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At Cannes

For journalists, the process of accessing the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès de Cannes begins months before the first film. The application, designed to weed out all but the most persistent, requires the submission of an extensive dossier (which must include: the circulation – print and digital – and schedule of your publication; a tally of its various social media followings; a signed letter from your editor attesting to your employment and describing the nature of your commission; examples of your latest film criticism – three pieces minimum; a long form of personal details; scans of photographic ID and any professional passes you might hold, and a passport-style headshot). Accreditation acquired (after several weeks’ wait) and badge collected (following a lengthy early-morning queue that winds around the yacht bays of the vieux port), there is still the hurdle of security. A snaking line of white barriers is guarded by bronzed contractors dressed in the kind of smart, pinching uniform usually worn by air hostesses who will, at gated intervals, demand to scan your badge’s QR code, inspect the PDF of a film ticket, check your bag, marshal you through a full-body scanner, pat you down and finally, wave you inside the Riviera’s ziggurat temple of cinema.

From here, make your way to the fourth floor; to the single elevator (located between the Salon des Ambassadeurs and the Terrasse des Journalistes) that links the upper levels to the basement, its doors half obscured by a wilting palm. Descend to level -2, then follow a pathway outlined in chipped green paint, past the stock rooms in which thousands of rolls of toilet paper are being unloaded from large trolleys onto smaller ones, through the vending machine hall which seems to have no onward exit but, beyond the battered armchairs in its far right-hand corner, opens onto a U-bend corridor that spits you into a fluorescent dining room ranged with Formica tables and chairs and a wall-length buffet counter of hot plates and salads. The workers’ canteen is the quietest room for miles. On the final day of the festival as banners are cut from the balconies and white sheets are thrown across the conference tables, only the low thrum of fridges and the occasional chatter between colleagues break the silence. Everyone is exhausted, visibly far too tired to disturb with requests for comment; it is time, you realise – at four o’clock in the afternoon on the last Saturday in May – to go home.

***

The seventy-sixth iteration of the event known simply as ‘Cannes’ was a twenty-million-euro festival of retirement, the long-rumoured death of cinema pre-empted by a fortnight of curtain calls for the biggest stars and directors of the last half century. Will Scorsese actually, as he has intimated, cease production after his latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon? And Tarantino – a guest of honour this year – after his? At eighty-six, Ken Loach, most people agreed, has earned his pension. Unusually for the entertainment industry, at Cannes, which has long run on the fumes of cinematic heritage (the honorary president in 1939 was Louis Lumière), old age is something of an advantage. Crowds packed the Salle Buñuel to hear Jane Fonda, eighty-five, recount her memories of anti-Vietnam activism, the technical trials of shooting flight scenes in Barbarella, and details of co-starring with Robert Redford (‘not a kisser’) and Alain Delon (‘a kisser’). Her introduction to the final evening’s award ceremony was a brazen synopsis of the two major functions of the fortnight as a whole: insistence on the rude health of the seventh art as a major entertainment industry – ‘I’m sure that this festival has made you feel renewed hope for the future of cinema’ – and an opportunity nonpareil for the marketing of consumer brands – ‘I’m so proud of L’Oréal!’ Accepting the Palme d’Or for Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet ruffled feathers by ascribing a social purpose to filmmaking, while also indicating an ancillary function of the festival – as a demonstration of the singularity of French culture: ‘This year the country has experienced a historic contestation… and cinema is no exception. The marketisation of culture, defended by the neoliberal government, is destroying French cultural exceptionalism.’

Triet’s speech was a rare moment in which the reality of French social and political life threatened to puncture Cannes’ global bubble. The contestation Triet signalled? Ongoing protests against the retirement reforms forced into law by Macron and Borne earlier this spring and the brutal repression of protesters by the country’s police forces. On the central Sunday of the festival a crowd of around two hundred – mostly in their sixties – answered the call of the CGT to assemble beside a roundabout on the Boulevard Sadi Carnot to demand the repeal of the retirement reform, and to build enthusiasm for a national day of action on 6 June. Earlier in the week, the union had staged an illegal protest outside the Ritz Carlton highlighting the plummeting working conditions of the hotel staff. Three days later, CGT members cut the gas supply to the bustling restaurants along the seafront during the midday service, as part of an action whose aim was to target ‘symbols of capitalism’ such as ‘the hotels and restaurants of the Croisette’, ‘the Cannes police station’ and the ‘Palais des Festivals’.

Beyond the employment conditions in the service economy around the festival, did anything link Cannes to the demands of the demonstration, I asked a protester in her early sixties, a hospital worker three years retired, who wished to remain anonymous: ‘Down there,’ she pointed towards the Palais, ‘you see the power of the rich. They’re against the workers who demand good salaries, affordable food, the right to protest in the streets. The government does everything for the rich and nothing for the rest of us. We’re already cutting back on water, electricity, food – soon there’ll be nothing left to cut back on.’ Stéphane, a municipal worker in his late fifties, emphasised the role of the CGT in the creation of the festival. ‘There’s a rich history that links Cannes and the union’, he stressed. Animated by the desire to challenge the fascist film competition in Venice’s La Mostra, the efforts of CGT members were integral to the construction of the infrastructure in 1939 (the inaugural event was delayed to 1946 by the outbreak of war); the union remains part of the organising committee and runs its own parallel film screenings each year. Given the scale and force of the government’s reaction, what were the chances of success for the next wave of demonstrations, I asked a couple who were nearing retirement from the postal service: ‘I don’t think it will work, but we have to keep it up anyway. We want to try and show people elsewhere in the world that things don’t have to be like this.’

***

That Cannes has become a metonym for a bonanza of industry trading and red carpet photocalls only does so much to distract from the fact that it takes place in a city also called Cannes. This is a deeply strange place, devoid of the usual enjoyments associated with spending time in France – the restaurants are terrible and expensive, the beaches segmented into private strips, then paved over with temporary parquet bedimmed by canopies bearing the idents of food and drink companies: the Magnum Dipping Bar, the Campari Pier, the Nespresso Plage Californian Dream Pop-Up. Every night, these tents hold ‘parties’ that no one on the guestlist wants to attend (the dominant attitude among festival-goers is that there is always a better party than the one to which you’ve been invited, a sense that an imminent call or text will finally get you into the room that matters), while those without tickets stand outside peering past the bouncers at an empty strobe-lit dancefloor.

The coastline of Cannes is often compared to that of Southern California – an analogy no doubt prompted by the reference points of the Angeleno encampment that sets up for two weeks every May – but, demographically speaking, it is surely closer to Florida. On my first night, over dinner in a tourist-trap Italian restaurant with two critics, a raisin-faced Dutchman leaned over from his table to tell me he’d retired here after a career in ‘dance’ (later, a spot of light Googling revealed he had hosted a ballroom competition on Flemish TV before briefly taking over a three-star hotel on the edge of town – an acquisition his Wikipedia page described as ‘not without complications’). Keen to inform us that he had known Weinstein in his heyday, and once, at a festival soirée, seen Iman model entirely nude but for the ‘world’s largest diamond’, he was even keener to try and rent us his retirement yacht for next year – ‘why buy a house in Holland when you can have a boat on the Med?’ In the haunted atrium of the Gray D’Albion mall, a piece of prime real estate that links the beaches to the shopping hub of the rue d’Antibes, only a handful of businesses were occupied and open: a ‘luxury’ realtors whose windows were filled with English-language listings for bungalow villas in the adjoining commune of Mougins (in the interwar period a hub of poets and painters, now a sought-after third-age neighbourhood in the hills above Cannes); an interior design store selling fish mosaics and curlicued mirrors; and a weapon shop where a toy katana and a BB gun could be had for roughly the same price as a salade au chevre and half a dozen oysters at one of la Croisette’s extortionate seafront brasseries. All, in other words, that the adventurous but security-minded pensioner might need to set up and defend their last investment.

***

The purpose of Cannes – the festival – is not to watch films but to sell them. The organisation works on three levels: market, carpet and press. Arranged here in order of importance they also service one another’s needs: sales of films by agents to distributors are driven by the glamour of the associated premieres; the press, in the form of reviews, provides part of the marketing for the titles whose rights are mortgaged against anticipated ticket sales, while the chance to interview actors and directors – as well as to see advance screenings of the year’s upcoming titles – brings journalists to the Palais in person. The activities of the ‘marché’ dominate, the trade press covering breathlessly the price fetched by territory rights and distribution partnerships in their daily bulletins (large-print magazines with the glossed feel of travel brochures and for whose back pages underemployed critics moonlight). This year, an atmosphere of panic buying predominated, prompted by the Hollywood shutdown enforced by the Writers Guild of America strike and the threat of concurrent action over the summer by directors and other industry workers. ‘It’s not a question of money, since we don’t pay until the film delivers’, one distributor told the Hollywood Reporter, ‘but if everything shuts down, eventually we’re going to run out of movies.’

Common to virtually all cultural institutions, and no less true of Cannes, is the sentiment that it used to be better. Two peaks are evoked by seasoned regulars, one beyond most attendees’ memories – the 1960s, when it is said you could walk onto the beach and see Kirk Douglas braiding Brigitte Bardot’s hair – and the other squarely within it – the 1990s, when fortunes were made by film execs who flew in from LA, London and New York to cut deals and other substances. The long shadow of this latter decade still stretches over the industry side of the festival today. Cannes and the kind of cinema it typically represents – high-profile arthouse filmmaking by star directors with star actors vying for awards (though not as brazenly, most people seemed to believe, as in Venice) – have not recovered from the spectacular crash that ended the Weinstein era. If MeToo was once more in the spotlight thanks to the stunt selection of Maïwenn’s Jeanne du Barry as the festival’s opening film, it is rather the diminution of Miramax-style mega-company filmmaking that has most unsettled the business of cinema. Streaming service deals, not distribution sales, now account for the biggest payments of the fortnight – this year’s record was the purchase of North American rights to Todd Haynes’s May December by Netflix for $11 million. Killers of the Flower Moon offers an interesting example of the uneasy but occasionally reciprocal relation between the new titans of cinematic industry and the old distributor model: though it was made by and for AppleTV, by partnering with Paramount as a theatrical distributor, Apple gained access to Cannes as a marketing coup; in return, Cannes got the most famous director in the world premiering in the Salle Lumière. The streamers, it is clear, will inherit Le Palais – should they want it.

‘The film industry is not what it used to be’, Sam Brain, a freelance screenwriter and producer confirmed. ‘People don’t go to the cinema anymore, the cinema is really expensive – in part because people aren’t going – and so the glamour seems faded because the stakes aren’t as high. All the focus is on TV, because that’s where there’s more financial opportunity and creative space. The power in the industry is no longer in the international pre-sale market that Cannes functions to serve’. The amount of energy expended during the festival on denying and fighting this entropy is enormous and can even be detected in the form of the films themselves, as the critic Jonathan Romney, who has been attending since 1992, explained. ‘Cannes works under the assumption that everything is as it always has been: we must protect the sacred flame of cinema. The business rolls on, the stars turn up on the red carpet. But there’s a conservatism that’s emerged this year. Many of the films, even very good ones, in competition have been extremely classical. Kaurismäki for instance has made a wonderful film but it is the Kaurismäki film’. Such predictability, plausibly a sign of craft refinement among competition directors, can also be read as a further symptom of the festival’s endemic stagnation. ‘Cannes is like North Korea’, an editor and programmer for a section of this year’s festival told me over paper cups of wine at Le Petit Majestic, the bar descended on by critics after every evening’s final press screening. ‘Once hired, everyone stays in the same post for twenty years. They complain about it of course, but very quietly.’

