Author: Simon Hammond

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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 topic – Showing 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.

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Je ne sais pas

When I was a child, my mother would read to us from an illustrated version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The content of each page – words in a large well-spaced font followed by a colourful picture – was bordered by bright patterns. Young children are often drawn more to the rhythms of speech than its meaning (their attention seems always to be directed to the conditions which make things possible rather than the things themselves). To the extent that I concentrated on the content of the story, I thought of – and can still partly remember – pictures surrounded by margins so decorative that they threatened to crowd out the main event. I imagined that the margin would grow with each turn of the page, surrounding, constricting and finally overwhelming text and image and, in so doing, bringing about an ending. I thought, or I imagine now that I thought, that perhaps this was the movement which guided the story.

The French filmmaker Alice Diop often refers to her work as an attempt to draw attention to the margins. Marginality does not, as her films make clear, suggest inferior status. It can exist on both vertical and horizontal axes. The closest analogy is psychological: what is marginal is what is not thought about, what is suppressed. The director of six documentaries and most recently Saint-Omer, for which she won the Golden Lion at Venice, Diop is the child of Senegalese immigrants who moved to France in the late 1960s. Born in 1979, she grew up in the Cité des 3000, a district of Aulnay-sous-Bois, a northeastern suburb of Paris built to house migrants working in the nearby Citroën car factory. She studied history, focusing on the legacy of colonialism, at the University of Evry, before training at the prestigious Fondation Européenne pour les Métiers de l’Image et du Son (La Fémis). Like the writers Didier Eribon and Annie Ernaux, she is a transfuge de classe who has dedicated the early part of her career to challenging polite society’s view of the dominated classes.

Conceived as a political project, Diop’s documentary work offered successive portraits of the banlieues that intend to dispel misconceptions and half-truths. Clichy For Example (2006) documents the aftermath of the riots that swept through France after two men died fleeing from the police; Danton’s Death (2011) follows an aspiring black actor, Steve, who dreams of being cast as the lead in the Büchner play after which the film is named, but encounters belittling acts of racially charged dismissal; On Call (2016) presents a series of vignettes set in a refugee medical centre which focus on the psychological and physical difficulties of its patients; Towards Tenderness (2017) examines race, love and masculinity via a set of interviews with young working class men. Most recently, We (2021) saw the director bring herself into the frame, reflecting on the death of her father and the co-existence of modernity and tradition in Paris’s suburbs. Taking inspiration from François Maspero’s Les Passagers du Roissy-Express, a book of photos and prose documenting a journey through the outskirts of Paris which Diop says taught her to love the banlieues, the filmtraverses the city’s periphery without stopping at its centre.

The film marked something of a departure for Diop. Made in response to the Charlie Hebdo attack, We counterposes an image of a France divided between secularism and religious fanaticism with one whose fissures are too subtle to discern. Its scope – monarchists and car mechanics, nurses and game hunters – was wider than anything that Diop had previously attempted. In one scene we see a crowd, entirely white with the sole exception of a black priest, at a mass commemorating Louis XVI at the Basilica Cathedral in Saint-Denis. The camera scans the faces of the attendees. Some are moved, almost to tears, as they listen to the priest read Citizen Louis Capet’s final address. There is something pathetic about the scene, which is shot with an ambivalence that hesitates between disdain or pity. What we see are not those who would once have supported the Vichy regime, but a confused mass descending into the tomb of a dead king that is not kind enough to close behind them. Strange things live on in Paris’s margins.

In what follows, Diop recalls a dream in which she has mislaid the keys to her apartment. She recognizes the names of other residents on the intercom but cannot find her own. Eventually she is let in by a woman to whom she explains that she once lived in the building with her family. From deep in her pocket Diop retrieves a heavy bunch of rusty keys. With force the door yields; she enters, tentatively, and is greeted by a darkness which feels like a ‘tomb’. Unlike the monarchists of Saint-Denis, though, the director wakes up. Video footage of her father recalling his arrival from Senegal now plays. We see him move his face away from the camera and touch it as he speaks – through discomfort at being filmed or the effort of recalling the past? ‘I have always had work since I arrive in France.’ Should we share in his pride or find something melancholy in his assertion of it? Diop again lets the camera linger long enough for a shadow of doubt to be cast over first impressions. Her aim in such scenes is less to challenge a stereotype than, through the slow gaze of the camera, create a space in which the viewer can reflect on the varying meanings of the lives and words of her subjects.

Ambiguity is at the centre of Saint-Omer, Diop’s first feature film and her finest work alongside We. The film is inspired by the trial of Fabienne Kabou, a Senegal-born French woman sentenced to twenty years in prison for the murder of her child. Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), who confesses to the crime but pleads not guilty, confounds jurors and onlookers with her eloquence and psychological opacity. Asked by the judge why she killed her child, Laurence utters a line which will become a refrain: ‘Je ne sais pas’. At the film’s midpoint its other central character, Rama (Kayije Kagame), a black professor of literature who has travelled from Paris to the suburb of Saint-Omer with the aim of writing a book on the trial receives a call from her editor, who asks, ‘What is she like?’ A pause, slight but heavy follows. Whether this is out of exasperation or to collect her thoughts we do not find out, for Rama’s editor quickly supplies an answer: ‘She sounds fascinating’ (To whom?) ‘The press say she talks in very sophisticated French.’ Finally Rama speaks, her voice steady and dismissive: ‘She talks like an educated woman, that’s all.’

