can come only from outside pressure – that of ECOWAS in particular. But in Niger, this pressure got off to a bad start. Because Nigeria was caught off-guard by the putsch, exasperated by the feeling of one coup too many, and under a leader – Bola Tinubu – who is determined to give ECOWAS a truly Nigerian stamp (even though Nigerians know and understand very little about their French-speaking neighbours), its response was severe. It included threats of military intervention along with sanctions such as cutting Niger’s electricity supply, over 70% of which comes from Nigeria. The Niamey putschists, naïve not to expect this backlash, have responded with outrage –  recalling ambassadors, breaking off agreements and refusing to receive emissaries.

If the putschists manage to entrench their rule and maintain their intransigence, declining to reach any compromise with the Nigerians and Westerners, which would inevitably involve a break with the methods of the Malian and Burkinabe juntas, the likely outcome will be the withdrawal of European security and development aid (if not humanitarian funding) and the continuation of ECOWAS sanctions, which are likely to be more damaging for Niger than they were for Mali. The Nigerien population will suffer, but they will take it as one more calamity among many, especially given their proverbial fear of ‘the soldier’. There will then be two unknowns: the attitude of the Americans, who will want to hold on to their desert bases, and that of the Russians, should the junta decide to invite them to Niger in the form of Wagner. Which, given its recent rhetoric, is not impossible.

Read on: Rahmane Idrissa, ‘Mapping the Sahel’, NLR 132.

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Structures of Feeling

The front cover of Lucy R. Lippard’s I See/You Mean, republished in 2021 by New Documents after decades out of print, is a pale shade of violet. On its lower left side, a map of what appear to be sea currents, signalled by a series of arrows; its upper right side may depict land, with rivers marked as lines. The first edition, published by the feminist press Chrysalis in 1979, carried a version of this same design, but in a deep blue. How might we interpret the change? Towards the end of Lippard’s book, we read that blue ‘is complete calm, depth of feelings, the medium of empathy’, while violet might express ‘emotional insecurity’ or a desire for approval. An additional change has been made to the back cover, which now features a black and white photograph of the author. Looking down at something out of frame, Lippard could be standing at a desk or table, perhaps reading something or examining images, writing or annotating (the question of whether she was an ‘artist’ rather than a ‘writer’ was raised around the time of the book’s writing). Barely visible in the background are the ordered panes of a glass door, a hint of a structure that permeates I See/You Mean: the grid.

I See/You Mean is an entropic novel, one constantly on the verge of disintegrating into fragments. Lippard is principally known as an art critic and curator, and her book derives from the North American art world of the late 1960s, a period in which Lippard was working as a researcher for art books to support her writing career, was a mother to a young son, and participated in activist groups like Art Workers’ Coalition and Women Artists in Revolution. The writing of the novel coincided with some of her most renowned artistic projects, and their concerns are legible within it. One was Six Years (1973), whose lengthy subtitle gives an account of Lippard’s ambitions for the work:

Six Years: The dematerialisation of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones), edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard.

Another was a series of conceptual art exhibitions she organised between 1969 and 1974, often referred to as the ‘numbers’ shows because each was titled after the population of the city in which they were staged (the last of these, featuring only women artists, c. 7500, was held in Valencia, California). The third was the set of ‘feminist essays on women’s art’ collected in From the Center (1976). I See/You Mean, then, dates from a time when Lippard’s minimalist and conceptualist allegiances were being overwritten by feminism.

Lippard’s novel is on its surface an oblique portrait of New York’s avant-garde scene. One chapter, ‘Log V/Everybody’, for example, describes a party through a range of devices: unattributed snatches of speech, lists of conversation topics (‘Ad Reinhardt, money, day care, science fiction, Angela Davis’), movements (‘D to G to C and M and R’), data about guests (‘69 of the people at the party who live in New York City live below 14th Street; 18 live on the Upper East Side’) and their interactions (‘26% talked to people they had never met before; 17% of these because they felt physically attracted’). The quasi-systematic, quasi-rational cataloguing of information lies somewhere between Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist accounts of kinship systems and Dan Graham’s language piece March 31, 1966, with its list of measurements from the artist to the nearest subway station, to the paper in his typewriter, the ‘.00000098 miles’ between his cornea and retinal wall.

Most of I See/You Mean centres on four characters called A, B, D and E. Its most typical device is the description of imaginary photographs. Julia Bryan-Wilson has speculated that, used to writing about images as a critic, Lippard felt the need to invent some to hang her fiction on. Their effect is to conjure something of the solidity of the index, as well as distance. In photographs, unlike the movements of consciousness that have predominated in the modern novel, we see characters frozen and from outside. The additional representational form sets us at a remove from the characters, particularly as photographs are by their nature always in the past tense. The ekphrastic passages are interspersed with dated diary entries, lengthy quotations from other books, fragments of characters’ internal monologues, star sign information, I Ching readings (which might make us think of Lee Lozano’s 1969 I Ching Piece). Applied to the characters’ relationships, their jealousies, their pleasures, their arguments about feminism, writing and sex, these devices are ways of ‘managing experience’, to use Eve Meltzer’s phrase for the repressions and returns of affect in conceptual art.