What role, then, for the critic at this trade fair? For Yal Sadat, a writer at Cahiers du Cinéma, the end of cinema-going as a mass leisure activity, combined with the cultural shift to a preference for TikTok-length videos as entertainment, has produced a parallel death-spiral within film criticism. ‘The very idea of cinema has weakened, because of this economic problem caused by lack of desire for films, and for watching films in theatres. People are less interested in auteur cinema, and producers are no longer interested in criticism of their films.’ Numbers of tickets sold, scale of theatrical release, online views – these are what count now for producers, not critics’ reviews. At the same time, Sadat noted, there are still a few directors and producers for whom a good write-up in Cahiers is important. Even if the journal’s circulation is declining, its ‘seal of approval’ still counts. But auteur cinema, or an interest in cinema as an artform, is more and more a niche pursuit, the lifestyle choice of a select few, and further than ever from the cultural life of the many: ‘If cinema is dead, paradoxically, cinephilia is still alive and well.’

Viewing the films at Cannes, as a critic, is often surprisingly difficult. The ticketing system has its own hierarchy baked into it – a 7am online release slot is stratified by badge colour, with more tickets available to those at the top. The move to a booking website – as opposed to regular daily press shows for all competition films – is rumoured to have been triggered by a tantrum thrown by Sean Penn when (bad) reviews of one of his films were published after the afternoon press screening but before the glitzier evening slot. Critics were in two minds whether this year’s process was an improvement on the last, when the website would repeatedly fail but, if functional, tickets would at least be available to book. This year, waking up at 6:55am (CET) might only result in one ticket for four days’ hence – and rarely the one of your choice. If the marché du film is where the financial activity takes place, a smaller barter economy exists among the press, as those with higher-ranking badges trade tickets with the correspondents (yours truly) who lack film-world status.

And the movies themselves? Look beyond the death throes of criticism, the immiseration of industry workers, the jewel and ice cream experience pavilions that encircle the Palais, and it is still possible to spend days watching exceptional cinema at Cannes. Standouts of this year’s competition were Hung Tran Anh’s exquisite paean to gastronomic art and pleasure, The Pot-au-Feu, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s novelistic treatment of a school teacher’s midlife crisis, About Dry Grasses, while short films by Wang Bing and Pedro Costa played in a double bill before the lunch hour. (Stinkers included Loach’s trite post-Brexit parable, The Old Oak, Nani Moretti’s humourless self-tribute, A Brighter Tomorrow, Marco Bellochio’s hysterical melodrama, Rapito, and Karim Aïnouz’s embarrassing ‘lean-in’ treatment of the life of Catherine Parr, Firebrand.) An unexpected highlight, as part of this year’s superlative Quinzaine des Cinéastes programme, was the Georgian film Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, the second full-length feature by young director Elene Naveriani. It tells the story of Etero (Eka Chavleishvili), a single woman approaching menopause in a mountain village, stigmatised for her decision to live unmarried and alone. As other women boast of the feats of their children, a friend tries to warn Etero that the future of her shop is threatened by plans to construct a large shopping centre nearby. ‘Then I will retire’, she answers, a look of relief spreading across her face.

Read on: Julia Hertäg, ‘Germany’s Counter-Cinemas’, NLR 135.

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High-flown English

Even if he occasionally succumbed to the literary equivalent of quantitative easing – inflating his sentences with adjectives as if to ward off the collapse of the books that housed them – there’s no denying that Martin Amis was a master of English prose. The most tactile writer of his generation? Very possibly. He registered the feel of the post-1968 Anglosphere with relentless precision, fondling the rough surface of everything around him. Coins – specie – for instance. In Money, he could conjure ‘the time when cabbies’ change feels as hot as coins coughed from the bowels of fruit machines’, while in a late shot across the bow in the Times, he recalled the crowd in which Jeremy Corbyn moved in the 1970s: ‘Weedy, nervy and thrifty (you often saw a little folded purse full of humid coins), with an awkward squad look about them (as if nursing a well-informed grievance), the Corbyns were in fact honest and good-hearted.’ How that ‘humid’ clinches the scene! Amis’s early signature move was to revise his footwork mid-stride for maximal kick: ‘The hall smelled of cabbage – or, let’s be accurate, it smelled as if someone had eaten six bushels of asparagus washed them down with as many quarts of Guinness, and pissed over the walls, floor and ceiling.’ Pissing on the floor is nothing, in prose; even to piss on the walls can be pedestrian; Amis was the sort of writer with the hydraulic gifts to aim at the ceiling.

Toward the end, as James Wolcott noted, he was struggling to describe the coldness of cold (‘The winters were unsmilingly cold’, ‘The winters were medievally cold’, ‘the winter in between was petrifyingly cold’, etc.). In his cohort, Amis lagged in some quarters: he lacked the international dimension of Rushdie (his own core readership always hovered somewhere over the Atlantic, perhaps suffering the ‘small beer’ of coach class, as Richard Tull complained in The Information); he didn’t notably improve with age like Barnes (does anyone think The Pregnant Widow bettered the comedy of The Rachel Papers?); and his political feelers could not rival the antennae of pre-2001 Hitchens. But Amis had the widest range among his set: high journalism, reportage, novels, novellas, stories, memoirs, long-form criticism – only art-writing and poetry escaped him.

What was the style in service of? It was not in service of itself. He was not so much of a Flaubertian as that, with truth a mere byproduct of the mot juste. ‘Style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified’, he wrote in Experience. It’s an insight of considerable power. But Amis’s style unfurled a continuous comedy of morals ultimately founded on nothing more morally ambitious than his readers’ common-sense. As for his father before him, all deviations from some upper-class idyll of the mind – here irony would at last be enthroned as the universal sensibility – received acid scorn. For all his self-positioning as the surrogate son of Bellow and Nabokov, Martin Amis belonged, in this sense (and perhaps in the longer view of literary history), more in the line of satirists that stretches back to Fielding. The novels presented a vast pastiche of contemporary society with exaggerated characters whose wildly capacious voices dramatized the excesses of the age. But his anti-utopianism and arch-rationalism meant that their style never disclosed other worlds (as style sometimes does in the work by Ballard and Carter that appeared when he was starting out as a critic and novelist). Amis understood style not as a summons to new vision but as a conspiratorial wink of submission to contemporary conditions. In him, it became a form of eloquent complacency.

Amis was sly with language – and hilariously punctilious and proprietary about grammar and words and what he took to be literary crimes (Henry James’s vice of elegant variation a flagrant example). But he was not very sly about language. That high-flown English itself might have limitations never seems to have occurred to him. This came out in his antipathy for writers such as J.M. Coetzee, whom he derided for practising ‘vow-of-poverty prose’, but who made an art of using worn and etiolated language to escape what they took to be the seductions of English: the way it could pull away from both imagination and reality. ‘The tendency of English toward Chiaroscuro is notorious’, Coetzee wrote in 1973, going on to give the example of Conrad who, at the time that French writers were swerving toward analytical clarity and simplicity, observed that it was impossible to use a word like ‘oaken’ in its most basic sense, ‘for it brought with it a swarm of metaphorical contexts’.

Sixty years ago, in Harold Macmillan’s England, Perry Anderson made a case against Amis Senior, at that time considered a leading writer on the left (his abundant homophobia, xenophobia, disdain of modern jazz and ‘obsessive hatred of intelligence’ not-withstanding). After laying bare the misogynistic plot of Lucky Jim, Anderson zeroed in on Amis’s ‘quivering fear of the serious, with its attendant risks of failure’. The sins of the father were nearly reversed in the son. On the pursuit of sex, drink and coin, Amis could be pitch-perfect (though one puzzles over just what the narrator of The Rachel Papers means when he looks at himself sheathed in a condom: ‘Glancing downward, my rig, in its pink muff, looked unnatural, absurd, like an overdressed Scottie dog.’). But something – perhaps his rivalrous friendship with Hitchens – prompted him to war against his own frivolity, as well as his own courtship of literary celebrity. And so, starting in the 1990s, he began educating himself in public about history. A selection of 20th-century crimes were chosen, and Amis trudged into established hearts of darkness, writing books about Nazism (Time’s Arrow, The Zone of Interest), Stalinism (Koba the Dread, House of Meetings) and Islamism (The Second Plane), as if to prove his political mettle (the barbarism of colonialism and American wars, too far or perhaps too close to home, never aroused anything matchable in him). The trouble, as Benjamin Kunkel once observed, is that Amis’s ‘explanation of evil is … a counterpart to his style; he tends to ascribe it to envious inferiority’. The result is historical forces reduced to pub-chatter clichés, Stalin’s crimes deep down owed to his being a ‘low-brow’ and Lenin’s ‘underbred mascot’, while the attacks of 9/11 could have been avoided if only Mohamed Atta had gotten laid.

There’s a memorable scene in Experience during which Amis kicks Hitchens’s shins under the table to get him to stop grilling Saul and Janis Bellow about Israeli atrocities. Amis’s capacity for ancestor-worship was boundless: (at least) 8 articles on Bellow, 10 on Nabokov. But I wonder if he might have benefitted more from reading less of them. From Bellow he took the street-wise tough guys (already often unpersuasive in the original) and made them even more street-wise until many of them simply became vessels of Translatlantic Amis-speak, while from Nabokov Amis cribbed a kind of cliff-notes postmodernism, furnishing pointless doppelgängers for his plots, and making his narrators pick up a toilet brush and see a ‘moustachioed sceptre’ (a parody of Nabokov, even in the mouth of a character). With the exception of Inside Story, an unexpectedly moving coda to his career, the first half of his output outshines the second by some distance.

But time worships language and forgives everyone by whom it lives. I met Amis once, after arriving too early for a party at a bar in Manhattan. He was smaller than I expected, with a tall, handsome head. The voice was unmistakable: in his words, ‘one of those fashionable reedy voices, the ones with the habitual ironic twang’. He glanced at the Roth novel I had on me, When She Was Good. ‘He stumbled there’, he said. And then he proceeded to do what’s not really done anymore at literary parties, if it ever was, and intoned verbatim:

She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise. As soon as the last bell had sounded, I would rush off for home, wondering as I ran if I could possibly make it to our apartment before she had succeeded in transforming herself. Invariably she was already in the kitchen by the time I arrived, and setting out my milk and cookies. Instead of causing me to give up my delusions, however, the feat merely intensified my respect for her powers. And then it was always a relief not to have caught her between incarnations anyway – even if I never stopped trying; I knew that my father and sister were innocent of my mother’s real nature, and the burden of betrayal that I imagined would fall to me if I ever came upon her unawares was more than I wanted to bear at the age of five. I think I even feared that I might have to be done away with were I to catch sight of her flying in from school through the bedroom window, or making herself emerge, limb by limb, out of an invisible state and into her apron.

And it went on. He had the first few pages of Portnoy’s Complaint to hand like a hip flask.

Read on: Francis Mulhern, ‘A Tory Tribune?’, NLR 105.

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Hidden Dogmatism

Why is history necessary? In what sense is history constitutive of humanness? In one way, the answer to such questions is straightforward. Human beings are teleological animals. Under a determinate set of relations and conditions they formulate ends that they seek to achieve. But in what relation do these ‘micro-histories’ stand to the self-understanding of the human species at a broader level? The best way to approach this problem is to ask what micro-histories imply; that is to say, to identify the conditions of possibility for acting in a micro-historical way. Is it possible for any teleological orientation to do without ‘History’ in the broader sense? Or, to pose the question slightly differently: don’t ‘little stories’ already imply or refer to a ‘grand story’? Can they ever do without one?