Diop’s animating theme is hereby complicated by the fact that Laurence, as with the real-life Fabienne, is in some respects the opposite of an outsider. She comes from a well-off Francophone Senegalese family; we are told that her father is a translator for the United Nations, that as a child she was forbidden from speaking Wolof. (Diop did not speak Wolof at home either and recalls her parents being warned off doing so by her teachers.) That Laurence’s background could count as marginal, that it could make her interest in European philosophy and literature inexplicable and fascinating, is a consequence of the provincialism that Diop sought to expose in We.

The existence of Rama, easily read as a fictionalized version of Diop but probably closer to her image of an ideal viewer, allows the drama of the trial to be seen from a sympathetic perspective. This is in stark contrast to the fetishistic response of the French press, who were quick to treat the real-life events as an expression of ungraspable cultural differences between Africans and Europeans. Rama however is also locked in her own, more familiar drama: a difficult relationship with her mother and her working-class upbringing and the anxiety – fuelled by her pregnancy – that she is at risk of becoming either too close to or too distant from them. In the first glimpse of her personal life, Rama, accompanied by her husband, visits her family. She hesitates when asked by her sister whether she can take her mother to the hospital, before insisting she cannot. At play is not just Rama’s refusal to allow her mother into her life, but the sense that her autonomy has been won by drawing a screen between her upbringing and the life she has made for herself. We are invited to compare the two women: how thin is the line which separates the successful professor and mother-to-be with the woman on trial?

Further details of Laurence’s life are soon revealed. An emotionally distant but disciplinarian mother whom she resents; a kind father that does not raise her but whom she admires; a wealthy family; a bookish, isolated childhood; and an elite class position which places her uncomfortably in French society. Added to this is a relationship with a much older man, Luc Dummontet, with whom she begins an affair not long after arriving in Paris. He is married with children and an irregular presence in her life. When Laurence tells him that she is pregnant with his child he keeps this news to himself, even after the child’s death. Dummontet is frail and pathetic; sheepishly, he complains of Laurence’s jealousy, her anger, her silent treatments, his fear that she will leave him because of his age and declining health.

Rama looks on with compassion, but through Laurence’s plight she is playing out her own fears and anxieties. One night, sitting alone in her hotel room she listens to recordings of the trial. As we hear Laurence speaking about her mother, Rama thinks back to her own childhood. A wordless scene around a kitchen table unfolds. Rama’s mother finishes a drink from a bowl after which she washes it and then retrieves a container of Nesquik from the cupboard, placing it on the table for her daughter who has entered and, without speaking, sits to drink some chocolate milk. The young Rama is wearing pyjamas and her mother is dressed for work; it is dark outside and unclear whether it is early morning or evening. When the camera returns to Rama as an adult her face is heavy with sadness. Is there something in Coly’s sad story that could have relevance to the life of Rama or any other observer?

The latter half of the film attempts, with varying degrees of success, to interrogate this question by treating Coly as a symbol of universal issues of femininity and agency. Laurence tells the court that she was a victim of sorcery, an excuse which the film gives us plenty of reasons to doubt without discounting it. In Saint-Omer’s most unpleasant scene, the police officer tasked with investigating the case explains that in an attempt to provide a cultural explanation for Laurence’s actions he suggested witchcraft. A back and forth ensues between the officer and prosecutor about the difference between infanticide and female genital mutilation, a practice the latter describes as having ‘cultural value’.

To read this scene purely as an instance of racist ignorance and dismissal would be to miss something. The police officer’s fantasies offer Laurence an opportunity to envelope herself in mystery, withdrawing into the symbolic world and becoming someone that cannot be reduced to received social categories. In her final monologue – repeating the words uttered by Fabienne – she explains how, standing on the shore with her child in her arms, the moon rose before her ‘lighting the path like a spotlight’. The judge attempts, unsuccessfully, to point to inconsistencies between this poetic narrative and Laurence’s initial testimony but to no avail – ‘Je ne me souviens pas’, she replies. Evidently, within the world of facts there is no possibility of making oneself intelligible, at least for someone like Laurence.

In her earlier films, Diop was often torn between a desire to depict working class life authentically and angst about the meaning of her images. In the case of Danton’s Death, for instance, she has said that she was careful with her footage lest it might inadvertently reinforce pre-established narratives about working-class men from the banlieues. Steve smoking weed with his friends was left on the cutting room floor: ‘We were not there to reinforce stereotypes but rather to dispel them!’ Rather than careful, sometimes excessive curation of the material, Diop’s solution in Saint-Omer – as in We – is to embrace ambiguity and complexity. But the solution comes at a cost: it runs up against the director’s commitment to a kind of universalism. Two provocative but ultimately contradictory statements made by Diop clarify this: following the release of We she declared in an interview that ‘Cinema makes it possible to test in an extremely sensitive way the existence of the other’; after the release of Saint-Omer, she claimed that ‘the black body carries something universal… I think that all men and women feel some kind of mirroring through this figure of a black woman… that is a political statement.’