I See/You Mean embodies a decentred, intimate positivism: the accumulation of documentation never amounts to a totality. If anything, it starts to break down. Diagrams such as the one carried on the book’s cover reduce their objects to a state of conceptual order, but in doing so reveal the way the objects they depict – the deep complexity of oceans, tides and shores for example – exceed their dimensions. The ocean is the book’s central metaphor for this dialectic between form and feeling. At one point, there is a description of a series of photographs demonstrating the effects of different wind-speeds on the sea surface; this is followed by a dated fragment saying ‘I need the sea to be the book’s armature; no – its medium’. Elsewhere, an account of sea currents might just as well denote the movements of emotion:

‘…there are deep flows, generally as slow drifts of immense masses of water, and these are of equal significance with the superficial currents in the whole system of mixing and interchanging of water masses … Ocean currents are caused by conditions existing in the water as well as by outside forces. Of the internal causes, most prominent are those due to differences in pressure; unequal pressure results when one part of the ocean is heated to a higher temperature than another … There may be internal waves at several different levels, and each series of waves may have some effect on those above and below’.

At another moment, two women discuss the orgasmic potential of the sea:

What turns you on?

Sexually?

Yes.

Well, if I think about the ocean – the idea or image of the ocean, something cool and clear and wet and all-enveloping. Sounds of waves breaking, the rhythms all the same but different, crossing each other, and endless. It rocks me out of my head and thoughts and inhibitions, I suppose.

I can see that. Oh yes. The sensual curve of a wave, like a body, the build-up. I’d never thought of it as directly erotic.

Anything moving or changing or heaving or curving. But slow.

The desire for the sea stems from the way it carries along, swallows up, obliterates the subject. The book begins and ends on the beach – the edge of the ocean, where human figures can still stand before being encompassed by its depths.

I See/You Mean’s dedication reads ‘For Susana, who always understands the sensuous grid’. In Rosalind Krauss’s account, the grid is the exemplary form in modernist art, symptomatic of visual art’s desire to emancipate itself from literature, narrative and discourse, and to declare its autonomy from nature, mimesis and the real world. What happens when the grid is brought back into literature – as in the book’s various devices of description, measurement and commentary – and applied to events and states of mind? In I See/You Mean, the absolutism of the grid is compromised. Its grids are all partial and incomplete – tentative frameworks drawn in coloured pencil, to test a logic of feeling. The novel is sensitive to the grid’s edges, the places where its claims to reason and totality are problematised. This is a social fact as much as a philosophical one. At the party, we are informed that the only two black people see each other across the room and ‘exchange ironic glances’. While the book’s initial grid of characters (two men, two women) might suggest a heterosexual logic, as it progresses A sleeps with B (a woman) and E (a man, who is gay), as well as D, her partner (and has an affair with Oliver, one of the two black guests at the party). To say the grid is sensuous, moreover, is not only to say that this abstract structure is brought into contact with bodies and all the psychological confusion they bring with them. It is to say – as Meltzer has – that grids are already sensuous. The clarity of grids is enticing. There is a beauty in their aesthetic. We can become deeply attached to them.

‘Feelings are facts’, says Yvonne Rainer. This is another statement of emotional positivism. Rainer’s films from the early 1970s share a great deal with I See/You Mean: the New York art scene, minimalism as it encounters the effects of the women’s movement, the cool presentation of emotionally charged material, taxonomic methods applied to the interpersonal. The final sequence of her Lives of Performers (1972) restages photographs from a book documenting G. W. Pabst’s film Pandora’s Box (1929): representations of representations of a representation. About three-quarters of the way through, ‘No Expectations’ by the Rolling Stones starts to play, catching the spectator off guard. Pop music’s contrasting quality of allowing the listener to access and feel their emotions renders the moment, for me at least, almost unbearably moving. (‘Moving’ is a key word in the Rainer dictionary: ‘No to moving and being moved’ is the most over-quoted phrase in her writing.) Yet Rainer lets the Rolling Stones do this work for her. Everything on screen remains carefully controlled. I See/You Mean concludes differently. The structuring devices appear less and less frequently, while the distanced account of the various characters yields to a focus on A, speaking in the first person. Her narration resembles Lippard’s own life (she is in Spain, finishing a book, alone with her young child). This is close to – maybe is – ‘autobiography’. It is tempting to think that one of the determinants of this difference is feminism, a label that Rainer was still wary of embracing at the time, unlike Lippard, who said that writing the book made her into a feminist.

I see – the visual; you mean – language, literature. (Spoken aloud, ‘see’ and ‘you’ sound like ‘C’ and ‘U’, more letters.) We could interpret the book’s title in light of the feminist theories of the gaze elaborated shortly after, which posit women as the screen onto which the fantasies and fears of the male looker are projected, subjecting women to their meanings. Optics is one type of grid; language is another. Still, ‘I’ and ‘You’ are ambiguous here – could ‘I’ be the writer of the book? To ‘mean’, also, is not only to have meaning for another, against one’s will; it can also be to intend, which implies agency. And meaning is not only the bloodless work of signification, but the carrying of resonance, emotional weight. Seeing and meaning may sometimes be opposed, but they can also be connected (‘I see what you mean’). If Lippard’s title remains enigmatic, this may be because it is happy to slide between the analytical clarity of the grid and the mess of experience that eludes its grasp.

Read on: Caitlín Doherty, ‘Between Ego and Libido: On the Work of Carolee Schneemann’ , NLR 138.