To achieve clarity on these issues one must distinguish between the perspective of the actor in the micro-history and that of the observer. For the actor, meaning is fully exhausted in the particular action she undertakes. Consider, for example, the decision to take a job. Imagine the actor decides to work as an Uber driver because the hours are flexible and the money allows her to keep a roof over her head. From her perspective, the meaning of the sequence of actions leading to her employment is exhausted in her desire to pay the rent and maintain some autonomy. But the observer will interpret the sequence quite differently. From their point of view, the very possibility of employment as an Uber driver would be connected to the casualization of taxi work, the technology of the smart phone, the widespread use of digital payment systems, together with a wide array of other historical conditions. One might also connect the actor’s desire for a certain type of autonomy and flexibility with the rise of the neoliberal self and associated ethos of personal entrepreneurship. The point is that from the perspective of the observer, the meaning of the action depends on its relationship to a specific phase of historical development. (Before proceeding further, it should be emphasized that the distinction between ‘actor’ and ‘observer’ is a purely analytic one. The potential for these perspectives to overlap, for the actor to be self-conscious – where the actor herself becomes an observer, constructing herself as an object of consciousness, becoming a third party to her own actions – is itself highly variable, historically and socially.)

To historicize an action, however, is inevitably to face the question: as part of what wider shape of historical development, and what phase within it? But what if one regards history as having no shape? What if one holds to the view that history, in the larger sense, is a piling up of accidents, just ‘one damn thing after another’? The paradox of not having a theory of history is that this is itself a theory of historical development, a theory that says history does not develop or that if it does, the shape of its development is inscrutable. History, from that point of view, would be like Kant’s thing in itself, the paradoxes and contradictions of which have been well explained many times. All these critiques of Kant boil down to a fundamental question: how can one say something is inaccessible to human consciousness, that it cannot be known, when to say something is unknowable or ineffable is to say something about it? (It turns out it’s rather difficult not to talk about things in themselves and be drawn into all sorts of dogmatisms.)

Perhaps a different version of this sceptical position is possible. It would hold that one might have partial theories of development, but no ‘grand narrative’, no ‘big story’. This position – common to the Weberian tradition in sociology – seems attractive and reasonable. And yet it too suffers from paradox. In the first place, why are the Weberians so sure that partial theories of history are possible? What makes them confident that history is not total, or at least totalizing? Isn’t their scepticism just a hidden dogmatism? Then there is the second, more practical problem. If history is explicable ‘partially’, into what ‘parts’ should it be divided? Are, for example, ‘ideas’ to be treated as one causal sequence and ‘production’ as another, parallel one? Even if such a treatment were correct for a given period, would it not be dogmatic to assert that such autonomy always exists? Can it really be the case that the same conceptual framework applies across all historical epochs, or should concepts be tailored to the eras they seek to describe? It turns out that theories of history are, like many other seemingly overambitious ideas, completely unavoidable.

Read on: Dylan Riley, ‘Politics as Theatre?’, NLR 101.

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Grey Eminence

Ranajit Guha, who died recently in the suburbs of Vienna where he spent the last decades of his life, was undoubtedly one of the most influential intellectuals on the Indian left in the twentieth century, whose shadow fell well beyond the confines of the subcontinent. As the founder and guru (or ‘pope’, as some facetiously called him) of the historiographical movement known as Subaltern Studies, his relatively modest body of written work was read and misread in many parts of the world, eventually becoming a part of the canon of postcolonial studies. Guha relished the cut and thrust of intellectual confrontations for much of his academic career, though he became somewhat quietist in the last quarter of his life, when he took a surprising metaphysical turn that attempted to combine his readings of Martin Heidegger and classical Indian philosophy. This confrontational style brought him both fiercely loyal followers and virulent detractors, the latter including many among the mainstream left in India and abroad.

Guha was never one to tread the beaten path, despite the circumstances of relative social privilege into which he was born. His family was one of rentiers in the eastern part of riverine Bengal (today’s Bangladesh), beneficiaries of the Permanent Settlement instituted by Lord Cornwallis in 1793. The area of Bakarganj (or Barisal) from which he hailed was also the birthplace of another Bengali historian, Tapan Raychaudhuri (1926-2014) from a similar zamindar background. Raychaudhuri was himself a complex figure, a raconteur and bon viveur with a melancholy streak, who was destined to play Porthos to Guha’s Aramis. Guha was sent to Kolkata (Calcutta) for his schooling in the 1930s, where he attended the prestigious Presidency College in that city, and soon became active as a Communist. It would have been in these years that he acquired his violent aversion to the ‘comprador’ Gandhi and his version of nationalist politics, which accompanied him for much of his life. He also came under the influence of an important Marxist historian of the time, Sushobhan Sarkar, while at the same time developing a stormy relationship with another leading figure, Narendra Krishna Sinha (not at all a Marxist), under whose supervision he was meant to work on a thesis concerning colonial economic history in Bengal, which was never completed. Around the time of Indian independence, Guha left Kolkata briefly for Mumbai, and in December 1947 travelled to Paris as a representative to the World Federation of Democratic Youth, led for a time by the controversial Aleksandr Shelepin.

Over the next few years, until his return to Kolkata in 1953, Guha travelled widely in Eastern Europe, the western Islamic world, and even China; this included a two-year sojourn in Poland, where he met and married his first wife. On his return to India, he was already accompanied by ‘an aura of heroism’ (as one of his friends wrote) and exercised a degree of charisma and mystique over younger colleagues that would serve him well later. After a brief stint as a union organizer in Kolkata, he embarked on a peripatetic career in undergraduate teaching and began publishing his first essays on the origins of the Permanent Settlement in the mid-1950s. But these years also saw Guha’s estrangement from the Communist establishment, since – as for many of his generation – the Hungarian crisis of 1956 proved a turning point. Though his plans to defend a doctoral thesis never came to fruition, he was eventually able to find a position in 1958 at the newly founded Jadavpur University, under the wing of his former teacher Sarkar. But he quickly abandoned this post to move first to Manchester and then to Sussex University, where he then spent nearly two decades. There is much about this phase of his career around 1960 that remains obscure, including how a barely published historian managed to obtain these positions in the United Kingdom, where few other Indian historians had penetrated. Oral tradition has it that he was also proposed for a position in Paris, at the VIe Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, apparently at the initiative of the American economic historian Daniel Thorner (himself a refugee in Paris from McCarthyite persecution). It was also Thorner who helped arrange the publication through Mouton & Co of Guha’s first book, A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963).

This work remains something of a puzzle six decades after its first publication. Though begun as a work of economic history, it eventually became what is quite clearly an exercise in the history of ideas. Driving it at a basic level was Guha’s own childhood experience in a rural context where the Cornwallis Permanent Settlement had set the rules of the game, eventually leading (in some views) to the progressive agrarian decline of Bengal over a century and a half. But rather than analyzing class relations or related questions, Guha instead turned to debates among East India Company administrators in Bengal in the 1770s and 1780s over how the agrarian resources of the province were to be managed. This was presented as a complex struggle between different tendencies in political economy, influenced on the one hand by the Physiocrats in all their variety and splendour, and on the other by adherents of the Scottish Enlightenment (to which Governor-General Warren Hastings was attached). Demonstrating an impressive talent for close reading, Guha took apart the minutes, proposals and counterproposals that were presented and debated in the administrative councils of the time. A central figure who emerged in all this was the Dublin-born Philip Francis. While the opposition between Francis and Hastings had usually been read simply through the prism of factional politics, Guha was able to elevate the differences to a genuine intellectual debate, with lasting consequences for Bengal.

At the same time, it may be said that the work showed little or no concern with the ‘ground realities’ of eighteenth-century Bengal, and even less with the complex property regimes that had been in place before Company rule. This would have required Guha to engage with Mughal history and issues of Hanafite Muslim law, which were rather distant from his inclinations. Furthermore, there is little in A Rule of Property to suggest that it is a Marxist history, however broadly one wishes to interpret this term. Reviewers at the time often compared it with another work that had appeared a few years earlier, Eric Stokes’s The English Utilitarians and India (1959), probably to Guha’s chagrin. Stokes painted with a broader brush and embraced a larger chronology, but also showed less talent for the close reading of texts. But there is probably more that unites these books than separates them. While Stokes’s work was quite widely acclaimed, Guha’s somewhat unfairly languished for a time in obscurity. It is noticeable that for the remainder of the 1960s, Guha more or less ceased to publish, and when he did so in 1969 (in the form of a review of a long-forgotten edited volume on Indian nationalism) it was a bitter attack on the Indian history practiced in England, including Sussex University, ‘where the students are inducted into the rationale of […] thinly disguised imperialist procedure’. It was around this time that Guha decided to spend a sabbatical year in India, based at the Delhi School of Economics through the mediation of his friend Raychaudhuri who was teaching there.

The communist movement in India to which Guha had been attached in the 1940s and early 1950s had by now undergone considerable changes. The pro-Soviet Communist Party of India (CPI) had in 1964 split to produce the CPI(M), which was initially more oriented to Chinese communism and far more hostile to the ruling Indian Congress party. However, in 1967, a further splintering occurred in the context of a rural uprising in north Bengal, to produce the CPI(ML), which eschewed parliamentary politics in favour of a strategy of armed peasant and student mobilization. Radical student groups in cities such as Kolkata and Delhi formed in support of the tendency, generally known in Indian parlance as ‘Naxalites’. Guha, a visitor to Delhi in 1970-71, found this new movement attractive given his own pro-Maoist thinking and began to frequent these student groups. A handful of memoirs have gone over this ground, including a recent one by the development economist Pranab Bardhan. Owing to his fieldwork, Bardhan had a good grasp of Indian rural problems and was less than impressed with what he saw at a rather cloak-and-dagger meeting orchestrated by Guha, describing it in Charaiveti (2021-22) as a ‘collection of clichés’, with speakers ‘regurgitating rhetoric … learned from some cheap pamphlet’. Nevertheless, some of these students not only became activists but also historians, drawing directly on Guha’s formulations for inspiration.

The first of Guha’s renewed historical interventions was an essay, first published in 1972 but with subsequent incarnations, on the Indigo rebellion of 1860 in Bengal. This was accompanied in the following years by several texts of political commentary concerning the Congress and its political profile as well as state repression and democracy in India. Amid the political turbulence of the decade (symbolized by the infamous period of Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi), Guha’s intellectual influence began to spread. In part, this was aided by the move of Raychaudhuri to a position in Oxford; several of Raychaudhuri’s doctoral students came to be advised in reality by Guha, acting as a sort of éminence grise based in Brighton. This eventually led to a series of informal meetings in the UK in 1979-80, where a collective decision was made to launch the movement called ‘Subaltern Studies’, using a term drawn from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. The first volume with this title appeared to considerable fanfare in 1982 and was followed a year later by Guha’s second book, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India.

This, after roughly two decades of relative occlusion, was the moment of Guha’s second coming. In an opening salvo in the first volume of Subaltern Studies, Guha railed against the ‘long-standing tradition of elitism in South Asian studies’, and after listing various elements which composed the foreign and indigenous elites, summarily declared that the ‘subalterns’ were the ‘demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those we have described as the “elite”’. He further argued that the ‘subalterns’ or ‘people’ had their own ‘autonomous domain’ of political action, and that an elitist view of Indian nationalism had led to a consensual narrative which laid aside ‘the contribution made by the people on their own, that is, independently of the elite to the making and development of this nationalism’. This open attack on not only British historians but Indian ones was the occasion for a set of violent exchanges, particularly with historians attached to the CPI(M), as well as more conventional nationalists. These debates occupied much of the 1980s, by which time Guha had moved to his last academic position at the Australian National University. By the end of the decade, and the publication of six volumes under Guha’s stewardship, Subaltern Studies had established itself as the dominant force in the study of modern Indian history.

This was despite the doubt cast on the originality of the project itself, given earlier forms of history-from-below, as well as issues related to the highly uneven contents of the six volumes. Intellectual fatigue with the standard left-nationalist historiography may explain some of this triumph, but the novel jargon of the new school also played a part. During the 1990s, the main thrust of the project as a contribution to radical social history became progressively diluted, and the group itself began to fragment and disperse, with some bitter recriminations from erstwhile participants. By the time of the twelfth volume, published in 2005, the project had largely lost shape and become mired in a fruitless engagement with deconstructionism on the one hand, and cultural essentialism on the other.