The insistence that there are ways of being that cannot be reduced to pre-given frameworks and a desire to show that the particular is in fact universal pull in opposing directions. Saint-Omer responds to this contradiction with a forking path, following one before retracing its steps to follow the other. The first sees Diop granting Laurence the right of indeterminacy. Rama withdraws to her hotel room and watches a scene from Pasolini’s Medea. We watch Maria Callas tenderly dispatch her two children with a blade. They offer no resistance. She opens the window to a moon which lights a path across her face before the camera turns to Rama, stunned with recognition, her face lit by the same glow. A line from Pasolini to Laurence to Rama is drawn – its meaning unclear, its existence indisputable.

The second path is illuminated by a monologue from Laurence’s lawyer, who argues that her client is in need of psychological care. We hear of the chimeric nature of women who, like the mythical beast, are ‘hybrid creatures composed of different animal parts’. Women carry their mothers and their children with them; they live torn between different selves. The camera shifts to the women in the audience, moved almost to tears by this speech. Something like universalism emerges here but the cost of its appearance is never seriously interrogated by Diop. In Laurence’s story there is undeniably some analogy to the condition of women, to some universal – not to say mythic – experience of maternity. But in embracing it, are we not confining ourselves to a binary between ghettoization through racist narratives or universalism offered by empathetic members of the middle classes? Lost in this false choice is the incomprehensibility of Laurence’s actions beyond the poetic drama of her worldview.  

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

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Curious Stranger

July 1957. A 26-year-old Romila Thapar waits at Prague Airport. She is dressed in a sari. The pockets of her overcoat are bulging with yet more saris. ‘It is blasphemous’, she laments in her diary, to have crumpled ‘the garment of the exotic, the indolent, the unobvious, the newly awakening East’. But there is no more room in her suitcases. They are stuffed with photographic equipment (‘cameras, cameras, more cameras’) and saddled with ‘large bundles of books and papers, strapped together with bits of string’. Thapar – today the pre-eminent historian of ancient India – is on her way to China along with the Sri Lankan art historian Anil de Silva and the French photographer Dominique Darbois. Earlier in the year, the Chinese Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries had accepted de Silva’s proposal to study two ancient Buddhist cave sites in the northwestern Gansu province, Maijishan and Dunhuang. After some hesitation, Thapar, then a graduate student at SOAS in London, agreed to join de Silva as her assistant. She had been nervous about her limited expertise in Chinese Buddhist art, as well as the practical difficulties posed by the cave sites. And not without good reason. Just imagine crawling about in those rock-cut caverns ‘enveloped in billowing yards of silk’.

But China was still far away. The three women were waiting for their delayed connection to Moscow. The latest, much-publicized, Soviet plane had got stuck in the mud. Loitering in the terminal, Thapar observed the entourage of the Indian actors, Prithviraj Kapoor and his son Raj, a newly anointed superstar in the Socialist Bloc. As heavy rains poured outside, some members of the group began discussing the film Storm over Asia (‘Would they think it rude if I gently pointed out to them that the film was not by Sergei Eisenstein, but by Vsevolod Pudovkin, and that the two techniques are so different that one can’t confuse them’). Elsewhere, a French family tune into Radio Luxembourg; a young African man listens to the BBC on his radio; the terminal loudspeakers play the Voice of America (‘poor miserable propagandists’). Late into the night, Thapar leisurely smokes her black Sobranie. She thinks of herself ‘an overburdened mule wrapped in folds of cloth’.

This journey followed a new, but already well-worn, diplomatic trail. In 1950, India had become the first non-socialist country to recognize the People’s Republic of China. Two years later, a motley crew of Indian economists, writers and artists embarked on a self-styled Goodwill Mission. Their visit inaugurated a wave of political and cultural exchange that lasted for nearly a decade. In 1954, Nehru and Zhou Enlai signed the Panchsheel Agreement (‘five principles of peaceful co-existence’) in Beijing. Friendship societies bloomed on both sides of the MacMahon Line. And Indian trade unionists, state planners and litterateurs became eager pilgrims to Mao’s fabled cooperative farms. This growing decolonial intimacy was memorably captured in the breathless opening sentence of a 1956 dispatch, ‘Huai aur Cheen’ (‘Huai and China’), by the cultural critic Bhagwatsharan Upadhyay: ‘Abhi mazdoor-jagat Cheen se lauta hoon’ (‘I have just returned from the workers’ world of China’). The tone of the original Hindi conjures a neighbourhood gossip returning with the latest news from a corner teashop.

Thapar’s diary, recently published as Gazing Eastwards: Of Buddhist Monks and Revolutionaries in China, is a relic of this fraternal decade. But she was neither an emissary of the Indian state nor a member of any friendship societies. Unlike her fellow countrymen, Thapar’s travels were not fettered by the demands of cross-border diplomacy. Traversing the Chinese hinterland on trains and trucks by day and recording her experiences by night (often in the flickering light of a single candle), she travelled and wrote with greater freedom. The resulting travelogue is not only steadfastly historical, but also unexpectedly entertaining, a quality sorely missing from the reverential accounts of her compatriots. For instance, when the historian Mohammad Habib chanced upon a group of elderly war veterans during the Goodwill Mission, he sanctimoniously declared: ‘We are your sons from distant India’. Spreading her arms, a woman promptly responded: ‘If you are my sons, then let me press you to my heart’. When Thapar encounters a member of the youth team working on the Beijing-Lanzhou railway line, she cheerfully asks the young man if he stuck pictures of pin-up girls on the wall by his dormitory bed (he did).

Thapar’s political commentary is equally revelatory. Unlike other visitors who eulogized the popular emblems of Chinese development – factories, farms, oil refineries, dams – she highlights the uncanny persistence of ancient China in the Maoist era. As the workers laid the foundations for new construction sites, the remains of prehistoric societies were turning up with unprecedented frequency. After just a few years, hundreds of accidental archaeological digs spread out across the country. During stopovers at a neolithic excavation site near X’ian and a Ming-era Buddhist monastery in south Lanzhou, Thapar learned that groups of archaeologists and younger students were being attached to construction sites, where they mended, labelled and catalogued the discovered artefacts on the spot. The quantity of newfound prehistoric greyware was in fact so large that the country was facing a severe shortage of buildings to house them. During conversations with Thapar, the officials explained this popular enthusiasm by repeatedly quoting Mao’s directives to archaeologists – ‘discover the richness of China’s past’ and ‘correct historical mistakes’.

Faced with Thapar’s inquiries about the pitfalls of ‘salvage archaeology’, the provincial archaeologists and museum officials regurgitated statistics; politics was never mentioned, while the name of Marxist archaeologist Gordon Childe drew blank faces. Her requests to meet the historians of ancient China, university students and young intellectuals meanwhile were brusquely ignored. This puzzled Thapar to no end, not least because their counterparts in India were working through similar problems. Back in Bombay, she had recently come into contact with the left-wing polymath D.D. Kosambi, whose work contained a blend of Marxist theory, numismatics, archaeology, linguistics, genetics and ethnographic fieldwork. In An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956), Kosambi lyrically described India as ‘a country of long survivals’, where ‘people of the atomic age rub elbows with those of the chalcolithic’. China, Thapar slowly realized, was no different.

Recording her group’s trek towards Maijishan and Dunhuang, Thapar’s travelogue gracefully blends the world-historical with the everyday. Multiple timelines gather a heterogenous throng of characters onto the stage. At a monastery in Xi’an, we hear of the legendary seventh-century monk Xuan Zang lugging cartloads of Buddhist manuscripts, sculptures and relics collected during his sixteen-year sojourn across northern India. Back in the twentieth century, in nearby Lanzhou, Czech-made Škoda buses ferry Chinese workers to a power station. As Thapar proceeds across the hinterland, extended spells of isolation are broken only occasionally, as when a radio set catches the BBC News (‘the Russians had developed an intercontinental rocket that had alarmed the Western world’). On most days, Thapar’s battered copy of Ulysses serves as a marker of the passage of time (‘Ulysses is stuck at page 207 and at this rate will probably see me all through China’). Fittingly, this drama reaches its climax at the ancient cave sites, nested at the Chinese end of the Silk Routes which had once linked the region with Central Asia, India, and the eastern Mediterranean.

Thapar and her companions were the first group of foreign researchers to access the Maijishan site. Carved into sheer cliff faces, the caves contained hundreds of Buddhist murals and sculptures created over the course of a millennium. They were ‘like museums of Chinese paintings’: offering something like a historical timelapse of how the earliest Gandhara-era depictions of Buddha’s life were gradually adapted to the Chinese landscape. Every evening, the group descended from ‘heaven’ on rickety wooden ladders, sometimes nearly a hundred meters long. Back in the candlelit monastery, as wolves and bears roved outside, their experiences were equally startling: we hear of holidaying Chinese soldiers singing Cossack folk songs picked up from the touring Russian Red Army choir; a head monk toasting the end of the hydrogen bomb; a guard playing scratched folk records, featuring a Chinese cover of ‘Aawara Hoon’, the title song of Raj Kapoor’s latest hit. Meanwhile, at Dunhuang, the group discover that the Western explorers of the early twentieth century had vandalized and stolen numerous murals, paintings and manuscripts from the ‘Caves of a Thousand Buddhas’. In 1920, the White Russians fleeing the Bolsheviks had found refuge in these same caves, and had spent their days gouging out gold from the artworks.