Returning to the original moment of 1982-83, however, several peculiar features of Guha’s stance are worth mentioning. One was his insistent adherence to a particular reading of the structuralism that had been popular in the 1960s, not so much the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss as the reinterpretation of Saussurian linguistics by figures like Roland Barthes. As we know, Barthes’s own position shifted considerably in the years after his ‘Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits’ (1966), but Guha did not follow him in this trajectory. Instead, he stuck to certain strikingly simple ideas based on a binary division between elites and subalterns. This is turn became the basis of another article of faith, namely that the voice and perspective of the subaltern could alchemically be extracted from colonial records of repression through certain protocols of translation. These ideas, expressed by Guha in some form in the first volumes of Subaltern Studies, can also be found in some of the essays by his disciples. But they are laid out at greatest length in his Elementary Aspects, which provides us with another example of the long (and ultimately unsuccessful) struggle to reconcile structuralism and historical materialism. Friendly critics such as Walter Hauser were distressed to find in the work an unmistakable strain of elitist hectoring and a somewhat unsubtle flattening out of the complexity of peasant societies, while nevertheless recognizing Guha’s importance in the renewal of peasant history. There were also issues raised by historians of the longue durée like Burton Stein over whether Guha had not confounded distinct categories such as hunter-gatherers and peasants through his adherence to the logic of binarism.

In the years that followed, Guha’s most influential writings took the form of essays, many of which were collected in a volume entitled Dominance without Hegemony (1997), which argued that the colonial political system in India (unlike the British metropolitan polity) was one in which open coercion outweighed persuasion, and that the Indian state after independence had continued to practice a version of the same nakedly coercive politics. He also developed his somewhat problematic reflections on historiography, which appeared in their final incarnation as a set of published lectures, History at the Limit of World-History (2002). In some of these later essays, we find Guha moving away from his structuralist position to try out other approaches. One of the most successful and widely cited is ‘Chandra’s Death’ (1987), in which Guha presents a very close reading of a small body of legal documents from 1849 in Birbhum, concerning a botched abortion leading to the death of a young woman. Here, we see Guha deploying his intimate knowledge of rural Bengal, as well as his hermeneutic skills dealing with materials written in a ‘rustic Bengali’ possessing an ‘awkward mixture of country idiom and Persianized phrases’. Though interspersed with genuflection to Michel Foucault, these are moments when Guha comes closest to the spirit of Italian microstoria, an approach he never formally engaged with. In contrast, the lectures on historiography take a very different tack, espousing the by-then fashionable Nietzschean critique of the Enlightenment and claims for the superiority of literature to history. We also encounter the introduction and defence of the concept of ‘historicality’ as a manner of re-enchanting the past. This would lead, almost ineluctably, to the last phase of Guha’s career, where he would largely turn to literary criticism written in Bengali and focusing for the most part on the usual suspects of the Bengali literary pantheon.        

Unsurprisingly then, over the lifespan of nearly a century, Ranajit Guha’s trajectory was one of many unexpected twists and turns. The ‘biographical illusion’, as Pierre Bourdieu termed it, may call for a neater form of emplotment than what this life affords us. This is despite the fact that we are dealing with someone with a powerful drive, not to career and careerism, but to a more complex form of charismatic self-fashioning in which Guha largely eschewed the limelight, which he left to some of his younger disciples. Perhaps the secretive habits of his early adult years proved hard to shake off. Nevertheless, by choosing the fringes of the academic world, Guha managed to exercise a greater influence than many of those who held the great seats of academic power. In this, he showed that he did indeed have a consummate understanding of politics and its workings.

Read on: Timothy Brennan, ‘Subaltern Stakes’, NLR 89.

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Mannerisms

The purest pretension. A certain artifice. A failure or refusal to cohere. Chewy words. Insistent and mysterious italics. Eccentric punctuation. Deliberately awkward punctuation. Obvious awkwardnesses. Deliberate infelicities. Peculiar phrases. Slightly confusing phrases. Sudden obscurity. That is a list, more or less verbatim, of some of the unlikely – or not so unlikely – qualities and features that the Irish-born critic and essayist Brian Dillon prizes in writing, or as he often prefers to say, ‘loves’ in or ‘wants from’ it. Dillon also likes lists themselves, and is always making lists of things he likes. A meticulous, vigilant, in many ways immaculate stylist, he copies out stylish passages, sentences and phrases he comes across in his reading, and keeps a list of ‘words to be looked up, words to be used, words merely to be admired’.

Dillon is fond, too, of the outgoing and disorientating opener. His books often begin with a flourish that plants the reader a touch mystified in medias res, a dramatic overture that inducts you to his theme by instantiating it. Consider the openings of his last three books. Essayism (2017) leads with a list of topics of famous essays (without identifying it as such): ‘On the death of a moth, humiliation, the Hoover Dam and how to write; an inventory of objects on the author’s desk, and an account of wearing spectacles…’. The first sentence of Suppose a Sentence (2020) is a long, intermittently unintelligible one, announcing the subject of sentences through a formal display of their possibilities: ‘Or maybe a short sentence after all, a fragment in fact, a simple cry, of pain or pleasure, or succession of same….so exacting in the concentration it demands in turn, that – what? – here already the sentence swerves, and although you are sure you’ve caught the sense the shape has begun to elude you…’. The opening gambit of Dillon’s new book, Affinities, is more subtly bracing, as though a response to an omitted interviewer’s question: ‘I found myself frequently using the word affinity, and wondered what I meant by it.’

Essayism, Suppose a Sentence and Affinities constitute a loose triptych: collections of critical essays – about essays (and essayists), sentences and images, respectively – spliced with passages of memoir (in roughly diminishing quantities). Essayism, the shortest but most substantial and absorbing of the three books – the least like a collection – is a personal meditation on writing and depression composed of essays on the essay form, familiar essay topics (‘consolation’) and essay-adjacent themes such as ‘style’, ‘aphorisms’ and ‘sentences’. The latter is the subject of the sequel or spin-off, Suppose a Sentence, a collection of twenty-seven essays, each closely analysing a single sentence drawn from Dillon’s back-of-the-notebook treasury – some by essayists familiar from Essayism (Thomas Browne, Woolf, Hardwick, Didion, Sontag). The latest collection Affinities is closer to an annotated album: it contains essays of biographical criticism inspired by a single image – mostly photographs, some famous (by Julia Margaret Cameron, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston), but also photomontages (by Hannah Höch, Dora Maar, John Stezaker) and TV stills (from a 1975 version of Beckett’s Not I, a 1981 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, Dennis Potter’s final interview in 1994). The book concludes – or rather breaks off – with ‘a partial list’, to rhyme with the one that kicked off Essayism, of images that ‘do not appear in this book, but will not leave the mind’ (an Edwardian postcard, a Bowie music video from 1979, a polaroid taken by Tarkovsky etc).

Many of Dillon’s books are lists of a kind – compilations of discrete items – even those that seem more continuous or conventionally themed, since he is exclusively a writer of ‘pieces’ whose long-form projects, he notes in Essayism, ‘must also conform to the serial production of chunks or gobbets’. His debut, In the Dark Room (2005), a memoir about the death of his parents (his mother died of a rare autoimmune disease the summer he turned 16, his father of a heart attack five years later), is constructed from reflections on family heirlooms, photographs and other relics. Tormented Hope (2009) is ‘a history of hypochondriacs’ told through miniature biographies of nine health-anxious writers and artists (Proust, Darwin, Warhol etc). These illustrious neurotics were chosen ‘according to no exact criteria’ except their stories seeming ‘compelling’ and ‘capacious’, which is to say amenable: Dillon found himself wanting and able to write about them. This principle of selection is more brazen in his three recent books, which are about things with which Dillon happened to feel an eloquent ‘affinity’. The word recurs across all three volumes, each of which is overtly propelled by passionate fixation.

The insistence on rapture can sometimes seem an alibi for a more systematic kind of coherence, as well as a little at odds with the ‘contingent and occasional’ way Dillon works. A steadily occupied freelancer, he is entirely spurred by external demand: he confessed in an earlier collection titled Objects in this Mirror (2014) that he has ‘never written a word without the occasion of a periodical deadline or publisher’s schedule’. Dillon the obsessive inspector of indelible snapshots and lapidary sentences is somehow incongruous with Dillon the indiscriminate essayist ‘addicted’ to ‘profusion’, for whom writing is primarily a means of keeping himself occupied, in several senses. Writing is a technique for driving away anxiety and depression ‘with words – words about any subject at all’, he explains in Essayism, and it’s a job, a livelihood: ‘I have wanted from writing only to make a living…I’ll fill the allotted space on a page, move on to the next commission.’

***

Making a living from writing (and from teaching writing, latterly at Queen Mary in London) was what Dillon turned to in his late twenties in lieu of becoming an academic, a plan he aborted around the turn of the millennium, after, not uniquely, postgraduate study had left him disillusioned with scholarship, depressed and impoverished. As an English and Philosophy student – first in his home city at University College Dublin, then moving to Trinity for his PhD (on the ‘concept of time in twentieth-century literary criticism’), later following his supervisor to the University of Kent – Dillon had been into ‘high Theory’ (especially deconstruction), whose exponents he had first learned of in the pages of magazines like the NME as a teenager in the 1980s, when the music press was enjoying a heyday of spirited intellectualism. He was taken with Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, also Benjamin, Sontag, Agamben. Towering above all these was Roland Barthes, who Dillon at some point realized, or decided, ‘was not really a scholar or a theorist, he was a writer’ – ‘my writer’.

The distinction for Dillon has everything to do with ‘style’. Whereas scholarship demanded ‘a strange indifference’ to style, becoming a writer meant being openly devoted to it. Barthes was not so much an intellectual as a literary model, and a lodestar authorizing Dillon’s new vocation: he started out publishing short (300-word) book reviews for Time Out, gradually extending in length, form and field (photography, then contemporary art). The ‘patron saint of my sentences’, Barthes is the writer, Dillon claims in Suppose a Sentence, without whose ‘prose pyrotechnics…I would never have written a word’. Especially influential was the later Barthes (following his ‘subjective turn’) of Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse and most important of all, Camera Lucida, the inspiration for In the Dark Room, Dillon’s own record of grappling with the loss of a parent through studying photographs.

Although Dillon periodically worries that, as he observes in Affinities, ‘nothing I write pursues an argument or is built to convince’, he more often insists on the priority of ‘style’ or ‘sound’ over one of its customary antitheses (thought, sense, opinion, argument). ‘Frequently the style comes first’, he reflected in Objects in this Mirror: ‘many of the essays in this book were written because I wanted to see how one might write about their subjects, not what I thought of them.’ ‘Incapable’ of mounting arguments, Dillon conceives of writing, he notes in Essayism, as selection from ‘a repertoire of stylistic choices’, and sometimes thinks that what he loves about other essayists is ‘nothing but style’.

Alongside uncontentious things like ‘polish’ and ‘precision’, stylishness for Dillon – the quality that destines a bit of prose for one of his lists – entails a disfiguring measure of ‘raggedness’, ‘extravagance’, ‘rupture’, ‘surprise’, ‘hazard or adventure’. He wants his rigour ‘somehow botched’, his poise ‘ruined’, just as he wants his ‘awkwardnesses’ ‘deliberate’ and ‘obvious’ (like, we are to realize, that deliberately and obviously awkward word ‘awkwardnesses’ itself). His taste in writers, as displayed in Essayism and Suppose a Sentence, is by no means unorthodox (it is even conventional among writers: ‘writers’ writers’) yet he tends to be seduced by lavish or knotty or inscrutable passages that ‘embarrass’ or ‘flummox’ or otherwise arrest him. He enjoys being ‘snagged by the sound of the prose’, is drawn to writers ‘drunk on the almost erotic possibilities of their sentences’ and relishes ‘a turn of phrase that will not easily give up its sense’.