The thread of the present ties these proliferating timelines together. In 1957 the Chinese revolution started to unravel. Shortly before Thapar’s arrival, Mao had effectively ended the Hundred Flowers Campaign. His key distinction between ‘fragrant flowers’ and ‘poisonous weeds’ had instead impelled a brutal ‘anti-Rightist campaign’. Meanwhile, despite stiff resistance, the CCP was still pushing its ill-fated campaign for rural collectivization. Arriving in Beijing, Thapar fleetingly notes the ubiquitous ‘bright, bold cartoons and statements’, portraying the so-called ‘Rightists’ as venomous snakes. In the following weeks, her solidarity with the Maoists was severely tested by ongoing clampdowns on intellectual freedom (she was greatly disturbed by the case of the feminist novelist Ling Ding, who had been denounced and exiled). Despite warm encounters with the locals, she greeted village cooperatives with a mixture of guarded suspicion (‘Were we expected to believe that before 1951 production was low, in 1954 it rose by half and by 1956 it had doubled?’) and open cynicism (‘I asked somewhat diffidently if they had tried any experiments along the lines of Lysenko in Russia’). On returning to Beijing, she was told that Professor Xiang Da, an authority on Dunhuang, was too busy to meet her, only to discover from a newspaper report that he had already been charged as a Rightist last month. Soon China would be utterly transformed by the Great Leap Forward and the ill-fated Sino-Soviet split. The 1962 Sino-Indian War over their borderlands would close the curtain on a short-lived decolonial friendship.

In the six decades between Thapar’s journey and the diary’s publication, her scholarly studies have spanned the history of state formation in early India, the politics of the Aryan question, the conflicts between the Brahmanas and the Shramanas (the Ajivika, the Buddhist and Jaina lineages), the Itihasa-Purana traditions, and the Indian epics, among others. Along with Irfan Habib, R.S. Sharma and Bipin Chandra, Thapar is widely credited for inaugurating a paradigm shift in the study of Indian history – a radical break with the British colonial periodization and research methods. Her honours include both the Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities and social sciences, and the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award in India (she has declined it twice). In the context of such an illustrious career, the diary is likely to be read as a relic of youthful indulgence. And yet, as Thapar has often argued, past events always accrue new, unexpected meanings in the present. It is hardly surprising, then, that the diary has significant affinities with her later work.

In the widely acclaimed Somnath (2004), Thapar describes how a single event – the destruction of a Hindu temple by Mahmud of Ghazni, a Turkic king, in 1025 – has been narrated across Turko-Persian and Arabic chronicles, Sanskrit temple inscriptions, biographies and courtly epics, popular oral traditions, British House of Commons proceedings and nationalist histories. Patiently decoding these dissonant voices, Thapar disproves the myth of Hindus and Muslims as eternally warring civilizations, established by British colonizers and popularized by their modern-day heirs, the Hindu nationalists. In doing so, Thapar reflexively shows that history is a process of ‘constant re-examination and reassessment of how we interpret the past’. Her pursuit however has never devolved into a postmodernist free-for-all. This is not just because of Thapar’s lifelong engagement with sociological theories, economic histories, archaeological methods and Marxist debates, but also because her scholarship has always been grounded in the public life of postcolonial India. Thapar has written school textbooks, given public lectures on All India Radio, and published extensive writings on the relationship between secularism, history and democracy in popular periodicals.

In recent decades, Thapar’s work has been systematically discredited by a Hindu right-wing smear campaign (popular slurs include ‘academic terrorist’ and ‘anti-national’). She has responded with characteristic aplomb, poking more historical holes in the fantasies of a ‘syndicated Hinduism’. Shortly before turning 90, she published Voices of Dissent (2020). Written during the upsurge of nationwide protests against the new citizenship laws (CAA and NRC), the book traces a genealogy of dissent in India – spanning the second millennia B.C. of the Vedic times, the emergence of the Sramanas, the medieval popularity of the Bhakti sants and Sufi pirs, and the Gandhian satyagraha of the twentieth century – that offer a vital corrective to the popular right-wing tendency to label ‘dissent’ as an ‘anti-national’ import from the West. Yet with the BJP pushing for the privatization of higher education, its affiliates infiltrating university administrations and its stormtroopers terrorizing college campuses, the struggle for decolonizing Indian history is no longer merely a matter of critique. There now exists a nationwide network of 57,000 shakhas operated by the RSS (the parent organization of the BJP), where the rank-and-file receive both ideological and weapons training, while the BJP’s IT Cell has infiltrated the social media feeds of millions of Hindu middle class homes, promoting its historical propaganda.

These changes have not only upended the paradigm shift in Indian history of which Thapar was a leading figure but have also illuminated its political limits. Historically anchored in the Nehruvian-era universities, the decolonial turn has struggled to significantly transform popular consciousness beyond the bourgeois public sphere. The Hindutva offensive has put liberal and left intellectuals in a difficult double bind. This contradiction was first captured by Aijaz Ahmad, shortly after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, now widely recognized as the emblem of the ‘Hindu nation’. The Indian left, Ahmad had argued, cannot abandon ‘the terrain of nationalism’, but nor can it just occupy this terrain ‘empty-handed’, that is, ‘without a political project for re-making the nation’. In Ahmad’s words, to counter Hindutva with secularism is certainly ‘necessary’, but it remains ‘insufficient’. Likewise, countering the syndicated, market-friendly Hinduism by recovering a subversive genealogy of the Indian past is necessary but by itself, it too remains insufficient.