Eloquence for Dillon inheres in the discreetly weird. ‘Well-written’, he observes at one point in Essayism, ‘means: quite oddly written, but subtly so.’ One of the things Dillon loves about Barthes’s writing, he explains in Suppose a Sentence, is his ‘casting certain captivating details in the most particular language he can find’. ‘The most particular’ is indeed the mot juste for Dillon’s philosophy of style. Subtly equivocal, to seek out ‘the most particular language’ – the close relation ‘peculiar’ is in earshot – suggests one is not satisfied with the merely apt word, but is determined to unearth the perfectly bespoke one, as though there were one right word – a technical term – for everything.

Yet, pursued too fastidiously, the search for the most particular can reveal a weakness for the oversubtle or gratuitously recondite. Moreover, cultivating a preference for the striking word over the serviceable one can stoke a conflict of interest latent in criticism – between your own words and those of your subject, ‘oblique self-involvement and utter commitment to the things themselves’ (a combination Dillon discerns in his favourite sentences). Are you foremost a critic or a writer? Dillon, more interested in how he writes than what he thinks about his subjects, is certainly the second. Given words are referential and using them accurately and beautifully is supposed to clarify the things they refer to, attention to style and a commitment to ‘the things themselves’ ought not to be competing priorities, just as perceptive critics ought to make for dexterous writers. Probably all writers read as writers – as practitioners covetously scouring for cool moves. But close reading may breed an excess of self-awareness or knowingness. Can you know too well which effects you like and wish to reproduce? Must every one of your own sentences be a candidate for inclusion in Suppose a Sentence, built – we might say fortified – to bear the scrutiny bestowed on the specimens in that book?

Dillon’s commendable (if itself conventional) aversion to cliché can sometimes seem too scrupulous, in danger of issuing in a fetish for the alternative (the peculiar getting the better of the particular). Hardwick, Dillon writes in Essayism, was ‘a writer of elegant, incising, strangely pitched essays’. In an essay on Beckett’s Not I in Affinities he once again estranges the familiar adjective: ‘In the theatre, the play is an immersing experience’. These are interesting, in some ways effective twists, the present participle recalling the literal meaning of the adjective, faded by use (‘immersing’ is immersive, ‘incising’ cutting). Such words choices, however, risk irritation: you can be too aware of them – the variation a grating reminder of the more obvious word that has been refused; and you may not be convinced that the semantic difference between ‘incising’ and ‘incisive’ justifies the obtrusion. Has meaning been refined or is this a gimmick?

***

Imitation of what you admire is natural and unavoidable, according to Strunk and White’s classic guide Elements of Style, but the development of a true, which is to say, your own, style is inadvertent; it emerges almost despite yourself. ‘A careful and honest writer does not need to worry about style. As he becomes proficient in the use of the language, his style will emerge, because he himself will emerge’. Notwithstanding the rather marked difference in taste – instead of artifice, obscurity, extravagance and oddity, Strunk and White promote ‘plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity’ – Dillon similarly defines style in Suppose a Sentence as ‘verifiable presence on the page’, and later explains his attraction to the late, ‘subjective’ Barthes as his seeming ‘more present on the page, body and soul, vulnerable’. ‘What exactly does one learn from Camera Lucida?’, Dillon asks in Essayism. Not, he concludes, primarily ‘ideas about photography’, but ‘vulnerability’. ‘It’s that vulnerability’ that he values in ‘most or even all of the essayists I admire’. Yet the paradox, Strunk and White explain, is that one does not achieve such presence by asserting it but by withdrawing through unselfconscious absorption in style’s traditional opposites: ‘Write in a way that draws attention to the sense and substance of the writing, rather than the mood and temper of the author… to achieve style, begin by affecting none – that is, place yourself in the background.’

Dillon is alert to the irony that a writer as self-aware and tightly controlled as he is should so value ‘vulnerability’. ‘The problem essentially is this: I want control, and I want to let go, but neither in itself is art, and how on earth do you find a way between, a way to direct all of this ecstasy and ache?’, he asks in Essayism. Perhaps it is hard not to suspect that a writer so attuned to stylistic choices is deploying techniques of vulnerability rather than truly betraying themselves, but the problem seems partly that Dillon’s answer, his way of having it both ways, is often to let go too deliberately by courting embarrassment – here using a mawkish lyrical flight (‘ecstasy and ache’), elsewhere through an intentionally cringey effusiveness. Gushes often arrive with an effort to conjure some spontaneity, dramatizing hitting on, or resolving to indulge in, the rapturous word (‘…I admire – no, love’; ‘How to say, because this must be the word, what I love there?’; ‘All of them have recently – what is the word? – Impinged’; ‘This sentence – how else to say it? – embarrasses me’), or establishing a certain immediacy (‘I just looked, and…’; ‘I have just noticed…’; ‘I have just placed on my desk…’). This may reveal some intellectual anxiety about the consequences of leaving the terrain of scholarship for the exposed plains of stylish writing. The essayist is thrown back on themselves, anxious to make a lively display of their attentiveness and enthusiasm (what else have they got?).

On other occasions when Dillon appears to let himself go – imposing on himself a flash of extravagance or burst of experimentation – the results can seem contrived, almost pedagogical exercises: ‘The deliciously dismal effect of all this unceasing decease is partly a matter of Donne’s prose style’. Sleepless Nights is ‘a half-essay to which I’ve gone back sometimes daily, in search of the echt and elegantly energizing Hardwick edge.’ Or on Barthes’s odd punctuation: ‘I hoped to emulate his use of colons: they seem to function so frequently like semicolons or dashes: they make something happen:…’. Dillon’s overtures can create a similar impression, as though cordoning off the formal adventurousness (even getting it over with), and as though performed, brief flights from his own voice. Mimesis may seem harmlessly playful, but illustrating stylistic manoeuvres – alliteration, improvisations with punctuation and typography – can also make style seem a shallow thing, reducing what Strunk and White term the ‘high mysteries’ of a compelling manner to a glib bunch of mannerisms. Some kinds of artistry install a distance between the writer and their prose, showing the latter not to bear the imprint of their ‘body and soul’, but to be a sequence of choreographed gestures.

Dillon makes much of wayward punctuation and idiosyncratic grammar – admiring, in Suppose a Sentence for example, Claire-Louise Bennett’s ‘ability to forego commas when it suits her’. Calling it an ‘ability’ seems a bit of a stretch, just as it does to suggest in Objects in this Mirror that Barthes’s style ‘seemed to reside mainly in his punctuation’. Such local quirks are part of but surely not the heart of what makes Barthes a vivid presence in Camera Lucida, which must have more to do with his antic and systematically self-involved persona: ‘So I resolved to start my inquiry with no more than a few photographs, the ones I was sure existed for me’; ‘So I decided to take myself as mediator for all Photography’; ‘I was glancing through an illustrated magazine. A photograph made me pause…Did this photograph please me? Interest me? Intrigue me? Not even. Simply, it existed (for me).’ The value of Camera Lucida inheres not only in Barthes’s style – let alone in his liberal use of colons – but also in his insights (about photographs, about death, about their relationship). One can insist that style is not ornamental as long as one remembers that it is also instrumental, the end being communication. The interest of a writer is not just how they use colons but why they use them, not just how they use language but how they are using it – using it to express what they mean. One suspects that what makes Barthes ‘vulnerable’ in his final book is not direct confession or displays of weakness. ‘Vulnerability’ may rather be a way of describing the compelling intimacy a reader can feel with a text when convinced of the writer’s urgent, unguarded desire to communicate something candidly, evident in the distinctive means to which they resorted to do so.

Of his apprenticeship reviewing for Time Out, Dillon says he learned ‘how to maximize style…in a piece of writing that would end up, on the printed page, about the size of a bus ticket’. He admires the ‘compact soundscape’, the ‘teeming’ essay and the striking detail – what Barthes called the punctum (the ‘unexpected flash’ that makes him love a photograph, ‘that shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me’). Barthes contrasted this with the studium, the humdrum ‘field of cultural interest’ (‘of the order of liking, not of loving’). Yet Dillon’s prose is often at its most convincing, perceptive and casually alluring when he relaxes into the studium of relatively straightforward autobiography. Perhaps, then, the sensitive technician botches their rigour not by striving to be embarrassing or awkward, but by being prepared to miss some opportunities, to default to the good-enough word, allowing themselves some conformity in their impatience to communicate, trusting that the unexpected flash will arrive, or sometimes won’t.

This might involve allowing style its mystery, and its way of running beyond intention. After all, ask Strunk and White, ‘Who can confidently say what ignites a certain combination of words, causing them to explode in the mind?’ Or why an undistinguished phrase ‘for some reason that we can’t readily put our finger on, is marked for oblivion’? We go after the punctum, the ‘captivating detail’ rendered in ‘the most particular language’, because it seems to promise, like those offcuts listed at the end of Affinities, to refuse to ‘leave the mind’. Style too, for Dillon, is a bid for permanence, ‘a contention with the void, an attitude or alignment plucked from chaos and nullity’, as he puts it in Essayism. (‘One function of style’, Sontag ventured in her famous 1965 essay on the subject, is ‘to preserve the works of the mind against oblivion.’) Accepting we don’t always know why some writing works on us and seems bound to last, nor why people like our own style (or why they don’t), means reconciling ourselves to the fact that even our best-laid sentences may well finish up like bus tickets, swallowed by time. That might limber us up to betray ourselves better, availing ourselves of language’s embarrassment of riches, including vanilla words, slack syntax and proper grammar – small tributes to the fact that style is not only a field of choice, but that the language is also using you.

Read on: Lola Seaton ‘True Fictions’, NLR 122.

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Alien Minutia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Strange Hope

In many respects, Showing Up is nothing new for Kelly Reichardt. Michelle Williams plays Lizzie, a struggling artist, in her fourth collaboration with the director. Jon Raymond co-wrote the script, having done so for all but two of Reichardt’s eight feature films; Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy (2008) were adapted from his short stories, First Cow (2019) from his novel The Half-Life. The setting is once again the Pacific Northwest, now returning to the contemporary after First Cow’s excursion to the 1820s. And in keeping with past works, the film is realist, humanist; its focus, what Reichardt calls the ‘small politics’ of everyday life.

Of the many constants in Reichardt’s work, perhaps most singular is the taut thread of precarity running through it. In Old Joy, this means the first generation of American men to inherit a worse world, where career, family and other modern myths no longer ensure stability. Wendy and Lucy goes further, portraying a descent into homelessness and destitution following the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. Meek’s Cutoff (2010), set in the Oregon High Desert of 1845, was no less critical of the contemporary, offering an allegory of the Bush era – Stephen Meek a hapless fool who fails to lead his party through the desert. In Night Moves (2013) the precarity is a planetary one, which leads a small group of farm workers to commit ecoterrorism (perhaps Reichardt’s weakest film, the characters are morally indicted for this move from ‘small’ to ‘big’ politics). Certain Women (2016) chronicles the alienating qualities of late capitalism in three stories of quotidian suffering; First Cow, those of its beginnings – from barbarism to baked goods and back again. Always pulling at this common thread is the invisible hand of capitalist bondage, with Reichardt’s Pacific Northwest standing as symbolic endpoint for the American frontier.