Thapar’s studies of ancient India naturally offer no ready-made cures for these modern maladies. One incident from Gazing Eastwards though reads like an allegory for future action. As Thapar declared in a lecture for All India Radio in 1972, ‘the image of the past is the historian’s contribution to the future’. In Lanzhou, Thapar and de Silva’s clothes drew considerable attention from the Chinese public. Trailed by curious strangers, they found it difficult to walk the streets. To blend in, they ditched their saris in favour of peasant jackets in the customary blue, made famous by Maoists at the time. As the universities continue to crumble, perhaps historians of the new generation should also discard their clothes of distinction, and blend as organizers, pedagogues and foot soldiers into the agrarian and citizen struggles erupting against the BJP-led right.

Read on: Pranab Bardhan, ‘The “New” India’, NLR 136.

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Victorious Defeat

I.

Historically speaking, political funerals have been associated with authoritarian rule. Surrounded with an aura of sanctity that even brutally oppressive regimes have been reluctant to suppress – with exceptions, of course, as the Israeli state demonstrated during Shireen Abu Akleh’s funeral procession last May – political funerals have often acted as outlets of public dissent when other forms of protest are unavailable. The association, however, misses an important precondition: a conception of grief and mourning as a collective ritual. Such a perspective can help make sense of our contemporary predicament. The gradual eclipse of political funerals does not, of course, signal the eclipse of authoritarianism. It rather indicates another wind of change, one that has swept through authoritarian and liberal regimes alike: the transformation of mourning into a private affair. 

Against the spirt of his times, Gáspár Miklós Tamás’s funeral in Budapest in January 2023 was unequivocally political. It did not just bring together relatives and old friends. The overwhelming majority of those who made their way to Farkasrèti cemetery on that cold Tuesday afternoon did not know Gáspár personally. With the exception of a couple of supporters of Orbán’s government (some of whom came, perhaps, to see with their own eyes what a Hungarian newspaper announced after Gáspár’s death: the end of Hungarian Marxism), this wonderfully mixed crowd of young and old, local and visitors, was there because their grief for the loss of a public intellectual was not a private affair.

II.

Gáspár was born in 1948 in what was historically seen as the capital of Transylvania, a city Hungarians call Kolozsvár and Romanians Cluj. In 1974, in line with Ceaușescu’s attempts to embed his rule in nationalist mythologies, the pre-Roman Napoca was added, giving the city its contemporary name, Cluj-Napoca. Linguistic differences and national myths aside, these various appellations all describe a ‘castle within a closed space’. The ruins of castle Turnul Croitorilor remain on the outskirts of the old town, but the rest of the name has never rung true. The city’s permanently suspended sense of national belonging meant that it was more open than closed: Gáspár’s wide horizons, intellectually and geographically, can be seen as a testament to that.

With life stories forged in the turbulent years before, during and after the Second World War, his parents Gáspár Tamás (1914-1978) and Erzsébet Krausz (1907-1977), committed internationalist communists, were a strong influence in this same direction. While many Jewish relatives from Gáspár’s mother’s side were murdered in Auschwitz, she escaped deportation because she was already imprisoned as a ‘Bolshevik agitator’ by Antonescu’s Nazi-allied military dictatorship. His father, in prison since 1938 for communist activities, had his sentence abbreviated by forced conscription to the front, returning to Cluj in 1944 with an injury that forced him to walk on crutches for the rest of his life.

Their trajectories after the war reflected the fate of a large part of the revolutionary movement crushed by Stalinism and nationalism. Many of their comrades, who had survived torture at the hands of the Romanian and Hungarian secret services or the Gestapo, returned from Nazi concentration camps only to be re-arrested by the authorities. Contrary to Stalinist apologetics, it was steadfast allegiance to the emancipatory project that made such people dissidents against the new ‘socialist’ regimes. In his childhood and adolescence, Gáspár’s parents transmitted their knowledge and experiences to their son: alongside music, poetry and philosophy and the necessity of rigorous study to grasp each one, they taught him techniques for withstanding torture, in expectation of the arrival of the black car of ‘their’ Party.

Gáspár’s turn came in the early hours of a bitter February morning in 1974. The reason was not had he had done but what he refused to do, namely write an idiotic appraisal of Ceaușescu’s new ‘moral code’ for the Utunk literary magazine where he was employed. This cost him his job and, shortly after, the black car arrived, inaugurating a period of intense intimidation. When the regular ‘invitations’ of the Romanian secret police became unbearable and a prison sentence only a matter of time, his parents urged him to leave the country. In 1978 he did exactly that.

He could have settled in France: an uncle worked at the Renault factory in Paris. Instead, he opted for Hungary, inspired by the growing opposition movement there. His mauvaise reputation preceded him, however, and he was greeted by the secret police of a system just as ‘mendacious, stupid, brutal, repressive and treacherous’ as the one he had left behind. A job teaching philosophy at the University of Budapest would eventually also be cut short by his engagement with the dissident movement. When, after the Jaruzelski coup in Poland of 1981, he published his support for the Polish opposition under his own name, he was, once again, fired.