Showing Up is a film about artmaking under capitalism. We know this because Lizzie makes no money from her work (statuettes, paintings, sketches). Instead, her income derives from an administrative role at a local arts college, where we see her designing promotional posters on an iMac (capitalist artmaking), and which allows her access to certain necessities – a kiln, a community. She rents her apartment from fellow artist Jo (Hong Chau), who swings by to shoot the shit, ask a favour, vent about the school (where Jo is artist-in-residence, much higher status, better liked, more successful). Despite their apparent friendship, Jo refuses to fix the hot water in Lizzie’s apartment, which forces her to shower at the school (another institutional saving grace). The two are amicable but rarely genuine. Lizzie is pointedly not invited to one of Jo’s parties, which may have something to do with her prickly demeanour. Lizzie exhibits signs of autism and struggles to reciprocate the friendliness of others. (Her brother is more obviously neurodivergent – perhaps bipolar or schizophrenic.) In her self-inflicted isolation, Lizzie is the community’s black sheep, and as much as she embodies – economically, socially, emotionally – the Reichardtian precariat, this lifestyle is nevertheless afforded to her by nepotism: her mother also works at the school in a senior role, while her father is an accomplished ceramicist.

This is hardly an inspiring portrait of the artist today. Though the film’s distributors seem intent on marketing the film as a placid comedy, one senses something of Reichardt’s rage in Lizzie: an undervalued artist struggling to make ends meet, forced to align with an institution for survival, reliant on the kindness of friends and family. Reichardt’s precarity as a director is well-known. A decade passed between her first feature, River of Grass (1994), and its follow-up, Old Joy, despite the former’s critical success – playing at Berlin and Sundance, winning prizes, making end-of-year lists. (River of Grass now exists at such a distance that it appears the work of some other director, Jonathan Rosenbaum calling it an ‘atypical first feature’ that ‘might foster some false impressions’.) Old Joy was partly funded by Reichardt’s work on America’s Next Top Model, its budget so low that it allegedly cost the same amount just to feed the oxen and horses on Meek’s Cutoff – Reichardt’s fourth film, given a more extensive but still comparatively meagre budget (she was denied even one extra day’s shooting on the project). Reichardt attributes these financial woes in part to her gender, stating that independent filmmaking is ‘not really open and generous to women’, as well as to ‘the stories that I’m interested in telling’. Meek’s Cutoff, for example, is an anti-western, told from the perspective of its women, languidly paced, its ending unresolved. The film barely earned back half its budget at the box office – the only metric that matters under the tyranny of commerce.

During that initial hiatus, Reichardt worked on a few experimental films and began teaching at Bard in New York. A second feature was never certain. ‘I just thought I would teach and make films for personal gratification’, she said, and in a sense, that is exactly what she has done. Reichardt maintains creative control over her films, while relying on her teaching career for a steady income and health insurance (she makes films too infrequently to qualify for the benefits of the Directors Guild of America). Showing Up is clearly informed by these years of teaching. It begs the question: does Reichardt hate her students? Thanks to the website ‘Rate My Professors’, we know her to be something of a grouch, vehemently against cliché, requiring strict adherence to storytelling rules. ‘Kelly told me to my face not to be a filmmaker’ reads one of the many apocryphal comments. (Given Reichardt’s experience, this was probably good advice.) The students who inhabit Showing Up’s imaginary campus are treated with similar disdain – hard to take seriously when talking of their ‘dream space’ or waving their arms about in a class titled ‘thinking and movement’.

Portland’s uniquely liberal nouveau boheme became the subject of parody in Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s series Portlandia over a decade ago, which opened with a song-as-thesis-statement: ‘Remember when people were content to be unambitious? Sleep to eleven? Just hangout with their friends? You’d have no occupations whatsoever. Maybe you work a couple of hours a week at a coffee shop?’ The dream is alive in Portland, goes the chorus. ‘Portland is a city where young people go to retire!’ Portlandia’s theme tune could accompany many of the cutaways in Reichardt’s film, where we see students spinning yarn, rolling on the floor, pointing projectors at the wall. One student asks Lizzie not to be grouped with a certain professor because they have ‘different theories of cultural production’. What is Reichardt’s theory, exactly? Lizzie’s cultural production is moneyless, mirthless. Her sole gratification comes from a sad gallery show at the film’s end, with one prominent artist giving her a pat on the back. Is this how Reichardt sees herself? Her great theme of precarity is never resolved by hope or its fulfilment; fatalism reigns. Just like the arid desert of Meek’s Cutoff, Reichardt’s America is inhospitable. And yet, if ever a better world is possible in her films, it is in the school of Showing Up.

‘Places where people can still have a Bohemian lifestyle are a nice thing to have in the world’, writer Jon Raymond said in an interview. ‘I hope this movie depicts that kind of community – the community of Lizzie and Jo – in a positive light, one that is not satirical, but inviting and real.’ In that ‘real’ lies the rub: Reichardt’s fantasy campus is built on the boneyard of the Oregon College of Art and Craft, which closed in 2019 after more than a hundred years of teaching. Some of its graduates even worked on the film. A statement from the school’s board claims that the ‘path to closure was paved with years of restructuring, none of which could sufficiently eradicate the rising costs of running a private arts college in the 21st century’ – which says plenty about our present condition. In amending this reality, Showing Up represents perhaps the only time in her career where Reichardt has deviated from the real in favour of something hopeful. She resurrects the school to make a claim for its necessity – reframing her portrait as something almost radical. This is truly art for art’s sake, a polemic for the roly-poly.

Strange hope for stranger times: if this is truly utopia, why such precarity? Why is my boss my mother, my landlord my best friend? Why is this hope still so fatalistic? In Spirit of Utopia (1918), Ernst Bloch claims that times of decline perpetuate such fatalistic thinking, and that ‘those who cannot find their way out of the decline are confronted with fear of hope and against it’. He continues: ‘On bourgeois ground, especially in the abyss which has opened and into which the bourgeoisie has moved, change is impossible.’ This is the abyss that we encounter in Night Moves, where radical change is ruled out in favour of the status quo. Reichardt’s solution, then as now, is community, albeit one embedded within a hierarchy of exploitation.

Bloch argues that utopia has a ‘double origin’, rooted in ‘the remembered image of a time when men lived in a paradisiacal order, and in the desire for a future in which this order will be re-established’. Reichardt’s utopia is conservative in the same way: not a ‘memory of the not-yet-realized’ but of the once-was. The school is a place in the past; there is nothing of the ‘new’ in such nostalgia. In its portrait of American origins, First Cow endorsed a similar sentiment: a cow arrives in the area and so begins private property and its violent control. As in Meek’s Cutoff, the past operates to mediate the present. Both films ask how we arrive at the present misery of Wendy and Lucy, another film occupied by the violence of possession (and its supposed antidote: the kindness of the community). It is telling that in Showing Up, Reichardt’s first time engaging with artmaking and the nearest thing she has made to a self-portrait, we are not only estranged from the future, but also the present. Lizzie’s art is one of petrification. Her statues depict those in her community, in a way that chimes with the realist ethos – an exacting portrait of the present, a mirror up to nature. She is charged with stopping the flow of time. Film does the same.

The mirror can only look back, and so Brecht tells us to reach for the hammer. Reichardt rolls her eyes. Is this why Lizzie works with clay and not marble? Perhaps her statues are meant to crystallize the many contradictions of the topicShowing Up a utopic dystopia, or dystopic utopia. Both suffer from myopia, the artist’s inability to look forward. Another contradiction: the word ‘precarity’ derives from prayer, entreaty, a wish for the future – in a word, hope. I may suffer in the Here and Now, but in my present misery, I imagine a better tomorrow. It seems Reichardt’s films cannot. This is not her failing, but the great failing of our time. ‘Hope’, writes Bloch, is ‘the most human of all mental feelings and only accessible to men, and it also refers to the furthest and brightest horizon.’ Showing Up ends with Lizzie and Jo walking into the sunset. Make of that what you will.

Fredric Jameson, ‘The Politics of Utopia’, NLR 25.

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Atomizing

Three years of biopolitics have taught us that crowds are dangerous, and so I entered the bustling Delphi Filmpalast for my first screening with a mixture of joy and trepidation. Mask mandates had been slowly lifted over the winter. I removed mine undecidedly; very few of the other attendees were wearing them. Before the lights dimmed, I looked around and took in their expressions. Any residual discomfort gave way to pleasure at being in a crowded cinema once again.

The context may well have indirectly guided my choice of films. Notre Corps, a documentary by Claire Simon, tracks the treatment of patients at a gynaecological clinic in Paris. We observe a series of consultations with patients whose issues range from breast cancer to infertility to navigating gender transitions. We also witness the birth of a child. Moments of hope (a successful course of IVF) are interposed with moments of sadness and defeat (an unsuccessful cancer treatment). Despite its intimate material, Simon’s use of a restrained verité style as well as her choice to include only fragments of each patient’s story – we never hear their histories, witnessing only the moment of the diagnosis, an operation, a treatment – prevents the film from descending into voyeurism.

Two thirds of the way through, the director herself faces a doctor. Simon is told she needs a double mastectomy to treat her breast cancer. The reality of the Berlinale – where the director greeted the audience before the screening – and that of the film suddenly clash. I’m made aware of the vulnerability of my body once again. All the same, part of me is momentarily troubled by the coincidence of the filmmaker’s illness arising during the shoot, as if she had contracted cancer for the benefit of the film. An irrational sentiment, born from the mistrust fostered by a world in which exploitation of one’s own experience for attention is omnipresent. I feel ashamed of the thought.

Leaving the theatre, it isn’t easy to shake off the suffering of the film’s subjects – the common experience suggested by its title is actualised by the screening. Only retrospectively do I consider the other story that Notre Corps tells. In many scenes we listen to the doctors describing their patients’ pathologies along with the patients. And while some of the doctors treat their patients with tender empathy, in other moments the gap between the doctors’ words and the meanings they hold for those they treat is glaring. Ultimately, the film reveals as much about the institution in which it is filmed as it does about the patients who are its supposed subject. But a critical reflection of how the institution forms their experiences, is beyond its scope.

***

The Berlinale has always been expansive, both in its programming and its relationship to the city. One follows the other – there are simply too many films for it to be hosted in one neighbourhood – and so the festival generates a city-wide atmosphere of excitement. Recently, a friend disclosed to me that the Berlinale was one of the reasons he decided to move here many years ago. He has nothing to do with film professionally, but the internationalism of the event appealed. In the era before Berlin’s transformation into a global cultural capital, there was always a notable uptick in the English, French and Spanish heard in Berlin’s bars in February.

Since 2000, its epicentre has been Potsdamer Platz. The Berlinale Palast – usually a musical theatre venue – hosts the premieres of films in the main competition. The nearby Filmhaus, meanwhile, is home to the Deutsche Kinemathek as well as its archive, the Film Museum, the Institut für Film und Videokunst and one of Berlin’s two film schools, the DFFB. Lack of charm is the defining feature of these spaces. Though its name evokes a European square, Potsdamer Platz is in fact an intersection, bordered by glass-fronted buildings strung with enormous billboards. An artificial, almost ghostly, place, historically charged and developed to death. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it functioned as a transit hub, through which a great number of the city’s streetcars passed. During the Weimar era, it developed as a cultural and commercial centre, fostering a vibrant nightlife and a red-light district. Bombing during the war destroyed most of its buildings and, in divided Berlin, the area became a wasteland between the zones – a no-man’s land, as captured in Wim Wenders’ Himmel über Berlin (1987).

Following reunification, Potsdamer Platz was then transformed into an ‘icon’ of the new German capital. The city, arguing that it lacked the resources to rebuild the area itself, sold large parts to Sony and Daimler-Benz, and half a dozen famous architects – from Helmut Jahn to Renzo Piano – designed buildings for the space, including the 500,000 square meter multi-purpose ‘Daimler City’. As part of the deal, the Stadtregierung insisted that Sony provide space for several film institutions. The new city was supposed to do it all – at once a headquarters for international capitalists and a hub of cultural capital. The relocation of the Berlinale from its locations on and around Kurfürstendamm in former West Berlin fit perfectly with this vision.

The film school moved onto the ninth floor of a building in a complex called ‘Sony Center’: a circle of blocks covered by a large shining umbrella whose colours change from blue to pink. As a student there years ago, I would spend hours staring at screens or gazing through the window at the purplish canopy outside, gradually losing my sense of time and space. Not a great precondition for contextualizing one’s work. Being in the Filmhaus had its perks, including free access to the Kinemathek in the basement, as well as the film library and archive. But any venture outside the building was bound to be a disappointment. One mostly encountered tourists who often seemed not to know what to make of this space either (while the Kollhoff high-rise imitates the charm of one of the classic skyscrapers in New York or Chicago, it can hardly impress anyone familiar with the originals). If you were hungry, your choices were fast food chains, a supermarket and some overpriced restaurants with mediocre food. Uh, it’s great here, a 2011 film by then-film student Jan Bachmann, captures the sad absurdity of the location perfectly. It stars Franz Rogowski, today one of Germany’s most prominent actors, in his very first role. Stranded under the shimmering awning of Potsdamer Platz, Rogowski encounters a shaman, and decides to go shopping.

Who, then, would have predicted the nostalgia I felt as I returned to Potsdamer Platz this February, after two pandemic years during which the festival was reduced to a skeleton? Despite the inhospitable atmosphere of the Platz, which offers few opportunities to sojourn without consuming, during the Berlinale it has always been filled with activity and excitement. People ran back and forth between screening venues, they waited with thermoses for the appearance of some Hollywood star or stopped in the middle of the street to chat with an acquaintance from last year. Walking by the Sony Center umbrella a few weeks ago, however, I noticed a construction fence surrounding a site that houses one of the main cinemas used for the Berlinale. Later, a friend showed me an aerial photograph. Where once a cinema had been, there was now a gaping wound in the concrete. The theatre was never particularly beautiful, charming, or unique – just a regular multiplex showing mostly big-budget films, but it will be sorely missed. Serious festival goers may now spend as much time on the subway as at the movies.

***

When it comes to the number of films shown – approximately 400 a year – the Berlinale is the biggest of the Western A-festivals. Assuming an average length of 90 minutes (many are longer, but the program also includes shorts), this would amount to 600 hours of film. Obviously, seeing all of them is an impossibility. But when I first gained access to the screenings, ‘volunteering’ in exchange for a festival pass, I dove into the programme with abandon, focusing my viewing around Potsdamer Platz which, though always a strange and inadequate home for the Berlinale, was at least a home. Now the festival, with its never-ending series of films but no real-world centre seems to inch closer and closer to the viewing conditions of streaming services like Netflix: allowing you to ‘curate’ your own programme with an algorithm and bore yourself with your own taste.

This year, I found myself mostly choosing films based on their location and the likelihood of being able to watch them in theatres later. The division of the films into thirteen sections is supposed to help you navigate, but they are far too numerous and their criteria too indistinct for this to be of much use. The choice, for example, to screen two parts of a double feature in different sections this year, was mystifying. In Waters by Hong Sangsoo was shown in ‘Encounters’, a competition-adjacent section dedicated to ‘aesthetically and structurally more daring films’. Described in the programme as ‘his most personal’, the film is shot almost completely out of focus. While some told me they found it unbearable, other viewers thought it was a way of teaching them to see differently. Denying the pleasure of seeing clearly not only challenges the viewer’s willingness to engage, but could also be read as a refusal to produce a film for streaming, its blurriness mocking the razor-sharp images produced by every device. A festival seems to be one of very few occasions that might motivate an audience to take an experience like that upon themselves. In any case, no newcomer would get away with it. Festival darling Hong Sangsoo does.

One oft-repeated recent critique of the Berlinale is that it lacks a clearly defined curatorial profile. Hopes that this would change following the appointment of its new artistic director Carlo Chatrian (formerly in the same role at Locarno) have been disappointed up till now. It seems that besides the celebrity of the filmmakers, the selection of a film is often based on whether its subject is deemed politically ‘relevant’. As part of the cinematic machinery of consensus, the festival is, unsurprisingly, a mirror of the problems of the German film financing system. Symbolic gestures, such as inviting President Zelensky to speak at the opening, can make it easy to forget the many other levels on which politics operates in such events: in the funding of individual films, in the choices over the festival’s curation, the selection of star guests, and, not least, in the way a festival acts as marketing for a city and a nation. All of this distracts from its core cultural responsibility: to create a space in which viewing patterns and established meanings are challenged, in which an audience is confronted with images that affect their view of the world, and where a discourse about film as an art form can take place.

***

Între revoluții is a documentary-fiction film by Vlad Petro. Its voiceover, written by Romanian writer Lavinia Braniște, presents an imagined correspondence between Maria from Bucharest and Zahra from Tehran, whose friendship began when they studied medicine in the Romanian capital together in the 1970s. Zahra returned to Iran in 1978, at the beginning of a period of political upheaval. In her letters she describes her experiences during the Iranian Revolution, as well as the disappointment and fear that ensued when Khomeini took power. They exchange letters throughout the next decade until, ten years later, Ceausescu’s regime in Bucharest is overthrown. Once more euphoria gives way to disappointment and existential anxieties.

Through their correspondence, the two women search for the universal thread that unites their distinct experiences. Many students did travel from Iran to Romania in the period, but despite the historical nature of the film, it has a contemporary feel. Both talk about their isolation and the impossibility, for various reasons, of communicating with their immediate family. Their stories, drawn in very broad strokes, are brought to life through a montage of archival footage. We can’t always guess whether it stems from newsreels, from narrative films, from commercial ads or propaganda. The focus is on people, particularly women, whose appearance, expressions and bodies at a particular moment, age or state of mind are preserved. There is something consoling about watching people from previous periods on film, seeing them alive. That there is an audience watching them means they are not, in fact, so alone. And we, the audience ourselves, feel connected to each other through the experience of watching them – a connection strengthened by the intimacy of the Q&A. Then, we leave the cinema for Alexanderplatz – the second ugliest of the city’s famous Plätze – heading into the cold February drizzle, atomizing into different directions.

The spatial disintegration of the festival will only accelerate. Daimler and Sony sold their properties on Potsdamer Platz years ago, the latter at a huge loss. The present owners include corporations and funds from Canada, Qatar and Norway. Now that Berlin has attained the cultural prestige to which it once aspired, investing in film doesn’t appear to have the same priority. In 2024 the lease for the Filmhaus, home to the film schools, the museum and the Kinemathek, will expire, and part of the institution will move to Wedding, a neighbourhood in Berlin’s north. The film school will splinter off to a different location. This means that the films from the experimental ‘Forum’ section of the festival will no longer be screened on Potsdamer Platz. There will be even fewer opportunities for encounters between different participants – apart from exclusive industry receptions. If ten different people see ten different films in ten different places, they almost might as well stay at home and watch them there.  

As rents continue to rise and spaces for cultural experimentation continue to shrink, the numerous independent cinemas are still one thing that speaks for Berlin. You can see almost any given recent arthouse film at any given night somewhere in the city. Chances are high that you can watch it within a twenty-minute radius of your home. This is still true even after the pandemic intensified the economic pressure placed on movie theatres. There are also a number of institutions curating programs of historical films, and numerous more or less official screenings in bars, galleries and elsewhere. And it’s not just the quantity that matters. Many of these beautiful spaces celebrate cinema as an art form as well as a social occasion. This is a consolation. It should not be taken for granted.

Read on: Julia Hertäg, ‘Germany’s Counter-Cinemas’, NLR 135.

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Kill the Spiders

John Smith’s 1996 short film Blight opens with the image of a half-destroyed terraced house, its masonry crumbling away. Tree branches bob in the foreground. A passing car is heard. Birdsong too. A mother’s voice calls out for her children: ‘Jordan and Kim!’ The camera cuts to other angles, but each shot is static, tightly framed, the field of vision split into blocks of house and not-house. As another voice says ‘kill the spiders’, things begin to seem unusual, stylized. A timber beam twitches on a broken wall, as if it were a length of balsa wood on a puppeteer’s thread. The strings in the audio track swell, setting the expectation of a crescendo to come.

It’s only after a few minutes of the house appearing to dismantle itself that a couple of labourers are revealed behind a falling wall. Hard-hatted, bare-chested figures, their ungloved hands pick apart the brickwork. Fragments of speech develop into phrases, coalescing into sense and breaking apart again: a form of narrative cut-up that aligns with the impression that this space, and the social relations it represents, is in the process of being wrecked. The musical accompaniment, by composer Jocelyn Pook, imbues the scene with an almost unbearable weight of emotion. A whole world seems to inhere in these bay windows and chimney stacks outlined against the sky: fragments of interior décor become metonyms for family, community, life. The spiders turn out to be part of a woman’s memory of the outdoor toilet in her childhood home: her father would ‘kill the spiders for me’. ‘Sometimes you’d go in there and you’d sit on the toilet and you could see all these little legs twitching, you know, where he’d squashed those spiders. Oh it was horrible, and I still can’t bear them.’

At the film’s end we discover what it is we have been looking at. Tall capital letters on a corrugated-iron wall, which flash up word by word, read ‘NO M11 NOT HERE’ and ‘HOMES NOT ROADS’. Diggers shunt huge volumes of earth back and forth. A large blue sign is shown: the Department of Transport’s ‘£200m New Road Scheme Opening Summer 1997’. The film’s score reaches a crescendo, with insistent, percussive keys and agitated strings clamouring over the combined noise of traffic and crumbling mud. The scene cuts abruptly, and the phrase ‘kill the spiders’ is repeated once more, this time coinciding with the depiction of a map of the road network around London: an arachnoid tangle splayed across the screen.

The houses in Smith’s film were being destroyed to make way for the ‘M11 Link Road’, a stretch of what is now called the A12 that tears a gorge through East London from Hackney Wick to the Redbridge Roundabout, connecting the Blackwall tunnel to the motorway towards Stansted and Cambridge. Resuscitating an element of the Greater London Council’s junked ‘Ringways’ roadbuilding plan as part of the Conservative government’s ‘Roads for Prosperity’ agenda, the project met with fierce local resistance. This took the form of a series of actions running from 1993 to 1995, starting with the defence of an ancient Sweet Chestnut Tree at George Green, Wanstead, continuing with the establishment of a series of autonomous republics with names like Wanstonia and Greenmania, and culminating in a drawn-out standoff at Claremont Road, a small crescent of a few dozen houses off Grove Green Road in Leyton, which lay directly in the path of the proposed motorway. The protest had its own newspaper, The Roadbreaker, which kept readers informed of upcoming actions and carried lively reports of other successful road protests. It made the national debate too. In Parliament, the local MP Harry Cohen even sought to frame it in terms of international significance, comparing the Department of Transport’s use of ‘a private army to occupy the self-declared free state of Wanstonia’ to ‘the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait’. The Link Road, he said, would carve up communities like ‘a car-roaring equivalent of the Berlin Wall’.

Such links between the local and the global would have pleased the protesters, who tended to see cars not only as ‘the very essence of petit-bourgeois advancement’, as Roland Barthes once put it, but also as a key engine of post-war consumer capitalism. Sandy McCreery has written that, by the mid-1980s, ‘some estimates suggested that as much as half of the world’s measured economic activity might be concerned with making, fuelling, maintaining, and administering motor vehicles.’ Road construction, it was thought, didn’t respond to a need for new roads so much as prop up demand for more cars. Yet protesters could still disagree over tactics and strategy. The group behind the radical magazine Aufheben, for example, shared the view that ‘the motor industry serves as an indicator for the whole economy’ but thought that the protest should be more vigorous: the policy of non-violent ‘fluffyism’ was ‘the worst form of liberalism’, an approach born of weakness, undermined by quasi-mystical tree-worship and so preoccupied with image over substance that it amounted to little more than a ‘virtual politics’.