III.

It is often overlooked today, but the revolt of East German construction workers in June 1953, the workers’ councils of Hungary in 1956 or the 1968 uprising in Czechoslovakia were made in the name of proletarian self-management, not that of market freedom. Gáspár’s dissident network similarly advanced a critique of the regime from the left. Yet, though inspired by the anti-Stalinist positions of Socialisme ou Barbarie or Karl Korsch, by the 1980s many dissidents, Gáspár among them, started feeling that ‘attempts to overcome the Soviet-style system from the left were doomed’ (see his ‘Where We Went Wrong’, 2009). Increasingly convinced that putting an end to dictatorship meant ‘paying the price of capitalism’, they began to seek theoretical justification for their change of position. The times found Gáspár taking various teaching posts in the West: his wide knowledge and his linguistic genius – he was more than fluent in many languages ­– allowed him to teach in universities including Columbia, Oxford, École des Hautes Études, Chicago, Yale and the New School. In these years, his deep disappointment and anger at the oppression of the ‘communist’ regimes melded with a (neo)conservative zeitgeist.

Their collapse was accompanied by an upsurge of collective hope and political imagination. Gáspár hastily returned to take part. But the dismantling of the Stalinist apparatus went hand in hand with ‘an economic black hole, galloping unemployment and Third World-type inequalities’ (see his ‘Words from Budapest’, 2013). Party chairman for the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ) and elected to the opposition after the transition, Gáspár felt implicated in the historical disaster during which, in a country of 10 million, 2 million jobs evaporated while parliament spent months debating the republican coat of arms. ‘Our naïve liberalism’, he later reflected, ‘delivered a nascent democracy into the hands of irresponsible and hate-filled right-wing politicos, and contributed to the re-establishment of a provincial, deferential and resentful social world, harking back to before 1945’. What was intended as ‘liberation from centralized coercion’ ultimately resulted in nothing more than a ‘weakening of compound social power’.

In response, Gáspár ‘went back to school’ and re-emerged, once again, a dissident. In addition to Marx, Gáspár returned to the council communist and anarcho-syndicalist traditions that he believed had seen ‘much more clearly than famous and brilliant theorists that, however deserved the terminal defeat of the Soviet bloc. . . it was at the same time a historical disaster, heralding the demise of working-class power, of adversary culture, the end of two centuries of beneficent fear for the ruling classes’. He became an avid reader of Italian operaismo and the German Wertkritik school as developed by authors like Moishe Postone and Robert Kurz, as well as the writings of Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood. Guy Debord became one of his favourite thinkers. These resources, coupled with his observation of a transition that had unleashed the ‘most destructive power of capitalism’, set the stage for his most profound contributions to radical critical theory, re-conceptualizing communism as the emancipatory abolition of capital, state, nation and class. While most of his writings on these topics are in Hungarian, a significant number of essays and interviews were written, given and/or published in English, French and German. (And as his young comrades confirmed recently, a lot more will be published in English in the near future.)

IV.

Gáspár wrote and commented extensively on Central and Eastern European affairs. In numerous interviews (whose eloquence renders them of equal value to his writings), the dissident years before the collapse of the Soviet world and the transition to market capitalism were central topics, as were subsequent developments in the region. One of his most influential texts, On Post-Fascism (2000), is widely seen as a prophetic account of what has now become the all too familiar phenomenon of ‘authoritarian’ or ‘right-wing’ populism. For Gáspár the term ‘post-fascism’ was more appropriate.

Such interventions contributed to an image of Gáspár as an expert analyst of the region and a reliable forecaster of its authoritarian turn. Though flattering, this view is somewhat misleading. It was his analysis of the universal tendencies within capitalist social relations and its propensity towards (and compatibility with) authoritarianism that above all propelled his thinking, rather than any intimate knowledge of Romania or Hungary. On Post-Fascism begins, after all, by shredding any implication that what he is about to describe is regionally specific. Pointing to ‘a cluster of policies, practices, routines, and ideologies that can be observed everywhere in the contemporary world’, Gáspár’s primary concern was to spell-out what was post about contemporary fascist and authoritarian tendencies. Rather than relying on a violent mass movement, death squads and even the occasional suspension of the social function and political power of the bourgeoisie, contemporary authoritarianism in fact sits very comfortably within Western-style electoral democracies and a free market framework. In the absence of a radical, communist workers’ movement (the eradication of which was the historical task of Nazism), there was no longer any need to militarize the whole of society. Militarizing the police appeared to be sufficient.