The Link Road protest nevertheless attracted a broad church of supporters, engaging them in a project that, as the Aufheben group put it, aimed not just to stop ‘this one road’ but to create ‘a climate of autonomy, disobedience and resistance’. This included not only local residents and veterans of other road protests, but also a substantial number of artists living in and around Claremont Road. Their presence contributed to a year-long ‘festival’. Throughout 1994, the street was blocked to cars and turned into a public outdoor living room, just as protesters were busy burrowing underneath the houses’ actual living rooms, constructing a fortress that would be difficult for police and bailiffs to dismantle (and thereby refining a technique used most recently at Lützerath, Germany, where energy company RWE is about to dig an enormous new coal mine).

The result was, according to McCreery, a space with ‘no formal social organization’ in which ‘every moment of every day amounted to a political act’. Even if he doubts how much ‘radical French theory’ the protesters were actually reading, their activities ‘probably amounted to the most complete expression of situationist techniques ever seen in Britain’. And at that particular moment, the idea of treating streets like beaches was especially heated. On 3 November 1994, weeks before the protest site was cleared by hundreds of police and bailiffs, royal assent was granted to Michael Howard’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. Alongside the notorious ‘stop and search’ legislation, this also codified specific ‘powers in relation to raves’ – that is, to shut them down – and even included a legal definition of music as ‘sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’.

The cinematography for Blight began when Smith, one of the artists living on Claremont Road, came home one day ‘to discover that the house next door to me had been partially demolished, revealing a mural copied from the poster for the film The Exorcist on an upstairs bedroom wall.’ He soon noticed a tattoo of a spider’s web on the elbow of one of the workers, something that added to the ‘sinister theme’ established by the mural and reminded him of the road network. The woman who says ‘kill the spiders’ was one of the first residents he interviewed when gathering material for the soundtrack, asking them to reflect on their memories of life there. This set in motion a ‘serendipitous chain of events’ that Smith ‘never could have anticipated when the work began’.

Made over the course of two years, the film reproduces this chain-of-association methodology. Midway through, the recurrent phrase ‘I don’t really remember’ takes on a particular musicality, half-spoken, half-sung, circulating in new configurations. The prosaic is transfigured into poetry: ‘plaster roses’, ‘imitation primroses’, ‘wood chip’, ‘the most hideous red wallpaper’, ‘pastel green and cream’, ‘that turkey colour’. ‘You always had like a typical tiled fifties fireplace and open fire and all that’. These snatches of speech retain a sense of arising in the natural ebb and flow of conversation, and yet the intricate, cut-up, highly composed texture of the work – the mix of speech and atmospheric sound, the interplay of audio and image – flags the status of the film as artifice, troubling the relation between documentary and fiction, as well as gesturing to the idea of ‘construction’ as such: the relation between rearranging material things – paving slabs, tarmac, lengths of 16mm film – and creating new realities.

This accords with Smith’s preferred film-making practice, which often uses spoken narration to unsettle the status of what we see. Born in Walthamstow in 1952, he studied at the Royal College of Art and was associated with the same ‘Department for Environmental Media’ that produced other prominent artist-filmmakers including Patrick Keiller. Works like Associations (1975), which projects seemingly discordant imagery based on the mishearing of words in a deadpan voiceover track, or the one-minute-long Gargantuan (1992), which plays with scale and framing to resolve into one central pun on ‘my newt’, are typical of Smith’s distinctive approach: high seriousness laced with absurdist humour. The films he is perhaps best known for, The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) and The Black Tower (1987), use minor disruptions in film-making conventions to produce dramatic changes in the way we interpret what we see and hear. In The Girl Chewing Gum, a camera pans across a busy Hackney intersection; the film appears to be an unstaged actuality, but a director’s voiceover seems to order people around as if they were characters, a device that becomes ever more unlikely until it finally implodes. In The Black Tower, a mysterious matte-black building near Smith’s home is shot from a range of angles that seem to make it appear in totally different locations, apparently stalking the increasingly paranoid narrator.

In a 2013 discussion with Ian Christie, Smith reflected on having only been ‘vaguely’ involved in the campaign against the M11 Link Road. Blight wasn’t screened until more than two years after Claremont Road was cleared. Looking back, the sense of it as a protest film was something Smith attributed mainly to Pook’s emotive audio track, which (the reason for his uneasiness about music in film) ‘tells you how to read the images’. From today’s vantage point, another thing that stands out is how the film documents the construction of one type of infrastructure while forming an elegy for another – the system that afforded state funding to projects like this one and, crucially, supplied a platform through which a wide audience could be reached. Blight was part of a series called ‘Sound on Film’, funded by the BBC and the Arts Council, and was screened on BBC 2 at 7:30pm. Such a slot would hardly be expected for an ‘art film’ today, and Smith’s own most recent retrospective, or ‘introspective’, as he termed it, took place between the ICA and the tiny Close Up Cinema in Sclater Street.

When Blight was shown at Close Up late last year, it was programmed alongside Home Suite, a hilarious account of the bizarre ‘improvements’ made to Smith’s Claremont Road home over the course of ten years during which eviction always seemed imminent. On the day of the screening, the news ran reports of a cyclist who had been run over by a cement mixer in Berlin. First declared dead, this was revised to ‘braindead’. She later died in hospital. It was a horrifying story, but its newsworthiness was deemed not to be the death of the cyclist, nor the fact that an unknown passer-by had subsequently stabbed the driver of the cement mixer. It was the fact that the fire brigade vehicle containing the special cutting tools necessary to free the cyclist had been delayed by protesters from a climate-activist group called Letzte Generation, who had glued themselves to a nearby road. Two of its activists were later arrested specifically for the crime of holding up emergency services.

Whether Letzte Generation, Insulate Britain or Just Stop Oil, the practice and the resulting mediatized imagery of many such protests have often been the same: prone protesters, raging motorists, police armed with specialist solvents. The death of the cyclist on the Bundesallee was a crisis moment for this mode of resistance, in a context where it seemed more urgent than ever. In Britain, Liz Truss’s short-lived proposals for an ‘unchained’ nation saw the renewed prospect of a major roadbuilding scheme for the first time in decades. In fact, the apparent absence of one hitherto was largely illusory. As Joe Moran notes in his book On Roads (2009), although New Labour had nominally cancelled Thatcher’s plans for the ‘great car economy’, the Blair-Brown years saw ‘a roadbuilding programme more than double the size of the Tory one that had sparked the protests of the 1990s’ – it’s just that this work was dissimulated through private companies and received very little press attention. The difference with Truss was that – symptomatically – her styling was decades out of date.

Smith might be unwilling to acknowledge Blight as a protest film, but it is nevertheless interesting to consider it as one. The critic A.L. Rees has called it ‘a lament for the streets’ that is also ‘a warning, an alert call, for the future’. Watching it today, perhaps the most striking thing is that, simply by not looking at the road, the film seems to transcend it, offering up the possibility of a mode of habitation that isn’t obsessed with continually getting somewhere else. At the same time, the wider context surrounding its making reveals a complex ecology of resistance in which the act of doing without need not be imagined as some kind of penitent self-abnegation, but rather a joyous embrace of different ways of thinking and being in which four wheels are not always the answer.

Read on: Julian Stallabrass, ‘Irony Error’, NLR 123.

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High Income

For most of modern history, cannabis has primarily been produced in lower income countries for consumption in Europe and North America. Its provenance has shaped the way we speak about it: ‘kush’ stems from the Hindu Kush mountain range in South Asia, ‘reefer’ may refer to the Rif mountains in Morocco, while strains like ‘Malawi gold’ and ‘Panama red’ directly advertise their origins. In recent years, the wave of cannabis legalization has raised hopes of redressing this imbalance. Following higher income countries like the US, Canada and Germany, traditional production countries such as Malawi, Mexico, Colombia and Morocco have begun to update their cannabis laws: aiming to give legal producers a fair cut for their crops, so that profits no longer flow to organised crime via illegal exports and sales. However, it seems increasingly likely that as the cannabis market legalizes and formalizes, it will reproduce many of the same symptoms as its forerunner, with traditional producers again finding profits located elsewhere – this time primarily with formal firms in high income countries. Understanding these problems means interrogating the reciprocal process by which policy makes markets and markets make policy.

While legalization has taken different shapes across higher income countries, it has typically had a common feature: it has not created structures for the import of recreational cannabis. In itself this is unsurprising: the protocols for such a paradigm shift are non-existent, and policymakers want to be seen as moving cautiously and ensuring a maximum of quality control. Yet the absence of such structures has amounted to an infant-industry protection or import-substitution policy for new domestic producers, whose international competition is still limited to the illegal market. As a result, domestic production in richer countries has increased rapidly. The market has been flooded with new entrants who have established monopolies at home while investing in production capacity abroad. At first sight they seem to be a diverse bunch, ranging from tobacco companies to celebrities. But they share the ability to set up highly capitalized businesses and navigate a deeply unstable legal environment.  

Diverse models of legalization are simultaneously emerging in many low- and middle-income countries. Some, like Mexico, remain sceptical of larger commercial actors and focus on small-scale production for personal consumption. Others are gravitating towards a framework that favours highly capitalized investors, akin to that of North America. In Lesotho, cannabis farming licenses cost more than a quarter million dollars and have only been granted to five producers so far. Yet for most small producing countries, the legalization of domestic recreational consumption has either lagged or been explicitly precluded, while markets for medicinal use have not reached the scale of those in the US, Canada or Germany. Consequently, conditions for producers in lower income countries remain unfavourable. Given the set-up of their domestic market, the main pathways to growth bring them into direct competition with producers in more affluent states.

These are not the only factors that increasingly make large capital reserves a requirement for cannabis production. For decades, new strains developed predominantly in consumer countries like the US or Canada have entered traditional producer countries. They bring some immediate benefits for farmers, promising higher yields and higher THC contents, both of which are increasingly necessary to compete on the market. But they also commonly require significantly more resources – water in particular – which presents a challenge for small-scale traditional producers in comparatively dry areas, such as the Rif mountains. This threatens to generate another iniquitous dynamic – already seen in various agro-processing industries like cocoa and coffee – in which poorer countries do not benefit from the profits of expanding legal cannabis markets yet bear the brunt of their environmental impact.

Of course, the recreational cannabis trade is still in its infancy. It is unclear how many countries will legalize its use in the coming years, what kind of cannabis products will be offered to consumers, and how the illegal market will function alongside the legal one. But beneath this flux, structures of accumulation and advantage are crystallizing. They suggest that, by the time formal international trade structures are fully developed, most of the profits from growing cannabis will be concentrated in countries which were previously peripheral to production and central to consumption. Within just a few years, cannabis will likely follow the same trajectory of many agricultural products associated with low- and middle-income countries, whereby surplus is hoarded in processing, financing, and retail centres far away from where they are grown. It may also replicate the current distribution of profit in illegal value chains, where most of the retail price for cannabis bought on the street in high-income countries goes to smuggling and distribution networks rather than producers.

Of the ten largest cannabis companies in North America, four have already made inroads into South America. Among them is Canopy Growth, a major Canada-based firm, which has also established subsidiaries in Australia, Europe and Africa. While such investment is generally welcomed by the governments of low-income countries, concerned with promoting new industries and increasing tax revenue, its impact – including on the public finances – will be determined by how it is regulated. And so far, there are no guarantees that it will be positive, especially given the lobbying efforts of these emerging corporations. (Here the tobacco industry offers an instructive parallel.)

This scenario of increasing inequality is not inevitable. Legalization models that facilitate smaller-scale production, from the non-profit markets established in Malta to the reparations for historically oppressed farmers in Mexico, offer an alternative approach. Cannabis taxation in traditional producer countries could likewise become a valuable policy tool. But it is vital to note that if cannabis policymaking continues to develop in an ad hoc and spontaneous manner, it will not yield a great developmental dividend. Indeed, it may simply reproduce the unevenness of illegal markets under lawful management.

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