It is for this reason that the frequent depiction of authoritarianism as a peculiarity of Central and Eastern Europe (and Gáspár as its local critic) is ultimately a mystification. The Polish and Hungarian governments do not hide their contempt for key aspects of EU law, or have any qualms about presenting their racist, anti-LGBTQ and anti-left positions as a defence of Western Christian civilization. But it was a French president who declared that the existence of a ‘rule of law’ renders any talk about repression or police violence ‘unacceptable’, while his militarized police maimed hundreds of gilets jaunes demonstrators with full impunity. It was in Greece that investigative journalists were wiretapped by the secret services and where the law-and-order dogma propounded by the government co-existed with extensive evidence of police collaboration with the mafia. Gáspár’s insistence that it was a mistake to approach contemporary authoritarianism through the lens of Central and Eastern Europe was not, unfortunately, given the attention it deserved. Even many on the left who otherwise refuse to normalize authoritarian tendencies in Western liberal democracies continue to describe their emergence as a process of ‘Orbánization’ .  

V.

Gáspár also pioneered the concept of ethnicism (‘an apolitical, destructive practice opposed to the idea of citizenship’), contrasting it with a civic-democratic nationalism that he went so far as to proclaim the only remaining ‘principle of cohesion in a traditionless capitalism’. In later years, however, he grew increasingly sceptical of the universalizing potential of national citizenship: buried under anti-Roma policies in Eastern Europe or the EU’s systematic anti-migrant violence, citizenship had become weaponized as a justification for exclusion. When parts of the left joined this chorus and condoned the exclusion of migrants as a prerequisite for re-establishing a national welfare state, Gáspár did not just see a form of ‘banal left nationalism’, inspired by bygone visions of social democracy. He also saw in such positions the shameful affirmation of a contemporary paradox in which equality, for the first time in history, is portrayed as ‘an elitist idea’.

Recognizing this regression did not mean, however, that Gáspár saw equality as the end goal of a radical transformation of society. In one of his most penetrating analyses, ‘Telling the Truth About Class’ from 2006, he explored the ways in which the historical trajectory of the left had been split between a demand for equality and recognition of the working class and a call for its abolition. On one side, Gáspár saw a ‘Rousseau-ian’ affirmation of class: against the bourgeois projection of the working class as barbaric and uneducated, a mob ‘tied to vice and corporeality’, Rousseau-inspired socialism counter-projected the working class’s cultural superiority and ‘angelic’ nature. On the other side was the lineage deriving from Marx, who had identified the historical potential of revolutionary transformation in the wretched and alienated existence of a proletariat that has ‘nothing to lose but its chains’. Calls for a more egalitarian and democratic inclusion of workers might be noble, but they ignored the constitution of the working class through the capitalist mode of production. Quoting from the Grundrisse, Gáspár reminded his readers that ‘labour itself has become a moment of capital’; for this reason, while calls for equality (rightly) attacked persistent systems of privilege and caste, they failed to identify the significance of capitalist social relations in the production and maintenance of class society. Communism should be the abolition of class society, not an equitable recognition of its constituent parts.

VI.

A few years ago, I was invited to Hamburg to join Gáspár on a panel discussion that sought to criticize left nationalism and notions of sovereignty through emphasis on the question of migration. As luck would have it, the organizers had us staying in the same house; it did not take long before we decided to extend our stay for a few days, which we spent taking long walks around this exceptionally hospitable German city, trying out sausages, drinking wine, and talking insatiably. In that time and place we became, I dare say, friends.

Ever since, we maintained regular contact, using emails for logistical arrangements (we brought him to Berlin for a public discussion on nationalism and migration, an event that took place under the heavy shadow of the Hanau massacre that had happened the day before) but hand-written letters for more engaged exchanges. The terrible news of his cancer intensified our correspondence. Among other things, I promised him that once he beat that awful disease, I would find a small datscha near Berlin for him and his daughter Hanna. He welcomed the idea as something that could ‘help our mood and give us a semblance of a putative future’.

The fluctuations of his illness and the state of the world at large did little to subdue his pessimism. ‘It is an uphill struggle’, he wrote to me two years ago, ‘to defend myself from feelings of disgust, contempt & hatred when I am looking at this world’. But expressions of despair were, despite everything, the exception. Short of breath but full of life, he wondered in his last letter if he could ‘venture forth on an eight-hour train journey to the town of my birth’. He was also excited about finishing a text on how ‘resistance to war had turned young Lukács, Bloch [and] Benjamin into revolutionaries’. Regretfully, I never responded. The fear of sending a letter that might never be received paralyzed me.  

VII.

When we first met in Hamburg, I gave Gáspár a copy of Paolo Virno’s ‘The Horror of Familiarity’, a text which he became very fond of. In it, Virno evokes the dialectic between Heimlich/Unheimlich (familiar/uncanny) prevalent in our times, drawing attention to the ominous, hyper-modern appeals to tradition and Heimat. ‘Anytime one tries to say: country, community or authentic life, penetrative and frightening screams come out’ Virno writes, suggesting instead that the search for familiarity is a ‘historical bet, not an already guaranteed property’. In a similar vein, Gáspár answered the accusation that communism is insensitive to the ‘Home’ by unequivocally declaring: ‘Yes, it is, as it is concerned about the homeless’. As it turned out, his last public intervention was a text defending the homeless against renewed attack in Hungary. ‘One should not live on the streets’, he wrote, ‘one should protest there’. There is, perhaps, no more fitting legacy than this.  

Read on: G.M. Tamás, ‘Words from Budapest’, NLR 80.